Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  There will always be more bees.

  God, we were fools.

  Back when we were in the business of assumption—less than a decade ago, and so many lifetimes ago that it might as well have been the subject of a hundred history books, the sort of pastel fairy tale that feels removed by walls of words and circumstance and everything else that means “you can’t touch us anymore, you have no power here”—we’d assumed that when the end came, it would do so like a gang of villains in an action movie. One catastrophe at a time, each taking their turn to step up and swing at the heroes before being defeated and slouching respectfully away.

  The scientists had been warning us for years. The epidemiologists, pointing at the stripped-back forests and crammed-in factory farms, howling of spillover diseases and novel pandemics. The climatologists, trying to explain the complicated function of an interconnected system that no one, themselves included, fully understood or could reliably predict, but which was nonetheless dangling on the verge of collapse. The historians, struggling to remind us all that we no longer lost information the way we had for so many generations before; that the weight of what we’d done to get to where we were was looming heavier and heavier, threatening to press us all flat under the scope of itself. And more and more and more, until it seemed as if every expert the world contained was warning us of disaster.

  And we had done what we always did, as a species. Optimism is as much a part of human nature as anything else; hope was the last to exit Pandora’s box because, without it, we would become less than human. We need to hope that tomorrow will be better, or the presence of our intelligence will make survival less than desirable.

  Why would anyone struggle, day on day and year on year, only for a life that piles suffering upon suffering, making continuation an unbearable burden? No. We need to hope. We need to believe that tomorrow will be better than today, that there will be something to look forward to and enjoy. Without that, all is lost.

  So when the scientists sang their slaughter songs of sickness spreading and skies that fell, we listened for a time before we politely shut the doors and shut them out, for who could stand such a caterwauling in their ears? Who could listen to such tales of trauma when there were summers to be savoured, patches of clover to wade through, streams to dream beside? We knew that the scientists, with their clever tools and their treasured knowledge and their tales of doom, we knew that they were wrong, that they had always been wrong, even back to the dawn of ages, because for them to be anything else was to imply that the arc of the universe would somehow not bend toward a kinder tomorrow. And that, above everything, kept us moving forward, into a dazzle-bright future where nothing would ever come to tax or trouble us, where we would be shining and free forever, as we had always been destined to be.

  We were fools, but we were evolution’s fools, shaped exactly as she had made us, meant for optimism, meant for hope. Hope may not be humanity’s greatest virtue, but it was certainly our first, and it seems certain to be our last.

  When the forests burned and the birds fell from the sky like Icarus, the muscles of their wings reduced to softened wax, we said it was a shame. We donated to the relief efforts, wept over the images of ash and char, and went about our lives, buying imported goods from around the world, filling our stomachs with out-of-season fruit, unwilling to reduce our personal comforts without an iron guarantee that everyone around us was willing to do the same. We would happily suffer if everyone suffered in unison, but the thought of being the only person denied the sweet pleasures of inexpensive disposable fashion or imported oranges from the other side of the world was simply unbearable.

  So the world burned, and we ignored it, little girls in shining shoes with our palms full of silver coins, the broken wings of honeybees sticking to the soles of our feet, and we thought we could continue as we were forever. We thought we could endure.

  We had so much hope.

  When they said, “there is a new disease with pandemic potential,” we shrugged and went about our business. We had heard this song before, and it held no more reprises to excite us, only the quiet possibility of an intermission to come. And besides, the people next door were going about their business as they always did, and we couldn’t abandon the summer to their keeping. They might enjoy it wrong, might splash in the wrong streams, eat the wrong apples, step on the wrong honeybees. Our summer depended on us continuing as we were and ignoring the warning signs.

  And so we did, until the people began dying, until it became clear that this time was the remix that actually caught fire, and not the dull potential that had been dangled before us so many terrible times. The numbers were frightening, and for a time, we were willing to go home and close our doors and listen to the experts as they sang their songs of doom and desolation. They had been telling us this was coming for some time, and now it seemed that it was actually here, and there was no further escape for those of us who had chosen not to listen.

  But the people who controlled the things we thought we needed wanted us to go about our lives as we normally would, wanted us to leave our houses and buy their disposable fashion and their delicious, impossible oranges. Their hope said that normal was the only thing they could stand to consider, and so normal was the order of the day. Normal would return, they swore, and they swore it so loudly and so often that even those who should have known better than to believe them began to listen. Doors were unlocked, windows opened, air allowed to flow.

  And we liked this better, because normal had become normal through dint of being preferred by most people. Normal was the way of doing things that caused the least misery for the most individuals. And yes, some would always suffer under normal, but some would always suffer under any method of doing things, and as no one was willing to give up their own joy for the sake of people they didn’t even know. A fire on the other side of the world was still keeping someone warm, even if it was burning a hundred others alive. Normal was better. Normal was the right way.

