To Thine Own Self be True

By Scott Bachmann

By accident, Liza became the Paragon, a super hero. Overnight she changed from a small town nerd to a world wide celebrity. But after a time, it wasn’t enough. She’d lived for everyone, but not herself.

Then she met Leon…

"A superhero rom-com, like Sex & City with superpowers"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Bachmann
• Release date: Sep 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989605144

Book preview

DEDICATION

To my wife Anita, who lets me be me.

To my sons Devin and Alex, to show them anything is possible if you’re stubborn enough. Since you already have the stubborn genes of your mom, and me, you have a good head start on anything you want to accomplish.

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

EPIGRAPH

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE COVER PHOTO

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CONNECT WITH THE AUTHOR

OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Cover design by Scott Bachmann

Cover photography by Anthony Redell

Female Cover Model: Brandi Smiley, Model Mayhem #2668018

Male Cover Model: Sheldon Johnson, Model Mayhem #2973489

The first edition of this work was edited by

Aaron Einhorn and William Broughton.

They are Saints of patience.

Additional edits were done by Heather Anderson.

Inspiration for this work started from a conversation with Janine Rigg.

Scott D.M. Simmons and Diana Pressnell helped with the comic book version of Paragon, which influenced the novel.

Aaron Einhorn helped with continuity checks across the entire Scott Comic universe while making the Scott Comics Character Roster Book.

Epigraph

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

~ William Shakespeare

––––––––

"Note that venerable proverb: ‘Children and fools always speak the truth.’

The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it."

~ Mark Twain

Chapter 1

That’s the line? Liza asked, chewing on her last good fingernail. Her eyes darted back and forth over the hordes of people milling about the convention floor; the seemingly endless rows of tables filled with creators shilling their art and their books, and then came to rest on the snaking queue of people folded back on itself again and again that moved like cows to a slaughterhouse. I can’t do this, she mumbled and spun about to face the main doors of the convention hall with the intention of leaving.

Yes you will. Gwen said as she shoved Liza forward. She threw her back into it, but her efforts were as effective as shoving a concrete pillar. Undeterred, Gwen grabbed Liza’s hand and tugged on it with the same lack of effect. Gwen let out an exaggerated sigh. This was so much easier when you didn’t have super strength.

Liza’s eyes flared, then narrowed in an effort to stare Gwen into silence. As always, Gwen didn’t flinch. Liza started to mutter, Ixnay on the Uper-Say, but stopped herself. Telling Gwen not to do something was the quickest way to get her to do it.

Liza glanced quickly to see if anyone was listening to the two of them, and when she found they weren’t, did a quick inventory of herself. Her jeans were zipped and unstained, no holes but comfortably broken in. Her T-shirt was deep red with bright yellow flourished lettering that Gwen had hand painted. It read, We Stand With Leon. Leon referred to Leon Ramiro, the author everyone had lined up to see, and the We Stand With, portion referred to his series of novels that all of which had Stand in the title. Liza had thought the wording was incredibly clever, and at the first sight of her shirt, Leon would instantly know she was his biggest, and most devoted, fan. Now that she noticed how many other people in line had professionally made shirts, many bought at this very convention, she was sure she’d come across as a homeless stalker.

Her hands reflexively checked her hair. It was staying down for a change. The long, usually frizzy locks, were meticulously brushed and slathered in product until it was presentable. She panicked a moment when she realized she didn’t have a mirror to check her makeup. She rarely wore the stuff, and had no clue how to maintain it nor how to apply it. She usually left the applying part to Gwen, which was always a risk. Gwen preferred sparkly gypsy colors that would make a pre-teen jealous, but no one else. For a change, Gwen had been surprisingly restrained, and when Liza had looked in the mirror, she had to admit that for once, she looked pretty good.

