by John McCrae
Sting, the entity thought. Once it had been a weapon for his kind, against his kind, back in the beginning, when they had dwelt in oceans of gray sludge.
The others hurried to confine the broadcaster. They were apparently aware of what he could do.
Interesting.
■
“Just you and me,” Tecton said. “That’s what he said. Between gasps of pain, anyways. ‘I wish I had better company, but I’ll take what I can get. Ironic, that you’re so boring.”
Golem looked at his old leader. “That’s it?”
Tecton shook his head. “He said, ‘I bet you think you’re noble. You’re not. You’re uglier than any of us, sparky.”
“And?”
“And that’s it. The D.T. guy foamed up the gap, I raised the shelf, you closed the hand, and he was completely sealed in.”
“You’re right. That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“He hasn’t ever met me.”
Golem shook his head. “Doesn’t seem world ending.”
■
“…I always hated the blank… slates,” Jack groaned the last word. His utterances were finding an odd cadence or rhythm between the gasps of pain, the fresh wounds that were actively criss-crossing his body, opening his stomach, his intestine being gripped and pulled through the wound as if by an invisible force.
The foam weighed him down, and in the midst of the complete and total darkness, he stared skyward.
“…Never that interesting…” He grunted. “Never created art, never… created variation... you’re worse than… most…”
High above, the entity listened.
■
Tattletale listened over the earbud microphones as Tecton finished relating Jack’s statements.
She raised her eyes from the computer. Her underlings were arranged around the room, along with others. Her soldiers were at the ready, alongside Imp’s Heartbroken, the first and second in command of the Red Hands, Charlotte, Forrest and Sierra.
Sierra was bouncing her leg nervously. She’d cut off her dreads, and her hair was short to the point of being in a buzz cut, with a fringe flopping over one side of her forehead. But for the hair and two small hoop earrings in one ear, she was a businesswoman. Had to be, when she was the ostensible owner of all of Brockton Bay’s prime real estate.
Charlotte was in the company of one of the children, holding him close. Her fingers toyed with a paper origami cube, and she was doing her best not to look like she was poised on the edge of her seat for any news at all.
The second she gave the word, they’d be ready to evacuate the city, to get people onto the trains and moved through the portal.
But…
“Things have settled,” she said. “Jack is contained.”
She could see them all relax as if strings that had held them rigid had just been cut.
“That’s it?”
“I don’t know,” Tattletale said. She grinned wide. “But if the world is ending, then it’s an awfully quiet end.”
There were chuckles here and there, nervous relief.
“Go home, or go do whatever,” she said. “I’ll be in touch with more news, let you know how your territory leaders, past or present, are coping.”
As a crowd, the others began filtering out. Sierra stayed where she was, pensive, but the nervous bouncing of her leg had stopped.
Charlotte, too, remained.
“Sup?” Tattletale asked.
“It’s him,” Charlotte said.
“Aidan. Hi Aidan.”
“He triggered yesterday. It… didn’t take much. Which is probably good.”
Aidan hung his head.
“That’s excellent,” Tattletale said. She looked at the seven year old. “How are you?”
“Okay. Had a nightmare for the first time in a long, long time. I woke up and I was sleepwalking, and I didn’t know where I was… I got scared, and then it happened.”
“What happened afterwards?” Tattletale asked.
“Birds.”
“Birds. I see. Interesting,” she said. Her eye moved over to the boards that marked the perimeters of the room. Each was packed with information in her small, tight, flowing handwriting. Messy, but she’d gotten good at putting pen to paper these past few years
“I push and the birds go where I pushed. Or I pull and they fly away from that spot. It’s hard to do. I can see what they see, but not while I’m controlling them.”
“Like Taylor, but birds, and not that flexible. I see.”
“We suspected he would trigger,” Charlotte said.
Tattletale looked up, surprised.
“Aidan had a dream one night, back when the nightmares stopped. He drew that picture.”
“Picture?”
“I gave it to you. I kind of emphasized it might be important.”
“Pretty sure that didn’t happen,” Tattletale said. She stood from her desk. “Sorry, Aidan, to squabble in front of you, but Charlotte needs to remember I don’t tend to miss stuff like that.”
“All that money you’ve given me for helping to look after the territory? The money for the kids? I’d stake it all on what I’m saying now. I promise, I swear I handed you that picture.”
Tattletale frowned.
“I swear,” Charlotte said, for emphasis.
“Then there’s a fucked up stranger power at work. Don’t like that idea. Let’s see. Um. I store everything in a rightful place. If you handed me a picture… was it here?”
“Here.”
Tattletale crossed the room. She pulled a bin off a shelf, then sorted through file folders.
Charlotte said, “There.”
Tattletale stopped, then went back a page.
“Huh. I stand corrected.”
There was a beep on the computer. Tattletale went back to the computer to investigate, shrugged, then sat down.
“Well?” Charlotte asked.
“Well what?”
