Still continued. - Tales of the Parodyverse

Post By Fin Fang Foom Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:48:10 pm EDT	Subject Still continued. Originally Continued, again...	In Reply To Fin Fang Foom Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:46:51 pm EDT

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Whenever a list of artforms was made, human beings tended to be forgotten. They had a number of hands in their shaping, a number of things seeking to express themselves in their form--genetics, perhaps the divine and/or evolution, events and experiences, other human influences, reason, and free will; it was the only art that could both control itself and sabotage itself (via deception). This particular one was a blend of appearance, performance, movement, and sound, and even those who weren’t remotely interested in art were connoisseurs of this one. They could read other people like there was no tomorrow, especially if they knew them well. A pair of virtually unchanging eyeballs could communicate millions of emotions through some unknown means. Claylike expressions modified themselves in response to new stimuli, while body-language sent out infinite ripples of meaning. Of course, they were free-ranging masterpieces, refusing to stay still or be honest enough to be fully understood, for good or ill. In the case of the three superhuman women that were part of the Kansas City freedom-fighters group--yes, three--they themselves were all exquisite examples of the artform, but truly grasped by very few, if any at all.

Lilith, being a literal example of this, didn’t particularly need to be explained. She’d woken up in what was practically a colorless world, her first memory being the destruction of the vast majority of the species that had created her. She was compassionate enough to want to help, and wise enough to be more than aware of the darker side of life, as both extremes found themselves embodied in her admittedly-impressive body. Despite all the pain and suffering around her, she felt an undeniable urge to enjoy her existence and create--using drawing and painting, poetry, even the otherworldly fruits and vegetables that only she knew how to grow. (But not sculpture, which would have creeped her out.) Being with Hadrian had helped her understand humanity, though, as he wasn’t exactly a touchstone for normal people, her view was often somewhat skewed. And for a wise man, it was practically impossible to get him to give you any kind of advice, which, as a young being, she needed. Each bizarre outfit she wore contained ultra-subtle messages about both her mood and where she was at a given point in her life, but she was afraid that only Hadrian understood.

Akiko Masamune had started as an orphaned, homeless thief in the neon alleys of Tokyo, eventually rising to the level of America’s premiere crime-queen. She’d never been convicted of anything in any country. Pulling off such a Herculean task meant being anal about details and demanding about people. If you couldn’t cut it, you were a liability, and you were out. She’d come up with the organizational blueprint; you stuck to it under penalty of death. The criminals that (knowingly) worked for her may have thought nothing of society’s laws, but her laws were another matter entirely…she might as well have come down from a mountain with them, awash in thunder and lightning. Akiko was near-fatally injured in the first round of the attacks, her body rescued by loyal employees. A team of expert, criminal surgeons and engineers--who knew they were doomed, as bio-weapons in their secret offices had been ruptured during the attacks, infecting them, so they had to operate in air-sealed suits--poured their final efforts into her, giving her all the inventive potential that their lives would have had.

If dying words had tremendous power, then dying creation was barely able to be grasped by mortals. Cosmetically, she appeared to be exactly the same, but inside, she was a wonder of science. Instead of focusing on strength (though her own had been multiplied by five), they focused on speed, agility, awareness, and an internal, high-tech “bag of tricks” that she could rely on, such as her matter-accelerating eyebeam. But her creators were exhausted and hallucinating and racing towards death, so their improvements were skewed, bizarre, and often hidden. While her body changed, so did her mind…the sometimes-living, sometimes-dead Akiko (they had to shock her back to life several times, during the operation) saw things that humanity had no name for. Her old existence suddenly seemed petty and meaningless in scope. After her near-death experience, the new cyborg learned that everyone she’d ever cared about was dead, and that Japan was literally in tiny pieces. Immune to depression, she found herself powered by hatred, determination, and a sacred vow of revenge. She wore the eyepatch (which she didn’t need, and it didn’t interfere with her artificial optics or eyebeam) as a reminder of what she’d gone through. The New American government was distracting them from going after the aliens; she’d help take them down, and then confront the Swarm, even if she had to do it by herself. One against infinity.

Sabrina Lewis--President Wertham’s second ex-wife--had grown up in what was then called the jetset lifestyle, her large family living in a series of strangely-named Northeastern towns…or, more specifically, country mansions near those towns. They bred Presidents. Her life was the seemingly-opposite combination of nonstop partying all over the globe and intellectual discussion and studying. She’d lost most of her virginity to the prince of a tropical country, and had nude sunbathing pictures taken of her by the tabloids when she was sixteen. (They were sued out of existence, of course, though the pictures did resurface years later, on the ‘net. Then, she was only too happy to have everyone see, in the hopes they’d think that she still looked just like that.) After acing Ivy League schools and becoming a poet laureate, she’d met a certain Mr. Wertham, and they kicked back and slacked off together. She wasn’t particularly a fan of his political career, but she hated politics in general--it was just a matter of focusing on other things. It wasn’t who he was, he was just playing a part. After the attacks, when Price had essentially hijacked her husband, she’d been sure that she could change him back to the way he used to be…but she’d failed.

Then, Mary Vasquez killed Sabrina’s body, and had scientists modify her consciousness so it could be trapped in inanimate objects--unable to express herself; a poet’s worst nightmare. Mary had had a ton of fun with Sabrina, like that, carrying her around in pens and such, or making her watch her have sex with her ex-husband. But one day, Mary had been visiting the recently-discovered inert form of Anvil Man, as recovered by the New American government, and Sabrina found herself sucked into it. Still unable to communicate--the body had no fingers to write with, it was more of a prison than a person--she escaped and joined the insurgency, now hating herself for her failure to influence the one man who might have steered America clear of certain bad decisions. Mary thought she’d left Sabrina as a paperweight, in a drawer. In 4 AI, hoping that Sabrina might help lure Wertham back towards sanity, a more mature Mary had tried to get her put into a robot body, but, obviously, she was no longer in the paperweight, and the scientist said she must have existentially evaporated. The main thing she could do as Anvil Man was kill people, but she’d never been remotely violent. Initially, it had made her want to throw up…unfortunately, she had no mouth. All she wanted to do was make up for her mistakes and get her son back.

Morning in the middle of New America was only barely brighter than night, with the clouds going from black to a dull silver. Snow that had fallen hours earlier now blew across the plains, mixing with dirt and debris and filling up cracks in architecture and deceased trees. Unless one paid very close attention, there were massive areas where there appared to be no living beings--even in the remains of Kansas City, nothing could be seen but dark holes in the ground and decimated urban areas. However, there was a lot of activity in their underground network-city: people filtering the pollution out of water from the well and transporting it, guards changing as the new shift started, repairs being made, young soldiers trying to jog through the claustrophobic layout, food being prepared and either served in one of the “cafeterias” (i.e., large caves with several hundred mismatched picnic tables) or delivered to those who were too sick or weak to get out and about. The work was somewhat lighter, today, as the St. Louis people were being integrated into their jerry-rigged system of society.

The closest thing the KC superheroes had to a headquarters was a round wooden table with metal folding chairs, wedged between vehicle-sized crates in a cinderblock storage room. Currently, Harmonic, Anvil Man, and Akiko were sitting there (though Anvil Man sat on her knees, almost like the Japanese did, as she was too heavy for any chairs the insurgents had--and she was still taller than everyone else, even kneeling). Harmonic wore his usual perpetually-clean white suit and sunglasses, while the no-longer-fashion-conscious Akiko wore battered bluejeans and a grey, hooded sweatshirt, her hair looking like she’d just walked through a tornado. With just the three of them, there, it was always awkward: Anvil Man couldn’t talk, Akiko was now too antisocial to care about talking, and Harmonic couldn’t shut up about any number of things that very few people understood. Akiko was drowning herself in coffee and doing paperwork--the duty-rosters for the next week--while Harmonic had been teleporting around to relatively close insurgent/illegal camps, asking about their local doomsday prophets and gathering intel on any superhumans they might have seen. Now, however, he was back, and trying to talk to Akiko and Anvil Man, except Akiko wouldn’t take her eyes off her work.

“The thing is, America is different than other countries. Every country has its own strengths and weaknesses, but, America has the coolest strength ever. Obviously, Harmonic is a little biased about this--”

“Uh-huh.”

“--but it has a different kind of origin than most countries do. America’s secret origin! Harmonic means, it wasn’t exactly a secret, but Harmonic doesn’t know that anyone has ever thought of it this way, and--”

“Uh-huh.”

“--anyway, most countries, they end up getting formed because people share a common territory, or a common race or religion, or whatever. That’s what their foundations are. But America’s foundation? It’s an idea. It’s imagination. It started on a piece of paper and became real. It’s people who sat down and tried to figure out how to build a utopia. People are a little scared of that word, Harmonic doesn’t know why--”

“Uh-huh.”

“--and the first thing they did? They set up a Bill of Rights that limited what the government could do. Have you got that? The most important thing was to limit the government’s power, not the people’s power. The second most important thing was to make it simultaneously tamperproof and able to be upgraded. In theory, we can’t screw it up, but we can add stuff that helps. They knew things would change, and that the law would have to change with it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You with Harmonic, man of the anvil?”