Liza took a deep breath and decided she looked fine, because she had to look fine because. If she thought anything else, she’d flee and face Gwen’s wrath for months. It was so much easier to be her other self. As Paragon, she could zip up in her uniform, bind her hair, lace on boots, and not worry about being dirty and mussed up because it was Paragon’s job to get mussed up. But today she was her ordinary self, Liza Lang, and not the hero Paragon.

And that terrified her.

The strange thing is, she didn’t look any different as Paragon. She didn’t wear a mask, and rarely wore a helmet. She used her real name in the press. The Paragon was Liza Lang, but so far, not a single person at the con had recognized her. This happened all the time. She could go the grocer in her Paragon suit and be mobbed with fans. If she went as Liza, she’d be ignored. It was a phenomenon that she was accustomed to, but didn’t understand at all.

On the other hand, today she was counting on being anonymous. If she was recognized, especially at this convention of geeks, she’d instantly spawn her own mob of autograph seekers and question ready fans. It was best to be quiet about her identity.

This was why Liza tensed when Gwen mentioned her super-strength out loud. If anyone heard her... but no one paid any attention to them. Liza unclenched her hands that had reflexively balled into fists, and then shook the tension out of her arms. She steadied her breathing and found her calm place. Being able to bend steel on accident, it was important to have a calm place.

Liza studied her best friend. Gwen was Gwen. Gwen wore a gauzy, multilayered skirt that she’d batik dyed herself and then decorated with hand painted stylized birds. The blouse, in contrast, was plain white except for a single blue bird painted off-center, lying upside down, legs in the air, dead. Her outfit was so sunny and breezy that the shocking contrast of a dead bird begged an observer to comment or ask about it - which was exactly what Gwenifer Two Tales hoped for.

Gwen loved telling stories like kids love candy, but there were rules, not all of which made sense. For example, she liked to be prompted to speak. Gwen didn’t start conversations, but she could finish them off like a serial killer with something to prove.

Gwen was slight of figure, but thin in the way that other women hated; Gwen could wear anything she wanted, from any store. In contrast, Liza was statuesque. She was six and half feet tall, broadly built, and rounded off with generous curves. Liza had to have nearly everything custom made for her, except when she gave up and shopped in the men’s big and tall stores. Even then, she had to compromise and tolerate the lack of hip room in pants that would otherwise fit.

Growing up, it was a different problem for Liza. Nothing, in any store, suited her. She was shorter than average, and noticeably overweight, and everything she tried on was baggy in some parts and way too tight in others. She resorted to oversized and baggy all over, and avoided shopping until her clothes fell apart.

When she became the Paragon, she’d grown nearly two feet over the course of a year, and replaced a noticeable portion of her childhood chubbiness with Olympian muscle. The former Paragon, John, said becoming Paragon wouldn’t change her. Just one of his many lies, but this lie was a good one.

After a lifetime of ridicule about her weight, being able to trade short and chubby for tall and intimidating was amazing - until she realized that being a big tough female made men insecure. Women didn’t change. They remained as catty as before, trading chubby insults for amazon ones.

On the inside, she was the same old Liza, and she never quite understood why people were so caught up by her external appearance. But they were, and she ignored it as best she could.

When she was honest about herself though, she had changed on the inside as well. For the most part she remained shy, stubborn, smart, curious, and utterly bewildered by the social world that everyone else seemed to instinctively understand. But when she was in public as Paragon, she had learned to smile and stand tall. She was enthusiastic and friendly, bold and outgoing. As Paragon, she was adored.

It was a kind of magic transformation when she suited up, given that it was only blue denim fatigues, black leather boots, and black canvas flack vest. The clothing was simple and practical, and not entirely flattering. But when she suited up she positively glowed with charm, and magazines insisted she was sexy. That was a word she was not used to hearing. Stranger still, the less skin that she showed, the more people labeled her as hot.

After a few years of this she had concluded that people wanted their heroes to be tough, confident, and capable looking. It was a different kind of sexy then a super model, or an air brushed centerfold, but it was real.

