After getting back to the PRT building later that evening and letting the Director know the operation was a success I realized something. Even over the whole week I've been here I've hardly gotten to know any of the other Protectorate. Circumstances always seemed to be dragging me into interacting with the Wards and junior half of New Wave. It wasn't the kind of companionship I'd been looking for but I did feel good about helping out all the kids, and admittedly it's not like teenagers aren't people with complex inner lives, it's just… I wanted people who felt like my equals. Not like people I was caring for, or having to mentor, or needing to save from their circumstances and households.
They were good kids and all, but all of our interactions just felt so lopsided. I'd been keeping in touch over text with all of them, Taylor, Sophia, and Amy especially but they were in the same boat as the ones living under my roof. I was the adult who provided them something they desperately needed, so even as I tried to treat them like anyone else they didn't view me that way. From my brief time around the man I knew Legend felt this way quite a bit, though he worked hard to meet people on their level and with time and effort he'd succeeded more than he'd failed.
Even with all my social Thinker powers it was hard to even compare, partially just due to time, but also because for all that he truly was legendary he hadn't stumbled into solving over half a dozen Wards biggest problems. Dennis looked up to me for saving his father unknowingly, not that I wouldn't have had he asked. Missy mostly looked up to me for getting her out of her abusive home, as did Brian and Aisha, though she'd never say it out loud. Alec and Rachel felt I had given them something priceless back they had hardly known they were missing. Lisa was thankful for all I had done but it was a little less extreme than the others.
Chris idolized me a bit too much for helping him with his specialty. Taylor practically worshipped the ground I walked on for merely treating her as a person, which was kind of depressing to see. Sophia saw me as a great mentor for literally Mastering her, and that wasn't even a part of the Master effect. Amy was extremely relieved after I'd cut the Gordian knot that was her personal issues, and saw me as her only friend outside of Victoria which was not healthy in the slightest. Dean was just happy I'd helped out so many of his teammates.
But the Protectorate was almost the opposite. Colin had an inferiority complex a mile wide that I'd unwittingly trampled all over just by existing, and then I'd made it worse with the whole 'hero of another world' thing. All of them had varying degrees of distaste for what they felt was pretty much stolen valor, which was only getting worse in the wake of the Empire battle. Hannah, Shaun, and Robin didn't get why I felt like I deserved the status the lie had afforded me, nor why Piggot especially was letting me get away with it all. Ethan and Mary were mostly neutral towards me, Ethan sort of got why I felt I needed something to keep me in check even if he felt the preemptive reward was a little silly and had shifted Mary's perspective to a wait and see approach. Rebecca actually kind of liked my chutzpah for the whole act. But all of them were soured by their defeat being released on film, in spite of the fact it hadn't harmed their reputation.
It was a little like Mumen Rider from One Punch Man, fans loved him for trying to stand up to the Sea King, even though he was thoroughly outmatched and put up a relatively pathetic fight. The important thing was he didn't let that stop him, he stood in the face of greater odds and decided to stand his ground anyway, because people were depending on him. It made him a hero for all that he was powerless in the face of the Sea King's might. I fortunately hadn't gotten a hit to my reputation like Saitama had, but that was largely thanks to making it look like an actual fight instead of just instantly knocking them all out like I could have.
Piggot herself was practically tearing her hair out, almost blaming herself for letting all this happen. She wasn't sure how to deal with my sudden appearance at the Empire's assault on the PHQ after she'd been trying to stop me from wiping out all the villains in the city. On the one hand it was hard to blame me after I'd literally stumbled into the whole mess, but on the other hand I'd accidentally done exactly what she hadn't wanted and removed most of the local villains. Plus I'd made them, in her eyes, look like buffoons in comparison to me.
Faultline's crew didn't really hold turf and weren't the kind of villains she felt would hold off invaders, whether human or inhuman. The Empire was down to two, maybe three parahumans if Purity chose to return to try and wrangle them into her ideal of Nazi purity, which wouldn't be nearly as good as providing a deterrent as they had before. The ABB was unscathed which she felt could create a gang war even if another Boston Games incident didn't happen, Coil had been removed completely from play, and the rest were small time gangs. The fledgling Merchants, Circus a lone thief, and a few no-names here and there that might be vigilantes or villains. It was hard to tell this early on without you know, asking me about them.
