— Real World. Egghead Island. —
Stussy had returned to Egghead Island before anyone else could make competing claims on her time.
The Sky Screen had broadcast what she was. The identities she had managed carefully — pleasure district queen, CP0 operative, something Vegapunk made — were now world knowledge, stacked on top of each other for anyone watching to see. That kind of exposure, once it happened, changed the operational value of staying wherever you happened to be. Egghead Island was not safe, exactly, but it was the location where the person responsible for her existence worked, and that had a logic to it.
She had watched herself on the Sky Screen during the brief window before she left. The version of her shown in Rome — X-ray vision, teleportation, the strength that had put a man through multiple floors of the Marine's scientific facility — was not a version she recognized. Her current capabilities ran to the vampire-adjacent: the wings, the fangs, the ability to suppress another person's consciousness through a bite. It was an ability designed for ambush and intelligence work, not for what the broadcast had shown.
The gap between those two versions of the same person was not small.
What did you put into me, she thought, looking at Vegapunk's back across the laboratory, that I don't know about yet?
The satellites had questions. All of them, and not softly.
They had arranged themselves around the original Vegapunk in a configuration that did not technically constitute a confrontation but communicated one. Lilith led, because Lilith managed the money and the money was the first and most obvious thread to pull.
"The evidence is in the broadcast. You were conducting experiments without telling us." Her voice had the particular quality of someone who has been made to look foolish professionally and is taking it personally. "The Anti-Life Equation — has development progressed to an active stage? And if it has, how? I see every transaction in and out of this island. If you were funding independent research, I should have found it."
She had not found it. That was the problem. Either Vegapunk had a separate source of funding she had no line of sight to, or the future shown by the Sky Screen was stranger than any of them had been calculating.
The original Vegapunk said nothing. He had been doing a great deal of nothing since the satellites began, which communicated either guilt or the particular internal distance of a man who is listening to his own future be explained back to him by people who don't know they're doing it.
York's betrayal had done something to the internal dynamics of Egghead. The question of who could be trusted, which had previously felt mostly theoretical, had received a concrete and violent answer. The consensus that had emerged — that Shaka had been right about York from the beginning, that the early warnings about her trajectory had been accurate, that patience had been the wrong approach — had consolidated around Shaka's judgment in a way that left very little room for competing positions.
Trust in Shaka, after York's execution, had become essentially unanimous. Whatever Shaka said was almost certainly correct. This was a useful simplification, and also a fragility that nobody had named yet.
Pythagoras was examining his own data.
"Is Stussy a clone?" He had produced this question as if it had emerged from a calculation. "Is she a human? We should run the analysis again."
The broadcast had shown her operating at a capability level that exceeded the established architecture for a standard satellite. She was older than any of them, predating the clone program that had produced the numbered satellites by several research cycles. Technically, the term "clone" applied. Technically, the term "android" also applied. The bloodline factors connecting her to the original body made the taxonomy genuinely ambiguous.
Perhaps, Pythagoras suggested, the terminology itself needed revision. Perhaps the distinction between clone and android was less meaningful than assumed.
Stussy, standing near the wall with her arms crossed, did not contribute to this conversation. She had heard it begin and understood where it would end: with the conclusion that the version of her shown on the Sky Screen had capabilities that the current version of her did not have, and that Vegapunk had apparently given her those capabilities at some point in the future without informing her in advance, which was information she would have preferred to receive earlier.
Her base form: the vampire transformation. Wings. Fangs. Sensory suppression through physical contact. It was effective for what it was designed for, which was covert operations requiring precise and quiet resolution. It was not the thing that had punched a man of Garou's physical caliber through multiple concrete floors.
What Vegapunk had apparently decided to put into her future self — on top of the existing architecture, as an upgrade rather than a replacement — was something she had not been consulted about, and was now watching on a broadcast alongside everyone else.
She filed her feelings about this under the category of things to address when the current institutional crisis resolved.
The original Vegapunk was becoming more confused rather than less, which was not a state he was accustomed to.
The future version of himself, visible in segments through the Sky Screen's broadcasts, had accomplished things he could not currently explain. The Anti-Life Equation existing in theory was one thing — he understood the theoretical framework, had developed it himself. The Anti-Life Equation existing as an operational system that someone could actually deploy was something he did not understand, because he had not built the bridge between theory and practice yet and did not know, currently, what materials that bridge would require.
