Sovereign

by April Daniels

  He’s really into it, ticking points off on his fingers as we go. We enter a large room that’s part cafeteria, part presentation room. More of those low, leather chairs around teardrop-shaped tables set at knee height, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out into the black night at one end, and a full buffet area at the other.

  “Come on, help yourself!” he says, leading us to the food at the back.

  I’m about to speak up and say we’re not really here to be wowed by how neat-o his big floating house is, but Karen brushes past me and grabs a plate. She begins piling food on it with grim, mechanical purpose. I follow suit. Then Garrison leads us to one of the clusters of chairs, and we sit down around the low glass table.

  He bites into his own sandwich with gusto, and I’ve got to admit, the tofurkey is not bad. “This was all harvested last week, including the grain for the bread,” he says. “We’ve got plans to expand production soon so we’ll have something to export.”

  He says this with a look in his eye, like he’s baiting a question. Okay, fine, I’ll humor him. If he can help Karen, he can try to sell me the moon for all I care. “What does a resort need with exports?” I ask obediently.

  Garrison laughs. “Nothing! But this isn’t a resort, it’s a country!”

  “A country?” Holy shit, I kept a straight face. Cecilia would be so proud.

  “Yes, of course! We’re not recognized at the UN yet, but that will come.” He hunches forward at the edge of his seat. “Look, Dreadnought—may I call you Danielle?—Danielle, the nation-state is dying off. Small, privately owned communities in a global network are the future. Out here, we’re free of territorial disputes, of the archaic and rotting Westphalian system—we’ve got a clean slate! There’s no bureaucracy, no handouts, no petulant special interests; it’s the urgent and inevitable path forward for human development, and we’re taking the first big steps here.”

  “That’s really cool,” I say, and it even sounds like I mean it. The truth is, Garrison’s personal crusade seems like another rich dude’s fantasy of remaking the world so that it will kiss his ass just that much more, and I cannot scrounge up even half a shit to give about this. Not that you’d hear it from my voice or see it in my body language. Hooray for media training! “But, and I hope you won’t mind, I actually came here because I was hoping that you and I could help Karen with her problem.”

  Garrison, like his daughter, seems for a moment to have forgotten Karen was in the room. “Oh! Oh, yes, of course. We can get right to that, but I was hoping I could show you a little presentation I’ve been working on.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. Garrison, I think it can wait until we’ve gotten rid of Karen’s extra memories.”

  “Yes. Please,” says Karen.

  Garrison blinks. “I…well, if you’ll agree to listen to it afterward—”

  “Can we just do this the way we said?” asks Karen, just above a whisper.

  “That was the arrangement,” says Garrison. Karen sucks in a horrified gasp. “I give Karen her cure, and she brings you here to hear my pitch.”

  Wait, what? She said he’d had trouble making a cure stick. And she didn’t mention anything about a deal. I look over at Karen, confused.

  Her words jam into each other. “That wasn’t—you said you wouldn’t—!”

  “Karen, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Garrison. “If you’ve misrepresented yourself to Dreadnought—”

  Karen’s face has gone crimson. Her hands are clutched white against her knees. “Fine, whatever, just give me the necklace.”

  “What necklace?” I ask. She’s not looking at me. Her jaw bunches and unbunches. “Karen, what necklace?”

  Garrison has reached into his jacket and pulled out a small phone, not a smartphone, but an old-style digital-faced cell. He pushes a single button and speaks into it. “Jonathan, why don’t you come take Ms. Kim to one of the other lounges, and bring her payment with her.”

  Even as the words leave his mouth, Karen is standing. Eyes locked to the ground, shoulders tight and high to her neck she marches away. A man in a dark suit, this one buttoned up, meets her near one of the halls away from the lounge and hands her something. I twist back around in my seat to look at Garrison.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I really could not begin to say,” says Garrison. He cracks a can of soda and takes a sip. I look down at my own food and suddenly lose my appetite. “Karen came to me in quite a state. We each had something the other wanted, and I offered to make a trade. If she decided to keep you in the dark about our arrangement, well, she’d been on the streets a long time. She might not be very stable anymore. God knows the poor girl has more pressure on her than anyone should have to bear.”

  “I see. Why are you so interested in me?”

  “Aha, yes! To the heart of it!” He shakes his fists with that kind of Silicon Valley excitement that tastes stale everywhere else. “I’ve got a major project in the works, totally world-changing. Cynosure is part of it, but it goes so much further. And I need a spokesperson. Someone with name recognition, someone who’s modern and polls well. What about the world’s preeminent cape? What about the first transgender superhero?”

  “I’m not,” I say.

  “What?”

  “I’m not the first transgender superhero. The first was Masquerade in 1959, though she only came out in the ’70s after her retirement.”

  Garrison processes that for a moment, then goes on: “Regardless, you’re a very in person right now, and you’ve got a strong reputation. I’d like to show you what I have in store, and I hope that you’ll agree to become part of this project.”

