When you get your powers, you learn a lot about yourself. My professors called me mad. It was time for me to stop punishing myself, and start punishing everybody else.
Computers had their origin in military cryptography-in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression.
Video games are a huge, incredibly popular, world-transforming medium.
The video game story-development process is incredibly broken.
Wearing a cape doesn’t do much for your social life.
One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered.
There’s a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition.
When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don’t just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.
When you can’t bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn’t you anymore; you’ve changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all.
I’m the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could do with his life.
If you haven’t been this close to superhumans, you don’t understand what it’s like to fight them. Even when you’ve got powers yourself, the predominent impression is one of shock. The forces moving around you are out of human scale, and your nervous system doesn’t know how to deal with it. It’s like being in a car accident, over and over again. You never feel the pain until later.
Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn’t interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say ‘no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don’t care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,’ whereas the game had only ‘over the river and through the woods’ to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not me mine.
Save the world? I don’t think so. I have my reasons. The world was lost a long time ago, and nothing’s going to fix it, maybe not even science.
He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn’t ever studied for any of them.
I miss the girl I was, and I wish I could tell her that. But she got hurt really bad and I’ve been waiting such a long time for her to be okay again. I bet she never dreamed she would live so long, or do the things she can do now. I wish I could tell her what she’d grow up to be, how strange and beautiful and unexpected she’d be. She’d probably feel a lot better if she knew. The sky and the stars are brilliant, and I think of how much she would have loved this.
This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, or the fifth or the tenth. I guess it’s time to think of it as your life.
I saw the misadjusted dials and the whirling gauges and the bubbling green fluid and the electricity arcing around, and a story laid out for me, my sorry self alchemically transmuted into power and robots and fortresses and orbital platforms and costumes and alien kings.
You haven’t known terror until you’ve been chased by a man-sized crow.
The heroes pop out at you, impossibly vivid, colorful as playing cards but all from different decks, a jumble of incompatible suits and denominations dealt out for an Alice in Wonderland game.
I won but I wasn’t like Pat. Because – and why this should be I’ll never know – I never did a thing that wasn’t somehow touched with selfish, furtive hunger, with a private, annihilating need for recognition. Because I’m like a child in a fairy tale cursed from birth, and there has never been anything I can put my hand to without tainting it, no triumph so great or solemn that it doesn’t turn spoiled and ridiculous. Because, sooner or later, the darkness always gets in.