I appeared on the bridge of the Enterprise, and phasers were pointed at me. The bridge wasn't that much different than that of the Saratoga, even though from the outside it was a much larger ship although it was still dwarfed by the Borg cube.
The crew looked jumpy as I appeared. Apparently at least some people were upset about the whole mind control thing.
"This guy belongs to you, right?" I asked.
I had Locutus…no, Picard by my side. He was still stunned and in shock from everything that had happened. I'd learned the name of his ship from his mind, and they'd shown up after the battle was over. I'd have been more critical, but it looked like they'd already been in a fight.
Picard was still stunned and barely conscious. Even so, guilt almost radiated from him. He had given the Borg everything they needed to destroy ten ships and kill thousands of people. Without my intervention, it might have been billions of people.
The Federation had a hundred and fifty worlds and a lot more colonies. Their ships were spread out; forty were all that could make it to this site in time.
They either needed faster ships or more ships; both would be the best.
The Federation core worlds tended to be within a five hundred light year radius of Earth. Their colonies spread out in a four thousand light year radius, and there were a lot of holes in that area.
Considering that their ships seemed to average a light year an hour, that meant that it was going to be difficult to defend the whole thing. If it took two thirds of a year to get from Earth to the outskirts of their territory, they'd have trouble bringing a fleet together.
Their solution was to keep a lot of their fleet close to the border
They were stretched thin, and when that happened mistakes were made. It was already happening to me. Six or seven billion people were dead because I'd gotten distracted and hadn't gone back to visit zombie world for a couple of months.
One careless decision, and billions were dead, and the more worlds I visited, the more stretched thin I was going to get. It was only going to get easier for this kind of thing to happen again and again.
Letting that guilt cripple me would be counterproductive. I just had to make sure it didn't happen again.
A man with a beard stood up and asked, "Do you represent the Borg now?"
A glance in his mind showed that he was William Riker, temporary captain of this vessel while Picard was gone.
"No. The Borg in the cube are busy deciding who their representative will be. I'm terrible at politics, and so I refused when they asked."
Negotiations would probably take a long time, and I hardly had the time to spend weeks negotiating with politicians and lawyers, if they still had those.
"I'm sure the people were converted recently will want to be reinstated into their old lives," I said. "But there are others who have never been anything but Borg who are going to need some help."
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Taylor Hebert," I said, bowing as I gave Picard to a couple of security people. "Interdimensional traveler and protector of Earth."
"You're human then," he said.
He didn't really believe it. Starfleet had apparently encountered numerous races with powers like mine. I was instantly interested, although I kept my interest off my face.
What kind of power would I get from seemingly omnipotent aliens?
"Sort of?" I shrugged. "My people call us parahumans."
"She's scanning our minds," the woman beside him said. She was half-Betazoid and half human.
Races could interbreed here? That seemed weird; no matter how similar they seemed on the outside, internally they should be no more similar to us than the Harvesters.
"Please stop that," he said. He scowled. "There are rules most telepathic races abide by, the first of which is respecting people's privacy."
"Well, I haven't had these powers long," I said.
At his look, I shrugged.
"My people developed abilities thirty years ago; nobody knows why. I'm a little like the Borg in that I can copy the abilities of others. I can't do anything I want; I'm limited to the powers I've acquired, although the more I use them, the stronger they get."
Riker frowned.
"I don't harvest people's powers unwillingly, unless they're assholes," I said reassuringly. "Although if you have any people you can't heal with your technology, I'm willing to make a trade."
Riker frowned.
"What would you trade?"
"If they've got abilities I don't have, I'll do it for free. If they don't, I'm willing to accept technology, favors or money."
He seemed a little disgusted by that for some reason. Was medical treatment free here? I'd seen what healing people for free had done to Panacea; it couldn't be healthy.
"I'm responsible for two or three Earths, including one where humanity was almost wiped out by an asteroid. I'd love to get some terraforming equipment to remove the ash from the air and replant everything."
"You claimed to have technology beyond ours," he said suspiciously.
I sent an image of a design that would triple their top warp speed while not increasing the energy requirements too much. His human mind would retain the basics, but he wouldn't remember enough to use it.
His eyes widened.
"I can build these things, but it will take me time," I said. "Time I could be using to do other things. I have to build the tools to build the tools to make the things needed to build even a simple replicator. Do you know how long that would take with early twenty first century technology?"
I suspected that actual Tinkers used shortcuts; those were probably part of the reason that Tinkertech couldn't be duplicated. I certainly couldn't do that. Something like a replicator would give me a massive boost in actual tinkering.
"You should really at least buy my new design; your current warp design is damaging to the environment," I said. "You should probably check areas of space that have heavy traffic; it'll be noticeable there. There are some simple fixes that will prevent the damage."
"That's impossible," he said. "What could you possibly know about our warp drives?"
"The Borg know," I said, shrugging. "I read their minds. A couple of assimilated species already used drives similar to yours. They discovered the damage and used better technology."
Current Borg drives were only twenty times as fast as the Federation ships; if they didn't improve quickly by assimilating someone with better, it would take three years to arrive here from where they were.
But there were better drives, and chances were good they'd get one sooner than later.
Riker glanced at the viewscreen behind me. The damage to the Borg cube was already healing, the nanites already working.
I could tell what he was thinking.
"They would have chewed through this entire fleet like it was butter," I said. "If I hadn't intervened. I hope Earth's defenses are better than these ships, or you'd have been screwed."
"These are vessels of exploration," he said stiffly. "Not of war."
"Well, I think you'd better start building some vessels of war. Do they still have hornets on Earth?"
He nodded.
"What happens when you beat a hornet's nest with a stick?"
"Why would anybody do that?"
He seemed genuinely confused by the question. Weren't the children needlessly cruel like back at home? I'd seen kids pull the wings off flies just because they could. Hell, that was basically what Sophia had been doing to me.
"Well, imagine you didn't see the hornet's nest and you accidentally hit it. What would happen?"
"It wouldn't be good," he admitted.
"I just whacked the hornets' nest and dropped it on the ground, and the hornets are still alive. They're going to assume that I'm with you guys."
He stared at me.
"And that's why you took over all our minds?"
"I overestimated your ships' capabilities," I admitted. "I thought that surely somebody would have weapons worth a damn. When I saw you didn't, I used you all as a distraction."
"Mind control is not acceptable," he said. "Individual volition is sacrosanct."
"You wanted me to maybe let another eight thousand people die and then let however many people are on Earth be assimilated? There are three thousand dead crewmen who might still be alive if I'd gotten there sooner."
"We had a plan," he said.
He seemed convinced that whatever they'd planned would have worked, but the Enterprise hadn't arrived until everyone in the fleet would have died.
"I don't suppose I'll get to speak to your leaders?"
"You were able to take over minds over communication channels," he said. "Nobody is comfortable with the idea that you might try it again. I'm authorized to negotiate with you."
Everyone on the bridge was pretending that they weren't listening, but empathy alone was able to tell me differently.
Riker was offended by my mind control; probably because it had only affected half of them, and he'd been one of those who had been affected. It seemed to make him a little insecure.
"So, I hear that you guys don't use money," I said, trying to distract him.
"That's true," he said. "We work for self-satisfaction."
There was a sense of smugness about that. It was probably the thing I liked the least about these space hippies. They were good people, nice people, but they were utterly convinced that they were right.
"Even the guys standing outside my door and staring at the wall? That doesn't sound very satisfying." It also didn't seem very bright. They should have been facing the door to make sure I didn't come out and cut their throats. "Anyway, so that means everything is free?"
"Within reason."
"So, can I have a replicator, a power source, and a holodeck?"
"No," he said.
"If it's free, why not?"
"You may be warp capable; we have only your word for that, but your people are not. We do not interfere in the development of worlds that have not achieved warp drive on their own."
I somehow doubted I could have gotten those things even if I was a citizen.
"Even if those worlds would die without your help?"
He nodded.
"There are good, valid reasons for that."
"Well, if you protect a species by letting them die, it doesn't seem very valid to me. I guess I always figure it's better to at least try to help."
There were at least a few of the ensigns who actually agreed with me. The overall feeling was one of agreement however. It seemed weird to me. Maybe it was a cultural difference.
"Has that worked out for you?"
"I had one world die because I didn't intervene enough, but it's working out so far."
"And if you can't always be there? If they become dependent on you, they would die."
That was a weak argument; they might die if I helped them, but they would surely die if I didn't. I didn't belabor the point, though.
"You give them a leg up," I said. "I'm not going to support them forever. I think I get bored pretty easy."
Everyone except the security officers and Captain Riker, his second in command and the Betazoid were facing away from me. I could see through their eyes, however, and the pilot looked at the guy beside him and smirked.
"Could I get some books on space navigation then?" I asked. "Astronomical charts, things like that?"
"What?"
"The Borg don't have books. Their replicators don't even have the plans for books."
"The information is available on pads," he said. "Assuming we are willing to give them to you."
I shook my head.
"Maybe just the replicator schematics for books," I said. "Get that for me, and I can learn the ins and outs of Borg technology pretty quickly, and help you come up with counters for it."
I could tell he didn't understand why I needed books. The sheer number of books it would take to even begin to explain the technology to build a Federation ship would more then fill up its interior.
I didn't tell him why I needed them. I'd already told them enough anyway.
"What would you give us in return?"
"I can help return Federation citizens to normal faster. I've got a smoke that will disintegrate all matter; I can melt all the extra parts off them, and use my healing ability to regrow their limbs. It won't do anything for their internal implants, but it would speed the whole process up greatly."
"So, you plan to melt off parts of their bodies," he said.
"Just the robot parts," I said. "You've have to surround me with a force field, or my power would devour a lot of your ship."
I could tell that he didn't want to do that. I'd tell him that it was perfectly safe, but I doubted he'd believe me.
They' still have to replace the internal parts, but I would be able to restore any of the damage I did by removing parts pretty quickly.
"And the other Borg?"
"They might want to keep their implants, or at least some of them. I'm interested in seeing if some of their internal implants can be used to enhance normal humans."
His disapproval was growing for some reason.
"That kind of technology was forbidden a long time ago, for good reason."
"From what I've seen, most races in the galaxy are stronger than humans, except for the Ferengi. Some of them are smarter, faster, better. You don't complain about a Vulcan being twice as strong as a human. What's wrong with making a human that strong?"
"Vulcan strength is natural to their species. They have had millennia to get used to it. Humans can't handle that kind of power."
"Well, I guess the Eugenics wars are the reason you didn't have any good music after the 2020's," I admitted.
Even after 2020, records were sparse.
As more and more music and mass media had gone fully online, the destruction of the Internet in the Eugenics wars and later in World War 3 had meant that a lot of stuff had been lost.
Only things preserved in physical media like CD's or books had been preserved; purely online material had been forever lost.
This was why these people seemed so knowledgeable about twentieth century music and culture; it was the time period they had the best records of. Even by my time more and more stuff had existed purely online.
Their music and culture had been almost non-existent in the second half of the twenty first century, and after that, they'd been influenced by Vulcan music and by other alien music to the point that I didn't like it at all.
Well, some of the Vulcan music was ok, but Bolian music was terrible. It sounded like someone had dropped a squid in a blender.
"The Eugenics wars were committed by people from my generation," I said. "Even normal people in my time were obsessed with money and power. You don't think a culture as "advanced" as yours could handle augments?"
"We believe that everyone is equal," he said. "Everyone deserves an equal chance; augmentations are cheating."
"So, commander T'Pok is cheating when he uses Vulcan memory on exams?" I asked.
"No!" he said. He sounded irritated.
Arguing with him over policies he had no power to change was probably counterproductive, but I was starting to put Riker in the category of people I liked to mess with.
I had to remind myself that I needed these people's permission to get the terraforming equipment I needed. I could probably steal a replicator or two from the debris, but there weren't even any planets in this system.
"Also, you come from the twenty first century. What does that say about your desire for money and power?"
"Well, I do like getting new powers, but compared to everyone else I'm pretty top tier, so I don't really obsess over it that much. People keep trying to kill me, and that makes it easy to get new powers."
He looked like he wanted to know why people kept trying to kill me. If he irritated me enough, he'd find out eventually."
"As for money-I don't need to eat, I barely need to sleep, and there are nearly empty Earths I can sleep in if I really need it. I'm pretty much post scarcity all on my lonesome."
I'd do better now than I had in the past as a hobo. I could at least make a glass house.
Could these people replicate houses and ships yet? Somehow, I doubted it, otherwise they'd have been able to create a lot of ships in a short time as needed and launch them from Earth.
They could have created mostly automated ships that needed only a few crew.
Of course, then they couldn't bring their families and next generation movie theaters, and bars. Wow, these people liked their comforts.
"Anyway, the Borg will be coming to slaughter you all," I said. "You can ask the drones I freed and Captain Picard when he gets out of surgery."
Before he said anything, I said, "Well, I'm off to deborgify some interesting aliens. Talk to your bosses, and we can see what kind of a deal we can come to. Maybe send an ambassador or something.
I blinked back toward the cube, and I felt something wrench me off course.
"Well hello," I heard a voice say. "What do we have here?"
Out of the darkness stepped a man who looked exactly like my Dad.
My mind instantly tried to look into his; was this some kind of alternate version of my Dad?
He let me look inside his mind; and for a moment my mind was overwhelmed. Billions of years of memories, and a deep understanding of the universe so complete that my low galactic technology couldn't begin to understand it.
Suddenly I had trouble remembering what I'd seen, and I straightened back up.
"Interesting," he said. He circled me. "You're something new. I haven't seen anything new in a very long time."
"Could you please use some other form?" I asked.
There was a flash, and suddenly a short haired man wearing a Starfleet uniform stood before me. He bowed.
"You can call me Q," he said. "I am a Q from the Q continuum."
"Well, that's not confusing at all," I said.
"We haven't seen anything new in ten thousand years," Q said. He sounded fascinated. "And we've explored ten thousand different timelines and alternate realities. Most of them are just minor variations of the same thing."
I'd seen the horror of boredom in his mind; it was the one emotion that had come through clearly. Q and his people were trapped by their own immortality.
The power to do anything meant that there was nothing to strive for, and nothing meant anything. All sense of accomplishment, of discovery was long gone.
He was older than the universe; he'd been time traveling for billions of years in order to see everything and do everything.
On Earth, he might have wanted to visit ancient Rome, ancient China, India and the Americas all at the same time. With time travel he could.
But once he'd been everywhere interesting, where would he go?
"Well, I'm only fifteen, so everything seems new to me," I admitted. "And I've only been doing the cape thing for two or three months."
"Capes…" he said. "Interesting."
He was reading my mind; I could tell at least, but there was nothing I could do about it.
"I've been to two universes that had Capes," I said. "And I've heard of others."
"An entire section of the multiverse unexplored," he said. "Brought to us by someone who represents the worst of humanity."
"Well, pardon me for not being enlightened," I said peevishly.
I'd felt that sort of condescension from Riker, but I hadn't expected it from an advanced being.
"Your own people think you're pretty horrible," he said.
"Well, there's a lot of assholes on my world," I said. "Some people have issues with my response to that."
"You know, part of the reason we don't like the Borg is that they're boring. They're the Wal-Marts and the McDonalds of your own world. They edge out all the little Mom and Pop stores that are so much more interesting."
"All right," I said.
"You're a little like the Borg," he said. "Stomping around as if you own the world, still stuck in the petty mindset of your time."
"Well, if I live long enough, I'll bet I grow as boring and peaceful as you."
"I'm a rebel," he said.
"Actual rebels don't call themselves rebels," I said. "They just smack society in the balls and wait to see what happens."
"Crude little thing, aren't you?"
"Right," I said. "I guess the Federation doesn't swear anymore?"
"Swearing is the refuge of beings who can't think of what to say. Starfleet and the Federation never stop talking."
We smirked at each other for a moment.
I felt a brush against my mind.
"Are you stealing the locations of the universes from my mind?" I demanded. I could feel him rifling around in there, and it was uncomfortable.
He shrugged.
"Why would it bother you? You do it to other people all the time."
"I need it to protect myself!" I said defensively. "And I'm using it to protect people!"
Telepathy was too big of an advantage when facing unknown adversaries. I wasn't going to give it up.
"Well, my people are dying of boredom," he said. "Why is that any different?"
"I'm trying to defend multiple worlds! You're just doing it to annoy me."
He gave me a look.
"Well, I only annoy assholes," I said defensively.
"I'm sure it's a matter of perspective," he said.
Was he calling me an asshole? I could take it from Loki, but this guy barely knew me.
"And quite the little barbarian and mass murderer you are," he said.
"I'm sure the Federation thinks so," I said irritably. "And my own government. And most of my friends."
All of my friends? Except Loki. He'd been raised Asgardian, so a little mass murder probably didn't bother him that much.
He'd looked through my mind while I'd looked through his, and much more thoroughly.
"You already had the information from my mind the first time you looked through it," I said. "The second time was just to rub my face in it."
I was sure of that much.
"You're a little quicker on the uptake than some Federation officers I know."
Extending my senses in all directions, I could see no end to the void we were in. Where had we ended up?
"I don't suppose you'd let me beat you up?" I asked hopefully. "You look like the kind of person who would love a good beating."
He smirked.
"By the time you were able to, you wouldn't need to."
I'd seen enough in his mind to know that was probably true. He could kill me in an instant, or transform me into an amoeba, although for some reason I would still have my powers.
That fact irritated him.
It probably would keep him from actually transforming me. Nobody wanted a superpowered homicidal amoeba around.
"I don't recognize the source of your powers," he admitted. "But you've opened a few realities that we haven't explored yet, and that's interesting."
"So maybe you can resurrect my Dad?"
