The Amazing Underachiever

[WP] You thought you never got a super power. You were always just average. Until you realized you were average at EVERYTHING. Making a sandwich, stopping a bank robbery, building a spaceship, etc. Never great, but never terrible either.

*****

This was it. This would be the best use of my power. I sat down at the computer, looking over my specialized software.

The hardest part about my superpower? Just discovering it. I mean, think about it: when was the last time you actually tried something crazy? Most people don't go trying to stop runaway trains. Most people don't fly to central Africa and try to unseat warlords. Honestly, when was the last time you really broke your own expectations, really pushed yourself to do something you thought was impossible?

I figured I'd start with the big ones, since having those would make everything else easier. I opened up DWSIM and started working.

We live in a world that punishes anything but mediocrity. I realize that now. My whole life I had waited for something wonderful, until one day I realized I was equally waiting for something terrible. A fire I could rush into, an earthquake I could heroically try to rescue people from. A tragedy I could exploit, if only I had phenomenally exploitable powers. Those flying white guys with the technicolor underwear? Every heroic act they perform is predicated on someone else's loss.

I ran the simulator, saw my molecule try to interact with the far more complex proteins. It seemed like it worked ok. I felt for my power, and it replied.

"Eh, fuck it. That's good enough," I felt myself say. I saved the file, zipped it, sent it to the mailing list of international pharmacology lab addresses. That was my immortality serum done; they'd race each other to fine tune it into as many variations as necessary for it to work correctly.

See, I didn't have to be great at anything, so long as what I was mediocre at was great enough already. I closed the molecular modeling software, and opened AutoCAD.

We humans, we get stuck in our ruts so easily. I was, too: that's why my power went undiscovered for so long. I was selfishly waiting for someone else's tragedy. So when my own tragedy came knocking, my first instinct was to look for some asshole in a cape to rescue me. Because all my life I had subconsciously thought that that's what tragedies were for. They exist to demonstrate what the mighty could accomplish, and we mere mortals were so many NPCs, whose role was to alternate between begging for help and fawning over the heroes who deigned to respond.

Oof, this one was a complex problem. I was forced to design three different novel component machines and a new metamaterial that could withstand spaghettification. But my power kept clicking, so it was possible, so I kept at it. It would probably all fall apart if some random schmoe tried to build it in his backyard, but with some refining by the real geniuses, it would work just fine. I just had to do the work.

Because that's what it is, isn't it? Work. Pushing yourself to break free of your own expectations, to overcome your own doubts and fears. To become more than just some cog in the grand machine. To achieve, however modestly, some measure of making the world better than you found it. People would laugh at you, people would judge you, people would warn you not to dare. Governments would pay attention to you--the wrong kind of attention, especially if you had the wrong skin color or the wrong economic upbringing. These conformity pressures were their own tragedy, and exploiting them in order to demonstrate excellence in overcoming them was celebrated as the most heroic act an NPC could accomplish. Cue applause, here's your trophy, thanks for being the real hero.

"Eh, fuck it. That's good enough," I blurted out. Whoops, got lost in thought and zoned out while working there. But now, the first working (if mediocre) plans for a real life time machine was finished. Once again, I saved everything, zipped up the files (I was surprised at how big these were), and found the mailing list for engineering and physics labs I had made.

I watched the progress bar, and wondered how many tragedies I was exploiting to be the hero today. I had solved aging and time travel; I still had cancer, hunger, and world peace on my list for this afternoon. Tomorrow's list was Alzheimer's, ALS, nuclear proliferation, space colonization, and climate change.

I sat back, stretching, and realized I was hungry. I looked down at my frayed sweatpants and considered getting dressed, going out for a burger. Would anyone notice? Would anyone care that I had the solutions to all their ills? Would anyone ever recognize what I had just done here? I was sending these plans out anonymously to every lab I could find, knowing that allowing any one group to have proprietary control over any of these technologies would be catastrophic.

Perhaps that was my tragedy, then. Perhaps I would wait for someone to exploit it, hoping to find my own personal hero in the one who recognized my work, someday.

I shook off the absurd thought, and laughed at my own hubris. I was being a proper cunt, I knew it. Real heroes? They don't need applause. They just do the work that makes the world a little better than they found it. I got up and went to get dressed, in my mediocre clothes, as a mediocre person. If I was anything more than mediocre, it was merely because I was willing to try.

Not all heroes wear capes. Right?

*****

THE END