When she was alone, she relaxed and slouched. Out of uniform her smile was nervous at best. She sat in corners, away from the crowds. She was another person as Paragon. To her, being Paragon equated to being an actor playing a character on a TV show, and when the camera turned off, she was Liza again.

A sudden roar of cheers from the convention crowd caught her attention. She looked around and couldn’t see the source of the commotion. Given the acreage of chaos in the dealer’s room, this wasn’t that surprising. There was a vast ocean of people swirling about, but you couldn’t see them as they were blocked from direct view by an archipelago of booths. You could only see the surging of humanity in the eddies between the rows.

Each booth sold things you never saw in ordinary stores.  T-Shirts, comics, toys, posters, videos, art, books, games, figurines - and every one of the booths was swarmed with customers like sharks feeding on the tchotchkes like chum.

The banners above the booths proclaimed that they were at the 20th Annual FanWorldCon. It was a gathering of all types of fandom from animation, movies, TV Shows and comics. Science fiction, fantasy and horror genres all blended together into a smoothie of pure visual chaos. The only common denominator between the types of fandom was that they all gathered together like pilgrims to Mecca to share their adoration of the things they worshipped, and to treasure the chance to meet some of the people who made the things they loved. The fervor could at times seem religious and scary in its intensity, but that was the exception to the rule and by and large, everyone had a sense of humor and could laugh at themselves.

This year’s convention was dramatically bigger than previous years, not only because of its twentieth anniversary, but because this was the year 2000. For science fiction fans, this was the arrival of the future - a future they’d been dreaming of for decades.

So far, Liza was loving it - when she’d let herself.

She’d been fighting off a down mood all day, but being around people who were proud of being different and enjoying themselves, made her smile. For a time anyway, the malaise kept sneaking back in.

When she was growing up, being weird or labeled a geek was a scarlet letter, not a thing to be proud of. In the small Ohio town she was raised in, she was the only teenager to visit the small one-room library for pleasure instead of under duress from a school assignment. When she wasn’t being picked on for her weight, she was ridiculed for being a nerd, which in the social ladder of a football worshipping high school, was the equivalent of being a leper. In contrast, at FanWorldCon, everyone was a freak and reveled in it. The people came in all shapes and sizes and didn’t care. They wore costumes and silly clothes and the fashion police didn’t intrude. It was a different world, one she should have felt at home in, but didn’t.

Being the Paragon hadn’t changed her sense of isolation all that much. She’d made a good life with her friends and coworkers within the service of the Defense Force, but that was work. Really crazy work, but work. Outside of her work, she only had Gwen, and Gwen was in a world of her own.

She’d tried to make new friends, but everyone had an agenda. They wanted her to sponsor something, or sign something, or do something only the super strong Paragon could do. When she wasn’t being used, and managed to strike up a real conversation with someone, there was little in common to talk about. They’d complain about the weather, and she’d complain about saving people in a hurricane. They missed a buss; she lifted one off of collapsing bridge. They got stuck in traffic; she flew among the clouds.

The only person who shared her geeky passions and understood her crazy life was Control, the computer geek from work whose job it was to connect her and her team to the world of information.

His real name was Adam Czerwinski. He pronounced it Sir-Winsk-Eee, though she never did figure out how those letters were supposed to make those sounds. She just called him Control, or occasionally Adam. No matter where they were in the world, there was Control’s voice in her ear feeding her details and helping her out.

When the missions ended though, they would talk for hours about books and shows and things no one else seemed to care about. He liked most of what she liked, with a few glaring exceptions that they loved to argue about. When she was with Adam, she didn’t feel so alone in the world.

But that was several months in the past.

Control was a job, a specific position in the Defense Force. There was a new person sitting in Adam’s chair, and she had to call him Control, but it felt hollow when she said the name.

You’re thinking about him aren’t you, said Gwen.