I could give him superpowers later. An easy opportunity like this wasn't something that could be passed up.
"Always trying to get your best advantage," he said. "How Ferengi of you."
I didn't know what he meant by that, but it sounded vaguely like an insult.
"Isn't it right that if I give you something of value, you should give me something of equal value?"
"And you consider the life of your father the equal to the restoration of an entire species?" he demanded.
He knew that I knew that his species was stagnating; without new information or new experiences, their species was slowly winding down.
"Yes," I said. "You could maybe throw in a replicator and scrubbing an atmosphere if you feel like you're cheating me. Maybe restoring a biome."
He chuckled.
"I'd forgotten how primitive the people of your era were," he said. "How greedy, how grasping."
I doubted that he'd forgotten. I'd had a glimpse in his mind, and it didn't seem that he'd forgotten a single thing over the past twenty billion years.
He was just saying it to be insulting.
"So, you guys are even bigger assholes than the Federation?" I demanded. "Are you going to kill me now?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Because otherwise I'll be paying you a visit in a while, when I'm strong enough," I said. "Not because I need to, but because you guys are annoying."
"By the time you're strong enough, you won't want to anymore," he said seriously. "It's the curse of unlimited power and time."
"I wouldn't mind getting a little of that," I admitted. "Taking care of the Endbringers, Scion, if he's really the cause of all our problems."
"And let's say you had the power of a Q," he asked. "Would you wipe out entire species that were a threat to your people?"
"No?" I said. "I'd do what I could to make sure they never came in conflict with us."
"But doing that might lead to other species growing that were even worse," he said.
For once he seemed dead serious.
"The more powerful you are, the greater the consequences of your tiniest action. If you can destroy a solar system by sneezing, you end up moving very carefully."
"I have nothing to say to that," I said, although I could see his point. If I'd gotten some minor power like bug control, I probably wouldn't have been responsible for an entire world falling to a zombie apocalypse just because I got bored and didn't go back for a while.
It would have still happened, but I wouldn't have felt guilty about it.
"I accidentally destroyed the dinosaurs on your planet once," he said. "I made sure that some of them were transported to a different world, but they were supposed to evolve into a tremendous civilization, one that brough peace to the galaxy."
"They were destroyed in my world too," I said. "Maybe it was inevitable."
"Maybe," he said. "But I knew the civilization that would have resulted. I loved them. Now I have to make do with a set of monkeys."
"You look like a monkey yourself," I said.
"You couldn't handle my true form," he said. He frowned. "Actually, from what I saw, you just wouldn't remember it clearly."
"Gamer's mind," I said. "Don't leave home without it."
Looking around, I saw that we were in an utterly black area of space.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"The Delta Quadrant," he said. "An area of space where light does not penetrate. I've provided air because you still aren't used to telepathic communications."
"The Delta Quadrant?"
"Sixty thousand light years away from Earth," he said. "I could have taken you to another galaxy."
"So, what are you going to do with me?"
"Nothing," he said. "Your entry into this universe created an entirely new timeline. It's going to be entirely different from what the rest of us have seen before."
He sent me an image.
In a limited universe, with the exact same people, there were only so many ways things could go without outside intervention.
I was that kind of intervention.
"I'm going to explore a few universes," he said. "And then I'll be back. The rest of the Continuum is going to be watching you."
I suddenly felt the presence of hundreds of minds.
"We'll be following your exploits with some interest," he said. "And I might pop in from time to time."
Right.
They were anxious to explore the new worlds. Q was probably going to be a billion years older the next time I saw him, and bored again.
A moment later, I was back on the Borg cube.
They hadn't given me anything at all, and they'd interrupted me just to be dicks. Was everybody in this universe a dick? Either world assimilating dicks or peaceful dicks.
Was my power attracted to worlds where people were jerks, or was Q right, and I was the jerk?
No.
The Q and the Federation thought they were right; I knew I was.
Turning to the nearest Borg, a Vulcan named T'Kal, I asked, "Has everybody decided yet?"
They were still in the process of deciding who their leaders would be, but a vocal contingent of the people only recently assimilated wanted to be freed.
"All right," I said. "Federation citizens first, then Klingons."
Those were the people who had ships outside, and I was going to prove my capabilities to them.
The message went out throughout the cube. They didn't have any kind of speaker system; the Borg had never needed one. They'd all heard me singing, which meant I could communicate with all of them individually if I wanted. I communicated with some in each section and had them tell the others.
"We've got the force fields set up," T'Kal said.
I nodded. The Borg could walk through their own force fields, so I wouldn't even have to stop healing them.
I filled the area with disintegrating smoke, and once I did, T'Kal was the first to walk inside. His prosthetic devices immediately began to disintegrate, and once they were gone, I healed him.
The smoke covered both of us; I didn't need to see to sense where he was, so the fact that we were both nude didn't bother me.
The Borg at a nearby console transported him away. "Thirty seconds," he called out.
He'd once been a Starfleet engineer before retiring.
"Keep them coming," I called out.
The next Borg was apparently an Aenar; they were a blind strongly telepathic species that shared a planet with the Andorians.
TELEPATHY HAS INCREASED BY 2 LEVELS!
YOU NOW CAN READ MINDS IN A 2 MILE RADIUS!
LEVEL 12!
I repeated the process with at least twenty humans, three Vulcans and six Klingons before I found another race that I had not encountered before.
He was a Denobulan.
NEW POWER CREATED!
SLEEP RESISTANCE!
YOU HAVE A 10% PER LEVEL OF RESISTING SLEEP EFFECTS AND YOUR NEED FOR SLEEP IS HALVED AT EACH LEVEL.
YOU NOW ONLY NEED ONE AND A HALF HOURS OF SLEEP PER DAY!
LEVEL 1.
That was handy. I barely had enough time as it was; gaining an extra ten hours a week might make a lot of difference. I was wasting twenty-one hours a week already.
After that it was mostly humans, with a scattering of Vulcans and Andorians. I would have expected a better mix of races; apparently colonies tended to be predominantly of one or two races.
After an hour and a hundred and twenty recovered Borg, I re-clothed myself, blinked over to the Enterprise, and I stole a couple of shuttles. While the recovered Borg loaded themselves into the first and second shuttles, I went back and stole two more shuttles.
I had unloaded the first two shuttles in the shuttle bay when Riker came with a contingent of security personnel.
"I'm bringing your citizens back," I said. "I removed all their external parts, but they still need some internal work."
"You can't just drop ex-drones on this ship!" he barked out.
"Hold that thought," I said. I blinked away with two shuttles and returned with two more.
"You were saying?" I asked, as forty more ex-drones began to unload themselves.
"They're going to have to be checked to see if their nano-probes are still active!" he said. "And some of them may still be compromised by the Collective."
"This is Angie Everman," I said. "She was a Starfleet ensign until she left to join a colony with her husband."
Pointing at another ex-drone, I said, "George Johnson. He was a medic who tried to help people escape from the Borg until he was overcome."
"These people are heroes," I said. "And citizens of your own government. I'm not asking you to give asylum to Bolians or something."
"Bolians are Federation citizens," he barked.
"Well, I figured you'd probably exiled them for that awful Bolian Blues. Or maybe Bolian chili."
"Bolian Blues are a well-respected musical art form!" he said defensively. "And nobody but Bolians can even eat Bolian chili. How do you know all this?"
He actually had a set of files on the computer based on his love of Bolian Blues.
"I wanted to try something new," I admitted. "And the computer didn't warn me."
"You actually ate…"
"It gets better after the first twenty bites or so," I admitted. "Once you adapt to all the acid. Give me a second."
I blinked away with another set of shuttles and I returned with two different ones a moment later.
"Would you stop doing that?" he demanded. "We're going to have to make places and quarantine them until we can be sure they are safe for everyone to be around."
"How's Picard?" I asked.
"He's still in surgery," Riker said.
I frowned.
"So, it's going to take a while to de-borgify everyone. Well, I'm done here for the moment. Have your medical people tell me if what I did is speeding things up at all. If it's not, I won't bother."
"The Federation will have an ambassador here in four hours," Riker said.
"Well, that'll be enough time for you to help all these people," I said. "I'm going to ten forward to get a drink."
Before he could respond, I was in the bar at the front of the ship.
The view of the destruction outside was truly breathtaking, and the people who were here were quiet and subdued.
"Hey, what's it cost to get a drink around here?" I asked, sliding up to the bar.
There was a black woman behind the bar wearing an interesting headpiece.
"It's all free," the woman said. "But you already know that."
I touched her mind.
She was hundreds of years old; I only caught a glimpse of her mind before it slammed shut.
"It's impolite to go places where you are uninvited," she said firmly.
"You've met Q before?" I asked.
Her face tightened.
"We've met."
"He's kind of an ass," I said.
"Not all of his species are like that," she admitted.
"So, could I get something alcoholic?" I asked.
"Would it even affect you?" she asked. "After all, from what I've heard you can fly in space."
Someone had seen me on the outside of the Borg cube?
"No," I said. "But my last meal was Bolian chili, and I'd like something I haven't had before that's actually edible."
"I'm surprised you could eat it," she said. "Most humans can't."
"Yeah," I said. "Well, I could eat things a Bolian couldn't, but I still have taste buds. I don't have to eat, but I enjoy it."
"I might be able to come up with some exotic things for you to enjoy."
She produced some dishes she called Ratamb Stew, Uttaberry crepes, I'danian spiced pudding and Denobulan sausages.
"These aren't made out of Denobulans, are they?" I asked, prodding at them gingerly. "Because the Denobulan Borg I met seemed perfectly nice."
"We haven't reached a point where cannibalism is acceptable," she said. "But no Borg is ever nice. The person you met wasn't a Borg. They were a Denobulan who had been mutilated and abused."
I continued eating, and she said, "Did you find any El-Aurans on the cube you were in?"
"There were like 79,000 drones on the ship. I've only partially healed about a hundred and twenty. I wouldn't know. If I hear of any, I'll let you know."
"The Borg destroyed my home world a long time ago," she said.
"Well, I'd imagine that some of your species is free right now, at least for the moment," I said. "At least they're getting a chance to fight for their freedom."
They wouldn't win; I was pretty sure of that. The best they'd be able to do was run.
"Thank you for that," Guinan said. "Do you enjoy the food?"
"I hardly eat at all anymore!" I said. "But this food is great!"
Everyone in Ten Forward was watching us while pretending not to listen in on our conversation. Empathy told me that, as well as the fact that almost everyone had stopped speaking.
"People tell me that I'm a good listener," she said.
Was she a spy for the Federation? How much could I share with her? Should I speak at all?
I was really only in here in the first place to annoy Riker.
Still, something made me say, "Well, I'm trying to terraform a ruined version of Earth."
Letting them know that couldn't hurt, could it?
"It seems like a lot of responsibility for a fifteen-year-old," Guinan said. "Do you have any help?"
"Uh…maybe? I've got custody of a Norse god who tried to take over a different Earth…don't even ask. He helps sometimes when he feels like it."
I saw a couple of the nearest crewmen react to that, but Guinan's face never changed. She'd probably seen stranger things.
"That sounds like another responsibility. Do you have anyone else?"
"My mom died a couple of years ago in a car accident. My dad…died two or three months ago."
"You have no other family?"
"Not living," I said. "I had a couple of friends of my Dad who might have taken me in, but they were murdered too."
"Your father was murdered?"
A Betazoid crew woman entered the room and sat down at the end of the bar. I had no doubt that she'd been sent by Riker to get a look at my emotional state.
Well, as long as I told the truth, I could give them an advance warning of the things I wanted. Was that a disadvantage, or was that just giving them a chance to better meet my needs?
For the first time I wished I'd brought Loki, although he probably would have ended up Borg-ified.
"My home world had…some problems. It's got giant monsters that destroy cities and kill a third of the parahumans who try to stop them. It's a lot worse than this planet was at the same time period."
"You didn't have people rounded up and put into camps?"
I'd read about the Bell Riots in their version of 2024. I was amazed that their government would be willing to even try to provide for the homeless, even if it ended up going terribly wrong.
"We had entire cities quarantined," I said. "One of the monsters could see the future and she could leave…suggestions in the minds of people that made any of them potential bombs."
"They'd explode?" she asked.
"Some of them would go on mass murder sprees. Others would do something seemingly innocuous…say just the wrong words to a person who was suicidal for example to set him off. She could set off a chain of causality where people two or three layers distant from her victims ended up creating a disaster."
"How long had that been going on?"
"All my life. My world is dying slowly, and I want to do something about it."
"And the people on this asteroid Earth?"
"They deserve a chance to have their world back," I said.
"Why not ask the people you saved from the alien invasion for help?" Guinan asked. "I'm sure they'd be willing to provide resources."
"Maybe," I admitted. "But they're busy getting ready for the next invasion…kind of like these people here should be doing," I said, raising my voice a little. "Also, there's still a zombie virus floating around on that world, and the vaccine causes an annoying genital itch. I can't just spread it around on Harvester Earth without asking."
The Brockton Bay dockworkers had already had the vaccine anyway because of the virus outbreak.
"It sounds as though you try to do everything yourself," Guinan said neutrally.
"What else can I do?" I said. "Nobody else seems to want to do anything! My people have given up; they're just waiting to die. The government is corrupt and wouldn't do a thing about a normal man being murdered, because they need criminal parahumans to throw at Endbringers."
"There are places like that in this universe," Guinan said. "Not in the Federation; not being a terrible place is a condition of membership."
"Well, my world would never make it," I admitted. "We don't even war between nations that much anymore because we're too busy fighting among ourselves."
"Then ask for help outside your world," she said.
"The asteroid people are nice, but they're helpless. The people attacked by the Harvesters are desperately trying to build up their world's defenses because they're going to be overwhelmed. The other cape world…well, I haven't had much of a chance to explore it, but Loki's not welcome back because he tried to conquer it."
"And so, you feel like you are the only one who can help."
"I don't see anybody else universe jumping," I said. "Even if they wanted to help, they're stuck in their own little corner of the multiverse. They lack perspective."
"So, you feel that seeing multiple universes gives you perspective?"
"Yeah."
"Some think that leaving their home solar system gives a culture a new perspective," Guinan said. "Makes them stop paying attention to their petty differences and focus on the greater universe."
"You're going to tell me that's why Starfleet has that Prime Directive," I said. "It's just an excuse to not help. I've seen it all my life…my school administration, the PRT, the law. Nobody helps, and they all have an excuse as to why."
"What happens when a technologically superior culture interacts with a less advanced one?" Guinan asked. "What happened throughout your entire history?"
"Either they take it over, or the less advanced culture copies the more advanced one, and their culture changes," I said.
Actually, it would be for the best in my world's case. The Federation might be smug, but they took care of their people. There was no bullying in their schools, their prisons were meant for rehabilitation and their government seemed to actually represent the people for the most part.
"Most worlds have times like this, where imperial powers overrun their neighbors," Guinan said.
"So, like McDonalds or Wal-Mart," I said. At her questioning look I said "Megacorporations that come in and wipe out the competition until they're all that's left."
She nodded.
"It doesn't mean they won't help," she said. "There are exceptions to the Prime Directive. You might fall into one of those exceptions. Even if you don't, it only applies to Starfleet and the Merchant Marine. It doesn't apply to ordinary Federation citizens."
"That's kind of ridiculous," I said. "You mean if I was a citizen, and I wanted to set myself up as a god on some Podunk planet, that'd be ok?"
"Most citizens don't have their own starships," Guinan said. "And while the Prime Directive does not apply, they must follow their own laws about how to treat other people. Claiming to be a god would fall under a dozen laws, including fraud and enslavement among others."
"So, the Ambassador I'm seeing…will he be a Starfleet ambassador?"
She shook her head.
"They know what you want, so they'll send an ambassador who can afford to be more flexible."
So, it was possible the civilian government was a little more flexible than their military.
I felt better suddenly.
They'd probably set it up that way because Starfleet was the organization most likely to interact with alien species.
By appearing to be neutral in everything, they appeared less threatening to their neighbors. That would reduce the number of wars they had. If there was something they really wanted, the civilian government could take care of it behind the scenes.
Sneaky, but not really ethically terrible.
Of course, I was a mass murderer, so it was possible that my idea of what was moral could be skewed.
"I think they're worried about your ability to mind control an entire fleet at the same time," Guinan said. "It's not an ability that they've had much experience with."
"I copy powers," I said shrugging. "Sometimes if you get a couple of powers that have the right kind of synergy, you get an entirely new power."
"Still," she said. "Telepaths are not uncommon here, but mind controllers are. It's considered a fundamental abuse of a person's right to free will."
"I did it to help them," I said.
"Still," she said. "Imagine that the monster who required entire cities to be quarantined…imagine that she was benevolent."
I frowned.
A benevolent Simurgh wasn't something I'd ever even imagined.
"She flies over cities, and people are in the right place at the right time to make the world a little better. She makes people heroes who would otherwise stand by and watch injustice being done. How would people feel about that?"
My first response was to say that people would be grateful, but my knowledge of human nature told me they wouldn't. They'd resent her.
If they performed a heroic action, they'd always question whether they'd done it because they were heroes, or if it had just been the Simurgh's song. They'd wonder if that person who'd been in the right place at the right time was really caring, or if they'd just been manipulated.
It would lessen the value of heroism and free will, but would that matter if the world became a good place otherwise?
"People will always be grateful to be alive," I said finally. "If they're alive, you can apologize later."
"That's true," she said. "But don't hold their hesitance against them. It's humanoid nature."
"They'll be sending a telepath as an ambassador, won't they?" I asked.
"Most likely," she said serenely.
"It'll need to be a three-way discussion. The Borg drones have just as much of a right to determine their destiny as I do. They're electing a leader as we speak."