  And indeed, the people who told us to go back into the world were right, because the waves of sickness grew less intense, the death tolls less staggering, the funeral homes less crowded. What were a few broken hearts and early-filled graves when compared to the siren song of normal, the fists full of silver quarters, the promise of the world renewed to how it should always have been? Compared to hope, which was returning, as hope always did, one day at a time and without consideration for whether it might not have come too quickly?

  Hope was better. Hope was comfort. Hope was home.

  And so, we all ignored the scientists, those few souls who had learned to look past hope in their crystal balls, who had worked all their lives long to overlook the possible in favour of the probable. We ignored them as they wailed and shrieked that this was far and far and far from over; as they insisted that there would be costs, there would be consequences, this time we wouldn’t be able to walk away and pretend they hadn’t done their jobs.

  This time, hope would fail to wipe away reality. This time, we would have to live with the harvest we had planted.

  Normal had been reasserted in part by promising, again and again and again, that the children would be safe; that this latest new disease killed the old and vulnerable, people who had already lived their lives, people who presented more than a fair degree of drain on society. And if no one had ever asked the people making those promises what a “fair” burden on society looked like, or how anyone could be a burden on a structure literally created for the sake of taking care of people, well, that was beside the point. The children would live, and we still liked to pretend that the lives of children carried some importance to us, as if we hadn’t been feeding them into the meatgrinder of school shootings and constant terror and dwindling social safety nets for decades. As if the uterus you were incubated in didn’t have more power to foretell the shape of your life to come than all the choices you would ever make on your own, as if free will and effort had ever really mattered.

  We sti
ll pretended that we cared about the children, and when the ones who defined “normal” spoke over the scientists and said that the children would be fine, we believed them, because we liked the shape of believing them more than we liked the shape of not believing them. We liked the outline of a world filled with all our worldly wants, with oranges in the middle of the winter and ice cream in the middle of the summer, we liked to think that we were above and beyond biology’s limitations, rulers of the universe, evolution’s perfect darlings. We liked what we’d had, and we had never acknowledged, to ourselves or to anyone else, how fragile that really was.

  And when normal returned, when the pandemic faded, it was easy to close our ears to the howling of the scientists, to pretend that they were drunk on their brief dance with relevance, that they wanted us to stay scared because they wanted the new normal to place them in control. We didn’t stop to consider that sometimes the person determined to warn you that if you go outside, bears will eat you, might be doing that so that you don’t get eaten by bears. We didn’t stop to ask ourselves if some people might not have good reason to hate and fear normal.

  And we went back to the way things were.

  A virus, once it enters the body, will follow its own programming—its own version of normal. It will settle into the systems it inhabits, making them its own. It doesn’t care what lived there before it came. It doesn’t care what will be thereafter. It doesn’t care about anything; it is, after all, a virus, a tiny bundle of biological programming commands that follows the instructions of its own making scrupulously, not concerned with the world outside its self and its host. The virus is a universe unto itself.

  The virus doesn’t care about the summer, about the ice cream, about the oranges. About normal. The virus does what it came to do, and when its programming is complete, it stops. Perhaps it spreads. Perhaps it stays silent and frozen, perfect in its self-contained glory. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t care.

  The scientists warned us. The signs were there, but as they contradicted our dreams of normal, they were ignored in favour of other signs, kinder signs, signs drawn by men with goods to sell, by women who yearned only to get back out into the world. And we chose hope over hard work, as we will always do when given the opportunity, and the virus did what the virus was always destined to do.

  The virus won.

  The last normal summer came almost twenty years before the end, although some of those same scientists would be happy to explain that the last normal summer was the end, that nothing can really be said to have happened after it was over, and maybe they’re right; maybe they were right all along, when they reminded us that hope came with Pandora, that we had never truly had a chance once we chose it as our new and final god. Twenty years might seem like a suiting epilogue, but for people who had never expected to see an ending in their lifetimes, it was not enough. It was never going to be enough, not in all the years of the world that had come before us, that would endure after us despite everything we’d done to the contrary.

  Twenty years was enough time for us to do a lot of damage, and once it had become apparent to the people with their hands on the controls that “normal” was never coming back, no matter how loudly they yelled for its reappearance, we had begun doing that damage as if it were our jobs. We were all little girls in shiny shoes, collecting honeybees for science teachers who thought we were too young and too innocent to understand colony collapse disorder. They didn’t tell us what we were doing wrong when we were children, because they were afraid they’d scar us, and so we’d grown up to be adults who thought we weren’t doing any harm; that we could move through the world like it was built solely for our own amusement, buoyed by the hope that things would be better tomorrow, that nothing we did would ever make things worse, that it would keep improving and improving and improving, always and forever. We were all acolytes of the holy church of “more,” and we were going to have what the gospel had promised.

