Intermission 7.8
Eugene Lewis
2002, November 20: New York, NY, USA
DC was still being rebuilt so we gathered at the national Protectorate headquarters in New York. I walked through a Door and into a designated room on Legend's floor set aside for the purpose. I made my way to the roof, where I found only Legend, Eidolon, and Alexandria. I couldn't attend, Last Christmas had made it abundantly clear what the Simurgh can do with a good tinker in her area, but I wanted to see my friends off.
When I arrived, Eidolon was yelling at Alexandria.
"What do you mean we're not going?" he snarled. His suit glowed green from under the hood, a clever little trick with LED lights rather than a display of power on his part.
Alexandria was as unflappable as always. "The CUI has declared that they will not tolerate foreign capes on Chinese soil, endbringer truce be damned."
"You're fucking with me."
"I am not. They have stated their intention to fight against the endbringer with a combination of conventional military hardware and the best of their Yangban. If any cape who is not a recognized member of the Yangban arrives on scene, they will be fired upon."
"So we'd be fighting those idiots on top of the Simurgh?"
"Quite. At the bare minimum, it would cause an international incident. More likely, we will cause even more damage to the civilian population of Shanghai than if we did not go. Considering the Simurgh's abilities, our involvement would generate too many opportunities for her to kill one of us or damage the CUI irreparably."
"We had Contessa nurture powerful capes and minimize the loss of life," I reminded Alexandria bitterly. "Are you telling me this is the best she could come up with?"
"She cannot predict the Simurgh; that has not changed. Nor can she make the CUI more cooperative overnight."
"So what then? We just sit with our thumbs up our asses?"
"We go about our lives. You were informed of an endbringer attack because I felt you should hear it from me."
"Fuck!" Eidolon swore. "We should just go and fuck what the CUI says!"
"If we do, it'll result in an unmitigated disaster. We'd just give the Simurgh what she wants most. There is a chance that she'll be driven off by the CUI."
"And how likely is that?" Legend asked. We all knew the answer. A pair of blue scissors flashed through our minds. A lamb-like archer. A wolf's head made of roiling smoke. We'd seen what it took to force the Simurgh to flee. No amount of conventional arms would be enough.
"Nearly nonexistent," our friend admitted quietly.
"Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
"I'm sorry. I felt you three should be informed even if we would not be attending."
Legend let out a defeated sigh. Seeing the normally cheerful man like this made the world feel a little dimmer. "It's not on you, Alexandria… I'll… I'll start organizing aid packages."
"Same here. Even if they don't want Protectorate, they might be more willing to accept the Guild in their borders," I said hopefully.
"This is so fucked up. How many people live in Shanghai?" Eidolon asked. He was always the first to try and quantify our success by any metric, even more so than Alexandria.
"Fifteen million," the strongest brute said.
"Shit… I-I'm going to go be alone for a while…"
The four of us went our separate ways to deal with this in whatever way we could.
X
2002, November 20: Unnamed, Sahara Desert
I stepped through the Door to find Alexandria, Rebecca now, crashing down from heaven like the fist of an angry god. She'd stripped off her iconic costume and helmet in favor of a set of generic workout gear, a gray sports bra and tights that I might have appreciated more under other circumstances. She collided with a sand dune with all the force of a meteor, creating a mushroom cloud of debris and sending out a rippling wave of sand for a hundred feet in every direction.
Alexandria didn't show it, but I knew by her silence that she wasn't unaffected either. She tried to be as stoic as she could, detached and set apart from the world, our disciplinarian and objective counsel. She succeeded most of the time.
But then there were times like these, times when even the invincible Alexandria felt the need to stop being Alexandria for a bit. I hovered a few hundred feet away and let her blow off steam. She didn't scream or yell or curse. She didn't throw a tantrum in the normal sense either. Instead, she beat the earth with the same single-minded determination with which she tackled every other challenge in life.
"Is it dead yet?" I asked, trying to inject a bit of cheer that I did not feel.
She glanced back at me with a withering glare. "Eugene."
"Becky."
"If I say yes, will you leave?"
"You're in a mood."
"We just damned fifteen million people to become Simurgh bombs."
"Was there a choice?" I asked, not as Hero to Alexandria, but as Eugene to Rebecca.
"No," she laughed. It sounded hollow.
"Then we move on. We move past this, like every other tragedy we weren't good enough to stop. What's the silver lining?"
"There is none. Fifteen million people are as good as dead, Eugene. What silver lining?"
