Chapter 27: Final Solution
DEEP STATE
December 1
And so my plan started innocently enough. I leaked a bit of news that elections were rigged, that there is a Deep State, and that some heroes were in league with it. This was true in the strictest sense of the word, but usually they didn't know they were helping me, even if they worked directly for the government. I also made this come across like Deep State was an organization, not a person, so everyone subconsciously thought of a corrupt empty throne, and not a single person like me who ran the world. This made the public have unfocused anger rather than attempting to egg my lair or have me lynched..
Because the media is poorly run (I designed it this way when I bought out the news companies and got them to report the exact same news, down to the phrase), they all reported this, without actually mentioning which superheroes were allied with the Deep State. Not only did the lack of understanding of Deep State as a person (me!) lead to people imagining a large group of faceless government workers, but the notion that anyone at all could be working for the enemy of heroes everywhere, but the lack of detail was suited to brewing paranoia. Like with ROVER-04 before it, when everyone thought everyone else had it, everyone feared each other. Nobody thought to suspect, "If everyone thinks everyone else is sick, then logically, nobody is sick." And so it was with these superheroes, I had very few actually working for me intentionally, but all of them worked for me once they started to suspect each other. Flame Monger fought with Aqua Woman, and the cities burned or flooded that were their battleground. Electricity Girl fought Magnet Man, while Sacred Emu fought Horse of a Different Color, Paper Man fought The Rock and Scissoring Ladies, and so on. All of this made tons of rubble, which the villains Rubble and Slingshot used to create mayhem against the public. And so, the public asked the newspapers, just who was it that worked for the Deep State anyway? Was it Blue Panther? The Purple Pentapox? The Nibbler? Captain Awesome? Eagle Vision? Rainbow Titan Jackhammer Vigilance? Chromium Apex? Pearl West? Fluffy Rainbow Sparkle Cannon?
In predictable fashion, the media had no answers at all, but like politicians, lawyers, and news media everywhere, they simply redirected the question to an answer they wanted. The next paper read, «Answers still sought concerning identities of heroes aligned with the Deep State, but several notorious villains are at large.» Obviously, this did nothing to halt the violence between heroes, and now the public were involved in the fight too. The streets of most cities had been burned to the ground, then smashed up
I gave them very specific list of targets, who were named with a great amount of detail. Some of these also included heroes who hadn't joined in the fighting, like Shrinking Violet and Pacifist Brawler. After all, I knew that if heroes stopped fighting each other and turned their attention to actual villains, some of this unrest would stop. It wasn't that villains were any less violent or destructive, but rather, without the atmosphere of paranoia, society was able to function. If Tokyo was destroyed by Godzilla and Mothra (yes, kaiju were also classified heroes and villains), regular contractors were employed to reconstruct the buildings within a day. But if Hysterical Princess Yumi and Luminescent Spirit Princess smashed up the physical world, there was a deep sense of wrongness in the world, and people became too distracted with whether they were living in end times to go about their daily work. It was this sense of bewilderment and chaos that I wanted to cultivate when I wrote this list.
But this list also included several former heroes that had been a thorn in my side. It told in-depth the powers of Summer Winters, Isekai, Navy Seal, Emily Smithy, Gemini Fisher, Green Pieces, Transphobe, and Fundamentalist. More importantly, it told of their weaknesses, and their secret identities whenever that was possible to know. Some of them never saw it coming.
GEMINI
I never saw it coming. I was walking outside one day to get the mail when a group of random people blindsided me, and pelted me with rocks. Others hit me with a wooden bat. My vision went black as I passed out.
NERISSA
I saw this all happening from a distance, having a plan today to visit her anyway. So I fired a warning shot and told the group to clear away. They listened this time, and I was able to get Gemini moved to a hospital, where she was able to spend the night. But I worried because with superheroes blindly fighting each other, there was no telling whether some stray power would take out the very building she was sleeping in right now. The superheroes had destroyed most of the urban and commercial areas of our city, and had even smashed up some of our forests. They hadn't hurt any of the residential areas, but this was mainly because heroes did most of their fighting in other areas.
In any case, I kept a steady watch both over the crowd possibly coming to the hospital, and out the window for any people flying (or being tossed) through metal or glass. Gemini slept peacefully given the circumstances, as neither her face was bruised nor was her hair damaged. The reason she had passed out was not due to a concussion but rather blood loss. She was type AB so there was no real risk to a transfusion, but I was woozy from giving her my blood.
Like with child safety laws for adoptions, we had some weird laws about visitation. Like, it was not only okay for close friends to visit a sick person (no restriction to only family, after a bunch of gay people had complained that they weren't listed as married, and thus couldn't see their sweetheart), but sleeping with loved ones in the same bed was allowed, so long as they didn't hurt any wires or tubes. Since I felt exhausted, I snuggled under the covers with her.
