-37-

"Crisis on a Finite Earth"

"That is so nice," sighed Nuala the fairy. "You were reunited with your mother, and…" but then her expression became a worried one. "Whatever happened to John? Were the two of you joined as one, to live happily ever after?"

"No," said my mother Rose, dismally.

"Oh. I was afraid as much."

"Eh, so what?" said Mervyn. "It's not like it was the end of the world or nuthin'."

"Actually," said my mother Rose, "it was.

-Rose Walker's Tale-

You wouldn't have known it at the time, not at first.

I met up with Wanda, and Paul (who I was glad to see had eyes now, and didn't even remember having them stolen - he just thought he'd gotten injured in the disaster at our flat) and the spider-women, and Thessaly. They'd all moved into a big house in the countryside, and I joined them.

Victor Stone became the newest member of the Justice League, under the name of Cyborg. The Justice League itself was experiencing a resurgence of popularity, as people were looking to them to fight the war on crime and terror. It seemed, to a lot of people, like maybe things were looking up again.

Suddenly, however, LexCorp unveiled a new cybernetic brainchip implant, which would allow you to plug in to cyberspace any time you wanted to. It was touted as giving anyone 'the powers of a superhero'.

Old Lex Luthor decided to be the poster-child for this new device - he was at death's door, but got a new lease on life with the cybernetic implants, which repaired his body as fast as it was decaying.

Not only that, but it was finally exposed to the masses just how many children were being exploited and sex-trafficked - the crimes of child predator Funland, who preyed upon unaccompanied minors playing in theme parks, was allowed to make the news after years of being hushed up by the media. Terrified parents everywhere wanted to get their children chipped, so that their location and physical/emotional status could be monitored at all times.

I thought this sounded really suspicious, and wondered if the Brainiac AI was behind it.

I didn't have anyone to tell about it, though - Lois Lane passed away at the age of 96, and I couldn't find any other reporters who were willing to investigate LexCorp's new miracle product (Most of them were on the Luthor family's payroll, either directly or indirectly, because LexCorp owned most news media outlets and their parent companies).

So I watched as people ran to go get cyborg'd.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a luddite - I like having modern technology and conveniences. But I sure as hell wasn't going to get a chip planted in my head - not even if it HADN'T been made by the company owned by notorious villain and worst ex-president ever Lex Luthor, or if the money WASN'T going into the hot little hands of his son, Lex Jr.

But it became harder and harder to resist the rising tide, as all the old systems were not only made digital, but were made increasingly harder to access without an implant.

And to get any sort of job whatsoever required you to affirm your commitment to the ideas of competition, greed, and loyalty to the system.

I was hearing that a lot of old fogeys (most of whom actually WERE luddites who hated new technology) were moving to Coast City, where Hal Jordan lived and ruled.

Hal Jordan had created a perfect construct of Coast City - circa 1950's. It was basically frozen in time, and no one in Coast City was allowed to bring anything modern into the city boundaries. They were cut off from the rest of the world, stuck in their own little bubble… but, at least they didn't have to get brain-chipped in order to get by in the world.

I was starting to get worried that I was going to have to move there, if it became the only sanctuary left for un-chipped people. But I really wanted to hold out for as long as possible, because Coast City terrified me as well - their draconian laws forbade anyone from doing anything the least bit out-of-line with their conservative values, and I just knew I'd end up running afoul of at least a few of them right off the bat.

Hal Jordan never set foot outside of Coast City. He pretended the outside world didn't exist.

Nobody knew where the other remaining Green Lanterns had gone.

That's when the Red Hood came on the scene in a big way.

He'd been a low-level masked vigilante until then - but now he was openly threatening the oligarchy of wealthy billionaires like Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor.

Lex Luthor, in turn, shamelessly asked the Justice League for protection - the very same Justice League that he'd always tried to persecute and squash.

The Justice League were put in an awkward position - they famously believed that all life was sacred, and they couldn't countenance a threat against anyone's life - even if that life was that of their worst enemy, Lex Luthor.

So the Justice League put out a statement that they would protect Lex Luthor.