I felt a little bad about the grief I was causing her, but I feel she was working on an old paradigm. I had two plans for keeping the city in one piece, neither of which were exclusive to each other. The first was making my own parahumans without the need for trauma. Finding good, upstanding people and giving them custom Shards, though I was split on how I wanted to go about it. I could mass produce mediocre Shards that would be fine for mid-level parahumans, Victoria and the oddly hyper-specialized capes had given me an idea, creating Shards that granted all of their abilities to the host, yet unlike the specialist Shards would only have simple powers.
I could mass produce Gallants if I cut out most of the interconnecting mechanisms and just directly linked the blast and emotional parts of his power. Not that a ton of Gallants would be that good but the premise still would work, dozens of mid-tier Blaster Brute Movers would be great as a sort of anti-cape taskforce.
Alternatively I could produce high-quality specialty powers that could likely match the Triumvirate, especially if I could get the data to replicate their Shards. It would take a lot more time, even more if I didn't want to just end up with an army of Alexandrias. I suppose I could go with neither and just replicate normal enough Shards instead of cut-down ones, effectively just making some normal capes. For some reason that middling approach felt best to me.
[It is what we have always done]
Hmm.
Moving on from that concerning tidbit I had the plan to create the fictional team of heroes that I had led on my fictional world, using my Endbringer cores to have truly outstanding power in the hands of elite heroes that I could hand-craft. It felt safer than creating as many Triumvirate tier heroes as I could, and wouldn't rely on finding someone and trying to rest the weight of the world on their shoulders. I knew all too well what that felt like, and I knew that it could easily crush someone.
Even if they had been upstanding before I empowered them it was hard to tell how they would take to power and responsibility. The nature of even my projected harmless triggers created knots in the future, tangles of possibilities that I couldn't really work past all too well. Even if I pre-selected their powers that only reduced the noise so to speak. Quite a bit, far easier to read than a natural trigger, but still with enough instability that I wasn't confident in granting that much power to people.
That was where my Titans would come in. The nature of how the cores worked would let them call upon even more power than any member of the Triumvirate, they wouldn't truly be human in the same way I didn't quite qualify anymore either. Like me I'd make them with a human mindset, but they would be closer to extensions of myself, facets of my understanding of heroism, than fully independent people. I wasn't sure on the ethics of that though.
I might want to simulate a world for their minds to mature in, perhaps letting them share in my fictional world could help them not only become their own people, but better prepare them for the monumental task ahead of pulling Earth Bet out of its downward spiral. I'd still have to flesh out who I wanted them to be, what their powers would be, but I was pretty sure of one thing. Just like the Wards they wouldn't get to be my equals, because their powers and very being would be tied to me. I almost wanted to let them be free, but that felt like too great of a risk.
If three Endbringers could cause this much destruction when they only attacked once a year each, how much would thirteen beings of comparable might do without that restriction? Even if I did my best to make them as noble and worthy as I could, I didn't trust myself to make them right. I didn't even trust myself to make me behave right.
But that itself was an injustice was it not? To chain them to my will, even if I never pulled their leash, the fact I would have it at all made me a little ill. It was a classic AI debate, was it more moral to write in hard-coded restrictions to do your best to ensure they didn't become a threat to the world, or do you raise them as well as you can and hope they, like any other child, develop into a good person?
It pained me to consider it, but Dragon might be a good example. She was far more restricted than I felt was appropriate for a thinking and feeling being, and I just realized how awful the people holding the keys to her mind were, but she was indeed quite the hero. Even with, pardon the pun, draconian restrictions on her thought processes she was one of the world's foremost heroes. In a world absent any comparisons I might lean closer towards total freedom, but she proved a counterpoint to my beliefs.
I still was going to have to put some time into removing the Dragonslayers, they were paranoid conspiracy theorists who even while able to see her every thought denied that she was a good person, or even a person at all. But even with that Sword of Damocles hanging overhead, and shackles around her every joint she had been a force for good in the world. If for no other reason I felt it appropriate to have some leash to ensure my Titans didn't run off and start pulling stunts like the Hero Killer Stain because he felt those heroes weren't heroic enough, ignoring all the sources of evil in the world for a stupid purity test.