"There's always a silver lining."
"At least it's not America?" she asked acerbically. If sarcasm had physical weight, she'd have made a singularity. This was a side of her few ever got to see, the side filled with frustration and bitterness and regret, the side that raged in impotent fury at tragedies she couldn't stop.
She stood in the middle of that crater, trembling with the need to do something, only held in check by her own determination. She looked so young like this, without the makeup or the helmet, like a girl in her late teens rather than a veteran who was every bit my peer.
I wrapped my arms around her. "I get it."
Her hands came up to clasp around mine. I felt her take a deep breath and the trembling stopped. "I know, Eugene. I know."
"We move past this."
She was silent for a long minute, practically an eternity for her. When she spoke, it was with a wistfulness that I seldom heard from my friend. "He practiced here, you know."
"Hmm?"
"Andy. He used to practice with Anivia's Grace here, an armor with a cold field that saps all heat and uses it to fuel a forcefield around himself that even I couldn't break."
"You told me about that. I made a stasis field based off it. You said he killed a lot of lab rats."
"He did. He was on Lily #82 last I checked."
"Crazy kid."
"Determined."
"Yeah."
"Shanghai. It's as good as gone."
"It is. So what can we do about it?"
"Nothing…" she trailed off. I knew that tone.
"Nothing, but…"
"But maybe we can use it to prepare for the future. The fall of Shanghai will make sure no one takes the Simurgh lightly again. We can use it to reinforce the importance of the endbringer truce. If we play this right, we can push for better international cooperation, better response times so we can make use of the thirty minute window. The Yangban will be gutted after this so even the CUI won't be in any position to protest."
"That's assuming they don't cover it up."
"They can't. FIfteen million people going murderously insane is impossible to hide even for us."
"What can we do to prevent brainwashing?"
She winced. "Nothing, not unless you have any ideas."
I considered the question. Could I? How did the Simurgh's brainwashing work anyway? The "song" sounded like an ear-piercing screech, but Andy said it didn't matter. The song itself was just her playing with kid gloves for us; she didn't need it to brainwash anyone. But everything had a vector. It didn't matter what it was, everything had to cross some distance between point A and B, even if that distance was through a different dimension.
So assuming the Simurgh's song covered up an audio frequency that could not be heard but somehow carried enough force to adjust someone's brain chemistry at range, it was a matter of finding that frequency and playing its reciprocal to cancel it out. Or I was way off and she was simply reaching through dimensions to bypass any distance on our earth.
"I may have some ideas," I said tentatively. I explained my thought process to her. That was what was great about Rebecca. She wasn't a tinker, but she absorbed information like a sponge. Her vast repository of conventional knowledge made her among the smartest people alive; she seldom had any trouble following along with complex ideas, even when discussing tinkertech.
"How would we test its effectiveness? Even if you build working prototype dampeners, making enough for everyone would be impossible and distributing them to only some would be laughably cruel. Would some sort of speaker be possible?"
"Like Last Christmas? Yeah. Something to counter her scream in a small area. But… There are too many problems with that. She might usurp control over anything I make. Or she might simply change the frequency. Or not affect some people but affect others just to muddy results. Or sound might not even be how she does what she does in the first place."
"Then for once, tinkertech isn't the answer," she said matter-of-factly. She liked to let me come to my own conclusions. "Focus on building walls to contain the corrupted cities. Can you do that?"
"The Guild-"
"Can function without you for a few months while you come up with mass infrastructure projects. It's imperative that we have a solution for the Simurgh, even if it's only a band-aid."
"You're right," I sighed. It was yet one more thing for me to do. Even as I started brainstorming ideas for rapid construction, I made a list of tinkers I could contact. Several of them had helped build Cauldron's base on this earth, albeit unknowingly. "How do we minimize the impact of fifteen million people?"
"We're going to leave that to the Number Man and Contessa. They can't see the Simurgh, but they can still make hypotheticals of a worst case scenario in which a human tidal wave of murderers spews from Shanghai into the rest of China and make a Path to containing the damage. We can sell it to the CUI."
"We're not going to sell a plan that can save millions of lives, Becky."
"We will, because the emperor wouldn't trust it otherwise."
"Politics makes me lose faith in humanity."
"You still had that?" she asked with a wry grin.
I snorted in laughter. "Did you joke? Rebecca Costa-Brown. Joke? I mean, it wasn't very funny, but it was a solid effort."