A lot of people gave them kudos for this, but the Red Hood was pissed - he put out his own statement, saying that the superheroes were all fascist puppets helping to protect the rich, and failing to protect the poor and disenfranchised; he accused them of letting supervillains run amok, in order to feed their sick addiction to violence and to justify their actions to the public; as such, he would be forced to take them down as well.

So first he went after every criminal in Gotham and outright assassinated them, placing red hoods over their heads so everyone would know it was him.

Superman promised to personally deal with this 'Red Hood' and bring him to justice.

And that was when the Red Hood made good on the other part of his threat.

There was a daring heist made upon the vault at LexCorp headquarters, and something very important was stolen from within.

Shortly after, there was an attempt made on Superman's life.

The arrowhead that pierced his invulnerable skin was made of a green stone - a radioactive chunk of his homeworld Krypton, dubbed 'Kryptonite'.

The Red Hood immediately took credit for having shot the green arrow - and from that point onward, that became his new moniker: 'Green Arrow'.

There was a ton of confusion as to whether the Man of Tomorrow had survived - nobody knew where he was following the attack.

The Green Arrow was emboldened. He'd only been able to take down the non-superpowered bad guys up until then, but now that he'd taken down the strongest metahuman there ever was, he'd go for the big prize: The Joker.

I'm hazy on the details, but somewhere a showdown took place between Green Arrow and The Joker - and then Batman intervened. Again, I don't know what happened, but Green Arrow and Batman weren't heard from or seen ever again.

And The Joker got away.

With both Superman and Batman M.I.A., faith in the Justice League eroded.

Lex Luthor made his move - using his new army of cyborgs, he launched a hostile takeover of the U.S. government. He then set about taking the mantle of World Leader that Superman had turned down.

Things got real shitty, real fast.

One of the first things to happen was that women's rights were completely stripped away.

After all, the third most powerful superhero - and the one that was suddenly the de facto leader of the Justice League, now that Bats and Supes were gone - was Wonder Woman. So in Luthor's mind, he needed to do something to put women back in their place as quickly as possible.

The first stuff to go was the already-contentious stuff, but it was made clear that the decision had been made, and there would be no further argument about it: abortion was banned; transitioning between genders was banned; homosexuality was banned.

But then the Luthor regime started to roll back some of the stuff most of us had agreed on for a long time - like, for example, pre-marital and extra-martial sex had suddenly become illegal, as had all forms of contraception.

Wonder Woman tried to sound the alarm about this, but it was already too late: women were too afraid of speaking out, or fighting back, for fear that they would be retaliated against in the job market. If any woman wanted to work in a non-service sector job, she was required to prove that she held masculine virtues in high esteem - and this mattered way more than any 'feminist' ideals espoused by Woman Woman.

The Ring - that group of anarcho-feminists that included Catwoman - reportedly tried one more time to recruit Wonder Woman to their cause, and in turn convince the Amazons to go on the warpath. They thought that Wonder Woman couldn't possibly disagree anymore that a violent revolution was called for. But Diana insisted that if regular women did not care enough to fight for their own rights, then she would not spill blood on their account. She went back to Paradise Island, and similarly was never heard from again.

And she was right, I guess - because shortly after that, Luthor's cyborg army proceeded to wipe The Ring out altogether without too much trouble.

Having gotten all of America under his thumb, Luthor set his sights at the lands across the pond.

Aquaman, officially taking on the mantle of King of Atlantis for the first time, led a valiant effort to crush Luthor's ocean fleet - but it wasn't enough. Luthor still made it to Europe, and took it over as well.

The war added to pollutants already in the ocean and air, accelerating global warming. The arctic ice melted completely, flooding all the coastal cities (including Coast City itself, Hal Jordan's precious little time capsule, which he moved inland). Fishing pretty much ceased, because what few sea life still existed in the wild ocean were too poisoned to eat. The Atlanteans became sick, and died, leaving Aquaman as the last surviving metahuman of Atlantean blood.

Aquaman began to have underwater 'breathing' problems, and found that the ocean was now too polluted for him to swim in any more. It was announced that he had some sort of fish-cancer, and probably wouldn't live for very much longer.

The Flash was on the run from the Luthor regime for a long while, until he got too old and ran himself dead. Strangely enough, though, the word was that they never recovered a body.