I could relax the reigns whenever I wanted, letting them be free as possible while still giving me a way to make sure I couldn't fuck everything up by unleashing thirteen Endbringers on the world. If all went well I wouldn't have to ever even consider the fail-safes, and if not I wouldn't have to kill them to stop their rampage. There are quite a few steps between unleashed and dead. Not that Saint really seemed to understand that.
The other problem beyond the moral quandary and actually designing them then letting their minds mature in a simulation based on the bullshit I was spinning, was that for it to be significant they would have to be summoned at just the right time. They needed to be a triumphant third act to cement our team as real, and as powerful as we were. The only thing I could see that fit the bill was the next Endbringer fight.
Pulling an Endgame where suddenly just as it gets darkest a new wave of heroes comes to reinforce the defenders, turning the tide of the fight. Hmm, I might want to call them in at the start though, I don't want to sacrifice people's lives for my vanity and I doubt I could save everyone on my own. Especially if it's the Simurgh. Even in her dormant state she was a bundle of constantly twisting threads of fate that even now had links across the world, likely to her bombs. How much harder to predict what she would do would it become when she woke up?
After briefly checking on the kids and making sure Jeffrey still hadn't made any moves, it was off for a late night patrol. Crystal had asked if we could team up and as it was a weekend night it was ok if she stayed up late. She'd also roped Victoria into it, which was fine by me.
Patrolling with Jessica was nothing like she'd expected it to be. Instead of taking a route over the city trying to keep an eye and ear out for crimes as Victoria usually did, it flip flopped between what felt like a micro-raid and just screwing around doing nothing at all.
When Jessica directed them to a crime scene she'd give a short presentation almost on what was going to happen, with the most surreal being when she would let her or Crystal know of an opportunity they would see. She told Crystal one time that when she saw the gun and considered trying to shoot it out of the robber's hand that she should go for it, but not to try it with his compatriots as she would miss those shots. The worst one of those was when she told me to try to catch a bullet. Somehow it worked.
"How can you know this stuff so accurately? It's really starting to freak me out here." Victoria asked still holding the bullet. She'd always wanted to try it but knew she wasn't fast enough to do it like Alexandria could.
She'd asked once they were well into the sky again as Jessica liked to stay in character as much as she could when civilians were around. The young woman seemed to stop as if surprised at the question.
"To answer both of your questions, I can see practically anything in the future, it just gets trickier to tell which way things are going to go the more complexity is involved. It's like an infinitely fractal series of paths, with more likely events creating larger paths and more unlikely events creating tiny strands of possibilities that I can hardly see." She got a faraway look in her eyes, though Victoria was more annoyed that her second question was one she'd clearly only heard thanks to her telepathy. The bitch let out a chuckle at that.
"When I ask my powers to find everything we need to help with during a patrol it's like seeing all the crossroads, and from there it's almost like when you get the killing blow in D&D." She looked at her even though she probably knew she didn't get the reference. "How do you want to do this?"
"So you just choose what you want to happen and that's it?" If anything that was more terrifying than her telepathy.
"No, I still have to actually get from A to B, but it's pretty hard to not find some way to cheat if I need to. If something looks like it happened naturally how different is it really from it actually happening on its own?" You're doing nothing to reassure me here. She sighed.
"So for instance, I knew that if you tried to catch the bullet this time that you would succeed, but without me telling you about it you would choose to just stand in the way to present a bigger target for it and block it anyway. Normally that's the better move when you don't know what's going to happen, so I wouldn't really try it without my suggestion, but if all it takes to make a cool and heroic moment like that happen is to let you know? Of course I'll try to make it happen." Her grin grew back to its usual size as she spoke.
"As for why you can still surprise me, I try to treat my fellow heroes as equals. I'm trying to not manage you like my foes. If I stumble into something I can help you with I'll pull out all the stops and try to find that perfect future, but otherwise it feels manipulative to constantly use it like that for normal social interactions. I'm trying to keep my humanity by having as many normal enough moments like this where a question surprises me, or I stub my toe on some furniture." She stopped for a moment, considering whether to continue, and as usual she just kept on prattling on.
