Chapter Two: Weighing Other Alternatives
"Right!" Flash said. "So the next idea that springs to mind is treating them the same way we usually handle homegrown villains. Turn them over to the authorities to be tried, convicted, and locked away right here on our Earth!"
Shayera reflected that this solution would require Diana, John, and herself to contact their superiors (on Themyscira, Oa, and Thanagar, respectively) with warnings about these doppelgangers. New recognition codes could be set up so that a cry for help from one of the imprisoned Justice Lords would be screened out as a false alarm.
Even as she thought about mentioning this, John Stewart began to speak.
"Locked away for how long, and on what charges?" he demanded. "Ambushing us with that energy grid, and then blasting Shayera so she needed a hospital, only happened on their Earth. Just like all the other nasty stuff they'd done before we ever heard of them. Our Earth's courts don't have jurisdiction over what happens elsewhere. Sure, we might get the Justice Lords on a few petty charges—'identity theft' and 'excessive force' and so forth—but since they have no previous criminal records hereabouts, they'd be out on the streets again before we knew it. That just doesn't work for me."
Flash said in a long-suffering tone, "Hey, I didn't say the idea was perfect. But I figured we had to address it sooner or later, so I tossed it out there to get the ball rolling!"
"Okay, okay, you have a point," John admitted.
Wonder Woman said diplomatically, "Let's not rule out Flash's idea too fast. If Other-Batman will leave the portal open long enough, it might be possible to get the governments of our USA and Other-USA to make a special treaty to cover this. What if the Justice Lords were tried and convicted for their crimes over there, but then our USA agreed to accept custody of the prisoners and hold them for life sentences over here, where the Justice League could monitor the situation?"
"A compromise involving the best of both worlds, as it were?" J'onn J'onnz mused. "But what if they got death sentences instead? As I understand it, the appeals process could drag on for years or decades—"
"It doesn't matter if they get 'life' or 'death' or any other type of sentence," Batman interrupted. "Not if they're going to be incarcerated on our Earth according to the standard rules."
"You don't sound enthusiastic about the concept," Shayera commented.
"Because I'm not. It's a terrible idea. It would create unacceptable risks for a great many people. I suspect that the Justice Lords have shared many secrets with one another. Any of the five prisoners, if given access to a telephone or an e-mail account or a face-to-face interview with a journalist, could spill the beans on all sorts of things."
"Secret identities!" Superman said. "You're talking about my private life in Metropolis, and yours in Gotham, and Flash's in Central City. Suddenly everyone knows who we are, and the fallout creates deadly danger for friends, relatives, girlfriends, anyone whom villains might choose to target just because their deaths would give us extra-large doses of misery."
"That's one piece of the problem," Batman agreed. "A Justice Lord might do that to us, even convincing himself it would be for our own good in the long run."
"How so?" Wonder Woman wanted to know.
"Never underestimate a fanatic's ability to rationalize doing whatever he feels like doing anyway," Batman said. "One of the Lords might decide that if I lost my identity as . . . someone else, and if the people I most cared about in Gotham were killed by my old enemies after the news broke, or else were forced into running away to hide in faraway places as the only way to avoid being killed, then the shock and alienation might push me closer and closer to the Justice Lords mindset. Ready to impose absolute order on this wicked world so it would stop hurting me so badly."
"I see," Wonder Woman said thoughtfully. "And the fact that this also served as revenge against you for helping to overthrow the Justice Lords would just be a tiny fringe benefit; not a key factor in the cruel decision to turn your personal life into chaos?"
"That's what the one who blew the whistle on me would keep telling himself."
"Hold on," Flash said. "I admit I don't want my real name in all the headlines, but what's the alternative? Lock up all five of them in some cave in Antarctica that nobody but us knows about, with a ten-year supply of food and water? Concealed sensors all over the place to monitor their every move and see if any powers are creeping back? Do we have the right to treat anybody that way on our own hook?"
"That's fairly close to what I had in mind," Batman said with as much approval in his tone as Shayera had ever heard him use in speaking to Flash. "I suppose Superman would feel the Phantom Zone was overkill in this case, when they don't have any scary powers at the moment."
Superman looked at him. "I'm glad you understand that much about my outlook. I don't use that projector lightly. I certainly don't exile powerless people to the Zone just because they might conceivably become superpowered at some future date."
"Phantom Zone or no Phantom Zone, Flash had a point," John Stewart objected. "If everybody on Earth felt entitled to lock up anybody else who had learned some embarrassing personal secrets, half the human race would have the other half in cages, and then where would we be?"
Batman gave John a cold stare. (If it was meant to visibly rattle the Green Lantern, then it failed miserably, as Shayera was pleased to note.) "'Personal secrets'? Do you think that's all I'm worried about? Superman mentioned secret identities being compromised, and I said that was just one piece of the problem. I wasn't kidding. This isn't about isolating five prisoners strictly for my convenience. The potential problems with letting those Justice Lords run off at the mouth in public are much larger than anything that might happen to me, or to you, or to any of us and our loved ones."
John wasn't giving up. "Much larger? Can you give me a for-instance?"
Batman cocked his head. "You can't think of any? Don't the Guardians of the Universe trust their Green Lanterns with any items that shouldn't be shared with every Tom, Dick, and Harry?"
He waited a few seconds; Shayera supposed he was giving John a fair chance to reject that suggestion. Which didn't happen. John was suddenly looking very thoughtful—but didn't open his mouth to share his thoughts right away.