Her face twisted.
"I never imagined the Borg as having an election."
"They aren't Borg," I said. "Not anymore. Half of them are from Delta Quadrant races, and they'll never be able to see their people again."
"Most likely they don't have a people anymore," she said.
I felt a moment of pain from her before she shut it away.
"So, it's not like you can just drop them off on a planet somewhere and take their ship. For one thing they still have their ship, and they can still run it, even without the collective. I'm not helping if the Federation decides to trample on their rights."
"You can trust that the Federation will do it's best to safeguard that."
Hopefully so.
If not, I'd have one more responsibility to deal with. I'd be happy to take a Borg replicator, but they didn't really use theirs for the same things the Federation had. There was no need for fancy foods or consumer goods with the Borg.
I wanted the human replicator data as much as anything. Objects to be replicated had been scanned into the computer. They had hundreds of thousands or millions of designs in their computers.
Could I simply beam the dust out of Cannibal Earths sky, and then use that as material to supply the replicators?
"My advice to you is to not try to carry the sky on your own shoulders," Guinan said. "Find people to help you manage the burden, and focus on what you do best."
"Beating people up to get access to their powers?" I asked.
"Hopefully that's not all you are good at," she said firmly.
"I asked Q if he'd let me beat him up. He thought that by the time I was strong enough I wouldn't want to. I think he's wrong."
She smirked.
"Well, it's been fun," I said. "But I've got to get back to the cube. You should tell the Betazoid to hold back on the chocolate. It's going to make her fat."
"They've cured obesity," Guinan said.
I stared at her. I could think of several ways to do it, but the Federation wasn't into genetic engineering. It had to have been social engineering, or maybe all their food was low fat.
Or maybe their psychologists were so good people no longer needed to use food as compensation for something else. It was probably a combination of everything.
Or maybe that's why hardly anybody on the ship had chairs.
"I'll talk to you later," I said. "The food was good, and you've been the nicest person I've talked to from the Federation. Captain T'Pok wasn't bad."
I threw that out there because if they were going to send me a telepath, they might as well give me one that couldn't read me from half a solar system away.
Also, a Vulcan might be less of a jerk to me, or to ignore whatever jerk-itude that Loki and Q seemed to think I had.
Returning to the Borg cube, I stopped a nearby Borg. A glance in his mind showed that he was a Kelpien, a species with enhanced senses.
"Hey, are you ready to be changed over?"
He nodded.
There weren't that many different races other than Human and Vulcan, but I'd put the call out for new Federation species to come to the front of the line.
"Do you guys have everything ready?"
He spoke into a communicator on his chasse. They'd been replicating them like crazy, based on a Starfleet design since the ship didn't have its own communication system.
They set up the force field, and I suddenly wondered if I could use a hard light projector to give me clothes so they wouldn't be blown off me all the time. I could use small drones to project the holograms from a relatively safe distance away. It might take several of them to get me from all sides, and I'd probably want more than I'd need for redundancy.
Or maybe I could just beat Alucard up and get his ability to have his clothes regenerate. That's be cool.
There were only five people from other races who were from Federation space.
The first was a Kelpien, a species that had enhanced senses. I was pleased to finally get enhanced vision.
NEW POWER CREATED!
ENHANCED VISION! YOU CAN NOW SEE OBJECTS TEN TIMES FARTHER AWAY PER LEVEL! OTHER VISUAL ENHANCEMENTS WILL BE COVERED UNDER THIS ABILITY AS THEY ARE ACQUIRED!
Ten times the vision would be helpful in traveling through space. It'd take a few more levels before I could really use it for interstellar blinking though.
The next alien was a surprise. It wasn't a humanoid at all. It looked like a mound of rock, although it was moving. The Borg had attached mechanical pieces to it, but they looked ill fitting, as though they hadn't quite been sure what to do with it.
Apparently, it was a Horta; it had been on one of the colonies working as a miner.
As it phased through the force field, it shuddered as the implants that were covering it vanished.
I healed it, touching the fluids coming from its wounds. It was a silicon-based life form, and it felt oddly different than the other creatures I'd gained power from.
NEW POWER CREATED!
TUNNELING! YOU MAY MOVE THROUGH EARTH AND STONE AT YOUR RUNNING SPEED! YOU WILL LEAVE BEHIND A TUNNEL IN YOUR SHAPE AS YOU DO SO!
I could see that to be useful. At the very least I'd be able to build root cellars in the cannibal world, and given my running speed I'd be able to do it pretty quickly.
It took several minutes to heal the Horta. Apparently, it was pretty tough. I wondered if Horta would be willing to do services for healing.
None of the next three had anything useful; I was disappointed.
After dismissing the smoke and reclothing myself, I turned to the nearest full Borg.
His human name had been Jared Williams, and he'd been a colonist.
"What's the easiest way for me to get back to Earth?" I asked. "I can survive in space, and teleport and all that, but it's pretty easy to get lost out there."
"Take a shuttle?" he said after a moment. "This close to Earth, they've probably all got charts. You'd better watch out for the systems defenses; they can be pretty nasty inside the solar system."
He didn't actually know that; he simply assumed it was true. It was probably at least a decent assumption.
"Hey, while you guys are at it, could you start trying to transport me for a bit?"
A few minutes later, I stood and I saw light surrounding me.
-99 HP!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
This was perfect. They'd stop whenever I needed to so I could regenerate, and I'd gain thirty points of physical resistance in my base form. That'd make me a thousand times as hard to hurt in both forms, and I'd be part way towards resisting spaceship weapons.
I was going to need that if I was going to fight Endbringers. My lack of damage abilities still bothered me, but at the very least I could act as a meat shield to save the other fighters.
The whole thing took thirty minutes, and by the time I was done, I felt a lot better about my chances of surviving a shuttlecraft explosion.
I blinked back to the Enterprise.
"Hey Riker," I said. "I need to pick up a friend on Earth to help with the negotiations. I'm gonna borrow a shuttlecraft."
I enjoyed the outraged look on his face.
Blinking to pick up a shuttlecraft, I blinked it in the direction I thought Earth was in. It took only 6 jumps before I was an hour away, far beyond any of the ships ability to catch up.
It took me ten minutes to crack their encryption and another five to plot a course to Earth. Some of their programming was counterintuitive- probably a result of Vulcan influence or something.
I quickly realized that I'd ended up going in the wrong direction.
I blinked back into the system, and the communicator was blinking; my guess was that Riker wanted to open a dialogue. It had been blinking for a while. I just hadn't noticed it.
A moment later I was through the system.
Within forty jumps I was on the outskirts of the solar system.
I barely managed to dodge as the system detected weapons aimed at me.
Planewalking over to Earth Bet's system, I was landing on the moon.
"Hey Loki!" I said. "Look outside! I've got a cool ride to another universe! It's just a rental, but maybe I can get them to throw it in for free!"
Loki was in the lagoon room, sunning himself under the sunlamps. The entire wall was a television screen. It had been meant to project backgrounds like beaches or jungles, but I'd easily converted it to catch television. We could only get signals that were line of site, and that changed pretty often, but he could get national broadcasts; I had set up a program that would catch the same channel on different stations and almost seamlessly integrate them.
You couldn't get anything over the oceans, but I could probably set up my own communication satellites for that.
I wondered if that might be profitable.
For some reason he was watching MTV wearing a swimsuit. His efforts to tan weren't working all that well.
"What happened to the music videos?" he asked.
"They had music videos?" I stared at him, then shrugged. "Get dressed; I've got a job for you as an ambassador to an army of ex-homicidal cyborgs.
He stood up and a moment later he was dressed.
Was he just nude all the time and used illusion to pretend to be dressed, or did he have some kind of Asgardian clothes?
"Genocidal cyborgs," I corrected myself. Once they'd become Borg, the species itself would be gone.
"So, business as usual," he said.
"I'm sure you'd love to have access to our technology without giving anything up," Loki drawled. "But that's not going to happen."
Ambassador Suvok's expression didn't change.
Apparently almost a third of Vulcan males had a name beginning with an S in honor of some important figure in their past.
"There are issues with giving technology to cultures who are not yet ready for it."
"Taylor's got better," Loki said. "I've got better."
"She's admitted that she plans to give it to twenty first century citizens," he said. "People who still war among themselves and haven't gained wisdom by almost destroying themselves."
"We're perfectly willing to give Taylor any Borg technology she wants," Tanner Jacobs said, "Including the technology to revive her dead father."
He'd been a Maquis in his former life, and I hadn't yet removed any of his implants.
The Borg could apparently revive anyone within ninety hours of their death with specialized nanoprobes.
"It would seem like revivification technology would be worth a great deal to the Federation," Loki said. "I understand that your ensigns tend to have a… limited shelf life."
I'd read the minds of some of the ensigns assigned to away missions. Apparently, there was an appreciable death rate while exploring, and the officers tended to send the ensigns ahead.
Was it a sort of Darwinist philosophy, where the ensigns who survived were the smartest, toughest ones and they ended up as the officers?
"There are unavoidable dangers to first contact with new worlds," Suvok said. "And admittedly there are factions within the Federation that would be intrigued by the thought of such technology…but not at the expense of our principals."
"Well, I can get the technology I need from the Borg cube," I said. "And from what I've been reading, the Ferengi would be happy to sell me what I want in return for curing some of their members of incurable diseases. My question is what will happen to these people?"
"Those who were Federation members will be returned to their former lives," Suvok said. "You have already begun that process yourself."
"So, what about the thirty thousand ex-Borg who were not Federation members?"
"They have invaluable information about the Delta quadrant," Suvok said. "Federation scientists will likely spend the next several years studying their cultures and knowledge."
"Living like lab rats," Loki said. He shook his head. "You might as well kill them now. What happens when they run out of valuable information? Will you simply discard them?"
"The Federation does not simply discard people," Suvok said.
I scowled; this was boring. They'd give me what they gave me, and then I'd end up getting what I wanted from the Klingons, the Cardassians or some unaffiliated species.
The next three days were hell.
Eventually we came to an agreement. I was given a Federation shuttlecraft. It was only capable of Warp 2, which was apparently eight times light speed. It was mostly used for interplanetary travel. You could fit twelve people inside, if they were cozy, but you wouldn't want to keep more than four people inside for long trips.
They also gave me a full database for the small replicator on the shuttle. It had a small transporter on board as well.
The ex-Borg would be allowed the use of a colony world further inside the borders of the Federation. It was a colony that had been destroyed by some sort of space monster.
It was weird that this sort of thing seemed to happen all the time. The only reason that the ensigns died off so often was that this whole universe was filled with eldritch space aliens.
The whole thing was exciting really. What kind of powers would I get from crystalline space entities or salt absorbing aliens or even from Tribbles?
It made me want to go on an extended safari, but I couldn't. The location of most of the horrors was currently unknown, they were dead, or they were weeks away even by starship.
The one thing the Federation had not done was agreed to ferry me around.
The Borg gave me an industrial size replicator, the nanites to revive my father, and a small generator to power them. Even with heavy, industrial use it would last for five years before needing to refueled.
In return, I showed Starfleet simple modifications to their engines that would double their speed, and I gave them other modifications that would increase their shield strength by a factor of four.
I also gave them blueprints for a more powerful power system; it took me the three days of the discussion to write them up, showing the limitations of my ability.
Even with the knowledge in my head there was only so fast that I could type or draw. What I needed was a power that let me set my thoughts onto a sheet of paper.
Maybe using the water in ink to set up the plans? I wasn't sure it would work, but I'd need to see what I could do. My first attempt had separated the water from the ink, and that hadn't worked at all.
"I'm glad to be out of here," Loki said. "These people are like eating pure sugar; they make your teeth ache."
"You probably shouldn't have tried to needle the Vulcan," I said. "They're pretty hard to rile up. Riker on the other hand was pretty easy. He seemed pretty annoyed with me."
Loki smirked.
A glance in his head showed that he lumped me in with Q for some reason, which I found insulting. Q was a genuine ass, while I was only occasionally insulting.
"I don't suppose you know anybody in the Nine realms with water control powers?"
He frowned.
"There's a sea giant, Aegir," he admitted. "He's allied with Odin though, so he might frown on you taking advantage of him."
I was in the same situation about the capes who I knew had water powers. One of them worked for Accord, and there was one I knew about who was in the Protectorate.
Maybe the Protectorate hero would show up for the next Endbringer fight, but I wasn't sure that was going to happen. He lived in California, and it was most often local capes who showed up.
I blinked several times; I had the permission of the Federation as long as I stayed outside the orbit of Pluto and I didn't try to make any transmissions.
A moment later we were in orbit of the Cannibal world Earth's solar system. I decided to actually take a look at the asteroid belt. Something had caused the asteroid to hit Earth, and I wanted to make sure that no other asteroids had been thrown out of orbit and were likely to cause problems.
The Federation's sensor systems were top notch, at least for their technological level. Even this shuttlecraft was able to scan the entire system and make estimations.
I spent the next hour working on calculations.
"There's a couple of asteroids likely to hit the Earth in the next twenty years or so," I said. "I'll need to take care of them."
It'd be pretty easy to deal with them with my Horta powers. I'd be able to move through any part of the asteroid that wasn't metal. Once I'd destroyed all the parts of the asteroid that weren't metal, I'd break it down into chunks I could handle.
"I'm going to have to talk to some mining companies," I said. "Or maybe just smelters."
I didn't know enough about the mining industry to know who you sold metal ore to. There were likely precious metals as well as iron mixed in, and I was sure that people would want to take advantage of it.
We blinked, and quickly enough we were back at the encampment.
Even from above, I could see an army of cannibals. The army was composed of twenty men, but that was about the best you could get.
"You can land this, right?" I asked Loki.
He looked at me, then at the controls, then shrugged.
"It'll be fine," I said. "The controls are so simple a child could use it."
"You were flying it," he said.
"I'm just freshly minted. You're so old that I think I saw your portrait in some cave art."
He actually preened at that.
"And yet I've kept my figure."
"The Federation has cured obesity," I said. Using telekinesis, I absently lifted one of the cannibals two hundred feet in the air and dropped him. "Apparently it has something to do with diet food and a lack of chairs."
"I'm older than chairs," he said.
"I'm sure," I said dryly. Chairs were around five thousand years old.
I blinked out of the shuttle, and I was in the middle of the cannibals. I could hear Canary singing, and most of the men were standing and staring.
The two who weren't were hard of hearing.
They all had guns, although they didn't have much in the way of ammunition. They'd used everything they had to acquire them. They could apparently smell the food cooking, and they were desperate.
They'd killed all of the human prey in the area, and they were finally starving.
A quick Bone Garden killed them all, just in time for the man I'd lifted into the air to fall on top of the bone spikes and die in agony.
I could feel Canary's horror. The citizens weren't nearly as judgmental. For all that they hadn't engaged in cannibalism, all of them had been forced to fight for their lives, and they all hated the cannibals.
The bone garden would actually help to protect against cannibal incursions.
I turned the corpse into even more bones a moment later.
A moment's thought, and I blinked to the base of the wall. A moment later I sank into the earth and I began to run around the wall, careful not to undermine it.
It took several rotations to create a moat around the wall twenty feet deep and twenty feet wide. It would make ramming the walls impossible and would also make it hard for individual cannibals to just scale the walls at night.
Loki had chosen to land the shuttlecraft in the middle of the square, apparently using a tractor beam to move the tables there. That surprised me.
I'd have expected him to have landed directly on them.
"Your voice should grace the heavens," Loki said. He was standing a little too close to Canary, and she was staring up at him. He was wearing his green outfit, with the leather and the bracers on his arm.
He took her hand, and he kissed her knuckles.
I stared at them both.
Was he serious, or was he trying some kind of con?
Weirdly enough, empathy showed that he was attracted to her, and intuitive empathy showed that Canary was even more attracted to him.
She'd had boyfriends in the past, but since receiving her powers, most of them had been trying to cash in on her powers. She'd always been self-conscious about the feathers in her hair. She felt that it was a deformity.
It reminded too many people of the Simurgh. That, along with the nature of her power had meant that she had received some abuse from people in the past.
She'd heard enough about Loki from these people to know that he was a cape too.
"Are you really a prince?" she asked.
"A prince of Asgard," he said, releasing her hand.
She seemed almost disappointed.
"Are you all right?" I asked, walking up to them. I glared at Loki before smiling at Canary.
"These people are…nice," she said. "Nicer than I expected, even if this place is…poor."
"I intend to fix that," I said. "I've just been busy."
Looking up at the mountain, I frowned.
I didn't want to give the replicator to Blasto. He'd probably use it to replicate massive amounts of weed and the villagers wouldn't get access to it.
However, leaving it on the ground seemed risky. Kids were hell on electronics, and I had a feeling that they'd break it within a week.
Replicators and transporters were similar, but different. Replicators didn't have the resolution to create living things, but they were able to hold the designs for hundreds of thousands of things in memory.
Transporters used the same amount of memory to replicate a single living being. The state of computer technology in the Federation wasn't good enough to store multiple imprints of the same person, so they wiped the information when they started transporting someone else.
Replicators required materials too, and a lot of energy. Federation ships used non-transporter related ways to move things like water because it was cheaper in terms of power than transforming everything.
There was a slurry specifically designed to be easiest for the replicators to use. They could use other materials, but the energy requirements went up.
I floated up over the village, and I plunged into the rock face of the cliff. Soon I'd hollowed out a cave ten feet wide by twenty feet deep. I placed the replicator and its power source from my inventory.
I hollowed out another cave closer to the ground. I used my glassmaking abilities to create a massive tank to hold the slurry, and then I released thirty tons of slurry from Inventory. The tank held.
A little programming to the replicator to let it know where to get materials from, and everything was set.
