Beast held four doctorates. That might seem to fall short of the seven doctorates held by Bruce Banner, the Hulk, but the gap existed mainly because his mutant genes had awakened and shut him out of any further schooling. In raw scientific ability, he actually edged out Bruce Banner.
The man was a bona fide prodigy—and unlike Bella, whose expertise ran to the feudal and the occult, his was hard science, top to bottom.
Two days on, using homemade equipment to run a carbon-14 measurement on the soil, he arrived at a reasonably precise figure: the two of them were in the year 2185. That put them a full 180 years from the moment they'd started out.
"How did we even get here? And why us, of all people?" Beast asked, mystified.
With almost any other man and woman thrown together alone like this, their thoughts would probably have drifted toward something like fate tying two people together across a thousand miles. Lucky for her, Beast was the kind of man seemingly destined to stay single forever.
Bella cast her mind back. When she'd marshaled her psionics to stall for time and traced the pull of temporal energy, she'd caught sight of Kang the Conqueror—and of the strange thing in his hands, nine odd metal components linked together.
To her eye, those nine pieces strung in a row looked a little like an oversized shish kebab…
As for what that kebab-shaped device actually was, or why it radiated such dense temporal energy, she still hadn't worked out.
She described Kang's appearance, and did her best to put the tech in his hands into her own words.
Rich as Beast's scientific knowledge was, even he couldn't deduce what the thing was from her vague account. Far too fuzzy.
He did think it was some kind of temporal-conversion device, though—and that Kang had used exactly that device to fling the pair of them 180 years down the line.
Beast went further: the point in time the two of them had landed in was surely chosen in advance. Perhaps this particular era meant something to Kang, or to someone else.
Beast hadn't only pinned down the date; he'd used his scientific toolkit to dig up a good deal more.
"Look at this. Last week they ran an interstellar mission—the survey probe just cleared Earth's orbit. From the way it's written up, their tech isn't any more advanced than ours."
He laid out his reasoning further. "99% of the arable land is under seawater, so why not migrate to other worlds? There's only one answer: their space capability is badly lacking. They're still stuck at the launching-probes, scouting-for-targets stage. Most of their so-called interstellar theories are just theories. They're trapped on Earth."
Beast sighed over the plight of these future humans.
Bella bit her lip. "That doesn't add up. Weyland's side—I mean, I heard Weyland-Yutani's space telescopes had already found plenty of habitable planets. Nearly two hundred years, and they've made no progress at all?"
Patrick Star sits 185 light-years from Earth, which is admittedly a bit of a trek—but Pandora is only 4 light-years out. Build some hibernation pods, put your back into it, channel a little of that Wandering Earth spirit, and it's not out of reach.
Beast kept digging through the terminal the Collective had issued them. He was no hacker, but a scientist of his caliber ranged widely, and a bit of poking around turned up several backdoors in the systems of this era.
The technology of this age couldn't be called stagnant, exactly, but in certain respects it truly hadn't advanced—plenty of the equipment looked no different from what they'd had in their own time.
Beast soon found what Bella was after.
Peter Weyland had gone missing, and Weyland-Yutani had been broken up in his wake—split into more than a dozen companies. The space technology that had once towered above all others was ruined in the corporate turmoil. Several other major companies met the same fate: Stark Industries, Oscorp Industries, one multinational after another, almost none of them spared.
Humanity had sawed off its own wings. After that the environment kept worsening while everyone gathered day after day to bicker—democracy this, freedom that, back and forth—and a hundred years on, world order collapsed outright.
These people had drifted further and further off course, so far that only last year had they resumed any exploration of space at all.
And how far had that exploration gotten?
Bella's job was writing the text; Beast had been recruited for his talent at illustration.
The office tower they now called home was responsible for compiling space manuals. Listen to that word—compiling! A pack of writers and illustrators, compiling space manuals! The very idea was absurd.
"The one bright spot is that they perfected a serum to suppress mutant cells. There are no mutants in this era anymore." Beast let out a long sigh.
Ninety-nine percent of the population had died. Without that vast human base, naturally there'd be no mutants either.
Bella patted his shoulder. "That's hardly a bright spot. There's no reason to suppress our own gifts. The mutant gene isn't a virus—and neither is human emotion."
That evening, a crowd of men and women in identical white shirts and trousers sat in the plaza watching footage the probe had just beamed back. Bella and Beast turned up to watch along with everyone else.
Since getting close, touching, and laughing were all read here as early signs of Switched-On Syndrome, the two of them stayed a good ninety feet apart and pretended not to know each other.
"Today, we have set foot upon Planet TK-14, seven hundred ninety-eight million miles away."
The narrator's tone on-screen carried not a ripple of feeling, and the crowd below applauded nothing, cheered nothing, celebrated nothing. Perfectly flat, a row of robots—they showed up, watched for a while, then each returned to their own quarters. No one spoke, no one left with anyone else—every person there cold and detached to an almost inhuman degree.
Bella sighed to herself. She'd never paid much mind to Weyland-Yutani's grand cosmic-exploration program, but she knew the basics, and this "seven hundred million miles" only sounded like a big number. It wasn't far at all. This TK-14 these future people spoke of was, barring surprises, some moon near Jupiter.
The place was flatly uninhabitable; the whole expedition was doomed to be wasted effort.
Two days after that, Bella's psionics had recovered nearly to full. She meant to teleport to Vanaheim, where the magic ran thick enough.
But the teleport failed. The spell fed back a single verdict: target does not exist.
Asgard's realms were gone? She tried teleporting to Jotunheim next—and couldn't find that place either.
With no other choice, she was left to search Earth itself for a magic node.
Like a robot, she wandered the city the Collective had claimed.
"Why are you here?" Unlike the ordinary populace in their white shirts and trousers, the city's Enforcers wore tops marked with black stripes to set them apart. One of them happened to glance at the terminal on Bella's wrist—by the record, she had no business being here right now.
What a pain. Bella cursed inwardly, then looked the man dead in the eye. "I'm on assignment. Think it over carefully—I told you about it before…"