I’d actually had an argument when the crew showed up.

“But you don’t understand. Metahumans are the new prime aesthetic. If you are going to keep the beard, you need to look like a beard meta. You aren’t hairy enough to pull off the man-beast look, so you HAVE to hold the hammer!”

I growled. “No. I mean, yes, I plan on whoring myself out to sell...whatever that is, but I am not going to look like a metahuman.”

The guy, who had a thousand-dollar haircut, shook his head, “People WANT to look like metahumans. You’ve got the perfect build to pull it off, but you are too short. So we have to emphasize the super human. Just hold the damned hammer and stop acting like such a diva.”

I’d been fine with the gay lumberjack look, you know, shirtless, suspenders, rugged pants, and boots, with the underwear’s label peeking above the pants, and I’d been okay with the more neutral shots, you know, the matching tee and underwear look with the warehouse setting where we were doing the shoot behind us, but this… red, white, and blue metallic underpants that were thin enough that you could tell both my religion and the local temperature while wielding a hammer and presumably retouched with lightning and storm clouds, was going more than a bit too far.

“Nope, I am calling diva or primadonna. This stuff is supposed to sell to straight guys too, right? I have an idea.”

He raised an eyebrow below that FABULOUS haircut, “Really? And the professional what...Carpet layer? Lucha libre stripper, perhaps? Has an idea for a photo setup that someone like me, who has been in the business for 23 years, and has guided thousands of ad campaigns, hasn’t already considered?”

I nodded, “Yep. How much time have you spent in a coal mine?”

“None, obviously. I have been doing this for all of my life, it is my job and my calling, and I am very good at it.”

I nodded and started looking around. There was another guy, wearing some kind of metallic shirt, that was in charge of makeup. “Hey, buddy… you got anything that looks like coal dust?”

He nodded nervously and blushed like a first-time hooker.

I went behind the screen and changed into one of the more durable items that were part of the line… a pair of sturdy boxer briefs in a rich gray. I had come over right after work, and so I put on my hard hat and miner’s belt.

“Okay, now. What you see here is what a miner will often wear when they are working. Not pickaxes, not headlights, but when it’s 130 degrees down in the mine, You will see a dozen guys like me standing around dressed pretty much like this.”

“Like you?” Chip, the guy with the glassy complexion and expensive haircut asked. “Can we shoot down there?”

I shook my head, “When I say like me, I mean workers. I am weird because I have a fucked up metabolism. Most of them look a lot like you him.” I nodded to the warehouse supervisor. He was a big guy, with a big gut, big muscles, big clothes… kind of an older guy West Virginia standard.

He shook his head, “Those are not our top sellers.”

I shrugged, “Yeah. I guess not, but they are pretty durable and expensive.” I looked at the makeup guy. “Dust me a little, like I have been walking around in a cloud of coal dust for a while. Try not to get the underwear, though, obviously.” I sighed, “Leave a kind of imprint around my face clear like I have been wearing a mask and goggles.”

I smiled at Haircut Chip. “Besides, You are getting paid for this right? If it doesn’t work out, it costs you nothing, but if it does, you get to play dress up with musclebound idiots like me to make your own little village people portfolio.” I grinned at him, “Just take the pictures and hum YMCA to yourself.”

He shook his head, “God you are so 70’s. Your gay, aren’t you?”

I shook my head, “Not really. More like a narcissist. When you look like this, you don’t need anyone else.”

The way he looked at me made me wonder if he took my snarky comment seriously.

We took a few more sets, with some of the slightly more sober sorts of outfits, including a bit of pipefitting with a giant wrench that was actually quite a bit smaller than the real thing. Squirting a bit of water to make the ‘glistening sweaty’ appearance, despite the fact that the warehouse was probably only 40 degrees, seemed to satisfy Chip.

Good. I wasn’t getting paid, yet, for this shit, and when this job ended, so did the beard. I’d rather look like a paid hitter than a Chippendales dancer, and I bet if I hadn’t had the beard old Chip here wouldn’t have dared try to pressure me into anything.