When I ran out of slurry, I could use other things, but the farther I got from what was in the tank molecularly, the more energy the replicator would use.
I used my hands to cut stairs in the rock leading up to the replicator.
Having to walk fifty feet up the stairs would keep them from being frivolous with the replicator. I'd put hand rails to keep them from falling a little later when I had the time.
The end of the stairs came out next to William's house. He was the headman, and so I'd hold him responsible for keeping people from going crazy with the replicators.
Everyone had already gathered around the shuttlecraft, oohing and awwing as though they'd never seen tinkertech. It took me a moment to realize that they hadn't
"With this device, we can create anything your heart desires," Loki said to Canary.
"Don't let anybody touch anything!" I called out irritably. "We only get one of these, and I'm not sure what I can trade the Ferengi."
From what I'd heard, Ferengi technology was inferior anyway, although they'd been known to steal from other races and sell goods on the black market.
Healing was the only thing I knew would sell; the Federation races still had some incurable diseases. Federation members didn't exactly have a lot that I needed, not if they were limited in what they were allowed to give me.
The shuttlecraft they'd given me wasn't armed, at least. I had an image of one of the kids hitting a button and turning five people two houses and a portion of the wall into paste.
"Everybody out," I said.
Everybody obediently stepped out of the shuttlecraft, although they were obviously disappointed.
Loki was giving Canary a necklace; it had his symbol, two snakes intertwined.
"So you can remember me," he said.
"I…I will," she said.
She almost said something else before I shooed her out.
"That wasn't in the database," I hissed to Loki.
"You can modify things if you know how. I got bored while you were off playing with cannibals."
"So you made necklaces with your symbol?" I asked.
"Simple things are easier to modify than more complex," he said shrugging. "There were already models for basic necklaces."
Was he intending to give necklaces to people with his symbol? Like he was running for Congress or something?
"Come with me and show William how to run the replicator. We'll have dinner with these people."
After showing him how to use it, I gathered everyone together and asked "If you could have any meal you wanted, what would you have?"
The kids wanted pizza, of course. It was one of the only pleasure foods they knew, and it was heartbreaking that they didn't know much more.
The adults even had trouble.
Eventually we had the kind of meal they should have had; strawberries, hamburgers, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, steaks. They had gained enough weight that they weren't likely to die from eating, but afterwards some of them looked like they wished they could.
Loki kept up with me easily, though.
Was it him or Thor that had an eating contest with fire? I couldn't remember.
His only disappointment was that the Federation only had synthohol in the database. Fortunately, the replicator still had plenty of room to add templates, and a scanner. When we got back to a world with alcohol, I'd have him pick something suitable.
He'd sat next to Canary the whole time and seemed a little reluctant to go when it was time to leave.
"Next time we're here, I'll use the scanner to detect life signs. It'll make it easier to find people, and I'll decide whether they're cannibals or not. If they're cannibals, I'll move them to Australia."
We wouldn't have to keep protecting these people if we moved their enemies to another continent.
I'd have preferred to send them to China, but it was possible they could make their way up the Bering strait.
It would let me collect more people to join the village too.
"I could use that on zombie world too," I mused suddenly. "To look for non-zombie survivors."
Federation scanners were good enough to discriminate between zombies and non-zombies.
It'd be a useful way to get more hands on deck, even if it left me with more mouths to feed. The replicator would take some of the pressure off with that.
"What the hell were you doing with Canary?" I demanded. "You were all over her!"
"You wouldn't understand," he said. "When a daddy bee and a mommy bee love each other very much…"
"You should have said goat," I said sullenly.
"My brother gets to have a human girlfriend," he said. "And nobody says a thing. I talk to a pretty girl, and I get recycled old jokes."
"I'm sure you had a goat in every port," I said. "But neither one of us has time for romance."
"I get some off time sometimes," he said mildly. "Maybe you should try it."
"I'll rest when you're dead," I said.
"That's not…" he began.
I smirked at him.
"It'll take a while for them to check out the modifications I gave them," I said. "I think they're afraid they'll blow up the ships or something. Starfleet keeps doing all kind of risky shit, but the Federation is pretty cautious."
It was probably why they hadn't looked into replicating transporter accidents that happened occasionally. Rifling through his mind while the Betazoid was off the ship, I'd seen that Riker had a transporter twin somewhere, and several Enterprise members had been de-aged without losing their memories.
That was the kind of thing that completely changed the nature of a society. If they could reverse aging, then they could cure diseases by simply resetting someone to a previous state of health.
There were the obvious computer memory problems, but they had entire separate power and computer systems for their holodecks.
For some reason they'd been adamant that I not get a Holodeck. I wasn't sure that I could transport one yet anyway.
Vista looked up at me.
"Why are you telling me all this?"
We were in her room in the PRT headquarters. Construction had advanced some; I could have done it in a tiny fraction of the time, especially now that I could at least potentially use replicators to build my construction drones.
I just needed to find the time to program the replicator. Suvok had been kind enough to replicate an entire set of books on Federation programming skills.
"I barely gave them anything at all," I gloated. "I made a few modifications to their technology that they could have made themselves if it had occurred to them. Loki says we're just giving them a taste and we're going to screw them later when we get to the good stuff."
"You know security is on its way already," Vista said.
"I'm not worried about them," I said dismissively. "I'll drop them off in Tahiti or something, and it'll be a paid vacation…incurred as a result of job hazards."
Apparently, they were all listening to me because I could hear the footsteps of some them increasing the moment I said that.
"So, the point is that I've got my own spaceship now," I said. "It's kind of crappy, but it means that I can go interstellar without spending a few trillion dollars and twenty years to build the whole thing. You think anybody would pay to get pictures of the planets around Alpha Centauri?"
"Nobody knows whether there are planets there."
"I do," I said smugly. "I dropped a beacon there. In four years, you'll get confirmation. Anyway, if any billionaire wants to be the…first human to visit another planet, I'm open to the experience."
I held up some pictures and dropped them in her lap. She stared at them.
"Are you giving us a sales pitch?" she asked incredulously. "You just dropped a dozen ten-foot cubes of iron in Earth orbit. How are we not to assume that's a threat?"
"Those aren't cubes of iron," I said. I grinned at her. "I'm pretty sure one of them is of gold."
She stared at me.
"Anyway, I'm going to sell that stuff. If an American company doesn't want it, I'll sell it to the Australians, or possibly to the British. There's some large cubes of rare earths there too."
"You've got a kill order," she said faintly.
"The money all goes to charity!" I said brightly. "If the PRT wants to keep more than a hundred million dollars out of the hands of a charity designed to make people's lives better, well, I'm sure the news stations would be happy to hear about it."
"Why are you talking about this to me instead of to Tagg?"
I used my connection to her using Mama Mather's power to say into her ear, "Plausible deniability. He's on thin ice given his contact with me already. You've already had contact with me, and so they'd expect me to contact you."
She gritted her teeth.
"I'm going to spend the rest of my life in M/S containment, aren't I?"
Using Mama Mather's power, I whispered in her ear, "I dropped fifty thousand dollars under your bed at home."
She closed her eyes, and then sighed.
For all that she seemed to be a little uptight, she wasn't going to tell the PRT about the money. Although Tagg was better than Piggot, she was still considering leaving, and she felt she might need some money when she got older.
"If you need a job, I'll be happy to hire you," I said in her mind.
"They've got me at a desk because I was "compromised," she said.
"Also, there are hardly any parahumans in town to bother with."
"Shadow Stalker hates it. Beating up gangbangers was like her favorite thing, and now the criminals are all keeping their heads down."
"You don't know how much that tears me up," I said, grinning.
She glowered at me. She'd liked the action almost as much as Sophia, but she wasn't going to complain.
"Well, it looks like they are here," I said.
The door slammed open.
"Hey Armsmaster," I said. An illusion of a piece of glass with a design on it appeared in my hand.
He froze as he saw what I'd inscribed.
The amount of information required for Federation tech meant that I'd need an awful lot of glass panels; on the other hand, the design that I'd written in small letters on the page was simply but needlessly large.
"It's an improvement on my nanothorn," he said. He didn't move. I could tell that his mind was racing.
"It's not tinkertech," I said. I held it out to him. "It'd give you an advantage in combat with the Endbringers. It'd make you the kind of hero that people would remember a long time after you die."
He wanted this first page more than he'd wanted anything. He was on the edge of going through a tinker fugue.
"There's three hundred more pages to this," I said. "Most of it is how to build the tools to build the tools."
As it was an illusion, he wouldn't be able to use his visor to get a perfect rendition of the design. The design was real, even though the glass plate was an illusion.
"Unfortunately, I've got a kill order," I said. "And the PRT can't trust any information that comes from me."
There were PRT agents behind him.
"Hey guys! Anybody want a trip to Tahiti? I'll pay for rooms for a week."
Three of them actually wanted to take me up on my deal, but they knew they'd get in trouble if they agreed.
"Well, it's too bad," I said. "The weather there is great right now, not all cold and rainy like it is now."
I made the glass plate vanish from my hand.
"Keep the deals in mind," I said. "I'm tempted to drop some of those meteors outside Brockton Bay and let people just take what they can carry off."
"You'd destroy the city," Armsmaster said.
"I'd be careful," I said.
"The government would confiscate it," he said.
"That's too bad," I said. "A small hill of gold might do some people some good."
"Thugs would keep the poor from getting access," Armsmaster said.
"Right…the government would confiscate it."
More of the Protectorate were approaching. While I wasn't afraid of them, I was trying to improve my image with the people, and battling the heroes wouldn't be a good look.
"Well, it's been fun," I said. "Just leave a note on my fan page if you want to make a deal."
"You have a fan page?" Vista asked.
"Yeah!" I said. "It's really well done, too! They've got pictures of me healing people, even of the PRT trying to murder me! It's pretty awesome."
I looked around at them.
"Anyway," I said. "I've got more important stuff to deal with."
Before they could say anything, I was gone.
I appeared in the small office set up for my Brockton Bay charity. There were four men I didn't recognize there. Three of them were wealthy men with incurable diseases. The fourth man was healthy, but his nine-year-old daughter had tried everything- tinker tech, the rare healers who existed…and nothing had worked.
They were all afraid of me. They were even more afraid I wouldn't be able to help them.
"I appreciate all of your commitment toward helping out my city," I said. "I'm supporting a number of charities like this, and I'd be…unhappy if anyone was to make this public."
They all shuddered.
"There's no quid pro quo," I said. "You are making a fully tax-deductible donation to a charity, and I'm just having a meeting with donors."
They all felt this was sketchy for some reason, but it didn't bother me.
"Are we agreed?" I asked.
They all nodded.
I shook each of their hands, including that of the little girl.
"So, when do we start?" the heavyset man on the left asked.
"Oh, we're done," I said. "My healing is faster than other people's."
"It doesn't hurt anymore, daddy!" the little girl said, looking up.
"Your cancer had spread from your brain to your kidneys," I said to the heavyset man. "I cured that too."
"Why is my vision blurry?" a thin man in the middle demanded.
"I cured your vision," I said. "Take off your glasses."
He did, and blinked.
"Anyway, my advice is to see your doctors as soon as possible. The drugs you've all been taking aren't healthy to keep taking if you're healthy. However, I'm not a medical doctor, and so all I can do is advise you."
"Isn't it practicing medicine without a license?" one man asked.
"I'm an outlaw," I said. "Technically I'm supposed to have medical personnel present to make sure nothing goes wrong. However, I think it's all in our best interest that nobody knows this meeting ever happened."
They all nodded.
None of them would have had anything to do with me if they hadn't had to.
"Anybody have someplace they want to be?" I asked.
None of them had vehicles here, so I grabbed two of them and dropped them off at home. I returned twice and within thirty seconds they were all home.
The message to them was clear.
I knew where they lived.
I could read in their minds that they were going to be generous in their donations. I was grateful to the people who worked for the charity. They'd been the ones who had found the donors and made contact with them.
"It'll be another six million dollars," I said. I knew to the dime how much each planned to donate. They all planned to take tax deductions too.
If they were caught, they'd claim I coerced them.
If I got a pardon it wouldn't matter. If I didn't, it wouldn't matter. The only important thing was that the charity be allowed to continue.
"We've been buying up property," the new director said. "It's dirt cheap right now."
All the bombings and zombie plagues had caused property values to plummet.
"You aren't taking advantage of normal people, are you?"
"Just evil landlords," he said. He smirked. "We do a little research before we move in."
There were all sorts of old factories that could be had for a song; assuming that we could get the machines needed to manufacture the devices I was getting patents on, we could start a business that would employ people while providing money for the community.
I handed him a dozen gold nuggets the size of my fist.
"You can call these donations," I said. "Turn them into cash and use that money to start on some of the side projects."
We were doing what we could to rebuild the city one piece at a time. We'd already had three hundred volunteers who were providing their time and effort into beautifying the city.
Things were moving faster than I had expected.
"Have the boys stand guard when you move this stuff," I said. "There's still individual criminals out here."
He nodded.
I blinked away.
There were three people in danger within my senses, people who had heard me and were now able to be enhanced by me. I gave mental suggestions to two of them, while I enhanced the third.
Once the third had dealt with his attackers, I gave the first danger sense and watched as she demolished the man who was trying to rape her.
The second victim I managed to walk through how to de-escalate her attackers. It wasn't normally my wheelhouse, but Federation psychologists were pretty good at de-escalation techniques, at least among humans.
Every alien species required slightly different techniques, a little like parahumans.
Floating above the city, I frowned, and a moment later I was in New York city.
New text books were about to be printed. I blinked into an office in the publishing house, and I quickly hacked into their system.
I started making subtle changes in the textbooks. Individually none of the changes would amount to much, but all together they would start a shift in the way the next generation thought.
Even if the authors noticed the changes, they wouldn't see them until the textbooks were already printed, and the changes were subtle enough that they wouldn't get rid of the entire print run.
I heard movement outside, and I finished up my work and blinked away before the secretary could reenter the room.
Now I was in the sky over Las Angeles. New shows were being written that wouldn't show up for a year or two.
I had a list of likely writers with their addresses; I flicked over their houses until I found one who was struggling for a new idea.
Knocking on his door, I waited until he opened it. I was projecting an illusion of wearing a girl scout uniform.
"We're selling raffle tickets," I said.
"I'm not interested," he snapped and slammed the door in my face.
That was fine. He'd seen me, which meant that I would be able to whisper in his ear as he slept, giving him dreams of a kid's program that would teach cooperation and caring while being flashy enough to be popular.
More importantly, the show would teach kids to hope. The lack of hope was the greatest thing that was killing my world. People had stopped trying to make things better.
I needed to teach the next generation a better way.
According to the Federation handbook, people tended to fight back against ideas that were shoved down their throat. If the ideas were part of the background of their lives, it seeped into their psyche almost without thinking about it.
There were limits to what I could do; I was only one person.
However, I would do everything I could.
Blinking away, I was back on the moon.
"Well, I've finished the scans of Canary's world," he said. "There are ten thousand humans left, but most of them are in very poor health."
I nodded.
"You've got a map?" I asked.
"Printed and ready," he said. He handed it to me. "I'm happy to come along with you."
"You'd slow me down," I said.
"I could stay back in the colony," he said. "I'm sure they could use someone who wasn't as weak as a regular human."
I stared at him.
"You…the prince of Asgard…would do manual labor?"
"I'm not talking about digging in the dirt or anything horrible like that," he said. "I might be willing to lift a few logs if they were appropriately appreciative."
"I'm not selling Canary to you for a little work," I said dryly. "I'm planning to go to the zombie world for a bit. Do you want to come along?"
He shrugged.
"It's better than paperwork," he said.
I'd already given him the vaccine. I wasn't sure that he wasn't immune from the beginning, but other than the genital itching, it wouldn't hurt him. I checked against his DNA to make sure.
I blinked him to the shuttlecraft. I was in the process of programming the replicator to build my drones for me. I'd use those to add on a faster star drive to the shuttlecraft, to give it a useable speed.
They'd also start building a real city around the small colony there. If even one person in a hundred wasn't a cannibal we'd have a hundred new people.
A single blink and we were in the sky over the zombie world.
"There's a lot of mutants down there," Loki said.
"Zombies," I said. "They're zombies."
"There's a hundred thousand people still alive, though. How are you going to support a population like that on a planet like Canary's world? Even a single replicator would never be able to keep up."
"Well," I said. "Maybe we just start with a few people and work our way up."
"It's not even worth the trouble," he said. "I don't know why you even bother."
"My dad told me a story once," I said. "About thousands of starfish dying on the beach after a terrible storm."
I maneuvered the ship, taking it on a course down into the atmosphere.
"A man came upon a little girl throwing starfish back into the water. He asked her why she bothered. There was no way she could save them all; no way she could make a difference."
I started heading for Nevada. I could see a group of a few dozen people traveling together there.
"As she threw another starfish into the water, she said, "Well, I made a difference to this one."
Looking at Loki I said, "When he heard that, he started throwing starfish into the water too, and others came as well due to the example they'd set. In the end, they saved all of them."
"That's a likely story," he said, snorting, but I could tell that he was actually listening.
"If you get overwhelmed by how many people there are to save, you'll never save anyone," I said. "If you can't save everyone, save some of them. If you can't save someone, save just one."
"I'm not sure why you save anyone, frankly," he said.
I was sure that he just said it to be annoying. His emotions were contemplative, not dismissive.
"I saved Canary," I said.
He was quiet after that, all the way down.
"Is that a huge flock of infected birds?" I asked.
I hadn't realized that the T-virus was able to jump species. Bonesaw's variant certainly hadn't been able to. Maybe it had been a sign of mercy from her, or maybe she'd decided that an entire world of zombies would leave her without anyone to torture.