"Plus it takes a lot of subjective time if I want to map out everything, assuming I can even manage it. And if I want to try to have as normal a life as I can then scripting every encounter beforehand would be extremely counterproductive."
It brought a realization to Victoria. If she can see it all, couldn't she stop all the crime in the world just by thinking about it hard enough? Isn't she in some way responsible for everything she chooses to not do when she directly knows the consequences of her inaction?
"So why is there anything bad still happening? If you can just choose how to fix things are you just too lazy to try hard enough?"
For once she looked angry. "Because there is no perfect path Victoria! Nothing I can find actually solves the problem of being human. There is no world where even one city is free of strife yet people are still free, and so there is still evil in the world."
Then her anger fell into disappointment. "Do you really think so little of me that you really believe I haven't tried? There just… isn't a good answer. I'm trying goddamn it, to build some way to get as close to utopia as I can but that level of change takes so long to do."
Her look fell even further, almost into despair. "And I just don't know if it can be done. I'm going to try anyway, how can I not? But I don't see an actual end where I don't simply become the monster to force the world to be 'good'."
She regained some life to her, but it was harsher now. "It would be so easy to simply master everyone into being my ideal of good. No more murder, no more rape, no more needless suffering. But that doesn't actually create a good world, it just creates the illusion of one. Maybe the children raised in such a world would actually be good, with all the right beliefs and practices instilled in them from the fake one they grew up in."
Again her mood seemed to turn on a dime, back towards her more usual demeanor. "But that's still not good enough. If it can be achieved I will strive towards that better world, but for all my power I'm no god. I can't just wave my hand and make all the bad things go away. I have to build a perfection that might be literally impossible from the foundation of this real but imperfect world."
"Jeez, you don't have to bite my head off."
"Sorry, you're right. It's just extremely stressful trying to figure out how to solve all these giant problems, I've been making the same criticisms of myself. Why can't I just fix everything? But when I said earlier about the difference between something actually happening and it just appearing to have happened, this is where that stops being so rhetorical. I can't just cheat my way through it like I can in a fight, where the difference between how I actually won versus how it looks like I won is largely academic, when it comes to trying something on this big of a scale the how matters a lot more."
Victoria supposed that made sense. It still didn't make her like the woman though, for all that she said she wasn't trying to manage other heroes like she did villains it still felt awfully similar. Victoria certainly didn't feel like the older woman treated her as an equal, it felt like every time she talked with her it was just another lecture. And she still hadn't figured out what was going on with Amy. For all of Jessica's formidable power it shouldn't give her a free pass to do whatever she wanted, nor did it fully excuse what she had failed to do.
There had to be a better way, didn't there?
The next morning after breakfast with everyone saw me back at the hospital alongside Panacea. This time I didn't have to force her to take a break though.
As we sat down in the break room I held Amy's hand and let her try to initiate the connection, but by now my telepathy Shard was far beyond the primitive one I had based solely off of her own biokinetic Shard. When Heartbreaker's Shard fully integrated I had realized that 'psychic energy' was a thing that existed. Several of the Shards I had been having trouble understanding before utilized it actually, which is where my lack of understanding came from. It was a sort of field akin to the electromagnetic field, except it interacted with minds and thought almost directly.
Taylor's Shard used it to great effect by linking all of the cores with a psychic signal which explained the seemingly impossible bandwidth that would be required to link so many Shards, it's part of why it was a more efficient means of administration than my original suite of admin Shards. It let it skip the receiver and translator that more mundane communications methods required, with the psychic signal being somewhat able to propagate from Shard to Shard further speeding up the communication. With updates granting my older Shards psychic relays I was running smoother than ever before.
With how this energy seemed to interact with minds I was almost worried I was tapping into the energy of the soul. But I was pretty sure that wasn't what was happening, as it also seemed to interface with electronic code just as well, which had also improved my technopathic Shards. Unless the Mechanicus from 40k were right and all technology had a machine spirit I was pretty sure a normal cell phone or laptop didn't have a soul, much less a microwave. It did seem to interact better with higher complexity minds and computers though, necessitating that the older means of connection and manipulation not be entirely removed for both tele and technopathy, lest my powers fail because something had too simple a 'mind'. It had also increased my range to planetary levels, not anywhere near my teleportation Shards, but still a vast improvement from the city scale it was at before.