Anvil Man nodded vigorously.

“Excellent. Harmonic’s point is, you could take the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and plop them down on any alien planet, in any other dimension, and if some freaky glowing creatures found them and could understand them and subscribed to them, bam! You’d have America. It’s not a place, it’s an idea. And it’s very scaleable. We American Documents don’t mention capitalism, or white people, or Earth, or anything like that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And as for ‘New America’, well, they apparently didn’t read the founding father quote about how those who would forsake liberty for security deserve neith--”

Hadrian and Lilith walked in--both wore all black, except for Lilith’s blindingly-bright patterned shirt--and said their “good morning”s. They took their usual seats. Akiko looked quite relieved, while Anvil Man, despite not having a face, looked disappointed that Harmonic had had to stop. But they had an important meeting scheduled, so there wasn’t much of a choice.

“Sorry we’re late,” Hadrian said. “With the St. Louis people being so weak, I was working on some healing and renewal potions down in my lab, and the builders ran out of that special green glue I made for them, so I had to mix up a new batch of that, too. And Lilith was doing stuff down at the, uh, at the farm…”

Knowing that he still had trouble thinking of her as a farmer, and never passing up a chance to embarrass him, Lilith quickly whistled the very end of the Green Acres theme, tapping an imaginary cattleprod on the ground in time with the last two notes.

Even Akiko laughed at that. Anvil Man could only give something that vaguely resembled a thumbs-up, while Hadrian cleared his throat and stared at the table until they were done.

When they were: “Everybody knows the basics, right? Doomsday prophets being killed off, at least two were from the same hospital, and some unknown superhuman is the culprit.” Not hearing any dissent, he continued, “I had Harmonic check in with the other camps, early this morning--just to see if they knew anything. How’d that go?”

“Harmonic heard about two things. First, for the last month, there’s been a surge of strange sightings not just in Central, but, according to the rumors, all over the world. And second, at about the same time that started, a lot of new doomsday prophets showed up, with hospital gowns underneath their clothes--at least two dozen of them have vanished, been found dead, or been killed by a guy in white armor, riding some kind of hovercycle.”

“Two dozen?? God.”

“Each camp either thought it was an isolated incident, or didn’t even notice that they were gone--since there’s barely any communication between the camps that aren’t part of the main insurgency, nobody got a chance to compare notes.”

Finally putting her papers away, Akiko said, “ ‘strange sightings’? Meaning what, exactly?”

“People thinking they saw Swarm ships, ghosts that talk about the end of the world, that kind of stuff.”

Lilith considered it. “So, what they’re seeing isn’t anything unusual--we’ve been having urban legends about Swarm stuff for years, and the ghosts could be real, for all we know--but the sudden jump in numbers is what’s weird.”

“Exactly.”

“A month ago is right about when that mental hospital was taken down.”

“What do we know about these doomsday prophets?”

“Since they were all newcomers, and they didn’t exactly talk about themselves a lot, the tribes weren’t able to tell Harmonic much. They were more linear than most other doomsday prophets, though…instead of jumping from subject to subject and not making much sense, they kept repeating a single, clearly-defined idea. It was always some kind of apocalypse. As far as Harmonic could tell, they each had a different idea.”

“Like what?”

“Let Harmonic think…flooding cities with acid, using a kind of fire that humanity doesn’t have the technology to stop, taking ships that constantly transmit a deafening amount of white noise and landing them in densely-populated areas...”

“Please tell me you managed to find a live one,” Hadrian said.

“Only one, unfortunately.” A freshly-shaven, long-haired man with new, clean clothes was teleported into the room. He had a blanket around him, and looked quite surprised at suddenly changing locales. “Found him under Fort Kansas. I had some of my female disciples clean him up and get some food in him, just to help him out.”

Hadrian reached out to shake his hand. “I’m Hadrian Villas. And you are…?”

“I’ll tell you who I am--I’m the only person that knows about the earthquake-detonators the Swarm buried in the Earth’s mantle, just waiting to be activated!”

Akiko rolled her eyes. Lilith offered him her chair, helping the shaking man to a seat and glaring at Akiko. “What, that’s really so implausible? God only knows how many badly-named goons used seismic powers and weapons, before the attacks …from what I’ve been told, anyway. And it’s not like we live in a world that has climate-bombs or anything like that.”

“I don’t have a problem with the idea, I have a problem with the sourc--” Akiko suddenly jerked her head towards the seemingly-crazy man, and then looked at Hadrian. “You see that?”

Hadrian focused on the doomsday prophet. “Yeah, I do…”

Lilith also looked, trying to see what they were talking about. “What? What is it?”

“Harmonic, I want you to--uh, actually--” He continued the conversation in another language, as not to panick the doomsday prophet.

Without any warning, Harmonic phased, reaching inside the man’s head and pulling out a tiny microchip. The man screamed, of course, and Lilith had to restrain him--but within a minute, he was no longer shaking all the time, and his pupils somehow looked more normal. He slumped back into his chair. The skin on the underside of Akiko’s arm parted, causing a small containment unit to pop out and detach…they put the chip inside.

“Thanks, Harmonic, but I need you to do one more thing--teleport to security central and tell them to raise the alert level, because we might have a superhuman serial killer knocking on our door. That thing’s sending a homing-signal.”

Akiko used her onboard scanners (which had discovered the chip in the first place) to study it more in-depth. “Some kind of neural thing, definitely, it’s giving off all the right wavelengths for the human brain. And I can make this containment unit block the homing-signal, if you want…”

“No, I don’t want whoever put it there to know that we found it. But I don’t like making the civilians a target, either, so we need to figure out a plan…can this be a two-way signal? I mean, can you use it to track whoever’s on the other end?”

“If I hook it up to my system, and they get within a certain range, absolutely.”

The former doomsday prophet was now coming to his senses. After writhing in his seat for a few minutes, he gradually forced his eyes open. “Whuh--what’s goin’ on?”

Hadrian used a few esoteric methods of ascertaining the shape he was in, and said, “Do you know where you are?”

He shielded his pupils from what seemed to be a sudden onslaught of light…his tone was more annoyed and casual than anything else. “Of course I do, I’m in that stupid asylum that Richard sent me to. I--wait a--” His eyes having adjusted, he saw Anvil Man and Lilith and panicked, nearly tipping his chair over. “God, what did they give me?! I’m seeing crazy stuff!”

Lilith smiled, touching his arm. “Relax, it’s okay--you’re safe. What’s the last thing you remember?”

Despite himself, he calmed down--but it took a few moments for him to call up the memories. “Well, the attacks, of course. And a few years after that, I guess. Then, my boss--I was a government analyst--kinda went crazy and sent me here to impress one of his bosses. Some showy crap to prove what a good, tough leader he was. God…”

“You aren’t in the hospital, anymore. We’re insurgents.”

“Ins--? Oh, right, I remember that.”

Hadrian pulled his chair up to him. “I’m Hadrian Villas. This is Lilith, Akiko Masamune, and Anvil Man.”

“Uh…right. Tommy Monaghan. I don’t want to sound stupid, but, was I in a coma or something? Because I don’t remember how I got here, and I feel like I’ve been asleep for a really long time...”

Not wanting to distract him with that just yet, Hadrian said, “Tommy, do you remember the names of any important people that worked at the hospital?”

“Important people? I don’t know. It seemed like a bunch of losers worked there, people that weren’t really happy to--oh, wait--yeah, there was this one doctor. I saw him a few times, before I…well, before whatever happened, happened. A Dr. Price. I think he might’ve been in charge.”

Anvil Man did a double-take, which no-one noticed. In conversations, she tended to be forgotten about, unfortunately, as she couldn’t contribute much. (As Sabrina, she’d been an incredible, articulate conversationalist.) She wished that she could tell them everything she knew about the man that had further corrupted her ex-husband.

“What kind of a doctor was he?”

“Psych stuff, I think. And he was always carrying this briefcase full of chemicals around. Like drugs.”

Harmonic teleported back into the room, eliciting a new round of fright from Tommy. However, this only lasted a few moments, and then he exhaled happily, realizing something.

“Wait, you’re superheroes, aren’t you?? Why didn’t you just tell me that in the first place?! God! You people need to wear costumes or something, to give a guy a little warning.”

Akiko rolled her eyes. “What, the giant creature named ‘Anvil Man’ in the corner wasn’t enough of a tipoff?”

“Except for my boyfriend there, we don’t really do the costume thing. He even has a cape…not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

“It’s useful and cool-looking,” Hadrian muttered.

“Hey, I thought the anvil guy and the clown girl” (this misconception was Lilith’s pet peeve, and Hadrian had to place a hand on her arm to keep her from “educating” him) “were hallucinations or something. But…they’re not, apparently.”

“We’re not.”

“Well, that’s good. I think.”

“It’s 6 AI, for the record.”

He laughed nervously. “No, that can’t be right. It’s halfway through 4.”

“Look--I know you don’t feel tired, but, trust me, you need some rest. Harmonic, why don’t you teleport him to the hospital, and make sure the nurses know his story.”