I got cleaned up, again, especially getting rid of the greasy streaks of both makeup and ‘faux grease’ for the pipefitter look. I’d dealt with the real thing a thousand times, and generally, it didn’t make you smell like lavender and that shit they use to perm hair.

I didn’t wash my hair, and I didn’t know what the product they used was, but I kinda liked the short spiky look. It didn’t make me look more dangerous, but it did make me look like I could afford the kind of suit I couldn’t afford.

Chip scowled at me. “I am tempted to write off those last sets. I am not sure I want my name attached to them.”

I shrugged as I walked, “Do what you want, I don’t actually care. I just think they might work better in flyover country than the whole Thor look. Still, I have a real job, so if it doesn’t work out, that’s no skin off my nose.”

As I left I heard him muttering, “I have no idea what she was thinking, this guy’s a troglodyte.”

I grinned, according to plan. I had no interest in showing off clothes for the rest of my life.

I was hungry, as usual. I had taken a day off in order to deal with this crap, but that wasn’t too unusual, and as long as the mine made quota they didn’t grumble too hard. I was known as a hard worker, so I doubted I’d get the usual flack about missing too much work.

Besides, I might have to quit that job soon. I had been there ten years, and I figured the lack of lines on my face and gray hairs might start causing some suspicion.

I stopped in at Mama’s because I knew Mary would be there. “Hey, Mary,” I said, glancing at the specials board and then ignoring it because of the beef stew. Carlos did a lot of good things with food when he was in his element, but beef stew wasn’t one of them. In my opinion, beef stew and Jalapenos did not go together.

I’d stopped at Mickey’s office after calling him, to get some of the pictures printed out. He called the 8x10 glossy paper a sunk cost, and I didn’t argue with him. He would definitely get the whole ‘agent’ thing, especially since he was going to hang onto my apartment for me while I was gone, pack it up and ship it if I didn’t come back.

I was looking at the pictures and frowning, something was not right. I noticed Mary looking over my shoulder and chuckled. I knew what was not right, it was me being in those pictures.

Mary licked her lips, “You know, if you had done this years ago you could be set by now.” she said, I guess as a compliment.

“If I had done this years ago, I couldn’t do it now. I’d have been noticed as looking the same if I kept it up. Besides, Half of Smile’s team would look way better in these than me.”

She snorted, “Don’t sell yourself short. Yeah, some of them are prettier, but they don’t have that sort of sexy menace thing going on. You should keep the beard. I could see you behind the wheel of a pirate ship ordering half-naked women pirates to attack a merchant ship.

I grinned, “So you think I should get into porn?”

She laughed, “You could have, but I doubt it would have kept you fed. Especially now that all the old studios are going belly-up what with the internet and all. Too many people doing it for free, or for streaming. The old days of porn with a story are pretty much done.”

I raised an eyebrow, “Dare I ask how you know all this?”

She shrugged. “I am forty, single, and straight, and I don’t like cats. You learn stuff.”

I shrugged, “Are you still dating Dave?”

She nodded, “Yeah, but it’s been like 8 years and he’s still playing the ‘a cop’s life is dangerous' thing. I don’t know if I should move on, give up, or lay down an ultimatum. I kind of am in love with him and all that, and our life is pretty good, but I don’t want to wait forever.”

I chuckled, “I am not a psychologist, but I think he’s reveling in the fact that his kids left. Give him a little more time, let him get tired of coming home to a lonely house, but the ultimatum thing will just make him grind his gears.”

I grinned, “It’s kind of a guy thing. We get stubborn when we feel like we are railroaded, even if it’s what we really want.” I looked around. “Hey, I just need a couple of burgers, but I am going to be gone for a little while… I am not sure how long it’s going to be, but if it’s more than a few months I will definitely let you know.”

“Job?” she asked.

I nodded slowly, “Job, and people are starting to notice. This whole computer thing’s really cramping my style. I’m worried someone’s going to connect the dots and notice that such and such from Toledo a few decades ago looks an awful lot like that guy Jim we got sitting in a cell for public indecency, so it might be permanent.”

No, I’d never been to Toledo. But I didn’t want to weird Mary out by actually finding...say… a newspaper clipping from 1908 with a picture of an eyewitness that looked an awful lot like a slightly younger version of good ol’ Jim.

