I found the audiobook version of The Mad Scientist's Guide To World Domination by chance at Goodwill a couple years back and loved it. This was a story I was happy to see again in a different format.
Hearing this story, I think about Terry Pratchett's Silver Horde, that group of geriatric barbarians who were just a bit too good at being heroes to die properly. And I get why some people would wonder why this was run here and not Escape Pod, but I think behind the sci-fi hijinx, or overshadowing them, is an almost Ligottian kind of horror of the mundane, of knowing that nothing Steve or Mofongo did mattered, or was remembered, and now it's just a matter of waiting for an inglorious, anonymous death devoid of drama or meaning. There's no enemies waiting in the shadows because nobody cares if they still exist. Every world-shattering battle is a best a footnote for trivia collectors, a piece of garbage kicked under a chair in a trailer. How can a villain brilliant and powerful enough to bend reality to his whims be defeated by a Yale lock for 30 years? The same cocktail of apathy, habit and refusal to change that grinds us all under if we don't pay attention and catch it. That's the horror here. And oof.... man.