“Uh, I’d rather not go to another hospital, if that’s okay with you.”

“It’s a glorified cave, and you’ll be able to leave whenever you want.”

After Harmonic teleported Tommy away, Lilith said, “So, you were asking him about the torture ward…I think you’re right about the patients-turned-doomsday-prophets and the increase in sightings being connected. Since there was all this mind-altering stuff going on, do you think that someone from the hospital might be drugging Central’s water, something like that?”

“There aren’t that many of us left in the territory, so it wouldn’t take much to do it--but each camp gets its water from a different natural source, and everyone has those advanced filters that we gave them, back in the beginning…it’d be pretty hard to pull off. This Price was most likely the one experimenting on the patients. If he survived the attack on the hospital, maybe he’d want to find new test-subjects, to continue his ‘work’. But why would somebody be killing off his old ones?”

“Covering something up, maybe?”

“Could be. If the others had chips in their brains, too, and if the chips are what’s making them obsessed with these end-of-the-world scenarios, Price must have wanted them that way. So the question is what he was trying to learn or accomplish by making them insane.”

“Tommy was pretty calm after we got the chip out, so, yeah, I think we can assume that that’s the source.”

Hadrian pondered things for a moment. “I don’t think these sightings are hallucinations. It sounds like they started all over Central at about the same time, and there aren’t enough common-denominators left to drug most of Central that quickly--we don’t share the same water or the same food, and except for us, everyone is scattered into unrelated, small groups that hardly ever interact, which rules out airborne contact, telepathic viruses, and even STDs. But, at the same time, it’s pretty logical for Price to want to keep experimenting. Or to keep trying to scare the insurgency, if you want to look at it that way. So, maybe he’s mixed up with this superhuman killer, or maybe they’re the same person.”

“Okay, I’ve got the chip in my system--but not my neural-net, obviously, it’s firewalled--so, maybe we should have Harmonic teleport me a lot of different places, to see if I can get within range of this idiot’s homing frequency.”

HV tried to think of the most diplomatic way possible to say “no”, as he knew that she was often overruled by the majority of the team. “I don’t know…if the chip just appeared on his screen out of nowhere, he might suspect that another superhuman had it, kill the signal, and clear out.”

“Yeah, like I’d really let him get away.”

“I know you wouldn’t, but, you’d have to come back for us, and that’d take a few seconds.”

“Or Harmonic could do that by himself, while I ripped this serial-killing lunatic’s heart out and stuffed it back down his throat.”

“Akiko…you helped me make our policy for this, you know what it is. If it can be avoided, we don’t take on unknown superhumans alone, as we don’t know how powerful they could be. We’ve always stuck to that. I remember that one time you yelled at me for--”

Harmonic chose that moment to teleport back into the room, with Dmitri Glasser in tow. Glasser was half-American, a post-Cold War Russian spy who came to America, in the weeks after the attacks…of all the remaining countries, America’s intelligence infrastructure had survived the best, and he hoped he could help them gather info about the aliens, to prepare for the eventual war that everyone assumed would come. Once there, he quickly found himself shouted down by the neocons, as he tended to be reality-based, looking at the facts instead of overly-optimistic, not-thought-out theories. He wanted to avoid the detours of empire and focus on winning the war that mattered. The majority of the intelligence community actually agreed with him, but they were either terrified of the neocons or thought that winning a few wars, in this time when the entire world was on America’s side, would be a piece of cake. As he saw like-minded agents undergo lethal retirements, he wisely faked his own death and joined the insurgency. His own country had been in the process of detiorating for some time--first under fascism disguised as communism; then under the capitalist oligarchs who made billions while the vast majority of Russians waited in line for food; finally, the attacks had reduced them to chaos, though the EC was trying to pull them out of it--and he didn’t want America to suffer the same fate.

Glasser was fortysomething, with salt-and-pepper grey hair and a goatee, and he was the spitting image of his blue-collar father from Pittsburgh (minus the goatee and circa twenty years ago, when he’d still been alive), who, in his younger days, had fallen for a beautiful, foreign college girl who was theoretically out of his league. He had a competent, no-frills air to him, which Akiko was hugely attracted to. Strictly “friends with benefits”, though the “friends” part, not so much. He wore a long, black wool coat along with jeans and a few sweaters. (Rather than a love triangle, they had more of a food-chain: a sexually-confused teenage girl had a crush on Anvil Man, but she wasn’t sure if it was because of who he was on the outside or who “he” was on the inside; Anvil Man had a crush on Harmonic, who had the charisma and understanding of America that her ex-husband lacked; Harmonic had a crush on Akiko, ever since “accidentally” seeing her naked in the shower; Akiko had her aforementioned crush on Glasser; Glasser had initially had a crush on Lilith; and Lilith was obviously in love with HV.)

“Harmonic told him the basics,” Harmonic said. “People being driven insane and killed…that’s some serious double-dipping.”

Lilith, being the considerate person she was, offered to grab him a chair.

“I’ll stand, thanks--that table is for people like you, not people like me. In the words of those, uh, those rocking phonebooth kids from that Hollywood movie, I’m not worthy.”

“Dmitri, have you ever heard of a Dr. Price? He might’ve been involved with psychological torture at the ward in Central.”

“Christopher Price? Yeah, sure--he was the heavyweight champ of the spin-doctors. Degrees in all kinds of mind-related stuff. In fact, he pretty much ran the Wertham presidency, until a few years ago. He got demoted because of the Sumerian debacle. I heard that they put him in charge of that ‘hospital’ that got attacked, last month. Why?”

Hadrian quickly filled him in on everything that Harmonic hadn’t.

“That sounds like it’d be right up his alley,” Glasser said, after having heard the full story. “This is thirdhand, but, it matches with this theory that he had…they told me about it before they found out I didn’t agree with them 110%, unquestioningly, on everything.”

“What kind of theory?”

“Basically, the attacks screwed up society, psychologically-speaking--”

“You really have to be a genius to figure that out,” Akiko spat.

“--but more importantly, that that weakness can be used to control everyone. All the propaganda and PR that New America puts out, well, it used to filter through him. He’d always use certain language and images to reinforce this idea that another attack could be right around the corner, that everyone needed to turn off their brains and not ask their leaders logical questions. I know, I know: that’s obvious, now, but he was the first one to figure it out, just a few days after the attacks.”

“Was he superhuman?”

“As far as I know, no, but, take it from a lifelong spy--we live in a world with god knows how many secrets, and from what I’ve seen, anything is possible, in both good and bad ways.”

“Hang on a second,” Lilith said. “Was he using the torture ward as a, a focus group or something? They had those before the attacks, right? Maybe he was just testing his ‘marketing campaigns’ on them--making up scary propaganda and seeing how they reacted.”

“I think you’re right…he wasn’t trying to make them insane, it was just a side-effect of his experiments,” Hadrian agreed. “But what I don’t get is, why would he--if he is this superhuman--be going to so much trouble to keep it a secret? They’ve already legalized slavery, a little experimentation and torture is nothing.”

Akiko tapped her finger on the table repeatedly, as she tended to do when her extremely-organized mind was hard at work. “Okay, listen to this: how about, this wasn’t just some made-up stuff that he put in their heads, but it’s the stuff they actually plan on doing, to keep people in line. When the shock from the attacks wears off, maybe they fake a new one, to keep everyone terrified and under control.”

This idea created a good deal of excited, overlapping conversations, and Akiko gave everyone another rare smile.

“Yeah, he wouldn’t want their plans leaking out--and when the hospital got attacked, they all escaped, and became national security risks. They each have one of our chess moves in their head,” Lilith said.

Hadrian suddenly zoned out. Contrary to popular belief, the strongest sign of intelligence wasn’t figuring out something immediately, but figuring out that there was something that needed to be figured out--and from there, being able to feel the shape of it in the dark, until you could determine what it was. The clues had been gathering in his head, which had been processing them all along, assembing them into the truth. Everyone knew that he knew, of course, just from the look in his eye…they’d seen it before. Akiko looked momentarily vulnerable, as if she was afraid that she was about to be proven wrong.

Phrasing carefully, he said, “Akiko is absolutely right--and she made me realize that there’s another level to it. Tell me, where do you think they’re getting those Swarm doomsday ideas?”

Everyone, knowing it was a rhetorical, said nothing.

“I’ll get to that in a second. When Harmonic was telling us about the ideas that Price put in the doomsday prophets, they just didn’t feel right--but at the time, I didn’t know why. They’re too low-scale! I mean, using some kind of special fire and acid rain? Why waste time with stuff like that, when they can wipe entire cities off the map with just one hit? Think about it: they decimated our population, our atmosphere, and our ability to communicate with each other in just four days. Say that you’re Christopher Price…if you were making up Swarm attacks, to see how people would react to them, wouldn’t you go big-budget, to keep it convincing?”

“But they obviously aren’t as powerful as the Swarm, so they have to use a smaller scale,” Glasser said.