My mother Unity didn't live long after the invasion - she died, in her sleep, of old age.

The spider-women, Zelda and Chantal, were arrested for homosexuality, and locked up. I never heard from either of them again.

Thessaly fucked right off to god-knows-where, without saying a word. I never heard from her again, either.

Wanda died of AIDS. The new regime forbade the doctors from treating her, so I guess I was lucky to have been allowed to visit her, right up until the end.

I went to her funeral. I wanted to cry the entire time, and not just because I missed her.

Her family had cut her beautiful hair off short. They'd dressed her up as a man, in a suit, which I know that she would have hated.

And then, as a final cruel insult, they buried her with the name 'ALVIN' carved on her tombstone.

I couldn't say anything. I couldn't do anything. They were desecrating her body and her memory, and all I could do was watch.

After the ceremony I made my little act of defiance - using one of her lipsticks, I crossed out 'Alvin' and wrote her real name, 'WANDA'.

Yeah, real brave of me… writing something that was only temporary, that would be washed off by the rain or by the groundskeeper. But I had to make some gesture, however futile, to reassert the truth.

But the truth was dead.

The Luthor regime made marriage mandatory - anyone who wasn't already married, or didn't get married voluntarily after the law passed, would be automatically 'opted-in' to marriage with whoever the program thought was your best match.

To avoid this, and to just protect ourselves in general, Paul and I got married.

And, knowing that the next step was that they were going to make the implants mandatory, we moved to the one place Lex Luthor wasn't powerful enough to conquer: Coast City.

I noticed, as we traveled, that blue skies were no more - the pollutants, and the warfare, made thick black clouds that blocked out the sun. I could see all plant life, everywhere, dying. Everywhere we went, we saw dead earth and abandoned farms turning to dust. I figured that maybe all the food in the stores was being grown indoors now, but I knew that not everyone in the world had access to food they didn't grow themselves. It was no wonder they were all up in arms right now - those who weren't living in the major cities were starving, and dying of thirst because all the freshwater drinking sources were tainted with pollutants.

And of disease. A new superbug was making the rounds, the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu of my mother Unity's time. Everybody was wearing a mask, and that was only the people who were still going outdoors. Streets were clear, and most businesses were empty.

Mass extinction. The phrase was all over the news.

But in Coast City, everything was sunny and peachy keen - because Hal Jordan made it that way.

I found out that Barbara Gordon was living there too - I spotted her in the crowd of those applying for citizenship in Hal Jordan's bubble-world.

Glad to see someone I recognized, I embraced her, and asked her how she was going to cope without technology.

Barbara Gordon looked like she was at war with herself for a while, then she finally told me the truth.

She didn't need technology, she told me.

She was a true Oracle. She had the Sight.

I asked her what she saw in the future then, and she became very grim-faced. "Humanity's days are numbered," she said. "Most of us will die in the coming years - and those of us who remain on life-support for a little while longer, on the artificial air and food and water created by machines, will find ourselves living in hell. We may well wish to die, just to escape it - and many of us will not be able to.

And then, our final doom will come the day that the meteor hits - it will seem at first to be a large meteor made almost entirely of Kryptonite, but it will in fact be the creature that destroyed Krypton, the homeworld of Superman.

Superman, even if he recovers from his injuries and escapes from his current imprisonment, will be able to do nothing against the creature - neither will any other metahumans, or technological device.

The creature will not rest until it has razed the Earth of all its lifeforms, and sentenced it to the fate of Krypton.

It's already on its way."

Thoroughly bummed out, I tried to make lighter conversation, asking her if she'd always had the Sight. She shook her head, and said that it was only after she'd been paralyzed, and became the champion of an Endless.

Endless. The word echoed through my mind.

Death had said that my son Daniel was the new Dream - so just what was it that he was doing right now, when everything was going to shit?

I had an idea.

"Can you get me in touch with Daniel… I mean, Dream of the Endless?" I asked Barbara.

She could. And she did.

We found a private spot, and Barbara communicated with Daniel. It was sort of like those old-fashioned seances, where the medium lets a ghost inside of them and starts speaking in their voice.

Barbara's face was the one that fixed me with an inscrutable Endless look. "Hello, Rose Walker."