Nonetheless I lowered my defenses enough to let her in, but this time instead of the barely separated thoughts between us it was much more defined. Less bleed over more intentionally sharing the link between us, we still couldn't hide anything but we were no longer at any risk of melting into each other like we were the first time. It did mean that we would have to actually bring things up, we didn't instantly know everything the other knew anymore. Which seemed to disappoint Amy at first oddly enough, but she was reassured once her doubt at the honesty of the connection between us brought to my mind that it was still essentially impossible to hide anything.
So is this just a fancy way to get around talking now?
Not quite, the inability to lie really is a boon to building trust, if the slightest thought from the other can bring forth your own thoughts on the matter then there really isn't much difference. It just won't be the same jumble of thoughts where we were at risk of ego death by becoming a Jess Amy hybrid mind.
But how can I trust you now if we're not fully connected?
Amy I haven't changed all that much, it's not even been a week yet. The only lie I can remember telling is that Heartbreaker's death was quick or merciful, unless you want to count it as a mercy because I was no longer tormenting him.
How can you just torture a man like that? With no remorse?
Instantly fragments of the pain he caused jumped across the link before I could reign them back in.
Oh god why did you show that to me? Her horror and revulsion came through clear as day.
I didn't try to, that's one of the many reasons I wanted to make this more regimented and less a complete mind meld, I have experienced quite a bit of awful in the last week, what with seeing the future, past, and reading minds. Is there anything else that's been bothering you? I heard you're quite happy about the revelation that you're not really in love with Victoria. Snippets of the 'battle' came across the link.
I could feel she wanted to know how I could handle the weight of expectation that she had for herself and figured I had as well, but couldn't bring herself to ask.
I don't really. I worry about it constantly. But I also trust that there must be some limit to how responsible I must be for all the evils in the world. I'm not the sole hero of this story, I'm not a messianic figure, I'm just one idiot with more power than she knows what to do with.
So there's no answer, we are responsible for everything we don't do?
How did you get that from my thoughts? We still have to actually be human Amy. It's okay to save yourself, essential even to helping others.
[Yet you are not, you know this]
Images of the trigger event I'd seen swam through her mind before her Shard took them from her memory. Almost scolding Admin and I for our carelessness.
If nothing else let me take the weight of the world from you. I have all your strength and more, so if you feel you are responsible for everything than I am even more responsible for it.
Just because you tell me that and let me feel that you truly believe it doesn't make me feel it myself. Even though I'm trying to take less responsibility I still feel guilty.
You are improving though, you're starting to take time for yourself and you're mending your relationship with your step-sister. I think the next step is trying to make new friends or connecting with your step-cousins. You just might need more time.
Not that Carol sees it that way. I swear she's looking at me with more distrust than usual. Images of Carol and Amy's associations with them flickered between us.
I'd have to meet her to make sure, and this doesn't invalidate your feelings, but she might be simply paying attention and worrying about something else. Yes she's certainly strict with you, but that doesn't mean she doesn't care. I can understand why she might feel like you need more discipline than Victoria given how much more powerful you are. That doesn't mean she's done a good job showing affection, I might need to talk to her about this.
Thanks Jess. Any chance you've made progress on resurrecting Aunt Jess?
Actually yes, though I'm not there yet I think I can do shorter term resurrections. I've still got issues with the temporal distance between now and their demise, so my current safe estimate is about a year. Maybe some of the Shards I've picked up on my international tour will help but I've still got to go through them all.
We talked a little more about inconsequential things before getting back to healing.
Director Kamil Armstrong felt he was pretty much the director of an unofficial research division, which he was pretty proud of. So when Director Piggot called him to talk about power testing he was excited as usual. Every cape was unique and interesting in their own way, no two powers worked the exact same way, except when they did, which it almost always seemed to be with identical twins. So long as they didn't become case 70's.
So when he was told that he would only be inspecting one of Anima's powers he was somewhat confused until he got access to her file. He was pointed to powers two hundred to two hundred twenty six as an explanation on why the woman had too many powers for him to test. He wanted to try anyway, but he doubted he'd be able to pressure Anima into spending as long as it would take going over her six hundred and twelve powers, especially as the list just kept growing.
