The rules were written on the crinkly tag on the inside of the indestructible sky-blue unitard:
- UPHOLD JUSTICE
- DESTROY EVIL
- DO NOT MACHINE WASH
“Is this some kind of prank?” Chandler asked the giant blonde automaton with the glacial blue eyes that hovered by his bed. It had silently flown in through the window of his room, the spitting image of the man from the coupon on the Golden Age comic book that Chandler had mailed out 3 days ago out of boredom.
“Stardust does not prank,” the automaton boomed, the words spilling out from its wide-open mouth, the lips unmoving “you have sent out the coupon. There was a raffle. You have been chosen.”
“So what now?” Chandler asked. The Stardust automaton simply pointed at the golden studded wide belt that it had laid onto his sheets.
Chandler just shrugged and took the belt in his hands, noticing the fine golden weave of it, its delicate grid of gossamer circuitry. It was made up of tiny switchboards that fractaled out forever. He leaned in for a closer look and he could almost hear the tiny machinery sing like a choir of angels…
“Okay,” Chandler said, as he took off his clothes and began to squeeze himself into the unitard, one leg at a time, watching as the strange, lighter-than-air material stretched around his chubby flesh, becoming almost transparent, before pulling itself together. When it settled, the outline of Chandler’s right leg was as toned as an Olympian’s, all the way up to the middle of his thigh, when his pudgy flesh spilled out once again. “Freaky.”
“Quite,” the automaton agreed, then hovered over to squeeze the rest of Chandler into the unitard. Even with the suit’s body-morphing effect, it took a good minute for the belt to hook all the way around Chandler’s waist.
“What are these?” Chandler said, looking up at the motes of light arranging themselves in familiar-looking menus in his field of vision. Lists or rays and modes and functions floated into and out of his field of vision, bobbing out of the way when he blinked.
“Super-wizard interface. Mapped to your brain,” the automaton boomed “made with interplanetary scientific principles in mind.”
“What does that even mean?” Chandler asked. The automaton didn’t answer. Chandler flicked through submenus, finally finding one listing different types of vision. He turned on ALEPH and his entire being was flooded with every viewpoint in the universe. Overwhelmed, he switched it off.
For a while, Chandler experimented with the functions in the suit: he killed and restored gravity in the room, transmuted an old plastic fork stuck under his bed into gold, then changed it back. He turned the moonlight seeping through his window into an earworm, then his two-day-old leftover takeaway into a Michelin star five-course meal. Finally, he stepped out into the balcony, shivering against the December breeze.
“How do I fly?” Chandler asked the automaton, as he found the suit’s thermostat and set his body temperature to Cozy.
“You do not. You are carried inside a tubular spacial,” the automaton said matter of factly. Chandler blinked. “Imagine a vessel. Subtract gravity. Wreath it in a rainbow propulsion ray.”
Chandler did as the automaton said, drawing a tube-like shape in his mind. It encased him perfectly, cutting off his light and air, even as it slowly began to make him drift off the ground.
“Reduce opacity. Generate oxygen. Form controls,” the automaton said and Chandler fiddled with the mind-knobs until the spacial was finally transparent and he could breathe. He watched himself drift up in the air, four storeys over the ground, and briefly panicked until the automaton hovered beside him.
“How fast can this thing go?” Chandler asked.
“It travels at the speed of thought,” the automaton said as if that meant anything. Chandler sifted through menus until he found one that looked like a simplified cockpit and nudged at a couple of dials, picking up speed until his house sped away into the distance. He found a speed adjustment knob and switched up to supersonic speed, twisting up into the air to tear through the clouds. He switched across the Machs all the way to Transonic speeds and as he skirted across the edge of the atmosphere, he switched to lightspeed.
Chandler flew across the Moon and into the wide-open void. When he got tired of waiting for Mars to inch closer into view, he checked the dial again. It didn’t cap at lightspeed, so he flicked it up once, to twice that. Mars crept closer, but it still took too long, so he nudged it once, twice, then finally let the dial spin until Mars simply sped by, the rest of the Solar System passing him by. He tried to brake somewhere past Betelgeuse, slowed down as he passed through the debris of an obliterated nebule, and finally stopped, caught in the twin tug of two dying stars.
“Am I to assume this is to your liking?” the automaton asked, having just zipped next to him, its voice booming in the silence of the void.
“Beats being a sad sack at home,” Chandler said, twirling and twisting out into the nothingness “you know what I thought I was gonna do tonight? Get drunk by myself and look for a job.”
“There’s still time,” the automaton said.
“What? Why?” Chandler said, kicking at nothing at all as he swam through the void “So I can spend most of my time with strangers, putting numbers I don’t understand in sheets I can barely read for the rest of my life? So I can bend myself over backward to pay alimony to Ruby and I get fat on vindaloo takeout while watching porn? No, thank you.”
“Then what will you do?” the automaton asked. Chandler waved his hand, smacking a tiny meteor that bumped against his forehead like a gnat.
“I don’t know. Destroying evil sounds like a good start. A whole lot of bastards back home,” Chandler said, floating across the perihelion of the star, bathing in the stinging radiation.
“I’d recommend checking your crime locator,” the automaton said. Chandler sifted through his menus again, until he found it. A tiny screen, hanging off a silvery wire that snaked behind his head and out of sight, manifested before him. A list of automatically updating crimes began to scroll across his line of sight, updating by the second. Chandler groaned, feeling a migraine coming on as he tried to keep up.
“Let’s filter by category,” Chandler said, organizing crimes by severity, from misdemeanors to war crimes to transgressions against God and nature. He searched through the tabs, organizing them by victims affected, then alphabetically, then by date “those look like doozies.”
“A Super-Wizard’s work is no mere feat,” the automaton said.
“Best start small. There’s a convenience store robbery in a little town in the Rust Belt. Mom and pop store. Shouldn’t make too many waves, right?” Chandler said. The automaton simply shrugged.
Chandler reached back into the controls and drove the Tubular spacial across the Galaxy back to the Solar System, to Earth, to the tiny Rust Belt town where the sleepy convenience store was. He flicked through the options available in the menu, searching through the selection of beams, waves, and rays, finally settling for something appropriately ironic.
“Already called the police. Think I’ll give them a warning, then change their bullets into candy, maybe freeze one guy in place so the others can surrender. You ready?” Chandler said as he touched down into the parking lot.
“Always. If I might recommend…” the automaton began, but Chandler had already kicked the door open, bursting into the small convenience store.
“You are in the power of Stardust!” Chandler howled, hands filled with rainbow energy.
“Aaah!” the men screamed. One of them aimed his gun and pulled the trigger. Chandler’s body jerked back as the bullet went through his skull. He floated for a brief moment, then thumped onto the floor.
The gunmen ran out of the store, dropping half their loot as they headed for the car, just as the sheriff's car sped into the scene and after them. Inside the shop, the owners, an old couple, wept as they looked at the strange dead man, his lifeblood pooling on the floor.
“...the anti-ballistic field,” the automaton recommended, uselessly, to Chandler. It ran its scan, making sure that he was dead before it pulled the suit off him and flew away, out of sight.
There were others on its list, after all.