The vaccine worked on both variants fortunately.
If I destroyed zombie animals, would I get their powers?
"Take the wheel," I told Loki, even though there wasn't a wheel.
A moment later I blinked out in the middle of the flock and they immediately turned and began to attack me.
I barely kept myself from giggling. Their pecking wasn't doing me any damage, and it almost tickled.
Grabbing one of them, I snapped its neck.
ENHANCED VISION HAS INCREASED!
YOU CAN NOW SEE 100 TIMES AS FAR AWAY AS NORMAL! YOU CAN ALSO SEE COLORS THAT HUMANS CANNOT SEE, MAKING CAMOFLAGE MORE DIFFICULT.
LEVEL 2!
Holy crap!
The world was incredible.
There were colors that I'd never even imagined. I ignored the increasing frenzy of the birds around me, even though they were tearing my hoodie apart. I used telekinesis to keep them from my eyes, not because my eyes were vulnerable, but because being pecked in the eye would distract me from the colors I was seeing.
Finally, they annoyed me enough that I used Bladestorm to kill them all after making sure that Loki and the ship were high enough above me to be unaffected.
I spent a moment just enjoying the view. Did Loki see like this? Were humans simply the blind people in a universe of those who could see?
Would people be able to see what I showed them using illusion?
I heard screams from below me.
Los Vegas still had lights; probably powered by the Hoover dam. However, as I approached, I could see that the city was almost deserted.
There was a small group of ten people down there, which was disturbing because there had been a hundred when we'd first scanned them.
They were being attacked by zombies.
Blinking down in the middle of the zombies, I said, "Bladestorm."
I had knowledge of the location of every human in the area using telepathy, and so the zombies were cut down in an instant.
The humans had been fighting from on top of a school bus; their bus had been stopped by the zombies. They had weapons, but they were massively outnumbered by the zombies.
They were all standing motionless, staring at me. The fact that there were daggers floating in the air pointed at all of them probably had something to do with it.
Or maybe it was the fact that I was floating in midair. Maybe it was the fact that my outfit was in tatters. I gestured, and I was in a fresh hoodie.
Maybe I could build a hoodie factory in Brockton Bay. I could probably support one by myself.
I dismissed the daggers and got a better look at them.
Their leader was an attractive blonde woman. She was fit, and she knew how to fight. A glance in the minds of the others showed that they were mostly normal people, although some of them had skills that would be useful in the cannibal world.
There was an electrician, a plumber and two farmers. The bartender wasn't going to be as useful, but the hairdresser might help the women feel a little better.
The three sales girls didn't have many skills, but my little community had more men than women; the men had been able to fight cannibals off better than their spouses over the long term.
More women would be appreciated whatever their skill levels.
Claire was the one who I wanted for my community. She was a natural leader, and she was a fighter. She'd be able to handle it when I reintroduced bears and predators back into the ecosystem.
Otherwise, the deer would eat all the trees.
"My name is Taylor Hebert," I said. "And I'm here to help."
Some of them didn't believe me at first, but as I continued to be non-threatening toward them, they began to relax. I ignored the guns they had half pointed at me.
"I'm immune from the virus," I said, once they'd begun to relax. "I've got a vaccine; it won't keep you from dying if they tear you apart, but you won't turn."
"How…are you flying?" the leader asked hesitantly.
I could feel her worry. In her world, most things that were superpowered had something to do with the zombies. On the other hand, she seemed like the kind of person who could adapt quickly.
The others were still staring slack jawed at me.
"Oh this?" I said dismissively. "It's a thing I do. Anybody interested in getting vaccinated?"
Everybody was cautiously interested. Some of them were afraid that I was lying and that I would turn them into zombies, but they'd seen me light up the sky with fire and were afraid to say no.
Good enough.
"Has anybody here been a cannibal?" I asked.
Nobody had, fortunately. It had been only a few months since the plague had begun, and there was still plenty of canned food left. The crowd consisted of a group of regular people following Claire who had at least pretended to know what she was doing.
I gestured, and Loki dropped down to set the shuttlecraft in the middle of the bodies. I could hear a squelching sound as the two pylons settled down on the pile of bodies.
"Damnit Loki!" I shouted. "I'm going to have to clean that!"
I could see him grinning from the window. He gave us a jaunty wave.
"Excuse him," I said. "He's an asshole. I'm an interdimensional traveler, and I have another world that's kind of a shithole, but there aren't any zombies. Anybody interested?"
They all were, but Claire asked, "What kind of shithole?"
"It was hit by an asteroid ten years ago and there's no plant life. We're trying to get things going again."
"So, there's no food?"
"It's being provided," I said. "It probably won't live up to your current diet of spam and old soup, but we do our best."
"Can we come back if it sucks worse than here?" one man asked timidly.
"Absolutely," I said. "There's levels of hellholes, after all."
I should know.
I gave them all shots with a hypospray, faster than they could react, and I blinked four of them, putting them in the decontamination chamber.
I was going to need to build a bigger chamber; maybe by building a metal warehouse sized unit. That way I could clean not just people, but objects.
I was strong enough to lift a house; if I could start transporting entire houses, restocking the Cannibal World would be a lot easier.
Moving houses would mean I could move massive supplies of a lot of things from zombie world back to cannibal world; that would mean I could transport tractors and other things.
Of course, I could probably make solar powered tractors, or at least electric tractors that worked a lot better than the commercial ones.
Even there, I could start with a chasse and not have to rebuild the whole thing.
Returning after telling the first group what was happening, I said, "The first group is in decontamination. It's gonna be fifteen minutes. Anybody want a ride?"
Everybody was excited to ride in a real spaceship, so after loading them in, I took us up in the upper atmosphere.
"Find me some zombie owls, zombie hawks, hell other zombie animals," I told Loki.
"Trolling for powers?" he asked.
"Are you kidding me?" I asked. "Powers are awesome!"
I could now distinguish faces from more than a mile away. I wanted more of that.
"All right," Loki said. "I've got several species of undead hawks in the Pacific Northwest."
He took control of the ship and dropped us down a mile from the hawks.
I could see them and I blinked beside their nest.
I killed them quickly.
ENHANCED VISION HAS INCREASED!
YOU CAN NOW SEE 1000 TIMES THE DISTANCE!
LEVEL 3!
I loved Federation scanners. They could find creatures by species and type. I never would have been able to do this before.
Maybe I could use them to find Lung? I wasn't sure. He would probably appear to be normal to the scanners until he began escalating.
The zombie owls were only twenty miles away.
ENHANCED VISION HAS INCREASED!
YOU NOW HAVE LOW LIGHT VISION!
LEVEL 3!
Hmm.
Enhanced vision hadn't gone up a level. It had simply expanded in capabilities. I wasn't going to complain though.
Returning to the ship, I heard an argument between Claire and Loki.
"It's Alice. It has to be."
"There's a group of a hundred of them over here," he said. "Absolutely identical. Does your friend have a lot of clones?"
"She might," Claire admitted. "She was experimented on by the people who caused this whole thing."
"That sounds interesting," I admitted. "Let me take care of your friends, and then we'll see what we can do about it."
I returned to the decontamination chamber. It was still in the back of the van, but I'd moved the van when I'd seen signs that cannibals had tried to break into it.
It was now on a mesa in Monument Valley on the Colorado Plateau. It was more than a thousand miles from my settlement, which would help against any potential diseases I accidentally brought back that weren't taken care of, but it would be difficult for cannibals to climb the thousand feet to get to it.
On reflection, I probably should have built the settlement some place like this, but I'd chosen instead to go for a place that had once been fertile.
As the first five stepped out of the decontamination chamber, I blinked the second five inside.
I used Mama Mather's power to explain to the first five that this was not their final location and that they'd have to wait a while.
I returned to the shuttlecraft.
"I'm interested in this cloning thing," I said. "If there's one of them in Utah, it's probably your friend. A large group is either a colony or an experimental facility. Either way, I'm interested."
Loki sent us heading for Utah.
We arrived a couple of minutes later, and I saw a woman on a motorcycle being chased by a herd of zombie bison.
"Zombie bison!" I said. "That's cool, right? I got powers from a mutant cow once, but Bison are entirely different!"
We floated over the woman. She looked up, but to her credit she didn't stop driving her motorcycle. I could have used the transporter, but I had an uneasy feeling about them. I suspected that they actually murdered people and then reconstructed new people on the other end. I wasn't sure though.
I blinked down next to her, and I grabbed her.
She was strong for a human, maybe in a low superhuman way. She was fast too, and she tried to dodge out of the way.
Grabbing her, I was surprised when I felt a blast of some kind of telekinetic ability.
I punched her twice, knocking her out as I grabbed her.
The Bison attacked the motorcycle.
TELEKINISIS HAS IMPROVED!
TELEKINISIS NOW BEGINS AT 100 POUNDS AND DOUBLES WITH EACH LEVEL!
YOU ARE NOW LEVEL EIGHT, AND YOU CAN MENTALLY LIFT 12,800 POUNDS!
There had been a time when I would have been thrilled to have a power like that. Six tons wasn't a lot at my current power level, although it was a lot more than seven hundred pounds.
I healed her, but it took two more attempts to get her fully healed. I used illusion to keep her unaware of her own injuries.
"Claire?" she said when she woke up. "What's going on?"
"I met some space aliens," Claire said. "Who are getting us out of here!"
"He's an alien," I said. "I'm from another dimension."
She gave us both a skeptical look, and then stood up and looked outside.
"You screwed up my bike," she said. She didn't sound grateful at all. "I could have outrun them; they aren't as fast as a bike. I was leading them away from a caravan of survivors."
"Right," I said.
I blinked outside and set fire to the bison. The fire started a massive grass fire, but I put it out.
Plunging my hand into the nearest bison, I grinned.
STRENGTH IS INCREASED BY +5!
YOU NOW HAVE A STRENGTH OF 75!
That was totally worth it!
I could now lift 256 tons, and could blink and planeshift with the same weight. It made all of my abilities a lot more viable.
I had a sudden fantasy of just stealing the rig. It weighed 17,000 tons, but I might be able to manage it enlarged and in wolf form. That'd upset the Protectorate.
With a lot more levels I might be able to steal the Great Wall of China. That'd piss the CUI off a great deal.
Hmm.
Would it be considered an act of war if I started picking CUI capes off? Maybe if I was able to keep anyone from knowing I was doing it?
The Yangban were assholes, but I had the impression that not all of their capes were there voluntarily. I might not want to kill them all. I couldn't just erase people's memories, but I might be able to create an illusion of the attacker being someone else.
Returning to the cabin, I saw Alice staggering and holding her head.
"What in the hell happened?" There was blood dripping from her ear.
I touched her, and healed her partially. I restarted the illusion of her not being in pain.
"You had a bike accident, fractured your skull. I've got a healing power, but I still have a couple of more times to get you all the way back up to normal."
Claire stared at me, but Loki nodded and smirked a little.
"Anyway, I can't leave," Alice said. "Umbrella is still out there. They can't be allowed to kill everybody."
"I thought the guys who did this were all dead," I said.
She shook her head.
"That was just a satellite office. They've got offices all over the world."
"You're saying all this was deliberate?" I asked incredulously. "Not just an idiotic lab accident?"
She nodded.
I plunged into her mind, looking for details.
It had originally been a pharmaceutical organization founded in 1968. It had formerly been headquartered in Raccoon city, and a look at her memories of the labs there suggested that even a nuclear weapon at the surface wouldn't have destroyed them.
I might have to steal something like that for my own labs once I got them going. A lot of experiments were going to require air, and I couldn't do everything on the moon.
They had been researching bio-organic weapons to sell to militaries all around the world, including enhanced animals.
By the 1980s they'd become an international conglomerate. They'd bought companies all around the world and used them as a way to hide illegal activities.
Their ultimate goal, as far as Alice was aware was to create virally enhanced humans and use them to rule the world.
She was their only success, to the best of her knowledge.
They had bases in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
Before she could say anything else, I said, "We've got a lot of people who have similar mutations to you in a small area; maybe we should go take a look."
One limitation of the shuttlecraft scanners was that they could only see one side of the planet at a time. I'd had to blink to the other side to get a complete view of Cannibal world.
She nodded, and shortly we were approaching northern Illinois.
"That's a lot of power for a human facility," Loki said. "Especially now that everyone is dead."
"It's still active then," I said. "Intriguing."
I thought for a moment. "They might have missiles. Let's park in space and I'll blink us there."
We took orbit, and then I inventoried Claire and Alice.
"Why are we doing this again?" he asked. "We aren't saving anyone."
"You don't know that," I said.
"You're just hoping that some of them will be different enough that you can get some of their powers."
"I'm hoping they have research notes on whatever they did to Alice. She started out human, and they gave her superpowers."
"Planning to bribe your father so he won't ground you about the mountain of dead people you've left behind?"
I started to say I'd only left a hill, but considering the Harvester corpses he might literally be right.
"If he can take care of himself, I won't have to worry about him as much," I said.
I was tempted to just create a robot body for him to use while his real body was hidden in stasis somewhere else, preferably a pocket dimension.
I could periodically upload the memories into his real body, and that would mean that even if he died, he'd only use a few days to a month's worth of memories.
Human uploads were just copies of the original; downloading memories from a copy might be the solution instead.
Or maybe I needed to combine techniques. I'd had a glimpse in Midgard in the heroes' minds. At least two of them had powers given to them by experiments.
If I could combine the powers of the Hulk, Captain America, and Alice, I might feel safe in letting Dad live in a safe universe.
Even then, I might have to get him a modified version of the tinker's armor.
"Well, let's see what they've got," I said. I offered him my hand.
He bowed and took it with a smirk.
"You're still helping me clean the zombie parts off the bottom of the shuttlecraft," I said. "That wasn't cool."
Before he could respond, we were at the entrance to the facility.
The entrance was guarded by a door that reminded me of the door to a bank vault. I could have used disintegrating smoke, but I wanted to see what my new strength level could do.
Steel could withstand twenty tons per square inch. My fists were small, but that meant I'd have to do at least six times that amount to break through.
However, the speed of my punch multiplied the force I could do, and so I found that it crumpled in my hands, not like tissue paper, really, but easy enough that a single punch crunched it, and I threw it carelessly behind me.
The others were well off to the side, and they were in no danger.
-10 POINTS LASER DAMAGE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
Yes!
This would have cut through a human being.
"What's she doing?" I heard Claire whisper.
"She gets more resistant to things the more she's exposed to them," Loki said. "She's standing there hoping to get stronger."
The system tried lasers to my knees, to my neck, to my midsection.
It created a grid that flowed over me.
"It's ruining her outfit," Claire said.
"She's nude half the time because she does things like this," he said. "Just ignore it and don't encourage her."
I allowed the machine to hit me over and over again with the lasers even as the damage they did ticked down.
-1 POINT LASER RESISTANCE!
+1% LASER RESISTANCE!
LASER RESISTANCE IS NOW 15%!
I made sure that the lasers did not damage to me the next time around. I inventoried the poison smoke they tried to send into the hallway; with the door open, it would escape and maybe hurt the others.
Besides, poison smoke was useful.
I ripped the walls off, and I ripped the laser grid equipment off the walls and began inventorying it. You never knew when a laser grid would come in handy.
It looked like they'd carved the hallways into the solid stone of the mountain. It headed downward.
"You can come in," I said to the others once I'd switched to another hoodie. "But stay behind me."
Walking through the hallways, I saw four zombified Doberman Pinschers running toward me. They didn't have any skin.
Alice tried running past me, but I held my hand out, inventoried her and dropped her off fifty feet back.
I lunged forward; I wanted their powers.
They lunged toward me, but their teeth couldn't penetrate my skin. I pulled one dog's head off, and threw it at the second, crushing it easily.
The other two didn't let go, and so I grabbed their heads, one in each hand, and I crushed their skulls.
As the rotting meat of their brains touched my hands, I saw a new popup appear.
NEW POWER CREATED!
ENHANCED SMELL!
YOUR SENSE OF SMELL IS NOW TWICE AS GOOD AS THAT OF A NORMAL HUMAN! THIS SENSE DOUBLES WITH EACH LEVEL. AT LEVEL 5 YOU MAY TRACK OTHERS BY SCENT!
LEVEL 1.
I almost gagged at the scent of rotting flesh. It was sudden and horrifying. It took me a moment to adjust to it; apparently that was a downside of the new senses.
I'd long since adjusted to enhanced hearing, and enhanced sight hadn't bothered me at all.
Still, every little bit was good.
I inventoried the gore off my hands, and then inventoried it off again onto the dog heads.
"Who the hell is this woman?" Alice asked.
"I met her like twenty minutes ago," Claire said. "Why were you up in the middle of nowhere fighting bison?"
"Umbrella has been tracking me with satellites," she said. "I've been trying to figure out the pattern and I've been taking out the agents they keep sending after me."
"We can take care of the satellites when we get finished here," I said. I frowned. "I could actually use some surveillance satellites. How many do you think they have?"
If I could use satellites on several worlds, I might be able to keep up with things much better, especially if I modified them to use replicated Federation sensors.
Especially Earth Bet; it'd help me keep an eye on my many enemies there.
After a while it became clear that none of their traps were going to be of much use to me. They tried using a bomb once, but I could smell it, probably because my smoke had already eaten away at its walls.
Eventually I got tired of messing with the whole thing.
"Screw it," I said. "I'm just going through the mountain. Follow me."
I could sense where the people were; there were only a few people who had minds that were awake, and I could barely detect some sleeping minds. They were all together.
I went straight through a stone wall, and I began heading downward at an angle, then down even further.
"Some of us aren't as petite as you," Loki called down.