  Karen’s gone; I can’t see her anymore. What the hell was she thinking? And…crap, she spent days with us in New Port, pretending to be looking for a cure. Or was it even pretending? Maybe she was hoping to find an alternative. Or maybe she doesn’t need a cure at all. And what’s so special about a necklace? When I’m done here, she and I are going to have a long, long talk.

  “So, Dreadnought, will you listen to my proposal?” At least he’s not talking down to me for being young. That still happens sometimes, despite all the footage of me beating the crap out of supervillains two or three times my own age.

  “I have a publicist,” I say. “Why didn’t you just call her up and arrange a meeting?”

  “I like to do this sort of thing one-on-one, without the help. It builds investment.”

  The help, he says. Now there’s an interesting way to describe a woman with degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. I hang an opaque smile on my face and nod. “Sure. If that’s the condition of Karen getting the help she needs.”

  “Excellent!” says Garrison, truly excited now. He stands up and punches another button on his phone. A holographic screen pops to life at one end of the room, ten feet high and twenty wide. It’s showing a picture of low orbit, the Earth a slightly curved, fuzzy blue line along the bottom of a star field, a crescent moon hanging high to the left. “Now I’ve got to start with a little bit of background. Since the ’90s, private spaceflight has really taken off. One of my subsidiaries is a pure-science outfit, and they piggybacked an orbital telescope up on one of my heavy-lifter contracts. That’s how we spotted this.”

  The screen snap-zooms in on a segment of the sky to focus on a fuzzy blue dot. My blood freezes. It’s the Nemesis. I know it is.

  Garrison doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve gone rigid with shock and prattles on: “At first we didn’t know what it was, but after we consulted with NASA we realized what we had here. When Northern Union went out to stop that asteroid a couple years ago, they were heading off a fragment of this thing. It’s exotic matter, of a sort we don’t really have the science to describe yet. Every three-and-a-half-thousand years it makes a close pass through the inner solar system. It’s also the cause of all superpowers.”

  He tosses this last bit off like it’s nothing, but then waits a moment, hoping for a gasp or some
sort of reaction.

  “And you’re sure about this?” I ask. I’m remembering Professor Gothic’s words. You have enemies you won’t recognize until they strike. Without taking my eyes off the screen, I turn my gaze inward toward the lattice. The steel skeleton of the building jumps out at me, pretty standard construction. I don’t see any hidden weapons systems, and Garrison himself reads as thoroughly baseline. There’s a couple of men with guns and one without hanging out in a room behind a discreet door just a few yards away, but they’re probably just his security detail. The nearest exit is the windows directly to my front, but I could punch through the floor or ceiling if I had to.

  Reassured that this isn’t an ambush, I relax fractionally. But he sure has my attention.

  “Quite certain,” says Garrison. “We’ve matched up its trajectory with the historical record, and we’re pretty sure this is where the myths about Greek Gods came from. And not just the Greeks, either. Every ancient culture has stories of people or entities with fantastic powers, and many tell of a twilight of the gods or an era when the magic began to fade. Now the hour of the gods has come again.

  “And this time, we’re ready. Mankind stands at the threshold of a new age. Because this photo? It’s five months old. Here’s what the anomaly looks like right now.”

  The screen whips back around to a shot of the Moon, silver-gray and mottled with craters. The view is close enough that the edges are razor sharp against the shadows. The camera pans down and I catch my breath. The Nemesis is floating above it, wreathed in swirling blue mists that bob and weave in the vacuum like the tendrils of some living thing. It is surrounded by white scaffolding, tiny strands of steel and fabric against the immense bulk of the asteroid. Boxy protrusions jut from the scaffolds where they meet, an encrusted pentagon miles wide and blinking with running lights.

  “That’s a live feed of L2, the Lagrange point on the far side of the Moon,” says Garrison. “It is an island of stable gravity. You put something there—like this asteroid, for example—and it will stay there indefinitely, with no need to orbit. My company has ensured that humanity will never again watch its power slip away as it passes out of—”

  “The Nemesis is already here?” I say. I didn’t mean to say it. It just sort of slips out.

  Garrison looks at me, surprised. “Yes, that’s what some call it. But I like to think of it as a friend. It’s not here to destroy us. It’s here to disrupt the old world, to empower those who are strong enough to seize its opportunity.”

  The first time I saw what this thing could do, I nearly vomited. Utopia had used a fragment of it to create a weapon that undoes reality itself. Since then, I’ve lived with constant anxiety in the back of my head. The Nemesis was coming, and when it arrived, life as we knew it would change irrevocably. If we were lucky. “Utopia told me that the Nemesis would destroy the world.”

  “Obviously she was wrong. Look, I’m not saying there isn’t any danger, but we’ve got it well contained. The quantum destabilization effect of the exotic matter relies on line of sight to operate, and by hiding it behind the Moon we’re able to limit its effects on Earth. My company has satellites in polar orbit of the Moon, monitoring the anomaly and allowing us to precisely control the observer effects.”

  “How? Utopia could barely control her fragment.”

  Garrison smiles. “We’re cheating. We use magic.”

