Batman 3 - Batman Forever by Peter David

him. It was as if everything else in Nygma’s world at that moment had fallen away with the single exception of Stickley.
    It was not a location that Stickley found particularly desirable. He turned away gruffly and said, “I’m calling security.”
    He got two feet before Edward brought the coffeepot crashing down on his head. Stickley went down without a sound.
    “Caffeine’ll kill you,” Ed informed the unconscious body. Then he hesitated, wondering what the hell he should do now. He’d acted totally on impulse . . .
    Brain impulse . . . thought impulse . . .
    He looked from Stickley to the machinery and back again. A wide grin split his face.
    “When you least expect it . . . you’re elected,” he said.
    When Stickley awoke, he wasn’t sure where he was at first. He tried to piece together what had happened, tracing for himself the sequence of events that had resulted in his discovery that he was strapped to a rolling swivel chair. He felt a dull ache in his head and a further pain in his neck when he tried to look around.
    Then he became aware that there was something balanced on his head. He nodded back and forth, trying to shake it off. It felt like a hat or . . .
    There were wires trailing from whatever It was. Wires to a machine, and now enough of his confusion fell away so that he was able to perceive Edward Nygma wearing a similar rig on his own head, making what appeared to be some final adjustments. Nygma must have somehow sensed that Stickley had come to, because he didn’t even bother to look over to his boss (or ex-boss) as he said, “This won’t hurt a bit.” Then he gave the matter a moment’s more thought and added, “At least I don’t think it will.”
    Nygma did turn to him then and flashed a brief, if slightly pained grin, as he reached over toward a toggle on the power source. Mustering his ire, Stickley bellowed, “Nygma, you press that button and—”
    “And what? I’m fired?”
    He flipped a switch.
    The TV screen flared to life, and a green glow emanated from it. And hovering there, in the glow, was a holographic representation of Stickley reeling in a prize bass. Then the figures began to waver and tremble.
    “Losing resolution,” muttered Edward to himself. “More power.”
    He threw a second switch, and immediately warning lights flared to life. But the lead time between the warning and the opportunity to shut down was way, way too short. A white beam lanced out from the TV, into Stickley’s headband. The systems, both in the circuitry and in Stickley’s own neural pathways, overloaded, and the feedback smashed back into the machine and terminated in Edward’s own headband.
    If Stickley had been at all aware at this point of what was happening, he would have taken some small measure of rejoicing in the fact that Nygma was screaming as loudly as he was.
    But he was not aware of what was happening. Indeed, one look at his glazed, slack expression made it quite clear that he was not aware of anything at all.
    But a look into Nygma’s eyes would have told the exact opposite. He looked invigorated, even reborn. The normal glimmer of twisted genius had been accelerated by somewhere around a factor of a hundred.
    It was as if his brain had been blown in an infinite number of directions all at once, and was now hurriedly reassembling itself. And from that reassembly came different impulses, different thoughts, a scattergun of personalities and notions, people that Nygma and/or Stickley had met, or hated, or loved, or had made any impression on him at all—all of them bubbling to the surface, struggling for their moment, fighting for dominance.
    Sounding much like the host of a game show Edward had enjoyed in his youth, he barked, “Ed Nygma, come on down. You’re the next contestant on Brain Drain. I’ll take what’s inside thick skull number one. What have we got for him, Johnny?”
    Then for a moment the emcee eased back and Edward’s own personality . . . what there