At home in his apartment that evening, Ben Fowler opened up his Gmail account and downloaded the Word file he'd sent himself from work. He opened it up and read over it.
"This really does stink," he said to himself. He clicked Ctrl, Home and began to start editing the story from the beginning, but he stopped himself. He realized he couldn't change anything. Everything that was written was true, even though it was skimpy on the details. He knew that anything he did to flesh it out would make it less true than it was. He sighed audibly and sucked it up.
He hit Ctrl, End and took a moment staring at the cursor, his fingers hovering over the proper spots on the keyboard. Without giving it any thought, he continued the story.
Far down, between the center and the crust of the Earth in the rocky mantle, lay the Stronghold. It is within this fortress-like structure that Metaman is able to rest in complete solitude. He has his reasons for removing himself from the surface world, but he has not yet been able to bring himself to leave the planet.
Metaman is in the midst of deep sleep, when a slight buzzing sound reaches his ears. His enhanced hearing picks up sounds that the normal human ear cannot detect, and he picks himself out of rest. He does not need rest, his body does not need sleep at all, but he needs to sleep in order to dream. Without dreaming, the mind begins to hallucinate.
He hovers over to a large computer, an improvement on the Ultivac. Moments later, he pulls out a printout of tremors near the Earth's surface and scans it quickly.
"The signal!" he utters. "The surface world is in dire need of Metaman."
When he had left the surface world, he had given the Meta Board strict instructions not to be disturb him. But he had left them with one way to contact him, one way so drastic that they were only to use it in the hour of greatest need.
Metaman says, "Years ago, I planted four poles, made of an indestructible substance found on another world, into four selected locations around the Earth. At a specific signal, each of those poles would cause a minor earthquake, not enough to cause damage, but enough to register on my delicate scientific equipment at the Stronghold. I know that the signal has been sent, because it is a sheer improbability for four earthquakes of equal magnitudes to occur in four different places at the exact same time."
The hero flies over to a huge vault door. "I know now what I must do." At that, Metaman dons a protective suit of armor he had constructed out of the same indestructible substance that the poles were made of, and he begins to turn the wheel to open the door.
The entire Stronghold creaks under the pressure of the mantle surrounding it, but Metaman opens the door. He quickly dashes through it and then closes it again. He goes to the next door in the airlock and starts to open it slowly, knowing that he has only a split second of time in which to act. The moment he opens it, he closes the door behind him while using his telekinesis to keep the rock from crushing inward until the door is once again secure.
"Now -- to the surface world, in the only way possible!" Metaman says, turning himself and his protective suit of armor completely intangible moments later, and he rises up through the thick mantle toward the Earth's crust. A single tear rolls down his cheek as he reaches the surface world and sees the bright blue sky and the sun once more, after years of isolation.
"Fear not, world -- Metaman has returned," he says as he becomes solid and flies toward Thunder City.
Ben stopped typing. He frowned. "Why would Metaman be talking to himself like that?" he said. "It's like he knows someone's listening in who needs all the plot points filled out for him. Then again, I'm doing the same thing, so..." He stopped talking to himself.
He moved his cursor up a few paragraphs, thinking to change Metaman's expository speech from dialogue to third person narrative, but he stopped himself. Again, he felt unable to change anything. That's the way it happened. Maybe Metaman had a habit of talking to himself, he reasoned. A few years of complete isolation will do that to a man. Ben Fowler leaned back and sighed. It was time for bed.