“You’re right, but, that’s in the execution stage. In the planning stage, just for research purposes, you can make up whatever you want. And they wouldn’t have to physically stage the attack, anyway…they control the media, they could just claim it happened and maybe come up with some CGI footage. It’s not like Americans can control where they go, anymore--Safe America and the Labor Initiative would just avoid sending anyone to where the attack allegedly happened.”

“You are gonna answer your own question, aren’t you?” Lilith reminded him.

“The answer is, this is the New American government we’re talking about…they’re about as lazy as it gets. Instead of coming up with new ideas, I think they just took some old contingencies--things they were planning on doing to enemies, things they thought might be done to them--and retrofitted the Swarm in there. So they aren’t just trying to cover up what they plan on faking, they’re trying to cover up all of their strategies, period. And the reason that only one or two guys are working on this? I think that Price used this without permission. He’s on the outs with Wertham, right?”

“Yeah, he is.”

“But that--whoa. If you’re right, we could find out about a ton of New America’s secret plans, since they were ‘doomsday prophecies’ that were told to a lot of people.” Lilith sat back, happy and impressed.

“Exactly. So, our objective is no longer just taking out this superhuman serial-killer…we need to find out as much as possible about what the dead doomsday prophets said, or, even better, find some more living ones. And assuming Price isn’t the superhuman, we should try to find him, too.”

“What about the sightings?”

“I think they’re probably just more scare-tactics from Price, but, I don’t think they’re ‘contagious’--after we’re done, Harmonic can teleport me to some of the people who have seen them, and I’ll make sure their systems don’t have any drugs or viruses in them, or anything else that could cause hallucinations.”

As everyone was standing up and getting ready to go to work, Harmonic chuckled to himself, apparently amazed by something. Anvil Man nudged him, looking at him questioningly, despite not having a face.

“Oh, it’s nothing…Harmonic just forgot what it felt like to have an advantage.”

-------------------------------

From the very beginning of his career--which had only been in 1998, one year before the attacks--Jarvis had never understood something about other superheroes: for some reason, none of them had any ambition. Yes, yes, they were “selfless” and all that, and they were ambitious in regards to wanting a better world, but still…it was like they weren’t allowed to want things for themselves. To him, his pre-attacks colleagues had been afraid of admitting to those kinds of barely-selfish thoughts. Wasn’t that part of being human? Getting to a point where you had no desires would surely make a superhero aloof and unable to relate to the people they were protecting, so, for the good of the species, you simply had to have goals and wishes. (That was his rationalization, anyway.) Like most American Dreams, Jarvis’s own was unoriginal but magnificent nonetheless…he wanted to be the most important and powerful superhero on earth, and he wanted to lead the most important and powerful superteam on earth. He’d just started on that path when the Swarm had attempted to obliterate humanity, and afterwards, he’d suddenly found himself having achieved the first half of his dream. But, as tended to be the case, with life, it was in a radically different form than he’d originally envisioned…

Jamestown, Virginia no longer existed. The birthplace of America (though several spots had competed for that title) was now a hill-strewn field covered with dozens of feet of untouched snow. Though it was cold and blizzarding most of the time, it was a tropical oasis, compared to Central. Several Safe America forts had been established in the icy ruins of the former state--while some still used the old terminology, New America consisted of several territories--and the Labor Initiative was hard at work on building even more. Occasionally, you’d see a polar bear that had survived and was now living on fish that came from the pollution-free Atlantic. (That was another reason why the coasts were so popular: the nanotech had ended at America’s borders, so you could fish from either ocean, though Safe America would kill you if you tried. The plan had been to make other countries more appealing to the Swarm, should they want to raid resources. However, New America had used all of their nanotech stock to ruin their half of the continent, and most of the people who knew how to create it were dead.)

It felt strange to be agreeing with Wertham, but, Jarvis thought that things actually were getting better, for both himself and America. Yes, their wars were going badly, top US generals were claiming that they were creating insurgents faster than they could kill them, Labor Initiative and Safe America people were dying off left and right, and it looked like the country wouldn’t be ready for a non-government-run economy before 25 AI, but still. There was the sheer dumb luck of Project: Horus, of course, and there was the minor fact that he’d had incredible sex with Mary, a mere six or so hours ago--that was the best he’d felt in bed since Lisa had been alive. He really did believe that the two of them could get both Wertham and New America on the right track. And there was also the reason he’d come to snow-buried Jamestown…there was a bunker not too far from there, which held (as far as he knew) the only remaining piece of Swarm technology in New American possession. Even if it wasn’t a weapon or something obviously useful, surely they’d be able to reverse-engineer it and find some new application.

Jarvis had his own hopes for what that application would be, to say the least--namely, the second half of his dream. His new alliance with Mary notwithstanding, he’d felt very, very alone for the last six years, due to the triple-punch of Lisa’s death, Yo’s death, and the betrayal of most of his fellow superheroes, who’d sided with the insurgency over him. Wertham made sure that Jarvis was taken care of, in terms of sex, but it wasn’t the same, and he certainly didn’t have any superhuman friends. By no means did Jarvis consider himself to be whiny or the dreaded “sensitive”, but, when undertaking the Herculean tasks that were required of him on a semi-hourly basis, it certainly would have been nice to have a little help. The other superhumans that worked for New America were either drooling, reprogrammed zombies or psychotic true-believers that thought Wertham was some kind of deity. (He didn’t count the Falconers, as they were amateurs.) They could be effective enough in combat, but, in terms of planning and camaraderie, there was nothing.

Ever since taking on such an important role in national security, Jarvis had wanted to build his own kind of superhuman team. The Lair Legion had been too soft, for his tastes, while his current allies were unthinking soldiers. There had to be a good middle-ground. Maybe it would be possible to get some better people in the Falconer suits, redesign them, and call them the American Eagles or something, and then Jarvis could train the people from the (currently stalled) supersoldier program. (Due to the danger involved, they were aiming for low power-levels, at first, which Jarvis was more than happy to go along with, as he didn’t want any serious competition.) He wanted something like “New American Justice Squad” or “Empire Enforcers”. And maybe they could take a skycarrier and turn it into their headquarters. A round table of heroes that he could call his own, hopefully with male friends he could rely on and attractive women that would be more than happy to drop the soap in the unisex locker room’s showers.

What he really wanted, however, was something that had eluded him: a single, undeniable moment of world-saving glory. He hadn’t been among the Final Five that had infiltrated the Swarm’s flagship and forced them to retreat, hijacking their powerful communications technology to broadcast what could have been mankind’s final battle (it had been HV and four other LL insurgents, though he hadn’t led the mission, and they weren’t to be confused with his four other superhuman allies in KC), and he wasn’t considered a hero by that many people, anymore. What he did now was little more than repetitive drudgery. There was a temporary awe that impressed the enemies he’d kill and the Safe America troops that saw him in action, but, neither was fully capable of understanding the sacrifices he was making. He needed true teammates, people who could understand how great he was. And he was sick of having to do so much of the work himself--he’d more than earned the power to set something like this in motion. If Wertham didn’t like it, well, Jarvis could always find another empty-headed suit to do the same job.

Jarvis hovered at the coordinates Mary had given him, taking a look around. Miles and miles of frigid nothing. He unzipped one of his pockets and pulled out an electronic security-clearance key, which enabled him to interact with all New America technology. It detected compatible software directly below him--the fact that it was underground wasn’t a surprise, but, it was annoying, as he’d have to find the entrance. He was pretty sure that Mary had said the entry-tunnel started in a cave, near a river. After spotting the nearest river, he flew alongside it, looking for any kind of landscape clues. However, the snow was piled so high that the terrain seemed uniformly flat. Thankfully, the key sensed the entrance’s location when he flew close to it, and purposely-weak, green cosmic energy blasts strafed from Jarvis’s fists, clearing the snow away and revealing the cave. A polar bear cub shot out of it, panicking and growling defensively.

“God, shut up.” Jarvis blew it into tiny pieces with one shot, splattering blood all over the virginal white powder.

The cave itself was maybe ten feet across and thirty feet deep, with a low, uneven ceiling and walls that got closer together, the further you went. Upon closer examination, he saw that the narrow back end of the cave was choked with a ridiculously-thick layer of ice--it looked like a crystalline swollen throat. He now understood why the bunker’s personnel had starved to death, instead of getting fish from the ocean…in high-security bunkers like this, there was only one door, and it had been frozen shut. Icy shards on the floor attested to the fact that Mary’s recon team had been forced to use energy-weapons to blast their way through. In the years since then, however, it had built back up. Jarvis easily got rid of it with cosmic energy, and then gave his key time to trigger the hidden door (it was stone on the surface). He went right in.

As expected, Jarvis could still see his breath after he was inside--the main power had been out for years, after all. Flare-like emergency lights were sprinkled conservatively throughout the metallic entrance-tunnel. He quickly flew through the lengthy chute, reaching another electronically-locked door. His key had more trouble with this one; he suspected that the door used an outdated code (the bunker wasn’t hooked up to any networks, so no auto-updates), or that, since this had been built before the attacks, the tech wasn’t 100% compatible. But it opened nonetheless, though he had to help it along a little, as ice was apparently screwing up the gears. Beyond this doorway was a Hydra of barely-lit metallic halls. Jarvis nearly humiliated himself with the first step he took--apparently, the sprinkler-system had been triggered at some point, as there was a glacier-blue sheen on top of the floors. He almost slipped and fell flat on his back. His flight ability kicked in as soon as he lost his footing, however, and he was left floating, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle.