  And all that time, the virus was there, not concerned, not caring, doing as it did. It spread through the cells of the children—who had lived, as the ones who controlled the narrative insisted they would; oh, not all of them, of course, but so few had died, and what was a few dead children when compared to the weight of a world ground to a halt, to the alluring siren song of normal?—making its changes, modifying what it no longer felt necessary. All that time, the virus was doing what viruses have always done, creating a more hospitable environment for its own use.

  Most viruses came to humanity through other channels. “Zoonotic spillover” we call it, like a complicated name will change the simple reality of a complicated origin. Diseases begin in one thing, find their way out into the world, and then move on to something new. Something like us, home and harbour and comfortable stopping place.

  But not only. There is no détente with something that didn’t evolve to share your space, only the slow unravelling of unplanned plans, of systems set into motion by nature and its own ends. There is no hope in a virus, either innate in the virus itself, or in the people whose bodies it inhabits. And while we built out future foundations on hope, stealing silver from the future, the virus was there as well. Not hoping. Not stealing. Not doing anything but what it had always done, what it would always do.

  Twenty years, it took, for us to realize what damage had truly been done by that last summer, the summer where we gambled everything on hope, on stunned honeybees and silver coins. Twenty years of children growing up and growing older, and no new children being born.

  It took time because the people whose reproductive systems had been fully mature before that summer were unaffected, although their children were as sterile as the rest, and no one was monitoring a six-year-old’s reproductive potential. But when that same six-year-old was in her twenties, the fact that no children came was a much more noticeable reality. And when her brother was only slightly younger, the absence of infants was a glaring concern.

  We used to hope for a summer that never ended, for pockets forever full of shining coins, for plenty without limit and prosperity without bounds.

  Now we hope for one more child, one more brief bulwark against the teetering weight of eternity, which seems poised to come crashing down very, very soon, and sweep us all to sea.

  We were supposed to know.

  We weren’t supposed to notice that we’d been stabbed twenty years after the deed was done.

  Welcome to the Legion of Six

  By Fonda Lee

  Interview #1 - 9:00 a.m.

  This young whippersnapper’s name is Trevor Dutch. Dutch is tall, blond, and chiseled like one of those Greek statues of Hercules that you see in museums. He saunters into the conference room overlooking the Threat Chamber in the world headquarters of the Legion of Six (which is, for the moment, floating above Brooklyn on an anti-gravity field powered by the Continuum Stone) as if he’s done it a hundred times before. He settles spaciously in the chair across from us. As he brushes a lock of hair off his forehead, his pectorals strain against his arctic-blue-and-white costume. I give my waistband a glum tug. It’s a bit . . . er, snug as well, but it’s not muscled physique but belly bulge that my costume has to contend with.

  It’s not like I’ve let myself go. I work out and I eat right. For a guy coming up on sixty, I’m not doing so bad. But it’s been years since I’ve been out in the field. Nowadays, I only put on the costume for official appearances in my retirement-track job as league recruiter. The old suit looks outdated—listen, metallic blue grid stripes on black was considered slick and futuristic back in my day—but there’s no point messing with it now. I’m a founding member of the Legion so quite frankly, my costume is iconic, TRON-style stripes and all. Besides, I’m too old to change.

  There are four of us on the interview panel this morning. Salvo. The Spook (both halves of her). And me. My civilian name is Tod McClelland, but I’m better known as Nexus. Sure, Mr. Phenomenon got most of the attention from the press, but it’s no stretch to say, in all h
umility, that I was the lynchpin of the original Six.

  I clear my throat and start us off. “So, Trevor, you’re a graduate of the XCalibur Academy for Exceptional Youngsters, and your powers are superhuman strength, energy beams, and force fields, is that right?” He nods, so I give him the classic opening question. “Tell us why you want to join the Legion of Six.”

  The young man shrugs. “It’s got to be better than Alpha Squad. That’s the league my folks were in. Cat Man and Princess Syrene. They never got much PR or career development support and Alpha Squad’s benefits are crap.”

  “You’ve listed your professional name as Strikeforce,” says Salvo, frowning down at the paper in front of him. The poor guy looks tired; the rings under his eyes show even through his fitted red mask. “There’s already a Strikeforce in Fortress League. And a Stryker working for the Protectors of Earth.”

  “And Death Stryke, who’s henching for Mr. Malignus,” adds Camille Frank, who is one half of the Spook. Helena Kim, next to her, is the other half.

  Trevor Dutch spreads his hands and gives a rueful smile full of straight white teeth. “I had to come up with something to put down on the application, didn’t I? I can change it easily enough. Don’t you guys have an in-house marketing consultant to help with this sort of thing? No? Well, you should. Even Alpha Squad does.”

  I try not to sigh. Call it idealism if you will, but when I joined the Legion of Six at the height of the Cold War, we really believed we had a calling. A solemn responsibility to use our powers to save the world from destruction. You know what? I think it’s just not the same for young superhumans these days.