We’re back to fantasy hypotheticals, boys and girls. Management apologizes if that bothers you, and here’s a lollipop for your trouble.
First the short version. A homophobic, psychopathic supergenius has invented a ray that will force every gay and lesbian in North America “straight,” at the cost of psychological trauma that will drive up to 5 percent to suicide. To prevent Bob X–the black, bisexual superhero with Superman’s powers, no known weaknesses, and a kid in middle school–from interfering, the villain has also placed a nuke in a small town in India. Bob has time to stop either menace, but not both.
For the long version, see the spoiler box:
[spoiler]It’s a beautiful spring night in Paris, and Bob–is vacationing with his [del]adoptive daughter[/del] daughter, Lynn, and his [del] current boyfriend[/del] auditioning co-parent, Neil. Lynn is examining the Paris skyline with her binoculars when she sees a middle-aged woman on the roof of a tall building, clearly about to jump. Told about this, Bob instantly flies to the rescue. He catches the woman, Jean-Marie, just in time. She barely seems are of his presence. As he flies her to the hospital, she keeps repeating the phrase “I can’t live like this.”
Bob finds both Jean-Marie’s words and glassy-eyed expression eerily familiar, so he keeps track of her over the next few days, even eavesdropping on a therapy session via super-hearing. It turns out that she recently felt forced to abandon her female lover of thirty years in favor of the company of men, something she always–and still–finds revolting. It’s not that Jean-Marie fell out of love; far from it. But she felt a compulsion so strong it overcame her will and disgust. The therapist tells Jean-Marie that she isn’t unique; about a thousand gay & lesbian Parisians are known to have gone through this in the past few months. All were traumatized; ten have committed suicide.
Bob’s concerns grow. After taking Lynn and Neil home to Chicago, he gets a physician he trusts to examine a brain scan of one of the inexplicably-straightened. To his unsurprise, the scans show the same anomalies as those of some mind-controlled assassins he encountered a decade ago–assassins who, when when caught, all repeated phrases like “I don’t want to do this,” and had glassy-eyed stares. They–and, Bob suspects, the forcibly-straightened Parisians–were the victims of a supergenius villain who looks like this and whose name, for obvious reasons, is Lillianna Lake. Npne of the prior set of victims have either recovered or been cured, and some of the smartest people on Earth have tried.
Bob sets about tracking down Lake. A week later, he’s located her current base. Surprisingly, no death-rays, guided missiles, or giant robots attack as he approaches, and the armored door opens without having to be super-punched. Shortly he confronts Lake in her office; in her hand is a tablet computer.
“Hey there, Bobby,” Lake says. “You’re early. I thought I had another month.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Bob replies. “So are you going to pretend you’re not behind the mind-rapes in Paris?”
“Nope. We both know you can always tell when anybody’s lying.”
“So what’s the deal? I thought you gave up villainy after the Trident affair. Found Jesus in prison or some such.”
“Oh, I did,” Lake says. “I’m doing God’s work. See, after I got saved, I realized that homosexuality is an abomination and it was my duty to reduce its presence in the world. So I escaped the SuperMax–it was easy and got to work. At first I just put on my invisibility suit, grabbed a straight reason, and sliced up a couple dozen queers in San Francisco–but as fun as that was, it was horribly inefficient. So I rejiggered my mind-control ray to force homos straight, then tested it in Paris. I was trying to stay off your radar until I was ready to go worldwide. Also, I was hoping to improve the suicide rate. I’ve got it up to five percent now–”
At that, Bob yanks Lake out of her chair and gives her the heat-vision warning glare. “Unless you want to be set on fire inch by inch,” he growls, “you’re gonna tell me how to cure this!”
“Cure?” Lake says with a smirk. “I don’t have a cure, Bob. Why on Earth would I? But there’s more you want to know. You’ve interrupted my schedule; I am not ready to fix all the world’s homos. Just the ones in North America. I have satellites in orbit that, just a few minutes from now, will send my salvation rays all over the United States, Canada, and Mexico. No, don’t worry that you don’t have time to beat the information out of me; everything you need to find and destroy the anti-fag sats is on this L-Pad, which I will unlock for you after I tell you this. This base is as far on earth as possible from Singupura, India, population 23 thousand and change. Anticpating that you might stick your nose in my soup, I’ve placed a nuclear warhead in the middle of the town, arming it when you entered this room. It’ll obliterate the town in about two minutes, and there’s no way to disarm it. Not even you are fast enough to both save the town and stop the satellites. You have to choose. Now all the info you need to make your decision is on the L-Pad. I just unlocked it–”
Bob rips the tablet out of Lake’s hand, reads the information, and curses. She has calculated correctly and precisely. He has just barely enough time to save Singapur OR stop the anti-gay rays from firing; there’s no way even he can both. Dropping Lake to the floor, he flies out of the room.[/spoiler]
What should Bob do–save the town, or stop the anti-gay rays? Either way, should he have spared a tenth of a second to rip the villain’s head off?