“Nobody saw that. Nobody saw that. Thank you, Jesus.”

He touched back down carefully--with his boots’s special treads, it was possible to walk on pretty much any slippery surface, except you had to adjust your balance accordingly, and he hadn’t been expecting ice--and then decided to screw it and just glided through the complex. Blasters disguised as security-cameras tracked his progress as he went by. There were a lot of empty rooms…he guessed that it had originally been built back in the ‘70s, when they’d expected that they’d have a lot of (operable) Swarm technology to store, after reverse-engineering it. There was crime scene-style tape around puddle-shaped scorchmarks, the only remnants of the meltdown. (He’d expected to only find one room without the scorchmarks, but he found two, for some reason. Maybe they just didn’t put anything in that one.) He went by living quarters that looked like mansions, compared to the tiny rooms they jammed Safe America troops into, and he saw the sleeping security console and a conventional arms locker that had been cleared out, the ammo wasted on the then-frozen door.

Finally, he found a room that wasn’t sitting wide open--a windowless, doorless area marked C-11, with typical biohazard symbols and warning signs. A clean room/decontamination chamber adjoined it, and he went into that, instead. Sure enough, there was a massive, vault-style door that had to lead to his prize. But for some reason, his key wouldn’t open it. Jarvis pushed against the door experimentally, testing its strength. This model was familiar to him…they must have installed it just before the attacks. It was capable of withstanding a direct nuclear strike, of standing up to a thousand pounds of pressure per square inch. He’d seen people empty entire laser-clips at this sort of door with no result. It couldn’t be phased or vibrated through, teleported past, disintegrated, melted, frozen, or otherwise have its matter rearranged or altered in any way, thanks to a molecular-stabilizing field that was channeled through its alloy. And the alloy alone was virtually invulnerable--superhumans that could toss around fifty tons had bruised their fists on it. Kind of quaint, really. Jarvis just needed a strong blast of Jarviscosmic and three of his most powerful punches to get in.

The heavy, molecularly-dense door slammed to the ground quickly, kicking up absolutely no dust whatsoever. Blue alarms went off, of course, as the substance was lethally dangerous or whatever. The room was sterile-smelling and pitch-black, except for a bank of monitors that were still online. After shooting the alarms out, Jarvis approached what had to be what he was after: a plexiglass dome that contained a mirror-surfaced protoplasm. It almost looked like a high-tech incubator that had just been plopped down on the floor. For a moment, he panicked--had this melted down, too? After flipping through some hard copy notes that he found in a drawer underneath the monitors, he saw that it was supposed to look that way…but the more he looked at it, the more he thought that its surface was changing, somehow. Tiny explosions of vertigo started going off in his head. He could feel power pulsing from it, making the hair on his uncovered neck and forearms stand up. Suddenly, the mirror-like matter was reflecting all sorts of things that weren’t actually there, destruction and dark clouds and dreary badlands. Jarvis actually had to look away, as it was making him feel strange. Gazing at it made one feel emotionally naked.

Sitting down in a rolling chair and keeping his back to the protoplasm, Jarvis flipped through more of the 1976-dated notes. It was a lot of technobabble that he didn’t really understand. But at some point, he knew they’d have to present their findings in a short, easily-understood report, for government officials to read--so he kept looking for that. Of course, everything about where they’d gotten it was blacked-out, because of the coverup. But he did eventually find two documents that explained everything: the first was a page from the 1976 final report, which claimed that it was a “mindmirror” that acted as a barometer for a planet’s collective-unconscious. (Handwritten notation: “Jung was right? I’ll have to apologize to that idiot Psych professor I had.”) The Swarm had apparently used it to find weaknesses in the planets they were going to invade, for psychological warfare purposes. The second was a memo that was dated 1998, and it said, “re: re: Resurgence of Superhumans. Reached same conclusion as 1976 investigation, still scientifically impossible to either fully interpret or reverse-engineer mindmirror. Will have to find another method to track any possible future superhuman cultural movements. No practical application for mindmirror. Continuation of status quo recommended.”

Jarvis didn’t really remember his initial reaction, upon reading that. There was just the blinding focus that was often associated with extreme levels of anger. This was followed by a lot of green energy overwhelming the darkness of the complex, and then fire, which opened up white and light. It wasn’t going to give them a new advantage, it wasn’t going to jumpstart the supersoldier program, it wasn’t going to stop him from feeling alone. The Swarm had left them with what basically amounted to a glorified mood ring. No wonder they hadn’t been worried about humanity having it, it was worthless. Out of nowhere, Jarvis found himself hovering outside, snow falling on his shoulders. The bunker was a smoking hole in the ground. Now that he was away from that freaky mindmirror thing, his brain felt much clearer. Mary had told him not to get too excited about this…he was an idiot. Checking the wireless pocketwatch that he had in his suit, he saw that he only had a few minutes to make it to Africa--his meeting there had been postponed, which was why he’d had time for this detour in the first place. Time to get real and go back to work. He vanished in under a second, streaking neon green over the Atlantic.

Deep in the remains of the facility, the mindmirror room was still crackling with energy. The notes had turned to ash, and the computers were giving off a plastic-and-gold stink, but the mindmirror itself was untouched, except for a single fractured spot on its surface. One of Jarvis’s blasts had hit it, there. It had been in a C-11 room not because it was dangerous to people, but because people were dangerous to it…that room was sealed off from the frequency the human mind operated on, giving the mindmirror no stimuli to react to. When Jarvis had smashed his way in, however, things had changed. For years and years, the mindmirror had only tasted carefully-controlled mental content, which the scientists brought in, experimentally. (They wore special neutron containment suits that prevented their personal thought-frequencies from escaping.) For the first time ever, instead of just having individual thoughts piped into it, the mindmirror was now able to take in the entire species. And as the powerful, terrorizing psychological fallout of the attacks washed through it, the damage it had suffered from Jarvis began to twitch with some alien form of electricity, before automatically repairing itself. That twitch slowly crawled over the entirety of the protoplasm.

Semi-sentient from the cosmic energy it had been exposed to, it oozed out of the shattered plexiglass dome, suddenly feeling the need to find a certain individual, whose brain stood out like a beacon in the collective-unconscious. The mindmirror then blasted out of the wreckage and through the air, almost like a flying, liquid battering-ram. Gravity splashed off of it. Though it had memories of past planets, this one was different, and it knew its new savior would be able to explain what was going on…

--------------------------

There were things in life that just refused to take root in certain places. They were polar opposites that, as they came closer and closer to each other, pushed away harder and harder. But thanks to being both insanely self-confident and insanely self-destructive, humanity kept trying to make it work, anyway. Some markets just refused to accept that product. Some people just refused to accept that idea. Some cities just refused to accept that way of life. The most grandiose example of this phenomenon was found in the birthplace of modern civilization, the Middle East--there was still both inertia and power left over from the mighty acts that had formed it. No matter what you did, no matter how hard you tried, Civilization and Empire would always be mutually-exclusive things…civilizations existed under the idea that people could decide things for themselves, empires existed under the idea that someone else needed to decide for them. And though empires had tried to anchor themselves in many civilizations, they kept being drawn to their opposite’s point of origin, only to fail time and time again. Ambitious city-states like Ur and Babylon, juggernauts like Britain and America, legends like Alexander the Great’s Greece and Persia, dictators like the Ayatollahs and Saddam Hussein (who’d thankfully been killed in the attacks), and more.

The ancient organization known as the Crescent Key had used planning, violence, manipulation, and social magic to domesticate the species, trumping cultures and tribes to create modern society, which they named Sumeria. Like all good parents, they wanted to do everything they could to protect their new child, for as long as possible…unlike most parents, however, they actually had the capability to do that. They knew of two pre-existing bloodlines that produced champions of humanity, bloodlines which they attempted to tap into and control. Playing up their natural differences, they tried to create a set of superhuman checks and balances--not only would they protect and influence mankind, they’d also balance each other out, just to be safe. One of these was the HV line, the other was literally unknown to the world, even though most everyone had heard the name of its representative. (Without ever actually knowing that this representative existed.) They’d had both successes and failures, watching as their creation expanded, turning the center of their world into the west, and then the east. Though their invention would eventually extend over the entire globe (albeit in the hands of others), they kept their home in the desert land between the rivers.