  The screen shifts again, back to Earth this time. A series of orbital tracks are highlighted as throbbing gold lines. The image zooms in on one, and we see a satellite with a strange, almost bulbous projection at one end. “For the past six months, my company has been launching a new satellite every week under the guise of creating a new satellite Internet fleet. That’s mostly true, and they do pass data packets, but each one of these is also a node for a powerful ritual that our Head of Thaumaturgical Operations has constructed. With tomorrow’s launch, we’ll have full global coverage. With this satellite fleet in place, we can bring Phase One to completion.”

  My head is whirling with so many fears and epiphanies that I barely note his cue to play along. I sort of vaguely nod for him to go on and hope Cecilia’s training is keeping my friendly banter smile in place.

  Garrison nods enthusiastically. “The satellite fleet is just a tool to cast spells on a global scale, and Phase One is perfecting a spell to boost the probability curve in certain sectors—in layman’s terms, we’re fudging the dice roll to pick who gets superpowers. Until recently, we thought it was just random chance. A lab accident here, an ancient curse there. Nothing seemed connected, and yet from the very beginning there’s been a suspicion that something was causing all these people with strange talents to show up starting in the late nineteenth century. And for them to become more common and more powerful as time went on? There had to be something connecting them all, right? Now that we’ve definitively concluded that it’s all just the expression of a lot of weird quantum math, we can—and have—systematized it.”

  The screen has switched to an animated infographic showing how the cameras near the Moon take observations of the Nemesis. How those observations cause quantum instabilities of a predictable nature. How, by taking advantage of those instabilities, a spell cast from a ritual chamber here on Cynosure gets beamed up to the satellites and then repeated all over the planet. How a single individual can be picked out, and their probability graph pulled way, way up, so that it’s all but guaranteed that by the end of the week they’ll encounter a mysterious woman selling special rings, or experience a non-fatal accident with exotic chemicals, or some other canned origin story. Despite myself, I’m up off my chair and drifting toward the hologram.

  This is…huge. Bigger than I thought possible. Utopia’s failed plan to turn everyone into software she could control suddenly seems like it lacks ambition.

  “Our initial calculations were pessimistic by an order of magnitude,” says Garrison. “We’re not only able to pick who gets superpowers, we can even pick roughly what sort of powers they can get. Further refinements are on the way, but this is really just a means to an end. Ask yourself, what are the implications of being able to pick and choose—?”

  One of the implications occurs to me immediately. “Is it limited?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

  “Is it limited?” I ask again, pointing at the part of the infograph that represents the probability of what they’re calling an Empowering Event occurring. “The probability of someone somewhere in the world getting superpowers on a given day—is that a fixed number, and you’re just shifting who it happens to, or can you change the probability itself?”

  And for the first time, something genuine breaks through Garrison’s sales pitch. He’s surprised. Impressed. Like, I guess he expected because I look like a blond swimsuit model, I’d be an idiot or something.

  “We can adjust the total curve, yes.”

  I look back at him, excitement blooming in my chest. My smile isn’t media-ready armor anymore, it’s real, and growing. “We could give everyone in the world superpowers, and we could do it in a safe and controlled way.”

  Garrison’s smile falters a little bit. “But, well that would almost defeat the point, wouldn’t it? I mean, what’s the point of powers if they’re common?”

  “No!” I shake my head. “You’re wrong. It’s not like we’d all have the same powers, right? We’d all have something unique that we can do. We could let people pick what they want, be whatever they chose. We don’t have to wait for the Nemesis to do it naturally; we can do it right now! Look, I absolutely do want to be your spokeswoman, okay? Of course I do, this is huge! But if we’re going to do this, we need to do it for everybody.”

  Garrison purses his lips. “You’re picking up on this quickly, so I think we can skip ahead to some of the more advanced material in the presentation.”

  “There’s more?”

  “Oh yes. You see, this is Phase One. It’s the big one, but this is a holistic proje
ct—we’re not stopping there. There’s a lot of problems we’re going to solve.” He shrugs. “All of them, more or less. And like in any great undertaking, we’re going to make enemies.” Garrison pauses, seems to calculate some odds. He pulls out his phone again. “Peter, would you come in here? I think maybe Dreadnought could use your perspective.”

  A discreet door in the side of the room opens, and out steps Thunderbolt. Electric thrills go up my spine. He’s one of California’s premier heavyweight superheroes, and would likely be the head of his own team if the cape laws in California weren’t so screwed up. He’s smaller than he looked up on stage in Antarctica, wiry and tough. The blue on his bodyglove is dark almost to black, set in relief by the jagged yellow lightning designs wrapping around his chest. He was the first to use the half-cape off one shoulder, a banner of yellow silk that’s become almost as iconic as my own blue-and-whites.

  “Danielle, this is my friend Peter,” says Garrison.

  “Hi, Thunderbolt!” And then I clamp down before my fangirl reflex goes into overdrive and I embarrass us all to death. I’d seen him at the business meeting in Antarctica, but it’s different talking to him one-on-one.

  Thunderbolt crosses the room and offers me his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dreadnought. I was hoping to run into you at the convention.”