Right.
I was leaving a path behind me in my own shape, like I was in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Loki couldn't fit unless I widened the tunnel for him.
"Watch out for them and I'll come back for you," I called back.
I'd destroyed any possible traps in their near area, and I hadn't detected any minds, not even zombie minds.
Zombie animals had minds. They were just different than human minds, or even zombie human minds. If they had no mind at all, they wouldn't have been able to move.
A moment later I exploded through a wall into a laboratory.
"Light her up," a muscular man in a suit said.
A team of men began shooting at me, even as some of their scientists were working to destroy everything in the complex.
I blinked behind them, knocking them out, and it was a matter of moments before everyone was down with the exception of the muscular man.
"You're just a clone, you know," I said.
His eyes widened.
"That's not true," he said.
"You know it deep down. I can see it in your mind," I said. I was beside him in an instant, and I put my hand around his neck. I was too short to do the neck lift thing, so I levitated a foot and a half in the air.
He tried to break my grip around his neck, but it was like trying to break steel. As I choked him, I plunged into his mind to find out what he knew about Umbrella.
They had a virus that would kill anyone with a T-virus infection. They planned to use the zombie apocalypse to destroy the rest of humanity, and then they would release their people from suspended animation to inherit the world.
It would take years for the anti-virus to spread, but once it did, they would own the entire world.
They were worried about overpopulation?
Without limits, their starting population of ten thousand would double every twenty years; the world would be back to where it started in less than four hundred year.
In the meantime, they would have destroyed all the cows and chickens, which meant they'd be living in a vegetarian world.
Why they'd want to live in a living hell like that I wasn't sure. A life on kale and tofu burger was no life at all. Without the massive infrastructure that made modern life possible, they were going to take a huge hit in the other aspects of their lifestyle too.
It wasn't like they had replicators.
I drained as much information from his mind as I could while choking him. His body spasmed under my hands.
"You couldn't have just made a virus to make people less fertile? You're all assholes."
After getting the location of the other bases, including one in Tokyo where they were growing hundreds of clones, I snapped his neck.
+5 DEXTERITY!
YOU NOW HAVE A DEXTERITY OF 47!
The world seemed to slow down around me. Dexterity had always been the most obvious of my ability gains. Increased strength was most noticeable when you tried to move something. Increased constitution…well how were you to even know if you were healthier or tougher.
But dexterity increases sped up the way your brain processed and perceived information, among other things.
I savored the sensation as I dropped him to the floor.
A moment later, I blinked back to the others. A moment after that we were all back in the lab.
"Those are clones of me," Alice said.
"Technically, you're a clone too," I said. "They cloned you after some little rich girl, probably because you have the same x-factor that makes you resistant to the virus as this asshole."
"Wesker," Alice spat.
"This is a clone too," I said.
I almost said just a clone, but that probably wasn't a good thing to say to a clone. It wasn't like she wasn't her own person, after all.
"Anyway, there's about a hundred clones of you in these tubes," I said. "They're all infected with a variant of the T-virus and have the same powers as you. There's a few hundred clones of you in Russia that don't have powers."
She stared at me.
"Congratulations?" I said. "You've got more sisters than anybody. Anyway, they've got this antivirus that's going to kill all the zombies. They're going to release it when everybody else is dead. Who thinks it might be a good idea to start early?"
"This could all be over?"
"Kills anything with a T-virus infection," I said. "Which means Alice here and some of her sisters are going to need to leave the planet before I release the virus."
"What?"
"Well, they've got another virus to supposedly clear the T-virus out of your system, but it looks a little hinky to me. I think the other virus will still kill you even if you're depowered."
They'd told Wesker he'd be safe, but I had a suspicion that they'd lied to him. This didn't seem like the kind of corporation that would be loyal to its employees.
"Anyway, I can teleport all over the planet, so I figure I can release the virus a hell of a lot faster than starting it off in one place."
She frowned.
"And what about Umbrella?" she asked.
"I know where they are," I said. "And it won't take me long to kill them all. They've only got three thousand employees who are awake on the planet; the rest are in suspended animation."
"This…seems sudden," she said.
"Oh, don't worry about it," I said. "Their Russia base seems really awesome from what I saw in this guy's memories."
I kicked his head with my foot.
"Like, full on movie quality simulations of different cities level of cool," I said. "I can't destroy something that awesome. I'm going to keep it for myself."
"What?" she asked flatly.
"What?" I asked her. "It's not like anybody is going to be using it when I'm done. Why would you waste an awesome underwater base?"
It was the next best thing to having a replicator, and there were hundreds of clones who hadn't been programmed yet. I could make them into whoever I wanted them to be, and they'd be perfect to use as my representatives in various places.
I could even grow my own lawyers; did you have to have a law degree to practice law? Could I hire some hack to represent me, and then surround him with the best legal minds Umbrella was able to program?
The only thing better would be robots.
I'd be a good ruler to my clone army. The clones who'd already been programmed didn't even realize that they were clones; I wasn't sure how they didn't notice that there were only a few models of clones, and how every fifth neighbor looked like them.
The base was there to simulate zombie outbreaks, further proof that they'd planned everything.
"And what if there are bases he didn't know about?"
"Oh, I'm going to read the minds of the higher ups before I kill them," I said. "Not the guards or anything."
"You read minds?" Claire asked.
"I do lots of things," I said.
"And she's really smug about doing it," Loki said dryly. "I'm a literal god and she's more smug than me."
"Your ego is big enough to have its own gravity," I told him. "You're hardly one to talk."
"She's good at killing," he admitted.
"Maybe you guys should wake the other Alices and explain to them what's going on. I'll be back before you know it."
Before setting off to acquire the anti-virus, I dropped by the people in decontamination. I dropped them a note and a half dozen hot pizzas without stopping to speak with them.
A moment later, I was in the Racoon City facility. As I'd thought, the nuclear explosion in the space above hadn't penetrated this far down.
Wesker knew where the anti-virus was kept, and so I knew exactly where to blink to.
I plunged my arm into the bio-safe they kept it in, and I inventoried the single cannister they kept it in. They'd only created a single cannister because they'd intended to destroy it if Alice found it. After all, their important people were in suspended animation.
My only warning was an emotion from one of the few people left in the facility. He was determined to die, and he believed he could take me with him.
Instinctively I switched to my armored form, making me ten thousand times as resistant as normal, at least to physical damage.
-200 POINTS PHYSICAL DAMAGE!
+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!
-1 POINT FIRE DAMAGE
+1% FIRE RESISTANCE!
-80 POINTS RADIATION DAMAGE!
+1% RADIATION RESISTANCE!
I blinked straight up, into space, reeling. If I hadn't spent more than hour staring at the sun to grind my Blindness Resistance to 100%, I doubted that I'd have been able to see.
As it was, even from 200 miles straight up I could see that the crater that had once been Raccoon city had collapsed even further.
They'd been willing to destroy not only themselves, but the suspended animation pods of the founders hidden below. There were founders in other locations; I wasn't sure whether I should just kill them or leave them to the wrath of the survivors.
I'd been in the process of teleporting out when the bomb had blown. If I hadn't gained armored form, I'd be dead.
I was going to have to be a little more careful. If they'd let the computer activate the bomb, I wouldn't have been able to switch forms in time.
Now that I was thinking about it, I probably should have blinked away first. I was getting a little overconfident in my resistance to damage, and that would get me killed if I was hit with an esoteric effect, or with something that was still able to overwhelm my defenses.
I had the antivirus, though, which was the important thing.
Teleporting to Tokyo, which was the current headquarters of the corporation, I appeared above the facility. I listened in to the thoughts of the people down below. I couldn't do a deep dive without touching them, but that didn't matter.
I found the one man who was trying to program the computer to automatically destroy the facility when I entered.
Jumping inside, I grabbed him by the neck, and I plunged into his mind.
They kept the self-destruct systems in roughly the same place in each base. I needed to deactivate the self-destruct systems before I did anything else.
They were evacuating the base onto a military plane; there was a hanger a few thousand feet away, and everyone was loading into it.
Checking for anyone else nearby, I realized this was the last man in the base, which was part of the reason he was so terrified.
I snapped his neck, and then I blinked to the hangar.
The plane was already taking off.
They'd promised they'd wait for him, but he'd suspected they were lying. Umbrella had no loyalty to anyone but themselves. They'd killed six billion people or more because they'd thought them to be surplus population.
Appearing on top of the plane, I said, "Planeshift."
A moment later we were above Paradis island. My vision was good enough at this distance to see that the wall had been rebuilt, even though it looked sloppy compared to the rest of the wall.
I could see guards on the wall, although I couldn't distinguish their faces. We were a hundred miles away, but it didn't matter.
Walking over to the window, I knocked on it. When they looked outside, expressions of horror on their face, I punched down at the wig of the plane.
It came off, and the plane immediately began to spin in the air.
Spider climb kept me solidly affixed, and I grinned at them. It had been a while since I had dealt with people who had no redeeming qualities. Even now, these people had no regrets, only terror for their own lives.
Well, it was only going to get worse.
I grabbed the wall of the plane. Physics alone should have ripped the wall away, but instead it actually steadied the plane.
I had to be careful not to do it too quickly, lest the g-forces snapped necks and made what was to come irrelevant.
Aiming for an area that looked to be promising, I set the plane down gently, and then I ripped the top of it away.
"You guys are assholes," I said to the people inside. "Killing the whole world? Who's going to clean your toilets and make your fast food?"
None of them said anything. I could smell that several of them soiled themselves.
"Don't worry," I said. "I'm not going to kill you."
They weren't sure they believed me, but it didn't matter.
Ripping the side of the plane away, I said, "Those guys on the other hand…"
The giants were already crowding toward us, a group of over a hundred. I looked at them, hoping to see a variant I hadn't seen before, but I didn't.
"There's safety that way," I said, pointing in the opposite direction from the town. "If you can make it through these guys. It's just a hundred miles."
Twenty miles in that direction was only coast.
"Good luck!" I said brightly.
Frowning for a moment, I thought, and then blinked next to Wesker. He might actually be able to outrun the giants.
"You said you weren't going to kill us," he grunted as we appeared two thousand feet up.
"I'm not going to," I said. "The ground might, and if it doesn't, it'll probably break your legs. Good luck running after that."
He tried to grab me, but I blinked away whistling.
One down, twelve more to go.
"It was even better than I hoped," I said. "I had to kill off the zombies they were keeping to attack clones, but that didn't take long."
"You attacked all twelve installations in less than an hour and a half," Alice said flatly.
I was beginning to suspect that she said everything flatly. Maybe a failure in her programming? Or maybe she was just reacting strangely to me.
I didn't bother looking in her head to find out.
"Yeah," I said. "Your ride is outside. Did you wake everybody up?"
"Yes," Alice said.
The Alices behind her were all dressed in exactly the same outfit. Apparently, that was all the Umbrella Corporation had provided for them. They were all intended to believe that they were the original Alice.
They all nodded, almost in unison.
It seemed a little creepy to me.
"I'd like everybody to start wearing different hairstyles and clothing so we can identify you by sight. Your personalities will probably start to diverge from each other as you gain new experiences."
Alice seemed to be taking this pretty well. I had to wonder how I would have responded to a clone of my own with similar powers and personality characteristics.
Would I get along as well as the Alices, or would I see all the flaws I hated about myself reflected back at me.
"They've got a formula to depower you," I said to all of them. "But there's no guarantee that it'll remove enough of the virus from your system to keep the Anti-virus from killing you."
They all frowned, almost at the same time.
"I'm going to put Loki on my shuttlecraft, and I'm going to have him work out the best places for me to release the virus to have maximum effect. I'm sure the jet stream will have something to do with it."
"Won't that kill them?" Claire asked.
"It's why I'm taking you all to the Russia underground facility. It's protected against surface viruses, and there are non-powered versions of you and other clones there that might need your help. I don't have a place for you on other worlds, but you'll eventually have to go somewhere."
I couldn't take them home.
For one thing, Earth Bet was paranoid about biotinkers. They hated them with a passion.
For another, they'd end up murdered if people knew they were associated with me.
I'd have to check to see that the virus they were infected with was non-contagious. If it was contagious, I'd have to put them on the cannibal world. If it wasn't, I'd have more options.
Leading them up through the tunnels, I had to create ice steps in places where I'd carelessly used smoke to destroy whole sections.
It wasn't long before we reached the surface.
"That plane doesn't have wings," Claire said.
"Don't worry about it," I said. "If I'm wrong and it doesn't fly, you'll be fine. I'd put on my seat belt though."
They didn't argue, and they strapped themselves in. This was the third 747 I'd intercepted. They ignored the blood on the seats.
"They've got clothes washers," I said. "Don't worry."
I heard a small scream from Claire as I lifted the aircraft fuselage. Strictly speaking, I didn't have to lift it. I just had to be able to lift it.
Showing off was probably petty of me, but I now had a hundred and one capes in my hands, and I wanted to make a good impression, even if they were just low-level brutes.
Some of them didn't even have Alice's telekinesis. I wondered if they were separate enough from her for me to get a boost from one.
We blinked, and a moment later I set the ship down in the middle of the Simulation of Tokyo square.
It was deserted, of course.
They kept most of the clones asleep except when they needed them, and they were able to reprogram them with identities as needed.
We wouldn't be able to give them any kind of freedom until we deprogrammed them. Maybe I could ask them who they wanted to be, but how would they know without a personality?
I hadn't been able to keep to my idea of clone slaves, not when I'd read their minds and realized they weren't robots. They'd used the personalities of real people as the templates.
The Alices unstrapped themselves, and they were looking around.
"I've stolen the bomb," I said. "But we're still underwater. Be careful about dealing with certain systems. They wanted to be able to flood this place in an emergency."
I suddenly wondered if the T-virus had managed to infect sea life? Sharks could smell blood for miles and whales could hear for much further than that. A whale might even give me enhanced strength, and I appreciated every point.
"You're leaving us?" she asked.
"Claire was leading some people," I said. "I'll bet the pizza has run out by now, and they're getting worried."
"Maybe they could stay here?" Claire asked. "Unless the other place is better?"
I thought about it for a moment.
"Well, the other place is a dead planet. It's a real shithole, even if it's got some nice people."
She looked around.
This was probably the closest these people would have for a normal life, at least for the five years the supplies would last if all the clones were awakened.
"All right," I said.
It hadn't been a waste decontaminating them; the clones here wouldn't have been exposed to the virus at all and might have been more vulnerable to the disease.
I blinked away, and moments later I returned with the remaining people. I'd had them all touch me at the same time; it was a tight fit, but it worked.
Blinking back to the shuttlecraft, I looked at Loki.
"Do you have the spots I need to drop the virus off?"
"Yeah," he said. "Although I'm not sure why they'd waste the computer space for this in a shuttle."
"They probably send shuttles in for science missions when their disintegration teleporters don't work for some reason," I said. "Like weird space weather or something."
Loki rolled his eyes.
"That sounds stupid."
"Well, they seem obsessed with using the newest and best of everything," I said. "Which means they've got to deal with bugs. Their older tech probably works just fine."
Dad had always told us to wait a couple of generations until all the bugs were taken care of in things like computers and cell phones. People who dealt with the latest in cutting edge tech always ended up regretting it. Of course, he might have said that because we were poor, but I'd always wanted to believe he was just being cautious.
Of course, his attitude toward cell phones had changed after Mom had died.
"All right," I said. "I won't be able to modulate how much virus I release very well, so it'll be uneven, but it'll be better than releasing it in one place."
After taking pictures of the monitor on a cell phone I'd stolen from an Umbrella scientist, I blinked to the first place on my list, a spot over Los Angeles.
Prevailing winds in the United States tended to go from west to east, which was why the east sides of most towns tended to be where the poor people lived.
During the Industrial revolution, the rich had lived upwind of factories and the poor had lived downwind.
I worked my way across the United States, using three locations there, two in Europe, one in Africa, one in Australia, and two in Russia. I dropped one dose in India, one in Brazil and finally one in China.
By the time I got to China, hardly any was left, but I released it nonetheless. The Antivirus was designed to be self-replicating, but it would take time to make its way through the zombie population.
I sat in the disinfection unit for fifteen minutes back on Cannibal World; the last thing I needed was to go back and accidentally kill Alice and all of the others.
I returned to Loki, and we flew low over the underwater base.
Sending messages to Alice and Claire through Mama Mather's power, I said, "I've got other business. It might be a few weeks before I can come back. Enjoy the base."
A moment later we were back on the moon.
"How are we going to disinfect this thing?" I asked Loki.
"Well, you were talking about making a big warehouse thing," he said. "So, you could steal houses or something."
I nodded.
Both of us ended up back in decontamination, and then I took us to Brockton Bay.
At first glance there wasn't any smoke on the horizon, and empathy showed no alarm from the residents, so I relaxed.
"Where do you think we'd buy metal buildings?" I asked.
Loki looked at me like I was stupid.
"Do I look like somebody who has any idea? I've never bought Midgardian real estate."
"So, you just crashed on someone's house back in the nineties?"
"You can do a lot with a bag of gold and mastery of illusions," he said. "I stayed in the finest hotels in New York…which were still hovels compared to Asgard."
"Right. Asgard is the best at everything," I said. "They don't have television in Asgard."
"They don't have it in the Federation either," he said sourly. "It's all holodeck this and that. I suspect it's their way of forcing the Terrans to exercise."
"Yeah," I said. "Those guys never seem to relax. They don't seem to do lowbrow at all either…it's all fancy concerts and racquetball with those guys."
"I always enjoyed the show that showed how stupid Midgardians were," he said. "The one with the videos from home."
I nodded.
"No nut shots in the Federation," I said. "Or slapstick either. Well, their loss."