But before all that happened, knowing that a creation myth would be vitally important in establishing priorities, morals, and themes in their society, the Crescent Key set to work creating one. It wasn’t a religion, however…the Annunaki were not gods, but aliens, from Nibiru (“the Planet of the Crossing”), which antique sci-fi often referred to as Planet X. Their name meant “righteous, pure, and bright”. Not only did they create humanity, they also created artificial helpers that flew their craft and were quite similar to the modern notion of robots. Thinking big, the storytellers involved set up a line of Sumerian rulers that stretched 400,000 years into the past, though most of the older ones were aliens or at least superhumans. (How much of that lineage was myth, and how much was reality, no-one really knew, though Sumeria was indeed the oldest known civilization on Earth.) However, after a chain of events that triggered a great deluge, the Annunaki decided that they were too “lofty” and dangerous for humanity, and left them in charge of themselves. Someday, when we’d progressed enough to be their equals, they’d return. Focusing on science rather than spirituality, the Crescent Key hoped to inspire humanity to make themselves lofty like their supposed makers, teaching them that the creation of life (outside of reproduction) was within their grasp and that space was a place worth exploring.

There were other origins, however…origins in which humanity was guilt-tripped and made to fear knowledge, origins in which there was shame and strictness, origins in which people were divided into groups, instead of being united by a cosmic birthright that applied to everyone. As with all institutions, the Crescent Key waxed and waned, and over time, and their creation myth fell by the wayside. They were sometimes ineffective, misguided, or corrupt. And as they focused on guiding growing civilizations in other parts of the world, their own foundation began to crumble. When the sun set on their region’s fortunes, the people became bitter, further- and further-removed from their past greatness. Poverty and subjugation ruled. Though the Crescent Key had successfully fought off threats that most people would never find out about, and helped mankind avoid problems that could have destroyed everything, their burgeoning social-structure was coming apart at the hinges, and they’d been in the process of repairing it when the Swarm had attacked. Their organization had nearly been destroyed in the process.

For millenia, they’d lived underneath Sumeria--the country formerly known as Iraq--but now, because of the war and general paranoia about another Swarm attack, their headquarters, the unknown eighth wonder of the world, was on the move. It had been built before the Crescent Key had even existed, by a master architect who specialized in labyrinths. This particular labyrinth was able to be piloted, and capable of architectural shapeshifting--it could focus itself into a five-mile-long, wide, snake-like tunnel and shoot through the ground, smoothly filtering sediment in one end and out the other, leaving it exactly as it had found it, without causing any tectonic structural weakening or disturbance aboveground. (When it went through solid rock, its “teeth” would automatically grind it into pebbles and then fuse it back together as it came out, creating the appearance that the rock had never been broken up in the first place.) The thing practically looked like it was phasing through the earth. It could also spread out and take the form of a fortress, a conventional city, or a subterranean network-city, not unlike the one in Central. Today, it was charging through rivers of lava that traveled both horizontally and vertically.

Inside, it was the ancient masonry that Hadrian Villas remembered growing up in. They’d made superficial technological improvements to it, over the years, but the core systems were timeless, and had been left unaltered. Once, it had just been the hub of the Crescent Key; now, pretty much all of their surviving leaders and agents were crammed into it, trying to figure out what to do next. Two of those leaders were currently standing in a dark, empty, tan-colored stone room, which echoed with size. It had once held their only two submarines, which they’d since deployed. The leaders were a pair of identical twins who could have been anywhere between twenty and forty, as they were petite women with skin that had rarely been exposed to the sun. They were half-Arabic and half-Jewish, with black hair that hung down to their waists, wearing earth-toned working clothes that testified to the fact that one could be important without leading a particularly glamorous life. One of them held an electronic torch, the other was fidgeting with a small wireless device that glowed neon-green. Malqasi and Yenez had been coming down here for privacy since they were girls.

“Well?”

“Still nothing. The signal is fine, they just aren’t checking in.”

“It couldn’t have started already…Chang is one of the best, his intel is never wrong.”

“If the biggest naval battle in history were going on, I think Captain Siguardson would’ve broken radio silence, by now.”

“I’m still trying to figure out what their motivation could be. They’re obviously getting ready to stage simultaneous Atlantic and Pacific attacks against New America--what could they possibly hope to gain?? We may not know who they are, but we do know that they don’t want to conquer it, so what’s the point?”

“It’s not like we have much to go on. All we know for sure is that they aren’t Atlanteans--that submergible battleship our surveillance drone spotted was absolutely modern tech--and that they created that race of aquatic missing links that used to be ruled by Banjoooo. Though I’m pretty sure that was just a defective prototype for the perfect underwater warrior.”

“This is just--this is pathetic. Look at what we’ve been reduced to, just standing by and blindly hoping that whoever this is weakens one of the two remaining superpowers, so we can get back in control. Gods, we’ve failed completely. So have the elders. We had the perfect system set up, and we let it fall apart. If both bloodlines had done what they were supposed to, none of this would have ever happened, I’m sure of it.”

“Nobody could have predicted that Cross would react to the attacks the way he did. It’s just unheard of--holding your entire city hostage, without them ever knowing it? Setting it up so nobody can reach you? There wasn’t any precedent.”

“I know you don’t agree with me on this, but, I still have faith in Hadrian. Of all the superhumans that are left, I think he has the best chance of taking down the Wertham regime. Look at all the good he’s done in the territory they assigned him.”

“I don’t care how he looks on the surface…something’s wrong, there. I can feel it. And with the bloodlines being out of balance, he has way too much power.”

“You’re just like the elders--they always had problems with the control issue, too. Yeah, he does have a mind of his own, and it’s made him more powerful than any other HV that we know of. Don’t say it, I know; that has a bad side, too, like we saw with Cross. But that’s just the way people are, now. No more unthinking loyalty. It’s really amazing, I still can’t believe that such a visionary organization could become so locked in tradition.”

“You can save the progressive speechifying for those naïve little idealists you love getting to spank you. The bottom line is--”

“At least I have someone to sp--”

“The bottom line is, Hadrian should’ve offered to take him down, instead of babbling about ‘free will’ and ‘self-determination’. The elders agree with me, what Cross did obviously wasn’t right.”

“Like it even matters, now? Talk about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

“Look, this is--I don’t understand why you--forget it. Truce?”

“…truce.”

“Okay. I hate to bring this up, with everything else that’s going on, but…there’s still a major player that hasn’t made their move.”

“Who’s left? The Dark Knight? This is just a guess, but, I think he’ll end up coming down on our side, even if it isn’t 100%. He’s a long-term thinker, just like us.”

“That wasn’t who I meant, but I am worried about him, considering that we barely know anything about what he has planned.”

“Do we have to make this a guessing-game? Let’s see…Helios? He doesn’t even technically exist, yet. But Wertham’ll be in for a surprise--there’s quite a bit that his son hasn’t told him. Who else, Shifter? What happened in the Himalayas did put him on our level, but, I don’t think he’s ready.”

“I’m talking about the man with the power of The Name.”

“…ahh.”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t even know if he survived the attacks.”

“Oh, that is such complete and utter sh--”

“Hey, I don’t--”

“--nd both of us know it. Think about who we’re talking about, here. I don’t buy that he could be taken out that easily.”

“ ‘that easily’? Yeah, that Swarm attack was really low-powered…”

“You know what I mean.”

“If he is out there--and, yeah, he probably did make it--I haven’t seen any evidence that he’s up to anything.”

“Think he could be behind this upcoming naval attack?”

“With the quantum curse still in effect? No, it’d kill him. What possible reason could he have?”

“I don’t know, I was just wondering. His family’s patriarch was a sailor…”

“Yeah, and our family’s patriarch thought sex was evil, but I don’t think that’s gonna have much influence over our plans for the weekend. Assuming we aren’t fighting WWIII, by then.”

“With the Swarm’s attempted invasion, wouldn’t it be WWIV? Or WWV, if you count the American Empire wars that are going on.”

“You always have a way of depressing me.”

“That’s what sisters are for.”

“This is all important stuff, but, there’s one question we’re avoiding: do we tell Hadrian?”

“About…?”

“About the naval buildup.”

“What good would that do?”

“Well, maybe he could tell the insurgents, and they could launch a ground assault in synch with our mystery-man’s naval one.”

“I don’t think the insurgents are anywhere near ready to pull off that kind of operation. Guerilla-style attacks, yes, they do those all the time…but a full-frontal assault on multiple Safe America targets? They don’t have the numbers, the weapons, or the training.”

“Yet.”

“Hey, at the rate the Safe America troops are dying, I agree that the insurgents’ll eventually be able to start a conventional war--but it’s not like we can call up whoever this is and ask him to wait five years, until Hadrian’s American friends are ready and Wertham’s ranks are thinned out some more.”

“This is going to create another shouting-match, but, what if we helped him?”

“Hadrian or the mystery-man?”

“Hadrian.”

“We aren’t an army--a few more superhuman operatives, high-tech weapons, and spells probably won’t make much of a difference.”

“I didn’t mean like that.”

“Then what did you mean? I can’t think of anything else we could--”

Yenez shrugged in an explanatory fashion.

“--oh, you’re out of your mind.”

“I knew you’d react like--”

“We’ve only used the labyrinth in four wars, over the course of, what, six thousand years?”

“And those wars weren’t anywhere near as bad as this one could be, so it’s not like we wouldn’t be justified.”

“The elders would never go for it.”

“Everything our ancestors created is on the line--I think we need to pull out all the stops.”

“That’s clever…you should say that to the elders, you know how they love that American Get Tough slang. Do we need ‘hunker up’ and get ready to ‘smack someone down’?”