I’m sorry? Said Liza, who had been staring at the crowd, empty eyed, lost in her thoughts.

You’re wearing your sad look. There will be none of that today. Today is a good day. The day you get to meet your hero. Gwen pointed towards the tail of the monster line. Now move your butt before this gets any bigger. Any second now a fire marshals gonna run in here and shut this place down. Before that happens, you are going to meet your man! Move it missy! Gwen shoved, and Liza grudgingly stumbled forward.

Gwen’s thing was not conventions. She went to gallery openings and nightclubs, but Liza knew she had a point. She also knew she was afraid because her feet kept shuffling and all she could think of was the exit. She was acutely aware that, after all she’d been through in her life, being afraid now seemed silly, but there it was, fear pounding in her chest.

Gwen furrowed what little blonde brow she had when Liza paused.

Yes ma’am, my big butt is moving, said Liza as she turned around and shuffled backwards while making a beeping sound like a truck. This was still too slow for Gwen, so she took Liza’s hand and dragged her to the roped off area that held the queue. Liza let her.

The ropes were there to keep the line folded and compressed. They also divided the queue from the convention, and from the authors and actors at their tables. They also made it difficult to leave once you entered them.

Liza took up the last spot in the line, and as soon as she did, three more people got in line behind her.  She nervous looked around and noticed that Leon’s line was the longest, and nearly everyone was carrying a book to sign. They were the same title, To Stand Against the Tide. It was Ramiro’s newest book, and it had only been out for a few days. Here and there she spotted a few well-read copies of his first book, To Stand and Be Noticed. Empty-handed Liza was clearly in the minority. She even saw a few mother-daughter pairs, each with their own book to sign.

The line was predominantly women, and ranged widely in age from teen to late middle age. A stark contrast to the rest of the convention dominated by men in their twenties and thirties. There were a few male fans in line, but they stood out like gophers on hill. Most of them looked like boyfriends because they frequently craned their heads over the line to glimpse what they were missing elsewhere.

Above the general muttering and light conversation of the crowd were the staccato voices of the con volunteers as they kept the snaking line organized. Gaps were filled, line cutters discouraged, and all manners of questions answered. The volunteers were a mixed bunch, some sleepy and verging on incompetent, while others seemed to overcompensate by being insanely cheerful and more helpful then anyone wanted them to be.

Liza marched along and avoided eye contact with everyone. Hemmed in on all sides by people, she felt exposed and in eminent danger of being recognized. Gwen was talking about something, but Liza wasn’t even pretending to listen. Liza focused on her tennis shoes until she fretted about how scuffed up one of them was.

Hi!

Liza jumped back a step, startled, and actually hovered a few inches off the ground before willing herself to land. The source of the voice, the women in line in front of her, didn’t seem to notice. She did have a hand extended, waiting for Liza to shake it as the other clutched a book to her heart. She looked to be in her thirties and was out of place, dressed in expensive casual clothes like a yuppie. Hi! I’m June! It’s supposed to be Juno, you know, like the Roman God? But I shortened it. Mom was such a hippie. She was all into mythology, Joseph Campbell and pot back then, but now she’s selling real estate. Can you believe it? Liza obligingly shook her hand, and that seemed to encourage her to go on. So, how long have you been reading Leon? I first found him back when he was still writing short stories in Omni Magazine. Remember Omni? It was all artsy and fannish but put out by that porno publisher. They had lots of scantily dressed ladies in the art, but no porn. Which was good, because Leon had been writing for Playboy magazine too, and dad wouldn’t let me look at it. It was so dumb. He had a complete collection. Top shelf in his study. Went all the way back to the sixties. Almost six feet of boobs. Eventually my nagging wore him down and he went and photocopied out one of the stories for me, but it wasn’t a Leon story. I think it was Vonnegut. I didn’t have the heart to tell daddy he was totally wrong.

Liza blinked. Twice.