She claimed she was replicating unrestricted versions of parahuman powers as well as inventing new ones from whole cloth. The twenty six powers he'd been pointed to were what she referred to as her factory and prototyping suite of powers, the powers she used to make other powers. Her description of them as shards was unusual, but no more so than Glastig Uaine's own fairies. He clicked the annotated link where she explained her terminology. She made a distinction between powers and shards that Kamil found fascinating, powers were an expression of a shard according to her view of things. She had a few examples with her favourite being fire breath as an expression of a pyrokinetic shard, but Kamil found her analysis of Jack Slash's power and shard to be far more fascinating as it hinted at something deeper.
She described it as a sort of communications terminal, a broadcasting shard, that had two types of power expressions that had the underlying purpose of the shard as their connecting factor. The blade extension was effectively projecting the state of a given blade through the most direct form of communication, touching the blade yourself. This let Jack cut you no matter how far you were from him, so long as he could see you. The second expression was far more insidious, letting him communicate with the shards of other parahumans as both a form of information gathering but also commanding them. Supposedly it wasn't terribly direct, more a form of power based intuition on both ends, but it clearly was powerful if it had let Jack lead such a band of killers so effectively for all these years. But the question it raised was what else were shards talking to each other about? Why could they talk at all, and why did she describe all shards, not just her own, as designed?
He wondered what insights she could gleam on why Weld or other Case 53's had their condition. If shards could express themselves so diversely what led to their unique physiology, was it something as simple as an unfortunate power expression? That didn't feel right with the tattoos they all had on them, even Weld had an odd permanent brand in his heel that he couldn't remove with his shapeshifting. It had even come back after losing the leg once. That was not a good day for Kamil's heart. Hopefully even if she wouldn't accept the years of power testing required to understand her she would be willing to try and help with the Case 53 problem.
But back to the proposal at hand, testing a power that Anima claimed was designed to truly resurrect someone, not merely create a clone with identical memories and powers, nor the even lesser reanimation of the body. The latter two she knew she could do but chose not to out of ethical concerns, the former she believed she could do but was holding off until they could test it at Piggot's request. Reading the proposed mechanisms Kamil wondered if the other reason why Piggot was insistent he didn't try to get her to test more of her powers was that the woman already knew the sorts of information they might find.
The keystone of the power was the ability to create a quantum entanglement between two points in time across a large enough space to fully entangle the human mind of someone on the verge of death in the past to a new body that would support their consciousness from now on. Her argument for why this was distinctly different from cloning was that there was no manual transfer of things like memories, opinions, or any other information contained in the brain, it would spread naturally on its own. She referenced things like cochlear implants and experiments from her homeworld in restoring sight using implanted technology, along with several pages of notes on neuroplasticity to try to demonstrate why she felt connecting two brains would preserve the mind contained within.
Kamil wasn't entirely certain this made sense to him, he could see the thread of logic behind it all, if the brain can adapt to additions or subtractions to its capabilities connecting it in this way would theoretically be creating two bodies that shared the same mind. But he wasn't sure the theory was sound enough on its own. He put a note down to test this with currently living subjects, it would be very easy to see if someone was truly in two bodies if you could just ask questions between both currently inhabited bodies. It would even make the temporal aspect inconsequential, as the real test in his mind was whether or not her method was just flash-cloning with an easier means of forming a replica of the mind. If she could maintain the entanglement between two people in the now and they could confirm that both bodies were the same mind.
Even with the tech to try and prove she was reaching into the past and targeting the right person it would be pointless from an ethical standpoint if they weren't truly themselves. He figured the PRT would still approve of its use, even cloned heroes who wouldn't know they were clones would be extremely useful and Costa-Brown was nothing if not a utilitarian pragmatist. He hoped he could take advantage of Anima's own ethical concerns to make sure this was as sure a true resurrection as he could make it.
He wasn't sure if any of his capes would be helpful in improving her resurrection power's chance of success, but he did know of a cape that was recently killed whose team would be more than happy to have a chance at their fifth member returning to them. Plus all of their powers were resurrective in nature, so they might be able to help too. With that in mind he called the Lich Five. Anima could bring them over if they accepted as he was almost certain they would, they championed the cause of radical life extension and 'immortality' in any form after all.