Yenez rolled her eyes. “Foshizzle.”

“…is that that Iranian guy you lost your virginity to?”

Malqasi’s wireless device suddenly went off, which caused both of them to curse and fumble around for it--after a fashion, Malqasi answered it. Though its technology was augmented by the labyrinth’s comm-array, the connection wasn’t the best, and Malqasi put it in walkie-talkie mode, so Yenez could hear.

“This is Captain Siguardson, ladies. I just wanted to let you know that there’s been no change in the Pacific fleet’s status…they’re still in a trident-style formation, aligned with San Diego. That’s where one of the larger American naval bases is.”

“How far out?”

“In land terminology? Five, six hundred klicks.”

“Have you been able to get a closer look at any of the ships?”

“No, we’re staying just outside of their scanner range--or at least, what we think their scanner range is. And they have electromagnetic scramblers that screw up our long-range cameras.”

“They’re all submerged?”

“Yeah, they pretty much have to be, there are Coast Guard patrols making the rounds every two hours.”

“And they all have stealth technology in them?”

“As far as we can tell--they certainly aren’t showing up on our scanners.”

“What kind of a chance do you think they’ll have?”

“Judging from what our Captain M’kumbe has told me, more of a chance than their Atlantic fleet. The West Coast just isn’t as well-defended.”

“Okay…thanks, Captain. We’ll get back to you if we have any modifications for your orders.”

“Aye, aye.”

The connection was closed, and Malqasi tucked the device into a pocket. “One of us should update the elders.”

“You do it, you’re the teacher’s pet.” After a pause: “Think you could mention that Hadrian idea to them?”

“The coordinated attack thing? No, I probably shouldn’t. If this naval strike doesn’t work out, well, they’re putting all of their chips into their own solution to the New America problem. I can’t see them relying on Hadrian.”

“I’m hoping it won’t come to that--that kind of weapon has never been used in human history.”

“Wertham may not give us much of a choice…”

Standing there in the darkness, in what should have been the cornerstone of a glorious, global civilization, Yenez had to point out an uncomfortable truth. “No matter what happens next--whether the Swarm comes back, whether everything the Crescent Key ever built falls apart, whether the world goes into the last war it’ll ever have…one more thing would have to happen, before it could really be the end. There’s one more battle that’d have to take place.”

Malqasi nodded. “The two bloodlines turning on each other, once and for all.”

“I think that’s why Hadrian didn’t go to war with Cross. He knew that there’d be dark times ahead, and doing that would just make things even more dangerous--he was trying to buy humanity a few years to deal with the problems they already had, before getting them into another one.”

Long, long ago, when the Crescent Key was first researching superhuman bloodlines that they might be able to use in their mission, they came across a total of seven. Most of them were hidden deep within the genepool, only surfacing in the form of a “representative” every few thousand years. They chose two of the ones that tended to occur every generation or so--HV and Cross’s alter-ego. There was also the mystical Darkness family; the unknown, high-potential genetic lineage that Goldeneyed, Exile, and Suicide Blonde had come from; and the heavenly stock that Messenger and several other angels had been created with, in addition to two other legacies. Since there were seven of them, and since they each seemed to be tied to a certain color (purple for HV, blood-red for Messenger, blue for Sorceress), they were called the Spectrum bloodlines. But if the ancient theories were correct, if two of the bloodlines--powerful, volatile things--ever clashed, the fallout would be uncontrollable. It was useful to take this into account when considering HV’s true plan, and how it would surely bring him into conflict with other superheroes…

------------------------------

When it came to the matter of killing America, it was even harder than you might imagine, because of two factors: first, it was primarily an idea, rather than a country, and it was nearly impossible to fully destroy an idea. Second, America’s heart was something of a moving target. Being extremely cautious by nature, its citizens invested their emotions in things only for the short-term, frequently moving these investments around and spreading them out, in case something went wrong. Sometimes, the heart of America would be in its bountiful farms, other times, in its economy-powering cities. Depending on when you caught it, it could be in science or religion or both. It would be in the young generation and their potential one day and the Greatest Generation and their experience the next. Depending on the circumstances, it could (amazingly enough) be in politicians, and it could also be in the masses. At times, they called on the military or the peace-process. As things went wrong, they moved their emotional attachments around--ensuring that they’d always be driven by something both noble and effective. And when it was safe to return to something that had failed them, they would, giving it another chance.

But this had its downside…there were times when the American people weren’t able to define America’s heart, or lack thereof. It moved around so much that it could get away from them. Currently, the soul of the country was embodied in its de facto ruler, even if he was out of power, for the moment: Dr. Christopher Price, the Pale Horseman. No other individual had shaped America as much as he had, these last few years. (Though Jarvis and Mary Vasquez were certainly coming closer every day.)

There was a place in New America that only one person knew about. It had started as J. Edgar Hoover’s personal retreat--the gay, crossdressing, ever-paranoid FBI mastermind had blackmailed his way into getting control of a lavish bunker in the midwest, far away from cities that could be targets in a war. Then, he’d staffed it with fictional people, so he could have some privacy and call it his own. (Or their own, rather.) They’d never end up using it. Decades later, when the military was decommissioning old facilities, selling off public ones and destroying top-secret ones, Price had seen it on the Black Budget list…he responded with a flurry of paperwork that made it appear as if it had already been dismantled. There was certain equipment, neurochemicals, and personal files that he didn’t feel safe keeping in his home, which he stored at the bunker. (He also found Hoover’s hidden files, untouched since his death. Quite a useful thing for extortion and smear-campaigns.) He’d only returned to it a month ago, looking for a refuge after the destruction of the hospital…in that time, he’d found it to be more useful than he’d ever imagined. The now-mentally-enhanced Price had filled it up with an endless stream of inventions, giving it new security and stealth technology, as well.

This was the source of the world’s recent nightmares. His tools of the trade were all there: AI flare decoys that (in the dark) gave off the appearance of Swarm ships, hologram-producing nanotech that brought humanity’s doomsaying prophets and gods to life, and those genetically-engineered bugs that vaguely looked like primitive, tiny versions of the Swarm. It was an art, really. Sometimes he’d use audio equipment to experiment with various types of screams, broadcasting them over encampments of illegals or insurgents, tinkering to find the best possible effect. He was also pioneering new types of signs, in addition to borrowing some classics…turning rivers and rain the color of blood, making the howl of snowstorms sound like a sentient creature crying out, projecting frightening mental frequencies and maniacal subsonic whisperings at pregnant women and people who were in positions of power. (He couldn’t wait to see how the babies turned out.) Sure, he could use neurochemicals or bioweapons to make terror contagious (his current, “manual” style required word-of-mouth to spread), but that could be detected, and it was more fun this way, anyhow.

However, even though he was sure that what he was doing was good--that making humanity feel like it was the end of the world both kept them under control and gave their existence a significance it wouldn’t otherwise have--he always hoped for a sign of his own. Not fake like the ones he created, but something that would let him know he was on the right track.

Price had just finished suiting himself up, getting ready for another venture into Central. Since his injection, he’d trained his body and mind to only need two hours of sleep per day, so he spent the other 22 hours either spreading that rich, apocalyptic atmosphere, creating more toys, or covering up his tracks by killing his former guinea-pigs. It was even busier than his old life, but he loved it. Originally, his plan had been to be the Pale Horseman only until he got back in power--but now, he saw that this alter-ego was too useful to just gather dust in the bunker. Of course, Christopher Price was needed, too. Left to his own devices, that brainless man-child known as the President had made New America sloppy and inefficient…Price would fix that in no time. He’d been using his technology to keep tabs on what was going on in DC, and it was a miracle that Jarvis hadn’t found out about Project: Helios, yet. (That was the only good idea Wertham had ever had in his life; Price had consented to it, both because it was logical and because it got Wertham to go along with the American Empire plan--of course, putting the consciousness of a teenager into the body of a god was dangerous. Before his exile, Price had made sure that the boy would be safely under his control, screwing him up enough to make him completely co-dependent. Or so he thought.)

Out of nowhere, the perimeter alarm went off--data from the bunker’s security tech was forwarded to the heads-up-display (or HUD) in Price’s helmet. Price had invented a device and standard for measuring the quality and quantity of information stored in a mind; according to both, his intruder contained more such information than he thought possible. Even the unchained biological brain couldn’t have handled that much raw data. Without hesitation, Price ran out of his living quarters and into the garage, mounted his hovercycle, and blasted out of the bunker’s hidden opening, preparing to capture or destroy whatever this thing was. To be safe, he activated his darkmatter sword: it created a blade made of obsidian energy that had come from an antimatter galaxy; a sample of which he’d borrowed from Safe America. He was greeted with black clouds, crimson rain that was left over from the last time he’d seeded the clouds of the region, and the usual nanotech-polluted grass that was no longer capable of intaking nutrients from water. His target was nowhere in sight, however.