I popped up both into the hospital, where Panacea was leaning over a patient.
She stood up and sighed.
"Haven't you ever heard of patient confidentiality?"
Loki shrugged. "The healers back home didn't seem to worry about it much. Of course, they worked for my father."
I looked down at the patient.
Michael Johnson age thirty-three. He'd caught a particularly bad case of gangrene, and he'd been reluctant to tell the doctors why.
"You should be ashamed of yourself," I said to the patient. I didn't even like to think about how he'd gotten the infection, but thankfully Gamer's mind pushed it out of my head.
His face paled.
I touched him and healed him in an instant.
Amy pretended to be outraged, but secretly she was relieved. She'd already had a long day, and healing bored her. As much as she didn't like Blasto as a person, she enjoyed checking over his work. It was at least something that as different.
"Hey, do you know where I could buy a metal building?" I asked.
"Why would I know something like that?" she asked irritably. After a moment she said, "With land, or without?"
"Just the building," I said. "I want to build a decontamination unit so I can steal houses from one world and put them in another."
"Why would I know something like that?" she asked. "I'm a teenager. I can't legally even buy property."
Well, technically we couldn't buy land, and since we legally couldn't have contracts enforced, people didn't like to sell us anything big because we could change our minds later.
"I know where you could buy a metal building," Michael said.
I looked at him, and then I nodded.
"Thank you," I said, plucking the information from his mind.
He worked for a metal building contractor here in the Bay. Their business had been poor recently, and so they'd welcome the work.
"The government is really angry that you freed Canary," Panacea said.
"It was an accident," I said. "She didn't deserve to go to the Birdcage. I exiled her and she's never coming back."
"Also, they're worried about you being the Butcher," she said. She looked at me uneasily.
"I fed her to somebody who already has a lot of powers in his head," I said. "Then I copied her power. I guess that makes me the new Butcher? The only voices in my head are my own."
"I wished that was a comfort," she said.
If they thought that the next person who killed me would have my voice in his head, but my powers at a weaker level, they might consider it.
However, my powers got stronger with use. They knew that too, and so I was hoping it might expedite getting rid of the Kill Order.
I used illusion to make the patient think we were talking about inconsequential things.
"Hey, if I had you take a look at some clones with superpowers due to biotinkering, could you tell me if they're infectious or not?"
"I could," she said, looking at me suspiciously.
"I recently came across some tech that could resurrect my father. I'd like to…upgrade him so that he's a little harder to kill by my enemies. Do you think you could replicate those abilities in someone else?"
"Maybe," she said slowly. "You can actually resurrect people?"
"Possibly even capes," I said. "Might make a difference."
"What about multiple sets of abilities from multiple people affected by biotinkers?" I said.
"Why are you asking me this?" she asked.
"Because I want to make sure my Dad is safe? You of all people should be able to understand that."
She winced.
"When can you be available?"
"I've got shifts all day," she said. "And I'm expected home afterwards."
"Are they treating you ok?" I asked.
She glanced back at the patient.
"He can't hear anything. He thinks we're talking about boys. That's why he looks so uncomfortable."
"What?" she asked flatly.
"He thinks we're comparing Aegis and Clockblocker's butts," I said.
Amy's face flooded, and she glared at me.
"Why would you do that?" she demanded. "Do you have to be a jerk all the time?"
Loki was looking through patient files at the end of the bed.
"I'm actually from her," he said. "She's a vicious little thing."
"I haven't killed anybody in almost an hour," I said irritably. At her look, I said, "There was an organization that created the zombie plague on purpose…killed six or seven billion of their own people."
"So, you killed them all?" she asked.
"I didn't kill the ones in suspended animation," I said. "I figured I'd let the people who were still alive pass judgement on them."
She frowned.
"You still shouldn't kill people," she said.
"Well, I dropped a plane load of them off next to cannibalistic giants," I said. "Does that count?"
"Yes!" she said.
"Huh," I said. "I thought it didn't."
"You can be charged with murder if death happens when you commit some other felony," she said. "And if you moved them unwillingly, that's kidnapping."
"She kidnapped me!" Loki said.
"Your dad gave you to me," I said.
"Is slavery against the law?" he asked. "She makes me do all sorts of things against my will!"
Amy was giving me a look.
"What?" I asked. "He's like a glorified secretary! He was judged by the laws of his own country and the punishment was to spend three months with me."
I frowned.
"That's kind of insulting if you think about it."
"It took you this long to figure it out?" Loki asked.
He smirked.
"So, it's indentured servitude at the very best. Was that ever made against the law?"
Amy frowned.
"Mom never talked about that. She talked a lot about the felony thing. I think she was afraid I was going to go around making cat people out of the homeless or something."
"Could you?"
"Yeah, probably. But I wouldn't! There's a couple of slave dealing parahumans who change people's bodies and minds and deliver custom made slaves."
"Any idea where they are now?" I asked casually.
"I'm not helping you make cat people," she said. "Or dog people, or lizard people, or whatever demented thing you want."
"What about talking dogs?" I asked. "I'll bet there's a market for talking dogs."
"I'd have to change their brains," she said hesitantly.
"You can, you're just afraid they won't be the same people afterwards as they were before," I said. "So, start with puppies. They haven't developed a personality yet, so if you change it it's no big deal."
"Puppies are cute," she said.
"Start with something ugly then," I said. "Fish or crabs or something."
"And if they get out into the wilds?" she asked. "What would happen if I made super smart fish?"
"Nothing!" I said. "They don't have hands and they're small! What are they going to do, attack people in rowboats?"
"It's a good way to get a kill order," she said.
She was just afraid. Having a lawyer for a mother had made her paranoid about breaking the law. Carol had been pretty critical too.
A glance inside her mind showed that the Pelhams were treating her well, even if they tended to treat her with kid gloves. They were all depressed, probably because half their family was dead.
Maybe I could give them a good day…assuming I could find a world they'd actually like to visit. I suppose the world with the giants seemed ok when the giants weren't attacking.
I'd always wanted to visit a fantasy world, and that was the closest, even if there was no magic there.
"I've got a couple of empty or soon to be empty worlds," I said. "Where there's no laws like that."
"That's how you got Blasto, isn't it? Every time he starts to come up for air you give him another project and keep him in tinker fugues."
I shrugged.
"He likes it," I said. "And smoking marijuana isn't all that healthy for him. Plus, he's starting a relationship with a woman there. Bad apple wasn't good for him."
For some reason she disagreed with me making decisions about his love life.
"Anyway, I'll drop by your house around eleven. If the Protectorate shows up, I'll be giving them another vacation," I said. I thought for a moment. "If any of the wards actually want a vacation, I can accommodate them, but I don't have a lot of really cool worlds."
Before she could respond, I grabbed Loki, and we blinked in front of a large metal building.
Stepping inside, I spoke to a receptionist.
"I'd like to buy a metal building…an aircraft hangar," I said.
"Aren't you a little young?" she asked.
I made a large pile of cash appear on the desk in front of her. She stared up at it, and then looked up at me.
I could see her make the connection about who I was.
"I'll get my boss," she said.
"They're safe," Panacea said after she'd examined the last of the Alices. "Mostly identical, except for some genetic variations, but they aren't carriers."
"How is that possible?" Claire asked.
"The virus in their systems is different than the virus in the dead bodies you showed me," she said. "You should probably get rid of those by the way. I think the virus mutated in response to their genetic code. The only way it will be transmitted is to offspring with the same genetic code."
"Can you reproduce it?" I asked, staring at her.
"Maybe," she said. "I wouldn't do it anywhere where any animal experiments could escape into the environment."
"I've got eleven other bases with labs already set up."
"They aren't all covered in blood," she asked suspiciously. "Because that crap is just disgusting."
"They mostly tried to run away, so I wouldn't go into some of their escape hatches, but otherwise you'll be fine."
"Escape hatches that are open to the outside? Won't that attract zombies?"
I shrugged.
"Maybe? The doors are thick enough that even a zombie Elephant wouldn't get through. I'm sure Alice would be happy to give you a guard of several Alices."
"It'd give us a chance to check the other bases, make sure she didn't miss anything." Alice's expression was flat again. It was like she'd been programmed to be a badassed action hero and had never developed beyond that.
Maybe being in constant action didn't leave her any chance to learn from her actions, or change as a person.
Fortunately, I didn't have those kinds of problems. I'd been a different person when I was younger, but who I was now was who I was always going to be.
"I didn't check all the databases," I said. "Just killed everybody awake inside and removed the self-destruct bombs."
"And what are you going to do with those?" Amy asked.
She always worried about becoming a villain. Her adoptive mother had drilled into her over and over that her powers were dangerous, and that she had to be a healer.
Also, that she had to heal people for free.
"Modify them to make them a lot better," I said. "You never know when you might need to destroy a really tough asshole."
At her look, I said, "Endbringers, of course. I can kill Alexandria whenever I want."
She needed to breathe, and even if she didn't, I could just blink her into interstellar space, far enough out that it'd take her a lifetime just to get back.
"Why would you?" she asked.
"Taylor probably thinks she's an asshole," Loki said helpfully. "She thinks a whole lot of people are assholes."
"You're an asshole," I told Loki.
He bowed.
"That's the god of assholes to you."
"Anyway, I'm finishing up on my warehouse," I said. "I've got drones putting the warehouse together, and they're working on the parts for the decontamination units. Pretty sure I'll be dropping houses in the cannibal world pretty soon."
I was using the replicator for a few of the harder to build parts. I'd pulled them out of the PRT vehicle and scanned them before replacing them. The programming was a lot easier that way.
"To kill people?" Amy asked.
"This isn't Oz," I said. "And I'm not Dorothy. If I was, that would make you Toto."
"Me?" she asked. "What about him?"
"He's the scarecrow maybe, or the tin man. Or maybe he's a munchkin…I haven't decided."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Loki said. "Some Midgardian pap, I suppose."
"If your whole impression of Midgard is formed from nineties Anime, and American Home Videos, I can understand why you've got such a terrible impression of us."
"I like Wagner," he said.
"Of course, you do," I said.
"Hey Alices!" I called out. "You guys like pizza?"
The looks of incomprehension on their faces made my heart hurt.
"Well, here's some pizza for you, and for you, and for you!" I said, making pizzas appear in their hands. "Share a little with the non-powered clones, will you?"
Amy was looking at me in disgust.
"You can't just feed them a diet of pizza. They'll die young!"
"They've got boring healthy food in the clone suburbs," I said. "Besides, they're all going to have a shorter lifespan anyway. They're born at the age of thirty…unless you can do something about that."
"What?"
"You could get rich by making a few billionaires twenty or thirty years younger," I said. "Movie stars too. What would they give to get a few more decades to enjoy their money?"
"Why do you keep trying to get me to get rich?"
"Wouldn't you be happy if you could spend all day on the beach, ogle the pretty girls, live in a mansion?"
She frowned.
"I could do that without money…not the mansion part."
"If you're healing because you want to, it's a lot more fun," I said. "Doing it for free is just going to burn you out."
"That's…" she said. She trailed off.
"I've got a sense about parahumans," I said. "And I can tell what they want and what they need."
She scowled.
"Stay out of my head!"
I patted her on the shoulders.
"Anyway, here's a gold brick," I said.
She almost dropped it. Gold was a lot heavier than in the movies.
"Where'd you get this?"
"I decontaminated some gold from this world's Fort Knox," I said. I scowled. "Did you know the lowest price I could get the airplane hangar was two hundred thousand, and that's without the land or the people to put it up?"
I'd checked the man's mind, and he'd felt he was giving me a price that was more than fair. He'd actually been a fan. Unfortunately, he had his own costs, and he'd had to make a small profit to satisfy his wife.
"These are twenty-pound bricks," I said. "Gold is $1500 an ounce, so this brick is worth $480,000. You can get seventy or eighty percent from a cash for gold place, but they've got to report transactions over $10,000."
"I can't use this," she said, staring at the brick in her hand.
"You can give it to the Pelhams," I said. "And they can use it to pay for your college. They can handle the taxes, call it a donation from an admirer, and it can offset what they're spending on your upkeep, since you aren't paying for yourself."
I'd known that bothered her.
"They seem like fair people," I said. "After selling the gold for maybe $330,000, and paying thirty nine percent on income taxes-132,000, and another $12,600 in state income taxes, you'll only have $185,000 left maybe."
She stared at me.
"You only get to keep less than half?"
"That's life as an adult…or so I hear," I said. "Tuition at NYU is thirty-five thousand a year. By the time you actually go in 2013 who knows how much it'll be? The money from this gold brick might barely cover it."
I was exaggerating, of course. They might be able to get a deal on the gold, but someone was going to want to make a profit.
Even though I effectively had all the gold I'd ever want…eight thousand tons…if I actually tried to sell it, the price of gold would collapse.
I'd have to sell it very gradually. I suspected I'd have better results just healing more rich people.
"You've got to think about your future," I said. "I've got my future already mapped out."
"God Empress of empty Earths?" Loki asked dryly.
"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe professional beach bum once I've accomplished all my goals."
I doubted that I'd ever be able to lie around. I could see myself exploring the multiverse once Dad was back and the Endbringers and possibly Scion were dead.
"Troubleshooter, maybe," I said.
"I pity this trouble," Loki said.
"Anyway," I said, "Let's be on our way. Clones have to get their beauty sleep."
Touching both of them, we blinked into Panacea's bedroom.
It was fairly spartan, except for a Katy Perry poster on the wall and a Xena Warrior princess poster on the other wall. She didn't even have family pictures up; it was probably too soon.
Photon Mom was in the doorway.
"Where were you, Amy?" she asked. She glanced at me and Loki, and her eyes widened.
"Checking to see if some clones were plague carriers," Amy said tiredly. She walked over and handed the brick to her aunt.
Sarah Pelham stared at the brick.
"It's salvage from a dead world," I said. "Totally legal. It's a donation to New Wave, or payment to Panacea, whichever you think the government will accept."
"Amy, she has a kill order," Sarah said cautiously.
"She says she can bring people back to life," Amy said. "Only up to three days, but still…"
Sarah's face snapped up to mine.
"I'm replicating the nanites now," I said. "The next Endbringer fight should be interesting."
It had been a problem getting around the replicator's prohibition against replicating weapons or poisons. The nanites weren't either, but they were in a gray area.
They wouldn't replicate real alcohol either, without a captain's override. Maybe I could con Picard into opening some things up for me. He owed me after all.
"Why haven't you told the PRT?" she asked. "You could probably get the Kill Order reversed for a game changer like that."
"I've still got to murder Lung," I said. "And maybe a few other villains. I want to get all my crime in before my pardon. Besides…I kind of want to see the expressions on their faces when they realize what I can do."
Sarah stared at me.
"What did they do to you?"
For some reason she seemed to think that killing villains was wrong. She thought the Birdcage was the more merciful alternative.
"They killed my dad," I said. "And my godparents. Wouldn't you have done something similar when Fleur died?"
"Maybe," Sarah said. "But I'd have done it in a fit of rage, and I'd have killed the person who did it, and not all of their friends and coworkers."
She believed that, but I didn't. She was a passionate person, and in the heat of anger, it was possible that she might have done a lot more.
"I'm worried," she said. "It's not safe for Amy to be around you, not as long as you've got the kill order."
"I mostly take her to other universes," I said.
"That doesn't comfort me," she said. "If you get killed, she'll be trapped there."
"I copied the butcher's power." I said. While I could hardly tell her that I had a good chance of returning from death, people already believed that I was the next Butcher. "Which means the next me would make sure Amy got home."
"You'd just be a voice in a new person's head."
"My version is different," I said. "I'm in control of my new body, and the original owner is a voice in my head."
Sarah was going to tell this to the PRT; as a lie, it was perfect for getting people off my back. It would likely eventually get the Kill Order reversed.
"So I'm not worried about getting killed, unless it's by a fat old dude. That would suck."
She was silent for a moment.
"I'll protect her," I said. "And I'll pay her. You guys aren't doing that great financially, and she's going to need to go to college."
"If the public knew we were accepting money from criminals," she said, but I could tell she was wavering.
"It was an anonymous donation," I said. "Or I can take it back and just drop a third of a million dollars under Amy's bed."
"It'd be less identifiable," she said. "Gold is easily tracked."
I took the gold from her, and I dropped the money under her bed, making sure that some of it stuck out.
"Aunt Sarah!" Amy said, sounding shocked.
"We need the money," she admitted. "And she's right that we need to invest in your future. Besides…she's not the kind of person who takes no for an answer."
Sarah Pelham was a lot more flexible than Carol Dallon had been. She didn't see the world in quite the same black and white.
She actually believed that Amy should get paid, and she was rationalizing taking the money.
"This was really salvage?" she asked hesitantly.
"That's money from the Slaughterhouse bounties," I said, nodding toward the bed. "Totally legal and taxes already paid. This is from the Fort Knox on a dead world."
"Are you paying your taxes?" she asked.
"I've got a kill order," I said. "If it's reversed by December 31st , I'll pay all the taxes I owe. If it isn't, the pardon I get would cover it."
I was lying.
Americans were supposed to pay taxes no matter where they made the income. I would not pay taxes on any income I made in other worlds, at least worlds the government didn't know about.
I would pay Earth Bet taxes, though.
Sarah knew that the possibility of my getting a pardon was almost one hundred percent. The ability to resurrect dead capes was enough of a game changer that the government would kiss my ass and would bend over backward to give me anything I wanted.
It'd buy me a lot of status in the cape world too.
With a strong assurance that unless their bodies were ripped apart, they'd be able to come back from death, a lot more capes would show up to Endbringer fights. Maybe twice as many or more would show up, and that might save the lives of millions of people.
