Ryan sat in a lab located in the Catskill Mountains, happily pouring over mathematical formulas. He was rarely happy despite being a child. He had just gotten accepted to Harvard despite his youth, his cartoon was the most popular kids’ show in America and he was potentially the wealthiest child in the world but he wasn’t usually happy. Visits to Rex Robinson’s Catskills lab were always welcome, however.  It was rare that he met anyone that approached his level of intellect and Rex seemingly surpassed it.

Rex and Ryan hunched over a stack of equations scribbled across multiple pieces of paper with several more scrawled along the blackboard behind them.

“So, making matter from nothing,” Rex tapped the equations in front of them, “Think it’s possible now?”

“Kinda,” Ryan looked up from the mountain of paper under him, “With a really powerful laser and a particle accelerator… Maybe a particle accelerator that’s about two miles long.  We could do it in a lab but it would have to be the biggest lab in the whole world,” he spread his arms out, indicating the two-mile wide accelerator.

“What if we did it in, say, the middle of Antarctica?,” Rex asked with a knowing smile, “Do you think we could develop a smaller one that we can take with us?”

“That’d be the hard part.  We’d probably have to use Neutronium for a power source or something.”

Rex gave him a pat on the back, “Consider it a homework assignment,” then he got up and moved to the door to retrieve Ryan’s coat from the rack.  Rex would occasionally  give him assignments to test theories or to simply keep Ryan mentally sharp. This one would turn into the longest homework assignment he had ever given him.

“When do you want it?,” Ryan asked.

Rex tapped his chin, “Hm, give it maybe thirty years or so.  A super smart hero like you can figure it out.”

“I’m not a hero,” Ryan’s face scrunched up, “Heroes are guys like you.”

“Take credit for your accomplishments, Ryan,” he said with a proud smile.

Thirty years or so later, Ryan received a buzz from his front gate early in the morning.  He groggily rolled out of bed, trying his best to ignore the hangover as a holographic display showed Rex at his gate along with his information displayed on a separate screen.  “I’ll be down in a minute, Rex,” he said through the intercom, “Make yourself at home.”  He tapped the screen and Rex was let inside his house.  After a brief shower, Ryan came downstairs to see Rex and Labrat on the livingroom couch, watching a cartoon.  Labrat was in his usual footed pajamas and Rex had already helped himself to a cup of coffee.  “I thought you’d like a cup to nurse that hangover,” Rex handed him an additional cup from the coffee table.  Ryan wasn’t sure how he knew he had a hangover and didn’t ask.  Rex was just good at figuring that sort of thing out and best of all, didn’t judge Ryan for being hungover on a Wednesday morning.

“So what’s up?,” Ryan took a sip.

“We’re watching Paw Patrol,” Labrat informed him with complete contentment.

“It’s an exciting episode,” Rex nodded in agreement, then turned to Ryan, “But I’m afraid we’ll have to excuse ourselves, Labrat, seeing as how we have to go to Antarctica this morning.”

Ryan gave him a blank stare before snapping his fingers in realization, “The particle accelerator.”

In Ryan’s garage, they moved past a row of tricked-out cars to an unused section of the annex.  “I managed to shrink it down over the years but it’s still too bulky to fit in storage,” he told Rex as he punched a code into a keypad, “It can generate a strong enough electric field to get the job done without needing a massive lab.  Of course, we’ll still need your ship for power but you knew that already.”  He opened the door, revealing stacked metal coils and literal tons of machinery.  “So, is today the day you tell me what this is about?,” he asked with anticipation.

Rex never did explain what the homework assignment was for and over the next few decades, asked sparse questions regarding Ryan’s progress on it.  Rex liked to set goals for his allies and explained himself when those goals were achieved. Rex worked that way and most people found it endearing as it gave them a sense of accomplishment.  Ryan once remarked, “When I do it, people just call me manipulative.”  Then again, Rex single-handily stopped the Invasion of 1981 and was over a century old so he was afforded certain quirks.

“Do you remember The Nirvana Man?,” Rex asked, “One of my more dangerous foes.”

“Of course.  Former Soviet scientist in a suit of armor.  He was into philosophy, metaphysics and Eastern spirituality which got him kicked out of the USSR.  He always had the worst possible takes on most philosophical concepts which somehow resulted in him endangering millions of lives.”

“One of those bad takes involved creating the Metaphysical Void.  He felt that enlightenment could be achieved through complete negation of the self which is a fine idea but his version of that idea involved creating an actual void that would slowly grow to the point of engulfing the planet. Not something I could abide.”

“Let me guess, Nirvana had a base in Antarctica? Complete with a big scary machine of some sort?”

“He certainly did.  By the time I found his base, the process had started and the Void would emerge at any minute.  I would have shut the damn thing off or even destroyed the machine but there were fail safes in place: once the process began, it would be indefinite. It wouldn’t matter if I broke the machine to pieces, the Void would come either way,” he raised his head and took a look at Ryan like a teacher waiting for a star pupil to answer, “Can you guess what I did next?”

Ryan thought for a moment, “If it were me, I’d check to see if the machine could be recalibrated and reduce the effects to cause the least amount of damage.”

“That is precisely what happened,” a proud grin spread across his face, “Once the Void emerged, it was only the size of a single particle.”

“But it’s been growing all this time, hasn’t it?”