"Daniel, is that you?"

"I must object to your use of my mortal name, Rose Walker," Barbara-as-Daniel said, in an eerily calm and even voice. "I am Daniel no longer. I am only Dream of the Endless."

"Like hell you are," my mother swore. "You're still Daniel to me. And I'm your mother, so stop calling me by my name. It's annoying."

"As you will," Barbara-as-Daniel said with a sigh, tired of arguing. "What is it you wish to speak with me about?"

"Well… first of all, how are you?"

"I am well."

"That's good. How's Nuala, and Mervyn, and the bird? And the whole rest of the gang, whose names I've forgotten by now?"

There was a long pause. "I… do not know."

"What do you mean 'you don't know'?"

"I have not been back to the Castle for some time."

"Have you been paying attention to how shitty things have gotten here?"

"...No."

"Christ! Why not?!"

"Reality does not interest me, Ro-... Mother. I find the world of dreams to be far more entertaining."

"Entertaining," I repeated.

"Yes." And then Barbara cocked her head to one side, and smiled a little - the little, quirky smile that Morpheus used when he was alive. "Would you like to hear about one of the superheroes, and what they dream about?"

"NO I WOULD NOT!"

Barbara's face looked hurt and puzzled. "What is the matter?"

"EVERYTHING'S THE MATTER!" I cried. "Literally everything! The world's falling apart, and soon it's going to get hit with a Doomsday creature that will kill us all! Dead! The end! And you're, what, entertaining yourself? With dreams?"

"I am the representation of dreams, Mother," he said within Barbara, defensively. "What else would I be expected to do?"

"The other side of the coin," I answered.

"What?"

"You're in charge of dreams, that's true - but just like you're in charge of UN-reality, you're also in charge of REALITY. Isn't that right?"

Barbara-as-Daniel's eyebrows knit together. "I… suppose…"

"Well the Reality here is getting pretty shitty - and it's only going to get worse. So what are you going to do about it?"

"I can do nothing."

"BULLSHIT!"

"I simply manage the dreamworld, Mother. The dreamers dream what they will; I cannot force my will upon them."

"That's a cop-out. Surely there's something you can do. Your father would have."

"Are you certain?" asked the boyish voice coming from Barbara's mouth. It had just a touch of impishness to it - I couldn't tell if that was inherited from me, or his father.

"Yes. He cared about the dreamers - he wouldn't let us all die, even if it was from our own stupidity."

"It should be a few years yet before all the human dreamers die; and much longer still before all the intelligent dreamers of the universe perish."

"How can you say stuff like that? You're a human!"

"What was human and mortal of Daniel was burned away: what was immortal was… transfigured. We are no longer blood-kin, you and I. I am-"

"-An Endless. Yeah, I know." I sighed deeply, exasperated. How was I going to get through to this kid? I thought back to something he'd mentioned… "You said something about superheroes, right?"

"Yes. I spend the most time in their worlds, and worlds associated with them. They are great fun."

"The superheroes are human."

"Most of them, yes. Some of them-"

"And they care about Earth," I interrupted, not wanting to let him get off on some tangent. "About life on this planet. This is their home."

"The superheroes are very powerful, and very capable in the use of those powers. I'm certain they will be able to save the world from whatever calamities threaten it."

"Even with all their powers, they're going to fail. They can't stop Doomsday."

"How do you know this?"

"Oracle told me so."

"...Ah. I see. That is most unfortunate to hear."

"Is that all you've got to say? Are you really going to let their home get destroyed? Are you going to let them suffer, and die? Especially when you have the power to save them? I mean, what kind of fan ARE you?"

"I am not a mere 'fan', as you say. I sculpt the dreamspace. I shape the dreams that I inhabit."

I wasn't getting anywhere with this kid - and that's exactly what he was: a typical, spoiled, overgrown adolescent, who just wanted to play around.

Apparently he heard my unspoken thoughts. "I am no mere child either," he insisted.

"You're about 20 years old," I told him.

"I am the King of Dreams."

"Then start acting like it."

Barbara-as-Daniel thought about that, very seriously, for many moments. Then, her face brightened. "I have an idea."