His scanners found it quickly enough. It was, unsurprisingly, approaching him from behind. The Pale Horseman made his hovercycle do a 180 without moving forwards or backwards, holding his sword in a blocking position. The weaponry in the ‘cycle was primed and targeting. Also, he assigned his forcefield a quick-command cybernetic “hotkey” on his HUD, bypassing the usual system-menu of suit> defense> forcefield> body-contour> maximum strength.

His suit initially mistook the creature’s makeup for some sort of liquid-metal, but after a microsecond, it correctly identified it as protoplasm. It was mirror-surfaced and roughly humanoid in shape. There were no facial features, nor did it wear clothing. For some reason, its hands kept taking different shapes, like it couldn’t decide which kind of digits to have. Most interestingly, however, it wasn’t attacking--it was just standing there. After a moment, Price saw all sorts of strange things in the creature’s “skin”, it was like staring at a 3-D movie screen. There were explosions and suffering and ominous threats from above. His scanners showed that the creature was in-tune with a universal mental frequency, absorbing information like there was no tomorrow. On one of his screens, Price saw an impossible number of beams crisscrossing and entering the creature’s head, it looked like a halo made of lines that were tens of thousands of miles long. Then, the creature seemed to recognize him--it actually bowed down.

Price saw what could be considered a voice, on his comm-screen. The creature told him that the Swarm had created it to gauge what a planet’s collective mindset was like. The creature told him that it had never experienced power like the power the attacks had caused in the human mind. The creature told him that it wanted to help him sustain that power. The creature told him that it’d do whatever it took to stay in its new master’s good graces. As such, Price deactivated his sword and descended from his hovercycle, putting all three systems (his suit, the ‘cycle, the bunker) on a more relaxed setting. This was the sign he’d been waiting for--the kindred soul that he hadn’t been able to find, in his own species. Between the two of them, they could create a dark golden age for not just New America, but all of humanity. And if both someone from Earth and someone made by the Swarm could find common ground, there was surely hope for them all.

Re-mounting and revving his hovercycle, the Pale Horseman told the mindmirror what his next target was. It nodded its understanding, converting itself into a less solid form that was more well-suited for travel (the flying, liquid battering ram), and lining up next to him. Then, they both took off across the decaying countryside. A new era for New America had begun…

--------------------------------

There was an anonymous fleet, deep in the chilled Atlantic: like its Pacific counterpart, it was in the form of a trident, and comprised of submarines, submergible battleships and destroyers of all kinds, personnel-carriers that held both aqua-troops and ground-troops, and manta-shaped craft that were either small like fighter jets or large like aircraft carriers. They were all waiting for the order to strike New America. In fact, they’d been waiting for weeks. That time had been used to gather additional intelligence from their spies on the continent, monitor Safe America naval movements, train more personnel, and gather more military assets. With so much of the country’s valuable targets positioned on the coasts, a navy could do far more damage than an army, in this case. Besides, some of their missiles had ranges of hundreds of miles--a few could even go over a thousand. They could wipe out the remains of DC, from there. All the major naval bases would be history. The Labor Initiative shanty-towns that dotted the West, East, and “South” Coasts couldn’t possibly withstand such an attack, meaning that the majority of the country’s innocent civilians would be wiped out. And Jarvis wouldn’t be a problem…their leader was his equal, if not his better.

In the flagship of the Atlantic fleet, a young ensign was running through dark metal halls, inadvertantly crushing a printout in his hand. He went down stairs and up ladders, brushing past officers that had just turned a corner. Unlike conventional underwater ships, it was cool, rather than hot, but cold sweat was beading down his face nonetheless. This would only be the second time he’d ever encountered their leader, and he was trying to remember the protocol, rules, and common sense tips that would keep you from getting killed. The most important thing was self-explanatory, however…you couldn’t say his name. Especially not in close proximity to him. The man with the power of The Name lived by different laws of nature than the rest of us, and those laws had to be abided by. Finally, the ensign arrived at the man’s sanctuary, and was allowed in by the royal guards. He saw a long, pitch-black hall that was illuminated only by the glowing, primordial-looking fish that swam by the wall-sized window behind the man’s throne. It was difficult to see if anyone was sitting there.

Apparently, someone was. The man’s voice was rich with power that had rarely been unleashed: “Speak.”

“The Plymouth contingency has been auto-activated, sir. Something in the latest intel upload triggered it.”

“Who’s responsible?”

“An insurgent named Zelner. Apparently, he hijacked something called Project: Horus...”

“I’m familiar with it. Where is he?”

“In Central, sir.”

“And you’re sure that he intends to engage in actions that justify our using the Plymouth contingency?”

“Yes, sir.”

He emitted a reverberating silence. Running an op on one of the continents was risky, this close to the attack…it could give everything way. But he couldn’t let this Zelner do what he was planning, either.

“I have the intel right here, sir, if you want to--”

“Use one of our personnel carriers from the Gulf of Mexico, it’s closest. I doubt we’ll be needing those ground-troops for the actual offensive, anyway, so it’s just as well. And if they get into trouble, we won’t be sending backup. We need to keep a low profile.”

“I’ll see to it immediately, sir. Thank you.” (He didn’t know what he was thanking him for, but, it seemed like a good idea.)

The ensign left as quickly as he’d come, and the man with the power of The Name was left alone in his great hall, watching as darting neon fish made the shadows dance. He breathed in a frightening way that made the air crackle, and said, “No. Never again. I won’t let them make another one…not in my name.”

--------------------------

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Follow-Ups:

* God help me, there's more. - Fin Fang Foom - Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:50:15 pm EDT
- * Last one! Yay! - Fin Fang Foom - Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:51:37 pm EDT
  - * Great stuff. Here's hoping for a sequel, spiritually if not chronologically.... (no text) - Nitz the Bloody - Sun Aug 21, 2005 at 09:25:36 pm EDT
  - * This seriously just made my year. I'll get right on this. - anonymous - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 11:28:21 am EDT
    - * You do that, slacker. (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:34:57 pm EDT
  - * And, if you want to reply, you can reply to this post, just for simplicity's sake... (no text) - Finny - Mon Aug 15, 2005 at 11:53:14 pm EDT
    - * Hey, what a cute surprise!!!... (no text) - Yo - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:39:38 pm EDT
      - * Alas, it's not as cute as you, Yo. (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 06:02:23 pm EDT
        
        * You forgot to mention sexy. - anonymous - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 06:26:22 pm EDT
    - * Give me some time to print this out and digest this. And I hope this means you're sticking around. :) (no text) - CrazySugarFreakBoy! - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 04:28:24 am EDT
      - * I'll be sticking around if the tree-spirits don't kill me for causing everyone to waste all that paper... (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 06:00:27 pm EDT
    - * I'm afraid if I start to read, I will be unable to stop, and thus miss my plane, so shall wait to read this when I return home. (no text) - Al B. - Thu Aug 18, 2005 at 06:37:05 pm EDT
      - * Very good. (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:58:00 pm EDT
    - * So, FALL. - anonymous - Wed Aug 17, 2005 at 04:20:18 pm EDT
      - * Thanks, of course. (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:57:01 pm EDT
    - * It'll take me seven years to read all this, but it's good to see 'ya in any regard. ;) (no text) - G-Eyed - Wed Aug 17, 2005 at 03:09:29 pm EDT
      - * *cracks whip!* (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:52:42 pm EDT
    - * This board does have an Edit feature you know. :) (no text) - Anime Jason - Wed Aug 17, 2005 at 09:35:40 am EDT
      - * Compared to the amount of words, I think I had relatively few typos...granted, I don't use spellcheck, as it doesn't like my various made-up words. (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:48:52 pm EDT
    - * Welcome back, Finster. Stick around. (no text) - Dancer - Wed Aug 17, 2005 at 08:45:20 am EDT
      - * My favorite cheerleader! *ducks, runs away* *nt* (no text) - Finny - Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 05:45:35 pm EDT
    - * I detected some slight political satire in the first two parts of this story. (no text) - killer shrike will finish the rest tomorrow - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 09:28:30 pm EDT
      - * *looks around innocently* (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 09:42:37 pm EDT
    - * It's good to have you posting again! Welcome back! (no text) - ag - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 07:52:19 am EDT
      - * It's good to be back. (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:32:50 pm EDT
    - * First Impressions - HH - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 06:53:55 am EDT
      - * Re: First Impressions - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:29:19 pm EDT
    - * Yeah, okay. So where's FALL? - Nats - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:08:22 am EDT
      - * Four times the nipplage, I say! (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:15:02 am EDT
    - * That's very, very, very, very, very long. (no text) - Visionary - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:07:12 am EDT
      - * It's quite short, really. Only 160some pages in Word. For me, that's a short story. (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:16:08 am EDT
        
        * So long as you're pacing yourself. Anyway, an interesting tale... - Visionary - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 10:53:13 am EDT
        
        * I could describe that scene too, dammit! (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:30:57 pm EDT
    - * Holy crap, I'm a bum right now and I don't know if I have time to read this! :) I'll get to it tomorrow...sometime (no text) - Hatman - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:05:08 am EDT
      - * No rush, obviously--I don't expect anyone to be as obsessive as I am and get through it quickly. (no text) - Finny - Tue Aug 16, 2005 at 12:17:11 am EDT