Incredible Hercules #135
The Origin of Amadeus Cho, Part 2: Meeting with the Goddess
Amadeus Cho finds himself living out the adventures of the Mastermind Excello radio program. It’s the middle of World War II and he is on a mission to stop the evil scientist known as Doctor Japanazi. Enroute by plane, he passes the time by continuing to read a book on the hero’s journey. The next part of this architype is the “Meeting With the Goddess”. It relates to the time when Hercules battled the river god Achelous to win the hand of Deianira in marriage. The imperiled damsel could be any female significant to the hero as long as they symbolizes the promise of perfection and the apogee of femininity itself.
Excello is interrupted by his government liaison who hands him a dossier about his mission. They are approaching Castle Japanazi, where the mad doctor has developed a hypercomputer capable of computing an infinite number of simultaneous calculations. This would allow the Nazis to crack any codes they can come up with. Cho’s mission is to get it before Doctor Japanazi gives it to Hitler himself. He also reminds Cho that the Junior Genius Brigade and one of their operatives, Agent Sexton, have also been captured. Amadeus tells the operative he won’t let his country down and soon parachutes down to the castle below. However, the wind catches his parachute and causes him to fall on one of the castle spires, impaling him through the chest and killing him instantly.
Amadeus Cho protests this and suddenly, he is a kid playing the Mastermind Excello role playing game with a young Pythagoras Dupree, who is the game master. Amadeus protests that this was a cheap death, but Dupree insists that he flubbed the parachuting skill roll on the dice. Amadeus points out that the dice fell off the table and his roll shouldn’t have counted. Pythagoras doesn’t find anywhere in the rule that specifically allows for a re-roll when an over-tabling occurs but since he put so much work into this game module, he decides to allow for it. He smugly believes that nobody will ever know how smart he really is until Amadeus reaches the end anyway. Amadeus thinks Pythagoras is a dork and rolls again. This time, he lands a 3 and his character survives parachuting from the plane. The fantasy then continues….
Mastermind Excello manages to use his intelligence, agility, and momentum to break his fall and land safely on one of the castle towers. Off the balcony is a room flanked with suits of armor on a checkerboard patterned tile floor. The armor are half medieval and half samurai. Cho examines the floor and determines that ther are pressure traps that will unleash some kind of gas from holes in the wall. As he carefully makes his way across the room, he spots a desiccated body slumped between two suits of armor and goes to investigate it. It’s one of his Junior Genius Brigade members and he pockets his decoder ring in case he might need it later. That’s when the suits of armor come to life and start attacking him. Leaping out of the reach of the mob, Amadeus uses the belt to his trench coat to trip up one of the suits of armor. This causes it to topple into the others, knocking them all down.
Excello finds himself in a lab where his curiosity is piqued by a box labelled with the symbol for a qubit (a unit of quantum information). Peering inside through a slot in the side of the box, Cho sees that there is a cat inside that is both dead and alive. That’s when Doctor Japanazi enters the room and boasts how he was able to conduct the Shrodinger’’s Box theory and freezing the probabilities so that the cat is trapped in a state of indeterminacy. He says that this was all possible thanks to the fact that he is a man with two evil Axis brains. He then shows Amadeus that he has Agent Sexton strapped to a table with a pendulum suspended over it that will eventually cut her in half. When Mastermind Excello tries to race in to save the agent he suddenly drops dead by some kind of trap set by Doctor Japanazi…
Amadeus calls foul again and demands an explanation as to why his character would suddenly die. Pythagoras explains that Cho failed to check the torches in the room of armor. They were emitting an invisible and odorless gas that poisoned him. When Amadeus demands to know why he wasn’t given the chance to a poison saving roll. Dupree says he rolled it for him and he lost. Amadeus calls bullshit and points out how frequently Pythagoras boasts how smart he, but still has to change the rules in order to win. Getting fed up with Dupree’s cheating, Amadeus decides to go. However, when he tries to leave the basement the stairs suddenly disappear. Pythagoras reminds Amadeus that this is why he is smarter than him and that no matter what he does, Amadeus will die by his hands.