It made me wonder if there were people… metahumans… that could actually erase chunks of this internet. Like all the chunks pertaining to me. Maybe with a regular gig that paid well, I could afford that kind of service. Eventually.

There’s this rumor going around that long-lived people were naturally wealthy because they can make long-term investments. That may be true for people that start out wealthy, but for normal folks? Investments are just as likely to go wrong as right. Trying to change lives and keep your old money just meant that old-life people could track your new life self. The best you could hope for was to change a little over time, and then after twenty or thirty years make a big change, cash out what you could, and move on.

If you try and trade bonds you invested in yourself after a hundred years, you better have a damned good paper trail, and to be fair, while they may have increased, Milk has gone from ten cents a gallon to five dollars a gallon. That bond, even though it has expanded hugely, has less buying power than you put into it.

I had tried stashes, I even had one in Reno, with a hundred dollars in it. Even if the money was still good, it would be more valuable to an antiquities shop than a bank. Today? It wasn’t worth the gas it would take to get there.

And, of course, moving regularly meant you never had any old antiques you bought new to sell off. Maybe, a hundred years from now, I will have done a better job at making money, but I wasn’t a genius. I’d probably still be doing the same thing unless someone figured out a way to finally kill me.

~100 years later

Welp, here I was on an asteroid. Running a mining rig, my suit coated with grime, trying to make enough to pay for my protein packs and air tax. Unobtainium was still selling well, but was hard as hell to find, although I had a hold full of MacGuffinite. I was probably going to go into debt again trying to make a profit off of it at the Mars Colony.

I chuckled a little at the mental image and shook my head as I walked into my apartment. Was there anything else I needed to take with me? Naomi had called back and said her advertising people were excited. Well, her female advertising team was excited at the idea of selling the worker photo ads to men’s health and a few women’s online magazines, since previously their male line got limited feedback from an entirely different target demographic.

Apparently, she thought she could sell my image. Well, more power to her. I was still keeping my beard tight and trim, and I figured without it no one would even recognize me. That 5 grand a week, as long as she could afford it, was more than enough to give me a nest egg.

Could I register? Sure, but I remembered what happened to the fools that registered themselves in the Soviet Union. First went the Teachers, then the scientists who didn’t believe that dying a sheep blue made an entirely new breed of blue sheep, and then the counterrevolutionaries that dared have an opinion that wasn’t party-approved, and then the folks that didn’t cheer loudly enough when the tanks and nukes rolled past…

Proteus, the internationally-approved organization, was entirely immune to the sort of corruption that having zero oversight could lead to, because… metahumans. And stuff. And I could lay eggs if I just called myself a hen loudly and often enough.

Besides which, the last time I was stupid enough to try, they hadn’t believed I was anything but a baseline human. Which was probably a good thing since I would be, I think, the oldest Metahuman in existence, and I didn’t need that kind of flack.

Nothing was worth adding to my luggage. A lot of clothes were just too beaten, worn, or stained permanently to fit my new image. My luggage was similarly simple… two navy-style sea bags packed with everything. My keepsakes were few and portable.

A ring from the 1940 New York World’s fair. A cigar box full of medals from the wars I had participated in and looked like a hero because I could afford to do stuff that would kill other people. A flag my wife, now dead, had gotten when I was supposedly killed in action and had given to me as a joke. A fat lead bullet that had been the first thing other than a cannonball that had killed me, dug out of my chest when I healed. A Tee-shirt from the last concert Van Halen had before David Lee Roth decided to strike out for greener pastures.

The medals were probably worth something to collectors, and I was pretty sure the Golden Star and the medals of honor would be worth something. Technically, if I had used the same name when I enlisted I would be the only person with four, but two of them were for weird stuff that happened which stopped happening in the ’60s.

Explaining how I got them to an antiques dealer would be a lot of lying, and having stuff like that out there could make things sticky in the long run. 100 years from now I could be floating in outer space, frozen but still alive because someone got the wrong artifact and tied me to it.

On the plus side, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t survive the planet exploding or the sun going nova. I hoped. How much would that suck?