“The picture.”
Tattletale frowned. “What picture?”
“What’s going on?” Aidan asked.
Charlotte stalked over to the bin that was still out, grabbed the paper, then slammed it down on the desk. “I don’t think a piece of paper can have superpowers. Pay attention. Focus Memorize.”
Tattletale frowned. She turned her attention to the paper.
There was a block there. She felt it slide out of her mind’s eye, caught herself.
She turned her attention to the surroundings, the underlying ideas.
“Aidan? Describe it to me. I don’t know what you drew.”
“Those are kind of like fish, or worms, or whales, but they fold and unfold in ways that are hard to understand, and there’s stuff falling off them. Those are stars, and-”
Tattletale felt something fall into place.
As though a floodgate had opened, the pieces started coming together. She stood from the desk, striding across the room.
There were still gaps in her work on the boards, where she was outlining everything, trying to decipher the underlying questions. Now, she began unpinning things from the board.
She was remembering, and she was putting it together, now. There was a block, but she’d formed enough connections now that things were going around the block.
The whole. The idea had stuck with her.
All powers fed back into a greater whole, each was a piece of a greater construct.
Of Aidan’s fish-whale-worm things.
But that wasn’t it.
No. It didn’t fit in terms of timeline.
There was more.
“Like gods,” she said, recalling.
“Like viruses, like gods, like children,” Charlotte said. “Back on the day I first met you, you said that.”
Like viruses, infecting a cell, converting it into more viruses, bursting forth to infect again.
Like gods. So much power, all gathered together. All powers stemmed from them.
Like children. Innocents?
Blank slate.
“Oh,” Tattletale breathed out the word.
“Tattletale?” Sierra asked.
“Oh balls.”
■
“I’m not… Darwinist,” Jack gasped. “None of that… bullshit. Augh! I’m… I think it is simple-”
He continued grunting. His switch to turn off the pain took a second to activate, took deliberate action, but getting in the rhythm meant he could buy himself one or two seconds of relief with each loop. It was a question of concentration, and his concentration slipped.
“It’s simpler. Us monsters and… psychopaths, we gravitate towards… predation, because we were originally… predators. Originally had to hunt… Had to be brutal, cruel…”
He paused, spending a few moments grunting in pain, letting the loops continue.
“Order to survive. Violence was what made us… or broke us back… in the beginning.”
The entity was patient. It had time to spare.
■
Saint swayed slightly in his seat.
The information continued to stream in along a dozen different channels.
Too much. It was too much, but somehow, somewhere along the line, they’d succeeded.
Jack was contained. Things were quiet.
Until he noted someone bludgeoning their way through Dragon’s password security. A series of personal questions, ranging from a favorite texture to something about a pet name for Dragon to a question about the first results of the ten by ten game.
The first two were answered in order.
Defiant? Getting access to the system?
No, too crude, too obvious.
The individual stalled on the last question.
He waited a few long moments, then saw the same individual making calls to Defiant. Three communiques, initiated within one or two seconds of one another. Then emails, to the PRT and Defiant both.
Saint intercepted it.
“Fuck, finally!”
“What are you trying, Tat-”
“Shut up and listen, douchestain. It’s Scion. He’s the point where it all catalyzes! And I just clued into the fact that he can probably sense Jack! Get Grue back to the area, blanket Jack in darkness, now! Now, now, now!”
“Mags!” he shouted. “Dobrynja! Get Grue back to the scene now! This is it!”
“On it!” the reply came back. There was a pause. “Grue is four miles away!”
“Teleporter,” he said.
“We don’t have any that survived the last few Endbringer fights!”
Saint hesitated.
Too far, it would be too late.
The woman who claimed she could control Scion.
His tired fingers flew over the keyboard. He dug up the file.
It had been seen to. They’d taken her name, but there’d been no proof. Hearsay.
Hearsay was better than nothing.
The cyborg was piloting the closest Azazel. Controlling it could be seen as an attack. The cyborg would fight, wrestle him for control.
He opened up the window for a message, instead, even as he used the full access Dragon had for every camera, email and phone message to find this Lisette.
A Hail Mary, if there ever was one.
“Defiant,” he said, overriding everything in his way to open communications with the cyborg. “Help me.”
■
The entity followed the movements of the various individuals around the battlefield. More containment foam was being layered over the broadcaster, burying the area.
A noise, a blare that had people doubling over, covering their ears, started emanating from one of the craft.
The craft launched a second later, flying right for the time distortion.
It crashed into the area of warped time, wrapping forelimbs, tail and rear claw around the irregularly shaped feature.
The blaring noise stopped as a voice emanated from the speakers.
“Scion. Zion. Golden Man. It’s Lisette. Kevin Norton introduced us. What the man down there is saying… whatever he’s saying, don’t listen. Turn away. Please.“
Turn away.