Liza pursed her lips, turned around, and shoved the still talking Gwen in front of Juno. Gwen? Juno. Juno? Gwen. You too were separated at birth. Discuss.

And they did. For the next hour and a half.

The line inched along, and Liza was left alone with her thoughts. They were random, but kept drifting back to her time with Control. The relationship they had was more than professional. It started off as friends, but after a year it kept drifting into clear intimate territory, something they took slowly, and had to keep secret because it was clearly a conflict of interest in the eyes of the Defense Force, and could have got him fired. Control worked in the DF headquarters, and Liza had the Paragon’s penthouse apartment at the top of the building. This afforded them ample time to be together. Between the proximity and the need for discretion they hadn’t actually dated in any traditional sense. They didn’t go out; they hung out, usually not far from the banks of computers and monitors of his lair. The sub-basements he worked in were filled with humming and blinking servers and enveloped in chilly air conditioning. He never seemed to mind the cold, and always wore t-shirts. His skin would be ice, and she’d flinch when they touched, but he always seemed to enjoy warming up in her embrace.

Control was more than socially awkward; he was gifted in a way that made it difficult to relate to anyone. He had such an affinity for machines and problem-solving that he broke the Wilkin’s scale.

The Wilkin’s scale was a big deal.

The Wilkin’s scale defined the life of Outliers like Liza and Control. It defined their missions in the Defense Force, which by proxy was the thing that kept them together.

The Wilkin’s scale ranked all manner of human ability in comparison to a statistical measured norm created from worldwide measurements of children in grade school. The specifics of the test, and its application, varied among countries. Most of the third world couldn’t afford math books let alone standardized tests, so the universality of the test was often questioned. But in the US, anyone measuring in the 3rd percentile of any category of the Wilkin’s scale was legally classified as gifted. The scales were broad and most people associated the term gifted with individuals who were statistical outliers, people with unusual abilities that were difficult to describe by traditional physical laws. But the term was meant to include many kinds of gifted individuals; including concert violinists, dazzling painters, and brilliant researchers.

The Defense Force’s primary objective was to manage and mentor those gifted individuals that tested as outliers on the Wilkin’s test. An outlier by definition was the first percentile trailing edge of a bell curve distribution, with most people falling inside the bell shape of normal, making outliers by contrast abnormal.  Outlier gifts created a law enforcement vacuum in what normal society could handle, and the DF filled that void.

The Defense Force not only helped administer the tests, and verify them, they actively recruited those with abilities that were useful to the DF. The best were in the Alpha Team, and Liza led the Alpha Team. When outliers broke the law, or got into similar trouble, and normal law enforcement couldn’t handle it, the DF sent in the Alpha Team. The DF’s jurisdiction was worldwide, and they answered to the UN This meant that Liza saw directly how outliers were treated throughout the world.

In Liza’s opinion, just being labeled gifted was really more of a curse than a gift. In addition to a tendency for legally curtailed liberties and freedoms, those who were true outliers were correlated in study after study with impaired social development. They were frequently the labeled the stereotypical nerd, and had a higher than normal percentage of sociopathic leanings. There was endless debate about whether being an outlier predisposes someone to these tendencies, or if society treats them differently enough to create these traits.

Control was a typical outlier. He was taking college level courses in junior high school, and spent his free time programming in the school’s computer lab. Most of the kids didn’t know anything about computers beyond video game consoles. Meanwhile, Control had been hacking before they had a term for it. He had a teacher for a mentor, but no one else talked to him, except to pick on him. His father was a truck driver who never understood his son. When the FBI came to the house to arrest Adam for hacking, his father gave him up without question, signed away parental rights, and made Adam a ward of the state. They gave Adam better toys to play with and a direction for his talents, and for the first time in his life he was happy.

For those with outlier athletic abilities, the specific problems varied slightly. They faced the double standard of being banned from collegiate and Olympic sports for having an unfair advantage, while being courted directly for professional sports. Human athletes without gifts were constantly taking illegal performance-enhancing substances just to keep up. Ungifted athletes didn’t even dare compete in heavyweight boxing or any form of wrestling.