"Hmph. I'm smarter than you and therefore I'm also wittier than you, Eugene. You just don't understand my humor."
"Of course, of course. Come on, let's go be productive." I called a Door and started to drag her inside.
"Yes, lets."
X
2002, November 28: Unnamed, Ivory Coast
Thanksgiving was typically one of my favorite holidays. No matter how much David got on my case about being an emotional busybody, I was the type to insist on a full turkey dinner with friends, or at least the Wards. I'd been looking forward to a nice dinner with my new coworkers at the Guild. Sure, most of them were blasphemous heathens who celebrated Thanksgiving Day a month early, but at least a few of us were American. I figured the rest of us would just have to reeducate them.
Unfortunately, that wasn't going to happen this year. Instead, I was in my lab on another earth testing out an energy-to-matter fabricator that could be used in building walls. It had been used before for Cauldron's bases and the dam in British Columbia last year following the Behemoth attack, but it could always use more fine-tuning. That, and I'd rather work on this than on bomb-bracelets.
I could see the necessity of it, but the idea of strapping bombs to brave volunteers who agreed to stand against an endbringer made me sick to my stomach. Just how fucked up was Andy's future for this to have been a fact of life? And how close were we getting to that hellhole?
I wasn't sure I wanted that answer.
So, fabricators.
I had, of course, seen the CUI's propaganda video celebrating their "victory" over the Simurgh. It was a military parade held in Beijing with jets, tanks, and a hundred of the "brave warriors" of the Yangban marching in lockstep. The video was also interspersed with footage taken from the endbringer battle.
I had to give it to them; it was well-edited if nothing else. The song had of course been edited out in favor of what I assumed to be the CUI national anthem playing in the background. Missile platforms mounted on military trucks launched what seemed like an endless barrage of rockets at the endbringer. When they struck, the bird bitch reeled in apparent pain and showers of fractured feathers rained down on the earth below. It would have been a heartening sight, if I hadn't also seen footage of her shrugging off Legend's best explosive lasers without a care in the world.
Twenty-four fighter pilots hopped into their planes. Then that footage was minimized to take up a quarter of the screen while three more shots of similar mobilization efforts were shown. Then again. And again. The CUI had been one of the few countries that had not seen fit to significantly downsize their conventional military in favor of capes and it showed. An estimated two hundred fighters of varying models took to the sky. Though the Number Man estimated their losses at close to fifty percent, the video claimed it was an overwhelming victory for the CUI's "military genius and tactical leadership."
"We need no western imperialists to defend our own. The false angel has been driven away and our city is whole. The Pearl of the Orient belongs to the Chinese Union," the tape concluded with a final dig at the state of DC.
It made me furious, and not just because I was a true blue patriot. They were playing a game of political oneupmanship against a nation that frankly didn't have interests in Asia anymore, not since Leviathan. And they were doing it while undoubtedly downplaying the danger of an endbringer.
By all accounts, the Simurgh was driven off with the combined might of China's military and Yangban. However, leaked (stolen) footage of the fight timestamped her departure at precisely thirty minutes. She wasn't driven off; she left because she got what she wanted.
The containment plan the Number Man and Contessa came up with had been offered to the CUI for a "modest" consultant's fee of two million dollars, or its equivalent in Chinese yuan. The emperor's proxy, of course, refused our advice. What use did they have for such a plan if there was nothing wrong with Shanghai?
And then the murder rate shot up within the week of the Simurgh's departure. It first began with the construction workers sent into clear out debris and pave the roads. Then, a single day later, every hospital simultaneously got attacked by a rioting mob that killed hundreds of medical personnel and thousands of patients. Travel was restricted in and out of the city in just five days of their "victory."
At my urging, Contessa arranged for a Chinese hacker to "discover" municipal containment procedures in the US government. Our document had been doctored to look like protocols to be carried out in the event of a major pandemic. No amount of warnings from the US government or PRT would have sunk in because to them, western governments were fundamentally corrupt.
I grunted in annoyance as I connected a dimensional stabilizer to the matter extruder. It would allow my fabricator to draw raw materials from an abandoned earth by converting them into set wavelengths before rearranging them in a predetermined pattern to "set" like overly complicated sci-fi concrete. 'It doesn't matter,' I told myself. 'Let the CUI be smug. At least they won't have to commit genocide against fifteen million people.'