The entity moved, and it broke through the time distortion effect with ease. The craft fell head over heels before propulsion kicked in. It had to fly in zig-zags to keep pace with the entity’s slow retreat from the scene.
“I- uh. You broke free. Okay, good. Leave. Run! Please go. I’m- I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to talk to you before. You never came back to that spot, and I could never reach you to talk to you. There was help you needed and I couldn’t give it. I went to authorities, and nobody believed me. But now, now maybe I can give you advice. We can work on this together? As a pair? Is that alright?“
The entity didn’t respond.
“I hope it’s alright,” she said.
The entity took flight, leaving it all behind.
Leave. Run.
It didn’t return to the task of saving lives. For a period, it only flew.
It stopped when it had circled the world twice, hovering over the ocean where it had first appeared.
The broadcaster had finished speaking just a moment before the craft had launched, oblivious to the blaring noise that had been intended to drown him out. What I don’t understand, is why a blank slate like you would default to doing good deeds, rescuing cats from trees. Why not turn to that violence, as our ancestors did? It drove them, just like it drives the basest and most monstrous of our kind.
Had he known he had a listening ear? Had it merely been a struggle to continue doing what he’d instinctively done for decades?
The shards retained memories, motivated, pushed.
The entity looked to the future, looked to possible worlds, and it saw the ways this could have unfolded. It burned a year off of the entity’s life, but he had thousands to spare anyways.
There was a scene where the entity stood over the broadcaster’s corpse and ruminated on what had driven the male to such extremes. The shard wasn’t a particularly aggressive one.
A scene where the man died, and years passed, the entity slowly coming to the same conclusions as it observed the rest of the species.
The entity had done good deeds for years, at Kevin Norton’s suggestion, waiting and hoping for the reward, the realization. When none had occurred, it had simply kept doing what it had been doing. Seeking out alternatives wasn’t even in the realm of imagination, because imagination was something it lacked.
It had power, though, and if either the counterpart or the cycle had been intact, they could have filled in for that imagination.
Still, it could experiment.
It gathered its power, then aimed at the nearest, largest population center. Kevin Norton’s birthplace.
The golden light speared forth, and the island shattered, folding, parts of it rising from the ocean. Crumpled like paper in a fist.
The entity did not eliminate the smoke or the waves that followed. It simply let the aftermath occur.
The simulated human mind within the entity felt a glimmer of something at that. Pleasure? Relief? Satisfaction?
Something deeper inside, something primal, tied to memories back in the beginning, before the beginning, responded in a very similar fashion.
The entity extended its perceptions outward, felt the reaction, the outcry. It turned words around in its head, as if it were broadcasting to itself.
Scourge.
Extermination.
Extinction.
That last one was the one to fit.
An interesting experience. After so much focus on the species as a whole, the evolution and development of the shards, on the cycle…
In this, it almost felt like it was evolving as an individual, moment to moment.
The entity opened fire once again, and this time it struck out at the coastline on the opposite side of the ocean.
Arc 27: Extinction
27.01
The news came through the earbuds, and it was like a shockwave rippl
ed through our assembled ranks. Some of the strongest of us dropped to their knees, staggered, or planted their feet further apart as though they were bracing against a physical impact.
The one Azazel that was still in the area landed atop one of Bohu’s buildings, nearly falling as a section slid off to drop to the empty street below. It found its footing and roosted there.
The pilot couldn’t fly, and the A.I. wasn’t willing or able to take over.
The other capes were talking, shouting, asking questions, sometimes to nobody in particular. With the blood churning in my ears, I couldn’t make out the words. I’d used my bugs to find Hookwolf’s core, but they’d been decimated twice over in the process, and I wasn’t interested in trying to use them to figure out what was being said.
I could guess.
I raised my arms, then found myself unsure what to do with them. Hug them against my body? Hit something? Reach out to someone?
I let my hands drop to my sides.
I opened my mouth to speak, to shout, to cry out, swear at the overcast sky above us.
Then I shut it.
There were no words. Anything I could do or say felt insignificant in the grand scheme of it all. I could have used every bug in the city to utter something, something meaningful or crude, and it still would have felt petty.
I looked at the others. Clockblocker was with Kid Win and Vista, Crucible and Toggle were nearby, on the back of a PRT van, bandaged. They were looking over their shoulders at the screen mounted on the wall of the van. Footage, covering ruined landscapes, and what had used to be the United Kingdom.
Parian and Foil were hugging. Odd, to see Foil hunched over, leaning on Parian for support, her forehead resting at the corner of Parian’s neck and shoulder. The crossbow had fallen to the ground, forgotten.
I wanted something like that. To have a team close, to hold someone. I hadn’t had something like that in a good while.
Chevalier was a distance away, his cannonblade plunged into the ground so he didn’t need to hold it, a phone to his ear. He was talking, giving orders, and demanding information.
Revel was stock still, not far from him. I watched as she stepped back, leaning against a wall, then let herself slide down until she was sitting on the street. She placed her head in her hands.