Of course, if the Endbringers noticed that the same people were coming back over and over again, they might start deliberately mutilating bodies so they couldn't be resurrected. That would take them more time, though, which still would be a net gain for the world.
The Borg technology was going to change the world, and with me being the only supplier, at least until a tinker was able to replicate it, I was likely going to be considered a hero.
Sarah was going to tell the PRT my claim even though I told her I wanted it to be a surprise. They'd check their precogs, who would agree that I had the technology, and then their PR departments would start to go to work.
They'd been slandering me all this time, and that gave a certain momentum to the narrative.
Their response would be to start to shift the narrative a little at a time. By the time I showed what I could do with Leviathan, it would be a narrative that I was a misguided teenager.
They could pivot then to make me out to be a hero once I came out with the Borg nanites.
Telling them now would give them time to work on the narrative to change it. Even the PRT couldn't change people's minds overnight. They needed to make it a gradual change so that people didn't realize that what they were hearing now was the complete opposite of what they were hearing two months ago.
People's memories were short, fortunately.
Federation sociology was mor useful than I would have thought. They knew how to reach people's hearts and minds.
In a world like ours, there were always crazy people who believed the opposite of whatever everyone else believed. If there was a plague, some people would see conspiracies.
Human nature wanted to believe that there was always a villain, that the government, or evil groups or somebody was responsible. The idea than an uncaring universe had simply caused so much misery was incomprehensible to people.
There had probably been people in Cannibal world who had believed that the asteroid had been brought by the government.
The Federation had seemingly eliminated a lot of that, and even with the skill books I had gotten, I still didn't entirely understand how.
There was still dissent of course; more among the civilian population than Starfleet, but it wasn't as…vicious as it was in our world.
They'd managed to make differences of opinion rational, without the craziness of our world. They were relatively pure in their principals too.
As inconvenient as it had been for me, I respected the Federation for sticking to their principals. They could have gotten all kinds of technology from me, but they'd worried about the effects of what I traded on my world.
The fact that I could buy my way out of a kill order in my world, even if it was with a cure for death was a sign of how corrupt our world was. That Sarah Pelham didn't even question the fact that I'd get a pardon was a sign she understood just how corrupt the world was.
"Well, I don't suppose we can stop you, at least not without putting Amy in witness protection," Sarah said reluctantly.
"I've got thinker powers, and a spaceship that can scan the entire planet," I said. "I can find her wherever you put her."
Sarah stared at me, and then at Amy.
"She's got a small spaceship," Amy admitted. "She took me up to look at the planet. She says I might not be able to have my powers on the moon, so she didn't take me there."
"Mine work anywhere," I said smugly.
"Mine too," Loki said. "Because I'm a god."
"You're a midget among your people," I said.
Amy glared at me.
"That's a pejorative," she said.
"What?"
"The term is little people," she said.
"Well, I guess he is half the man his father was," I said. "So, you're a little giant?"
Loki flipped me off. I hadn't realized he even knew the gesture.
"Anyway, we've got to go," I said. "Amy needs her sleep."
We blinked over the house, and I could hear Amy say, "It's not my fault. I'm helping her with some projects in another world, mostly to keep her from creating intelligent animals or whatever other crazy things she's got cooking."
As much as she complained, I knew she enjoyed the challenge to her power of what I was making her do.
Paying her outrageously and assuring her family that the Kill Order was temporary meant I wouldn't have to wait until after they went to bed to use her.
After all, eating pizza at midnight was likely going to give the Alices indigestion.
Stepping into a Brockton Bay police department was a little weird. I'd never actually been inside one, and it had a weird, chemical smell. I could smell the vestiges of vomit and urine and other substances I didn't want to think about.
I hadn't been sure which department would have the jurisdiction, and so I'd chosen the closest one.
Before I'd stepped inside, I'd used my arcane eyes and telepathy to get a look at the inside. The place was a dump. It had been built in the nineteen thirties, and it had never really been upgraded.
There wasn't any bulletproof glass protecting the desk sergeant from people coming in; I could hear one of the rookies complaining about that inside his mind. His father had worked in New York where more money was spent.
There was one bathroom; they didn't have separate facilities for men and women. There were two locker rooms; one for the higher ups and another for the rank and file. Again, they did not have separate quarters for males and females.
The parking lot was too small, and police cars had to be parked across the street. There were four cells, originally intended for two prisoners each; they each had six right now, and they'd packed even more people inside in the past.
It was open plan; I could have walked right inside if I wanted to do something bad to these people. No wonder they felt so defeated, even without the gangs causing trouble They were underfunded and afraid.
Stepping up to the desk sergeant, I waited until he looked up. I wasn't wearing either of my usual outfits. I was wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.
"I found some bodies," I said.
His head snapped up. He was old; he only had two months left until he retired. In a movie, that would mean an absolute certainty that he had only an hour left to live.
He had a paunch, and a touch of arthritis, and he had a heart problem that left him feeling tired all the time, but he hadn't had the money to take care of it at the time.
"Where?" he asked.
"Out in the bay," I said. "I was doing some…uh…diving, when I found them."
He looked at me skeptically.
I handed him a burner phone. Once I'd found the first body, it had been easy to use water control to create a sphere of air around my hand and then bring a phone out of inventory.
He clicked through the pictures.
"How did you take these underwater?" he asked.
I shrugged.
"I've got all the locations tagged," I said. "And I didn't mess with any of the bodies; I've seen enough forensics tv shows to know better."
He looked up at me suspiciously.
"What did you say you were doing down there again?"
"Diving," I said.
I'd actually been underwater to get close enough to the Rig, which was beginning to be re-inhabited to use telepathy. I'd been trolling for passwords and security codes, hoping to get access to the PRT databases.
"Uh…I was actually cleaning up some of the trash from the bottom of the Bay," I admitted. I hadn't intended to do so at first, but eventually I'd gotten bored while trolling for data and so I'd tried to do something useful.
"Who are you?" he demanded. "I don't suppose you're old enough to show ID."
"I'm Taylor Hebert," I said. He froze, and I reached out and touched his hand.
He pulled back, panicked.
"How do you feel?"
"It's a crime to use parahuman powers on someone without their consent," he said faintly.
"Just add it to the list," I said. "I didn't kill any of these people…I really did find them."
"How can we believe you?" he asked.
"Forensics?" I said. "I can take your CSI's out there and make it easy for them to get the bodies. You don't even need a boat if you don't want."
He stared at me stiffly. He wanted to pull the gun on me, but he knew it wouldn't help. He worried about the people behind him too.
"I took care of your heart, too," I said. I leaned forward. "You'll probably live a lot longer. The way it was struggling, you probably had about eighteen months left. Really, you should slow down on the hot dogs and beer."
He paled.
"The fact that you're involved makes it a PRT matter," he said.
"I didn't kill them," I said. "I suppose one of the gangs could have done it, but it was probably normal people who did it. Doesn't that make it under your jurisdiction?"
He frowned.
Like most cops, he resented the interference of the PRT.
I'd heard that the police here were less arrogant as a rule than police in Earth Aleph. The fact that any perp could turn out to be a parahuman and possibly master you or turn your spleen inside out made them a lot more polite and a lot more cautious.
There were still a lot of bad apples in the department though.
Sergeant Givens was a good man though, and a straight shooter.
"Don't tell anybody that I told you," I said. "But officer Hernandez is taking money from drug dealers to look the other way. Officer Jones beats his wife and Officer Smith is dating a sixteen-year-old girl."
He flushed red.
"I've already sent an anonymous complaint to IA, so you don't have to worry about it. Most of your guys are good guys though. Hey, if I created a bulletproof glass wall, do you think the station would accept it?"
"You have a kill order!" he hissed. "You can't bribe us!"
"Officer Jeffries takes bribes sometimes," I said. "I didn't call IA about him though because he uses the money to help a soup kitchen. It's a weird kind of morality, but I like it."
"You would," he said.
Jeffries was careful to only take bribes about crimes he felt were victimless, which meant he didn't make nearly the kind of money he could.
"I'm sure you won't say anything to anybody."
"The PRT would tear the wall down," he said. "Call it power created bullshit."
"Yeah, they're jerks like that," I said. "Say hello to your wife and daughter for me."
His face whitened.
"You know that breast cancer your wife beat five years ago? It was coming back. It's not anymore. Your daughter had those back problems from that cheerleading accident twenty years ago? She's feeling a lot better now."
"Why would you do that?" he asked.
"Because you're a good man," I said. "And I like to reward good men. Most people are assholes."
He stared at me like he didn't understand.
It had been trivial for me to find them using his memories before I'd even entered the building.
"Anyway, get justice for the families of these murder victims, ok?" I said. "I've got a thing about family being murdered and people just…ignoring it."
Before he could respond, I blinked up into my shuttlecraft, which was in orbit.
The PRT hadn't been able to pin down the location of Heartbreaker other than to note that he was in Western Canada.
Finding Heartbreaker would have been impossible without my shuttlecraft. Traditionally he went about his business of raping mastered women undisturbed, but he also kept his actions hidden.
He had an entire Harem of mastered women along with numerous children, and they all tended to target wealthy women with a lot of money and large houses. They would all live together in a family that was as much a cult as anything else.
All I had to do with my shuttle was to search areas where there were large numbers of people in a small area. I chose the middle of the day so that I didn't have to sift through as many house parties and the like, and even then, it took a lot of work.
I had to eliminate restaurants and movie theaters, which I did by limiting my search to groups of fifty or less. Despite that I had thirty false positives. I picked noon so restaurants would be busier, and despite that there were small restaurants that had less than fifty patrons.
I would fly over the houses and buildings and I would check them telepathically.
Hearing the sounds of rockets coming in my direction, I saw one of Dragon's suits flying toward me.
I blinked next to her, unwilling to wait the couple of minutes it would have taken her to reach me. My time was valuable after all.
"What's up?" I asked. "Are you here to kill me? I could use a dragon suit."
"Why are you here?" her electronic voice said. She ignored my taunt. "There have been numerous reports of you flying over the city."
There was no mind inside the suit, so I knew that it was remotely piloted.
"I'm looking for Heartbreaker," I said.
"That's…not a good idea," she said.
"I've got reason to believe that I'm resistant to powers like his," I said. "And his powers are line of sight, so I'll just poke his eyes out, and I'll be fine."
"His children all have master powers, and many of them do not have the same kind of limitations," she said.
"A large number of capes, all in the same place, sounds like a buffet to me."
"They were brainwashed by their father," Dragon said. "Some of them are still children. They may be able to be rehabilitated!"
"All right," I said. "Where should I drop them, and how much is the reward for Heartbreaker?"
"There is no kill order on Heartbreaker," Dragon said.
"I got a kill order and he didn't?" I asked, outraged. "What the hell?"
"Kill orders encourage outsiders to attack the parahuman the kill order is taken out on," Dragon said. "We didn't want to simply add to his army."
There was a growing crowd beneath us on the street. People had their phones pointed in our direction.
"So, Birdcage him?"
"The risk that he would simply take over the Birdcage was too great," she said.
"So, he gets to go on raping women?" I asked. "He's been doing this stuff for more than twenty years? You could take him out yourself! Just hit him with robots until he dies."
"His servants are mastered," she said. "They will try to kill themselves if he is killed."
"Maybe he's lying," I said. "Maybe killing him will free them."
"If it was your mother, would you want us to take that chance?"
"Yes," I said. "If the alternative was her to spend decades in a living hell."
Before she could respond, I blinked to the next location. I only had two left and…
This was the place.
It looked like they'd been watching me on live television.
Using telepathy, I marked them out, the parahumans and the others.
One of the girls sensed me already. She could sense my emotions.
"Do you really love your father?" I asked, creating an illusion of myself beside her using Mama Mather's power. "Or do you want to be free of him and the others?"
Before she could respond one way or the other, I appeared behind her father, who was having lunch. I shoved my fingers in his eyeballs and shoved them further into his brain as his skull cracked like an eggshell.
NEW POWER ASPECT!
POST HYPNOTIC SUGGESTIONS: YOU MAY NOW CREATE POSTHYPNOTIC SUGGESTIONS AND CHANGES IN EMOTIONS THAT LAST ONE HOUR PER LEVEL IF YOU CONTROL THEIR MINDS FOR AT LEAST TEN MINUTES. THIS DOUBLES FOR EACH LEVEL.
TELEPATHY HAS INCREASED +2 LEVELS.
LEVEL 14.
YOU NOW CAN USE TELEPATHY TO CREATE POSTHYPNOTIC SUGGESTIONS AND EMOTIONAL CHANGES FOR 341 DAYS!
Holy crap.
That was the kind of power that would make people paranoid if they knew that I had it, maybe more than the other powers I had.
I could see several of the children running toward me even as I felt powers trying to grab hold of my mind.
Blinking behind an older teenage boy, I broke his arm and as he screamed, I knocked him out with a punch to the back of his head.
He had the power to see through other people's eyes if he touched them, and he could blind their senses as well.
MIND'S EYE INCREASES BY 2 LEVELS!
YOU MAY NOW USE 176 PEOPLE AS MIND'S EYES AT THE SAME TIME WITHIN A RANGE OF 28,000 FEET.
I grinned. This was exactly what I had wanted.
Quick upgrades to my powers from a lot of targets in a small space.
They were all moving in slow motion; with the exception of one of them, all of them had normal human reaction speeds. They couldn't compete with me. Their emotion control powers competed with each other, trying to pull me in all directions.
I could feel what they were trying to do; feed me fear and hopelessness, anger and apathy. I felt all of those emotions for a moment before Gamer's Mind slid over me like a cool shower.
I grinned at them, and I could see the horror in their eyes.
The normals around them still didn't even understand what had happened. The parahumans were attacking at the speed of thought.
I hit a third teenage boy; his name was Nicholas, I thought. I broke his nose and he fell backwards. He had the power to create fear in others.
EMPATHY NOW HAS A SECOND UPGRADE!
EMPATHIC CONTROL!
ANYONE WITHIN RANGE OF EMPATHY HAS A TEN PERCENT CHANCE PER LEVEL MINUS RESISTANCES OF HAVING THEIR EMOTIONS CONTOLLED. YOU CAN CONTROL THE EMOTIONS OF ONE PERSON TIMES TWO PER LEVEL.
+1 LEVEL TO EMPATHY!
LEVEL EIGHT!
YOU MAY NOW SENSE THE EMOTIONS OF THOSE WITHIN A RANGE OF 1280 FEET AND CONTROL THE EMOTIONS OF 128 BEINGS WITHIN THAT RANGE!
It was a different power than my Siren song. They didn't have to sense me; I just had to sense them.
It was more subtle, and in a way more dangerous since it only required proximity.
I wanted more.
The boy beside him was a kid of twelve. He could sense emotions and he could manipulate people through those emotions. He used torture to get information from people.
I hesitated about letting him live despite the fact that he was a child. All of these kids had seen and participated in things that were horrible by the standards of anyone. Could they actually be redeemed?
Were the villains or victims? Were they both?
Hitting him was easy enough. Vista wasn't much older than him, and she was a professional badass. I couldn't afford to assume that he was helpless just because he was a child.
+1 EMPATHY!
That increased Empathic manipulation and Intuitive empathy as well.
STATUS EFFECT!
PARALYZED!
PARALYSIS RESISTANCE 10%.
The eight-year-old girl I'd just grabbed had some sort of physical paralysis effect. What the hell? It didn't match the powers of her siblings.
I could see the grins on the faces of the others.
Ah well.
Arcane eyes appeared in the air around them, and a moment later they were all on the ground. The girl fell last, and she was staring up at me.
It took almost two minutes for me to lose the status effect.
Some of the kids almost died. Well, even if they did, I still needed someone to test the Borg nanites on.
I healed them as little as I could, and then I proceeded to Harvest their powers once I'd tied the screaming normal women up. I could understand their upset; in their mind I'd just murdered their husband and possibly their children.
Still, it was annoying, especially with enhanced hearing, and so I sang them all to sleep.
Another eight-year-old had the ability to implant permanent post-hypnotic suggestions by touch. I didn't touch her; I used blood control to pull blood from her nose.
POST HYPNOTIC SUGGESTIONS CAN BE MADE PERMANENT IF YOU ARE TOUCHING THE VICTIM AT THE TIME.
Holy crap.
That was the kind of power that no one should have.
Within two minutes of gaining the power, I was already using it.
"You will not hurt yourself. You are happy to be free of Heartbreaker. You want nothing more than to return to your former life."
Despite the moral implications of the power, I had no qualms about using it to reverse some of the harm that had been done.
"You are strong, a survivor. Not all people are monsters; there are still good people out there."
I repeated the mantra over and over again with all twenty-five of his current harem.
"You did not love Heartbreaker. Those feelings were an illusion."
I threw whatever I could into each of them, hoping that I could avoid some of the pain they were all going to feel once they left his influence.
There was a boy who could project rage; I actually got +3 STRENGTH from him. Apparently, he became stronger and faster when he used rage.
A girl had the power to create illusions of pleasurable events.
+2 LEVELS TO MENTAL ILLUSIONS!
YOU CAN CREATE ILLUSIONS WITHIN 640 FEET AFFECTING UP TO SEVEN PEOPLE AT ONCE.
LEVEL 7.
I wasn't sure that all of the children were home, but I was satisfied with my haul. I'd gained the power to make a real difference, even if the temptation to use them would be terrible.
A touch in the middle of the night to a world leader followed by some whispers in their ear. A political pundit forced to reveal his true opinions instead of those he used to push his agenda.
Even a bad cop, a bad teacher, there was all sorts of ways the world could be shifted in small ways to lead you toward the end you wanted.
For a moment I wondered.
Was this what it was like to be the Simurgh?
