Doctor Sivana

Doctor Thaddeus Sivana had a laboratory at the top of a tower in downtown Fawcett City, and from his window he could see the whole skyline — the offices and the parks and the ordinary cheerful mess of the city below.

He hated it.

Not the city, exactly. More specifically: the idea that somewhere in that city, a child — a child, a ten-year-old with no scientific training whatsoever — was walking around with the power that should have been his.

Sivana was brilliant. This was genuinely true, not just his own opinion. He had degrees in physics, chemistry, advanced robotics, and three different branches of ancient occult science, which was a field most people did not know existed. He had built, in his tower laboratory, devices that no other scientist on Earth could have conceived. He was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most formidable minds on the planet.

But the Wizard Shazam had looked at him — he had gone to the Rock of Eternity, once, long ago, when he was young — and had said: not you. The magic of Shazam requires a pure heart, the Wizard had said, and the look in Sivana's eye even then had been the calculating look of a man who, if he received power, would use it to take more power.

Sivana had spent years being angry about this.

He arrived at the roof of the Fawcett City Convention Center on a Tuesday morning, accompanied by two drones the size of refrigerators and a box of stolen mystical artifacts he had spent fourteen months tracking down. His plan was precise, as Sivana's plans always were: he would use the artifacts to temporarily disrupt the magical connection between Billy Batson and the Rock of Eternity, strip the transformation, and then — well, then he would see.

He had not fully planned what came after, which was unusual for him and should perhaps have been a warning sign.

"SHAZAM!"

The lightning hit the Convention Center roof and Shazam landed twenty feet away, the golden bolt on his chest catching the morning sun. He looked at the drones, the artifacts, and Sivana, and said — because he was still Billy inside — "Oh, this is going to be a whole thing, isn't it."

Sivana activated the drones.

They were impressive machines. Even Shazam, in his battle-assessment mode, had to admit that the engineering was extraordinary — they moved with a precision and speed that most military equipment didn't achieve, their sensor arrays tracking his movement in real time, their weapon pods firing synchronized disruption blasts designed to interfere with magical energy.

They were, for about forty-five seconds, extremely effective.

Then Shazam laughed.

Not mockingly — genuinely, because the drones were clever and it was briefly very funny to be shot with twelve disruption beams at once and feel them bounce off the stamina of Atlas like drops of rain off a window.

"Those are really good," he said. "Did you build them yourself?"

Sivana, who had expected screaming and had not expected this response, said: "Yes, I built them myself."

"The targeting array is amazing. How do you coordinate the independent tracking without lag?"

"Parallel processing through a distributed neural—" Sivana stopped. "I am not explaining my engineering to you."

"Okay," said Shazam reasonably, and flew directly at the drones faster than they could recalibrate, caught them both by their sensor arrays with the strength of Hercules, and set them down on the roof very gently, upside down, legs spinning uselessly in the air.

Sivana reached for the mystical artifacts.

The artifacts were more serious. They radiated something cold and wrong — old magic, the kind that predated the Wizard's order, chaotic and seeking. Shazam felt it pressing against his connection to the Rock of Eternity, a kind of interference, like static between him and the signal.

He took a breath.

The Wizard's wisdom settled over him like a cloak. He understood the artifacts — not technically, but essentially, the way wisdom works: he understood what they wanted, what gap they were trying to fill. They wanted chaos. They wanted the absence of the Rock's order.

He faced them directly. He put his hand out and let the full connection to the Rock of Eternity pour through him — not a weapon, but a presence, the three-thousand-year weight of the Wizard's guardianship — and the artifacts' cold seeking found nothing to grip. The order was too complete.

They went dark.

Sivana stood at the center of his failed plan with his drones upended and his artifacts inert, and his brilliance, which was real and formidable, had run up against the one thing it could not calculate: goodness that wasn't a strategy.

"You're very smart," Billy said. Because he meant it.

Sivana looked at him with pure irritation.

"You could make things that help people," Billy continued. "Like, the drones. Those could do a lot of good if they were looking for missing people instead of shooting me."

"That is a preposterous oversimplification."

"I know," said Billy. "But I'm ten." He held out his hand. "Deal?"

Sivana stared at the outstretched hand.

He did not shake it. But he did, the next morning, find a missing persons report on his desk with a very small diagram of a search-grid pattern that would have been improved significantly by parallel-processing distributed neural drone arrays.

He had no idea how it got there.

He spent the whole morning telling himself he wasn't going to work on it.

By afternoon, the design was half-done.