Batman shifted his gaze to Diana. "What about the Amazons? Don't they have any secrets that should stay hidden? Or the Thanagarians, for that matter," he added with a quick nod to Shayera. "And who knows what sort of dirt the Justice Lords dug up on other people and governments during their two-year tyranny, things that could be equally damaging to the counterparts on this Earth? Have any of you ever imagined what damage Superman might do if he had no inhibitions against using his X-Ray vision on anything that caught his interest, and then sharing the juiciest items with the tabloids? Or J'onn, with his telepathy? I have. We all have secrets, and some of them could cause harm to millions if they became common knowledge."
A heavy silence fell upon the conference room. Shayera was shocked to realize she hadn't even considered the possibility that her counterpart might get angry enough to break solemn oaths by spewing out the secrets of the Thanagarian military—but now that Batman had raised the idea, it couldn't be ignored. From the looks on their faces, the other five Leaguers were also imagining what could happen in a televised interview with the captive Justice Lords . . . and hating the ideas that occurred to them.
Shayera finally broke the silence. "I don't hear anybody saying Batman is dead wrong in his assessment, now that he's explained it properly."
She waited a decent interval, and nobody took the bait, so she resumed. "I suspect we are all coming to agree that we don't want our fanatical doppelgangers to spill their guts about everything they know; not if we're going to keep them on this side of the dimensional divide, as per our previous vote. On the other hand, I know most of you will say that killing them in the name of security is also out of the question, so I won't dwell on that.
"It seems to me that we still have two basic strategies we can pursue within those parameters. One was already mentioned: Imprison them ourselves, where no one without Need-to-Know will ever have a chance to hear any stories the Justice Lords may want to tell. A lonely way for them to live, I admit. The second option is to let them socialize with other people all they like—after they no longer have access to the information that has us all so uptight."
Flash played straight man. "Run that by me again? How were you planning to surgically remove all the scary stuff from their brains?"
"Not surgically," she corrected. "Telepathically. And I think it would be best if all their specialized knowledge of their old identities and activities were removed or suppressed in one fell swoop. Then they could make fresh starts with new names."
Superman blinked. "You mean we'd turn them loose in a big city as regular civilians?"
"Why not? At that point, inflicting any further punishment for things they no longer remembered doing would strike even me as excessive. In effect, we would have 'rehabilitated' them into law-abiding citizens, which is supposedly a primary goal of your elaborate penal system."
"'Supposedly' is the right word," Batman growled.
Shayera ignored the interruption. "We could set up mechanisms to alert us if their metabolisms started regaining superpowers—I suspect it would be a very gradual process if it happened at all. I also assume that elaborate reconstruction of their personalities, without turning them into imbeciles, would take a very delicate touch."
Six sets of eyes turned towards the only telepath in the room, who looked less than happy at the attention.
"What Hawkgirl proposes is feasible in theory," J'onn J'onnz finally said. "But there are serious ethical problems. I could launch a telepathic assault on a powerful foe in the heat of battle. I am exceedingly reluctant to tamper with another being's core memories and behavior patterns when there is no innocent life in immediate jeopardy."
"We could always ask Doctor Fate to do it," Flash offered. "Five will get you ten he has a spell up his sleeve to fit the occasion. Betcha he could change their faces at the same time, so people wouldn't always be saying, 'Hey, that guy in the leather jacket looks just like Superman!' Would that work better for you?"
J'onn shook his head. "Voting to ask someone else to do such dirty work on my behalf would not leave me with clean hands, would it?"
"Besides, Fate may feel the same way you do," Superman observed. "I don't understand him well enough to predict his reactions, but he just might refuse to indulge in drastic tampering with a helpless prisoner who wanted to keep his own identity. I wouldn't be happy about it either . . . not on those terms. But tell me, J'onn, what if the subject knew precisely what we had in mind and gave informed consent in advance?"
"That . . . might make the difference. But how were you planning to obtain such consent?"
"By giving them the opportunity to choose," Superman said firmly. "Hawkgirl was right: Either of those approaches could maintain the necessary security on the big secrets. But on something this touchy, I don't feel right about settling this by just voting to pick one answer or the other, and then forcing the same answer upon all five prisoners at once. We may not like them, but we can still grant them some dignity where mental privacy is concerned. I propose that we bring them in here, explain these options, and ask each Justice Lord to select whatever strikes him or her as the lesser of two evils."
"Second the motion," Wonder Woman said promptly, and things proceeded from there.
Author's Note: When I started writing this story, I still didn't know exactly what the League would end up doing. As I said in another Author's Note at the beginning, several months ago I drafted out four possible answers, along with some notes on possible flaws in one approach or another. You've now seen the League examine all four. Those answers were:
1) Send the depowered Justice Lords back to their own Earth to stand trial. After all, that's where most of their crimes were committed.
2) Have them tried and convicted on the League's own Earth. That way, the League can keep a watchful eye on them.
3) Secretly imprison them without any nation's justice system knowing anything about it. (Looking back at my old notes, I see that I considered the Phantom Zone as one way to do that, but it isn't the only way, and when I researched this story by re-watching a few old episodes, including "The Doomsday Sanction," I noticed that Superman made it clear he will only use that option for real worst-case scenarios, such as a rampaging Doomsday. I decided that depowered enemies don't qualify as "worst-case" by a long shot.)
4) Mindwipe them to make sure they won't spill their guts about any really dangerous secrets they know (such as secret identities).
Some of the objections to 1) and 2) which have now come up in the course of this discussion were problems I hadn't really considered during my first look at the problem several months ago. I was also surprised when Superman finally insisted on giving each Justice Lord a choice between 3) and 4). Until then, I'd been thinking the League would just have to vote on it, and I was trying to figure out which heroes would vote one way and which would vote the other—but Superman pulled a fast one on me!
Chapter Three will be the end of this story. I already have it as a rough draft. Basically, we get a look at how the Justice Lords react when offered two unhappy options to choose from.