The Grasshopper

I’m a grasshopper. My jumping legs, mechanical marvels to be sure, are attached to my harness around the waist. They stick out about two feet behind me, like enormous elbows behind my shoulder blades. The lower part of the legs hang down from the elbows, hovering just inches above the ground.

Like a real grasshopper’s jumping legs, they give me the ability to jump several times my body length. On a clear field I can jump as far as 100 yards with a single jolt of high voltage sent through the artificial muscles in the thighs!

The hardest part of jumping is of course the landing. Depending on the angle, I can jump as much as 10 stories high at a time. No unaided human would survive such a landing without breaking several bones at best. The only way to land safely is to use the outstretched jumpers to absorb the brunt of the shock. By the time my natural legs hit the ground, the mechanical exoskeleton attached to my thighs and calves does the rest. I barely feel a thing actually. My body is just along for the ride, comfortably ensconced inside the heavily padded suit.

Being a grasshopper is an expensive hobby, especially as my suit needs to be upgraded almost continuously to keep up with the latest available technology. Luckily I’m independently wealthy, and thus able to afford this hobby. Of course, being a superhero is no fun without some bad guys to fight!

Naturally I do most of my hunting late at night, when my techno-gadgets laden suit gives me additional advantages. Unlike in the comic strips, real-life criminal masterminds do not usually dress up in ridiculous costumes to fight the likes of me in front of a hapless sidewalk audience.

Real underworld dons surround themselves with heavily armed thugs, and do their dirty work in abandoned warehouses or Park Avenue penthouses, depending on the nature of their crimes. Indeed, it’s very rare that I’m able to get my hands on the ringleaders at all. Usually I have to make do with frustrating their efforts, one clandestine facility at a time.

The cops of course don’t like superheroes, or, as they prefer to call us, “freaks in spandex.” For the record, I don’t wear any spandex, and even if I did, you would never see it as I’m completely covered by my armored suit. Crime fighting is a hazardous occupation, and spandex does not halt bullets! But the cops have their hands full, and can barely afford their bulletproof pads, let alone a sophisticated million dollar mechanical suit like mine.

After staking out my prey for weeks or months, I finally work up the nerve to strike. Last night was a particularly harrowing experience. I’d been staking out a clandestine chemical factory, after discovering it during one of my nightly “walks” through the bad part of town. Who knows what they were manufacturing there, but I knew they weren’t curing any diseases!

Armed thugs surrounded the old factory building on all sides, though of course you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know what to look for. There were no external signs advertising the company, and all deliveries and pick-ups happened in the middle of the night. During the day there was no discernable activity, other than the un-surreptitious guards walking their beats.

Satisfied that nothing good was going on inside, I decided to have some fun. Using the nano-Velcro pads in my gloves and shoes, I crawled up the side of the building, like a rock-climber, hanging on a billion fingernails. The special stealth coat on my suit made it virtually impossible to see me in the dark, especially moving as slowly as I did. It would be impossible for a human to move that slowly, but with the aide of my suit, it was a cinch.

Looking in from the second story window, I could see, the rows and rows of presumably immigrant laborers toiling away at their benches below. Many of them were little more than indentured servants, desperate to escape the crushing poverty and disease of their native lands. I always tried to avoid hurting them. Luckily they were usually smart enough to head for the exits when the shooting began.

With a quick punch of my mechanically assisted right hand, I shattered the glass. I lurched forward and broke through the glass, somersaulting down to the first floor below. With a twitch of my abdominal muscles I instructed my jumpers to go on auto-jump before landing. This very cool feature allowed me to jump continuously, initiating a new jump as soon as the previous one was completed, without having to time them properly myself. All I had to do was drive, using my body to direct the jumps.

My dramatic entry had the desired effect of flushing the cockroaches and exposing the rats. The workers dove for cover, while the guards opened up fire. I was moving way too fast for these amateurs to score any hits, though even if they did it would be of no consequence to my steel reinforced Kevlar body armor.

I had turned on my computer aided 360 degrees, full-spectrum vision system. Using tiny cameras and projectors, about 100 degrees of field on each side of my face was projected into the peripheral vision of each respective eye. By cycling through continuously, this allowed me to see, at 30 frames a second, what was happening all around me. It took lots of training to get used to seeing this way, but all that training paid off, as it saved my life!

I saw one of the rats pull a tarp from something that looked like it belonged on a Navy destroyer, near the far wall to my right. I turned and caught a full glimpse of the 50mm mounted machine gun he was about to man. The subsequent adrenaline rush nearly caused me to pass out! I’d never been so scared in my life. No amount of body armor would stop those bullets!

I adjusted my trajectory in mid flight, twisting my body so I was moving nearly horizontally; aiming for the wall I had come in through. Using my eyes, I indicated my desired trajectory to the computer. The gun was mounted close to the wall so it could cover nearly the entire factory floor. By aiming for a spot near the corner made by the side and back walls, I would come in at almost a 90 degrees angle to the barrels. This would require the gunner to swing the gun around 90 degrees before firing. With luck, that would give me enough time to take him out.

I bounced off the side wall, leaving two paint bucket-sized holes in the wall, and stretched out my body, with my jumpers straight behind me, streamlining as I missiled head-first for the gunner. I could see the barrels swinging around as the gunner, with a big grin on his face, prepared to open up. If I had miscalculated, I would soon have holes the size of golf balls in my skull!

By lifting my chin I directed the computer to alter my trajectory so I would sail over the gun barrels. Retractable folding composite wings sprang from my shoulder blades, giving me just enough lift to clear the gun. The bulbous fake composite eyes on the top of my helmet drove into his face, sending fragments of his skull into his brain. The rest of my 1 ton augmented body followed, and I had to react fast, grabbing him by the arm pits, hoping to use him as a cushion as I crashed into the ground. It worked, for the most part, as I slid on top of his crushed body for several feet, before finally crashing into some barrels piled against the opposite side wall. The whole mess came crashing in on me, and I had to climb my way out quickly to make sure no one else got a chance to man that gun.

Luckily, the rats had fled, and I managed to squeeze myself into the gunner’s seat, for a few minutes of fun. By the time I scrambled up the wall and climbed out the window through which I had entered, the factory was in shreds. The police would not be happy with the destruction of evidence, but the city was hopefully a little bit safer.

Like crows chasing hawks, superheroes like me are engaged in an endless tug of war with the criminals. But all the crows hope to achieve is to drive the hawk away by forcing him to use up his precious energy fending them off. Eventually, he’ll decide to go live somewhere else. Somewhere where there are fewer crows, or, in my case, fewer grasshoppers.