“I’ve been staying on top of it over the years.  It’s now big enough to engulf a good chunk of the old base in Antarctica and I want to take it out before it spreads too far.  My plan was to wait until it was a decent enough size, then use a particle accelerator and a high-powered laser to create matter.  The Void has been negating everything from the outside but…”

“… You want to create matter within the Void.  Once the Void is filled with matter, it ceases to be a void and the world is safe.”

“Let’s get to it,” Rex clapped Ryan’s shoulder.

Rex’s robot staff floated back and forth between Ryan’s garage and Rex’s ship, carrying the particle accelerator piece-by-piece.  Once it was loaded and secured in the ship’s massive dock, they took off. Rex’s ship, Hyperion’s Light, was fast enough to make the trek from Boston to Antarctica in a much shorter time than any standard aircraft.  As the robot staff piloted, Ryan and Rex remained in the lab, gazing at the wall-sized screen hanging above which displayed the schematics of the accelerator.  A gold robot scuttled to them with a tray of coffee as Rex nodded in approval.  “Everything checks out,” Rex told Ryan, “I went to the right guy for this.”  A rare, sincere smile spread across Ryan’s face when he heard this.  Forty  five minutes later, Hyperion’s Light buzzed over glaciers on its way to Nirvana Man’s former base.

The base was a two-story metal structure partially buried in a snow drift.  Ryan and Rex trudged over the icy terrain while covered in protective gear to combat the extreme temperatures.  Rex casually carried his laser on his shoulder despite it weighing over 600 pounds while Ryan watched the robot staff carrying large coils overhead.  As they got closer to the base, Ryan spotted a figure laying in the snow.

“That guy look familiar?,” Rex joked.  Indeed, the man looked familiar; Rex Robinson seemingly lay on the ground, lifeless despite his mirror image standing next to him.  Ryan curiously stepped over the body to get a better look and noticed the face was partially missing, revealing a metal skull and machinery.  Additionally, the chest area had also been damaged with wires and mechanical parts spilling out into the ice.

“I sent a robot duplicate to distract the Nirvana Man while I snuck inside to take out his machine,” Rex informed him, “The cold temperatures preserve things pretty well around here, of course.”  They went inside the base through a busted vault door that had been blasted open.  Once they made it inside, Ryan noticed the Void as it had taken over much of the inside, apparently eating away at the walls and ceiling, reaching up through the second floor and creating an atrium inside the base.  It also had taken out the back wall, allowing sunlight to enter the structure.  The Void itself was circular and without depth, seemingly being two dimensional.  It was also colorless but still visible somehow.  When Ryan looked at it, there was a spot in his line of vision that was unclear as if he was partially blind.  He picked up a piece of rubble at his feet and threw it at the Void to test it out.  Once the debris hit the Void, it disappeared.  There was no flash or explosion or anything to indicate a reaction.  It simply ceased to be.

“Secession of existence,” Ryan said, “Not the best way to achieve enlightenment.  The Nirvana Man had a way of getting shit wrong.”

“The man was a cuckoo-cuckoo bird,” Rex stated firmly.

The robots assembled the long coils of the accelerator near the rear of the base where the Void was visible.  A little over two hours later, a series of long cables and power couplings ran down from Rex’s ship hovering overhead to the accelerator. Rex and Ryan oversaw its construction and everything was ready. Ryan pulled a lever and the accelerator hummed to life. Peels of energy shot into the sky as it generated a large electric field, washing the area in a blue glow. “Homework’s finally done at least,” Ryan said as he squinted to see through the bright blue light.

Rex had already set his laser on a tripod on the opposite side of the Void and activated it, sending a white beam into the center of the Void.  The laser seemingly disappeared once it reached the surface of the negative space, however.  Ryan shouted over the roar of the accelerator, “Is it working?”  Rex signaled to him and shouted back, “Give it time!”  Even though the Void could not be seen clearly, Ryan still detected the appearance of a small black dot in the center of it. Moreover, it was growing in size.  The sphere grew larger and larger: a 3-D object invading 2-D space.  Soon, the black globe filled the gap inside the base and Ryan lost sight of Rex before it dropped from the sky. One did not have to be a scientist to understand that a multi-ton object hitting a damaged floor in a frozen wasteland was less than ideal, however.

Ryan and Rex had been prepared for this, of course.  The Earth shook and the sound of the impact was deafening as what was left of the base trembled and the ground sent ice and snow in every direction.  Ryan activated the jet pack strapped to his arctic gear and took off into the sky just as the ground gave way under him.  White mist rose to the heavens as the dark structure of the Nirvana Man’s base sank below.  The metal coils of the particle accelerator slid into the opening chasm, pulling the power couplings along with it.  Thinking quickly, Ryan brought up a holographic screen and disconnected the cables from the ship remotely.  Moments later, he found himself hovering over an icy canyon where the base and Void once were.  Rex flew up to greet him and while Ryan didn’t see him escape, he wasn’t surprised to know that he had. “I’ll give that assignment an A+,” he told Ryan proudly. The robot staff gathered what they could and the two men were soon on their way back to boston.

“Looks like the mission was a success,” Rex said assuredly.

“Hopefully, we didn’t contribute to the Southern Ice Cap melting,” Ryan muttered.

“We can assess the situation later but for now, the world is safe.”

“Yeah, you saved the planet,” Ryan gave him a sure smile.

“We saved the planet,” Rex corrected him.

“What?”

“Take credit for your accomplishments, Ryan.  You’re a hero.”

“Right… right,” he said quietly.

He never quite admitted to what Rex had called him but if there was one person on the planet who made him feel like a hero, it was Rex Robinson.

Coming Soon – The Resurgence