Homelander was a similar problem. The concept existed. The actual product — the thing on the Sky Screen with the Omega Rays and the near-invulnerability and the combined capabilities that should have been impossible to integrate into a single biological system — was ahead of where he currently was by a distance he could not easily measure.
And Caesar Clown had apparently been producing novel bioweapons, which was a variable that sat in a corner of Vegapunk's mind and refused to be comfortably explained away. Caesar was brilliant in a and unpleasant direction. If the future showed him generating results that built on Vegapunk's own Licker and Tyrant research—
"The rate of future scientific progress is genuinely beyond anything I can extrapolate from current parameters," Stussy said. She was speaking to the room rather than to anyone ally. "All of this." She indicated the general direction of the broadcast's implications with a gesture. "The world this is pointing toward. I cherish the present. Rushing into that future is not obviously better than taking it slowly."
Nobody argued with her. Most of them were having similar thoughts, with different emphases.
The Five Elders' awareness of her return arrived before Stussy had fully settled back into Egghead's routines.
She had not expected to disappear unnoticed. She had expected to have somewhat more lead time before the institutional machinery re-oriented around her location. She had overestimated the lead time.
Egghead Island was already under significant God's Knights presence — dozens of them, rotating through shifts, positioned at the approaches and the perimeter with the dual purpose of preventing unsanctioned pirate access and ensuring that the people inside could not leave without authorization. The cage had been decorated as a research facility, but the function was transparent.
Stussy's return completed the cage's occupancy roster. She was not singled out for particular restriction — the God's Knights did not approach her or make demands. The restriction was structural. She was here; the exits required their approval; their approval required the Five Elders' directive; the Five Elders' directive was currently "accelerate Homelander development."
Lilith was the one who managed the external interface with the Five Elders, which meant Lilith was the one who received Saint Saturn's communications. The frequency of those communications had increased proportionally with the Sky Screen's coverage of Rome. Each call was a variation of the same core message: faster.
"It's not possible to produce results on command," Lilith said, to no one who could act on it. Saturn was not a person who found this response satisfying, and saying it into the air was the only option currently available. "The Sky Screen gives us outlines. When Homelander appears again, if the broadcast shows any technical detail—" She stopped. If. The broadcast did not owe them technical ations. It was a broadcast of events, not a research summary.
Edison had been thinking about the problem structurally.
He flew to where Lilith was processing her frustration and offered the logical thread: Homelander's development was associated with two women. Stussy — the architectural template, the first-generation system the second-generation built on. Ada — whose bloodline factor had contributed something to the final design, which meant her biological architecture had properties that were relevant to the question of how Homelander's combined capabilities functioned.
Ada was currently in World Government custody, in a suite arrangement that had kept her away from CP9 colleagues and, apparently, away from Egghead.
"Transfer her here," Edison said. "If she's relevant to the problem, having access to her is better than not having access to her."
Vegapunk listened to this and said nothing. He did not endorse it or argue against it. He was still working on the prior problem: what version of himself, faced with what circumstances, had decided that the Anti-Life Equation's theoretical framework was close enough to operational that it was worth sealing rather than destroying.
In the meantime, there was a more immediate and manageable set of options available.
The Lickers and the Tyrants from Caesar's Rome laboratory were already in mass production — a fact that had emerged from the Sky Screen's Rome coverage and was now sitting in the Vegapunks' planning documents. Their cost was substantially lower than Pacifista production. Their effectiveness against mid-tier pirates was comparable or superior. They were, unlike the Pacifista units, genuinely consumable: when destroyed, the loss was financial rather than strategic.
The Pacifista program's problems were structural. The units were expensive to build, difficult to produce at scale, expensive to repair when damaged, and increasingly outclassed by the opponents the Marine was facing. Each one that fell in combat cost what a warship cost. The Five Elders' decision to phase them out was, in Vegapunk's professional assessment, correct — possibly the first institutional decision made by that body in recent memory that he could endorse without qualification.
Kuma's exchange was a separate question, and one that Vegapunk did not want to sit with for too long.
The question of Bonney was more urgent.
The girl had inherited something from her mother's modified biology, something Saturn had been characterizing as the next generation of a capability chain that started with what Ginny had been given and escalated from there. Whoever held Bonney held a variable that the Five Elders wanted under their direct management.
The pursuit operations at sea had already begun. Bonney's crew was composed of people who had been fishermen before circumstances required them to become something else, and the gap between that background and a serious naval intercept operation was not a gap that goodwill and familiarity with the ocean could fully close.