X
2002, December 23: Unnamed, Ivory Coast
News and refugees flooded into the western world. China built a "Second Great Wall," but it was too little, too late. The CUI military did their best to set up a cordon around construction workers, but the intentions of their leaders couldn't be hidden from the people of Shanghai for long. Throw in food and water shortages, sewage buildup, and an exacerbated sense of claustrophobia in an already jam-packed metro area and violent riots were all but constant.
That wasn't even mentioning all the Simurgh victims who had already broken cordon and escaped into the rest of China, over a million by last estimate. Even if only a quarter of them acted out the Simurgh's whims…
"What a shitty way to be proven right," I cursed. The executives of Cauldron were gathered in our headquarters to talk about the aftermath of the Simurgh's second attack. Every seat was filled save the one to Contessa's right. This wasn't the first such meeting, but that emptiness felt crushing now.
"How many people did we lose?" Legend asked. He looked exhausted, emotionally drained and so utterly done with the year. We could all relate.
The Number Man began to pass around his brief. "An estimated 2.6 million people died in the month since the incident, either directly as they encountered Simurgh bombs, or from the ripple effects of their actions. Within the city, an additional six million died despite Contessa's best efforts. More than a dozen separate attempts have been made by former residents of Shanghai on the ruling members of Chinese society. About a third were successful, but I suspect success wasn't the aim."
And wasn't that a kicker. I glanced at the second strongest thinker in the world. Gone was her typically immaculate appearance. There were noticeable bags under her eyes and her olive skin had taken on an unhealthy pallor. No, it wasn't makeup; I'd checked.
What rumors we could hear from within the city spoke of a "misty phantasm" who arrived with the chiming of bells and the smell of incense. It would spread that scented mist throughout the city, putting large swathes of people, hundreds of thousands at a time, to sleep no matter the resilience of the individual, then vanish just as quickly.
Somewhere along the line, Contessa had done what none of us could: She'd learned to operate Hyunmu's gear. Or maybe he'd taught her. Who knew with those two?
The "misty phantasm" would show up to quell unrest, but even Contessa could only do so much. Shanghai was a big place, and whether because it had limited juice or she herself wasn't using it to its full potential, she couldn't cover that much ground. In the end, she could only minimize casualties. Sometimes, all she managed was to make their deaths quiet as people waited for her to pass and looted the newly vulnerable sectors.
At the very least, none of us could say she wasn't doing her best to live her Path.
"It'll get worse before it gets better," Alexandria said. "We've ensured that detailed records of the CUI's blunder were leaked to every government and media outlet in the world. No one will ever take the Simurgh lightly again."
"I saw," David grunted. "They're calling it the 'Shattered Pearl.' Fuck, those leeches need a cute name for every damn disaster."
"They have their uses. An international summit has been called in New York to discuss countermeasures. At that time, we will create a shortlist of movers who can ferry rapid response capes across oceans and incentivization plans will be put into place to secure their cooperation. An international agreement to wall cities struck by the Simurgh will also be introduced alongside tinkertech designed for the purpose. A hard cap of thirty minutes will be implemented in all future battles."
"And we're going to strap bombs on everyone, right."
"We are. There is no other way. If a cape does not leave the battlefield within the allotted time, they present too much of a risk."
"That's… That's fine," Legend lied to us all. "This will help us save more lives."
The table fell silent at that. We were well aware that not a single one of these measures addressed the source of our woes. If the Simurgh's goal was to force the world to recognize her as a threat, she succeeded. She'd been called the "weakest" endbringer, the "baby" of the group. No matter how prodigious, an eleven year old boy drove her off after all. She couldn't possibly be as big a deal as the other two…
Eventually, the meeting continued. The Number Man told us more about what we could expect from the CUI. It would be wracked by political unrest for at least a decade more. The propaganda video it had pushed so proudly was now a millstone around its neck as it drowned in public outcry. Already, their Minister of National Defense hanged himself in shame; he wasn't alone.
I tried to quash the sense of dark vindication that rose in my heart when I heard that. I failed. I didn't pay much attention to the rest of the meeting; the ripple effects were beyond my scope anyway. I was a tinker, an inventor, so invent I would.
Author's Note
Kind of a weak chapter in my opinion. Narratively, it's something that needed to happen for the danger of the Simurgh to sink in, but I felt like the impact of the Simurgh's first appearance wasn't there this time (for obvious reasons).
The CUI very much went for a "There is no war in Ba Sing Se," approach. Surprised? You really shouldn't be.
Pretty melancholy chapter so have a nice, heartwarming animal fact: Sea otters hold hands when they sleep so the ocean currents don't separate them.