Suddenly, Amadeus gets some inspiration he suggests they talk about this hypercomputer that Mastermind Excello is trying to obtain and its ability to perform an infinite number of simultaneous calculations. It’s never just a zero to one probability but a panoply of possibilities in a quantum state. Through that act of measurement, one observing these calculations could determine the most favorable outcome, regardless of how unlikely it is.
In the game, Mastermind Excello begins computing this and computes the probability of him surviving the poison and is suddenly back on his feet. Doctor Japanazi orders one of his armored guards to throw an axe at him. Once again, Amadeus calculates the timing to grab the weapon out of the air and throws the weapon across the room. It strikes the chains shackling Agent Sexton to the table and she gets free just in time to avoid the pendulum. She then picks up a machine gun and mows down all of the armored guards.
Amadeus has finally figured it out, the hypercomputer objective was just a distraction from the fact that Amadeus himself is naturally a hypercomputer. When he makes this realization the room around him suddenly changes into a M.C. Escher room of infinite staircases going in all directions. He has decided that prior to entering the castle of Doctor Japanazi, Mastermind Excello injected himself with a universal antidote. Pythagoras protests this because he wasn’t told, but Amadeus says he didn’t have to do that. While Dupree has been claiming to be smarter than Amadeus, they are — in fact — intellectual equals. This makes Cho’s observations just as real as his opponents.
With the illusion shattered, Amadeus is now in control of both of the “bubble realities” that were created by Dupree: The one where he and Pythagoras are playing the game, and the one where Cho is Mastermind Excello during World War II.
In the wartime reality, Doctor Japanazi activates a self-destruct mechanism that traps them in the lab as one minute countdown begins. After Agent Sexton guns Japanazi down, Amadeus gets to work trying to crack the locking mechanism on the door. He tells Sexton that Pythagoras Dupree froze them in a multiplicity of quantum states. The “Boltzmann Brains” he created are just highly sophisticated quantum computers. Their observations manifest themselves on a separate but tactile plane of reality. But, as this is a synthetic reality it is dependent on the real world and as such underpinning of everything is based on the same mathematics. Through pattern recognition, any human created code can be cracked. Agent Sexton is impressed by how much Amadeus has changed since they first met.[1] Cho — thinking of Hercules — says he had a great teacher. With that, Amadeus figures out the equation to get him out of both synthetic realities he is trapped in.
Walking through the door, both he and Agent Sexton emerge outside of the crater that used to be the town of Excello, Utah.[2] There is a small building at the bottom of the crater and he intends to go down there and confront the real Pythagoras Dupree and demand he reveal the location of his missing sister, Maddy.[3] However, before he does so, he asks that Agent Sexton stop pretending as he has already figured out who she is. When she asks what he is talking about, he points out that there was only one person who described his intelligence as pattern recognition, the fact that her name means “one who looks after the sacred”, and lastly the owl overhead is a dead give away: Agent Sexton is really Athena. With the truth revealed, Athena drops her disguise and commends Amadeus for being a clever boy.
Meanwhile, in Inwood Park, in New York City, a group of pair of police officers have led May Parker to a cave that has become a homeless encampment. Inside, they discover that the people that live in the cave are all worshiping the Olympian goddess Hebe who welcomes them in with open arms. May Parker introduces herself and says that she has come on behalf of FEAST, a local charity organization who has come to see if they can offer aid to the Hebe and her followers.[4]
Recurring Characters
Amadeus Cho, Athena, Pythagoras Dupree, Hebe, May Parker, Pallas
Continuity Notes
Amadeus first met “Agent Sexton” back in Amazing Fantasy (vol. 2) #15.
As revealed in issue #133, the town of Excello was destroyed when the Excello Soap Factory there exploded.
Amadeus Cho’s parents were killed in an explosion in Amazing Fantasy (vol. 2) #15. At the time, he thought his sister was killed in the blast as well. However, he learned that this was not the case when he met his parents in the afterlife in Incredible Hercules #131. We won’t see Maddy Cho until Totally Awesome Hulk #1.
This story occurs during a period where May Parker was working at FEAST starting in Amazing Spider-Man #546.