Those gifted or outlier that did go into sports were faced with spectacularly inept competitions that relied on natural ability instead of the rigorous training collegiate sports expected. This emphasis of style over substance led to brutality that meant the career span of a pro athlete was criminally short. I also meant that the attention span of the fans was fickle, they always wanted the next crazy thing.

Liza’s brother was a normal and a football jock from the time he could throw. He went from peewee football all the way to college ball. One tackle from a lineman, later measured as borderline gifted, ended his career. Now he coaches and spends most of his time aggressively testing his team for gifted innate ability as much as for drugs.

Discrimination was common for outlier talents throughout history, except when the opposite was true and the gifted were lauded as a savant, a hero, or a God. The discrimination tended to coalesce around people whose talents weren’t perceived as conforming to their culture. For example, people that could make their hands glow were burned at the stake as witches in Salem, while those outliers were adored as rock stars in the psychedelic sixties. Liza’s teammate and friend Cinaed (pronounced Kin-Aye) was a typical example of the latter. She was the strongest pyrokinetic on record. In historical times she would have been considered a goddess or a demon because she could control a volume of heat and fire that can bring down an entire national forest in a day. Instead, she's a celebrity hero and a fan of tabloids for her loud behavior.

This was the world she lived in and worked in, and with Control it had seemed normal. Even fun. Now that he was gone... it wasn’t the same for Liza.

He would have like this con, she thought, outcasts bonding as a community. Yeah. He would have liked that.

Liza sighed deeply as she shuffled forward and made the first turn. The line had filled in behind her, like a snake that had swallowed her whole. She wondered how many in the crowd could be gifted.

Nearly one in a million was gifted, and one in ten million fell under her provenance as outliers. Outliers were scattered across the six billion people in the world, and each country had its own laws and treaties. The Defense Force was currently in the hands of the UN, but as her teammate, Rain, liked to point out, that made things even more difficult because the UN seldom accomplished anything except arguing. Rain was always pointing out how outliers in the third world were exploited or persecuted, while those in the first world got treated like movie stars. Cinaed’s boyfriend, Raymond Hardcase, actually was a movie star. He couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, but he could walk away from a real explosion unharmed.

Anyone around her could have amazing abilities. There was seldom a way to tell from the outside.

She saw spotted with an implant behind her ear, just a glimpse, then she couldn’t find the person again. It wasn’t an advanced device, just something simple, probably a hearing aid.

Control’s implant flashed before her mind’s eye. The socket was wide enough to fit a finger into it. It was located in the back of his skull, about where it connected to the spine. His hair mostly hid it, and he wore a cap in public, but it was disturbing anytime she saw it directly.

Adam’s natural talents had qualified him for the pilot studies on cybernetic testing. For decades, scientists were trying to integrate men with machines, and had mostly failed. Her former teammate, CyberSoldier, was the first public success, but there were many secret experiments before him, and enough failures to raise questions about the ethics of experiments on live subjects, no matter how much they volunteered for it.

The most important experiment was the one that produced Control. Adam was the first person to have his brain successfully integrated with a computer, translating his thoughts into binary language in real time, and having digital knowledge and sensory input translated into feedback that neurons could recognize. He had a biochip permanently embedded in his brain, and a portion of brain matter removed to accommodate it. A port was surgically installed into his skull, allowing a fiberoptic wire to connect him to a computer. That port also allowed a chemical cocktail to flow directly into his brain, bypassing the blood/brain barrier, which included drugs that allowed him to stay awake for days, and suppress emotional distractions at will. He could single handedly do the work of a room full of intelligence analysts, all by himself.

He loved it.

He could manage twelve separate conversations at once. He became ambidextrous to the point where his right hand could be using one keyboard, his left using another, while