DEEP STATE
December 10
While I plotted, Jesus had refused to kneel to me, and quickly made such an uproar about this that today I finally decided to loosen his chains so he could stand up. He had become male again, you see, and his rippling muscles as he struggled against his chains occupied my mind. What? Part of being a tyrant means making compromises with your subjects. I was being strong and dominant, and… stop laughing! I'm the ruler here, and I won't tolerate your mocking! It was… all according to my plan that I gave him this concession, I wanted to give him Stockholm Syndrome. True, it didn't seem to be working yet, but it would! After thousands of years, I was sure that my final victory would be that he would be loyal to me, and indeed something was changing. Every time I looked at him, I blushed. I wanted him to notice me.
Desperate to impress him, I set about my plans. The first of these plans was to get small children to act in stage plays. After all, the more fully they embraced the idea that humans are just animals and are allowed to be treated poorly, the more they would put up with further mistreatment. And so, young children were made to play roles like Toto or Hedwig. It was a deliciously terrible thing that I helped perpetuate, yet these kids still seemed be having fun. Curses, thwarted again?
Under Ungorr's assistance, I turned much of the dead into zombies to gnaw on the brains of the living. These were all people who had supposedly died of ROVER-04 (actually, without exception, all of these were those given the "vaccine" serum). I had put CCTV cameras on every street corner, and my plan was to make a touchless digital currency so that people would never have to touch each other again. This had the added bonus of being easy to hack, and I could inflate it or deflate it at will because they never at any point held their money. I also funded scientists trying to build killer robots to wipe the population of the Earth. They named their company something like... Skynet? What a stupid name! All this made all the religious people that I had given my end times "prophecies" reason to fear that end times were upon them, yet Jesus and I both knew better.
Jesus just rolled his eyes as I explained my plans. What would it take to make him happy with me?!? Surely all of this was impressive! Would he not be pleased unless I destroyed the world?
JESUS
Seeing her plans, I began to conclude that Deep State probably had a crush on me for years, but unfortunately, she never got around to just asking me what made me happy. It was kinda simple. Neither a horrific dystopia nor trying to have a perfect world, but people just able to live together without too much conflict. We could make some economy where no children ever suffered or nobody starved, but this would be horrible in other ways. Ultimately, most people wanted to be left alone, they wanted to find love, and to scratch out a bit of happiness for themselves in an uncertain and sometimes depressing world.
I didn't grant wishes, though sometimes my prayers had an effect that people associated with wish granting. Deep State's problem was that she had never learned that it is possible for one person to be happy, and several others to also be kind of happy. Never in two thousand years of living did she stop to consider that life might not need to be a zero-sum game. No, it was always higher taxes, higher penalties to those who didn't cooperate with her, and more regulations. She never realized that the more she hurt others, the harder she made her own life. She had gone by "they" lately, and pretended to be some kind of masculine world leader, because she thought that the things the world saw as strong or good or blessed were like they advertised. But I didn't want a world where one person held all the cards, and the other several billion were barely hanging on.
As one of her other experiments to impress me, she invented systems like socialism, where (in theory) everyone shares. But I saw this system for the fraud it is. With a big government holding the framework, what actually happened in practice was that money would be shared and then taxes would be raised. The government gets rich, while everyone else starves. You must understand that Marx mooched off his friend (who made his money from the cotton industry) and left his wife and children to nearly starve to death while he complained about capitalism. Meanwhile, actual capitalism enriches a community.
But for it to do that effectively, there must be no income taxes. If I had $1000, and I spent a hundred to pay ten men, the way money circulates without taxes is that not only can they have their needs met (buying a meal and a hotel room), but the money can circulate until it makes its way back to me, where I can pay them the same money again and again. Both the restauranteur and the hotel owner also have the ability to buy what they need. All of that changes however, if you add a 70% tax to "help the poor" with no tax minimum. I don't have the money to pay ten people anymore (only three), they in turn get only to keep only $30, and the restaurant owner keeps $9 of their $30. These taxes, absurdly high as they may be, help illustrate that income tax inhibits the free circulation of money, and creates tax debts in the name of addressing poverty and inequality.
No, there is enough for everyone, but while fawning over me and trying to impress me, she was doing the opposite of what I wanted. Not that I didn't love her. But I was very sad for her, because like the villain in Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood (I had been watching a few shows lately), she had not learned anything useful. Her "door of truth", so to speak, was blank. As I say, my blessing was over prayer, and so I prayed. I prayed that one day life would teach her that losing was not so bad. It was about how one played the game.
GEMINI
I woke up in a hospital bed to find I had been undressed, so whoever in the hospital must have noticed I wasn't exactly a biological female. Nevertheless, I had been dressed in a women's color-coded hospital gown, and someone had bothered to put a bra and panties on me. I noticed wires strewn on the ground that had probably previously been hooked to me while I was unconscious. It was fairly standard practice in hospitals to hook someone up to life support, then get someone with healing powers to kiss it and make it better, so to speak. Healing didn't make blood or replace fluids, so there was usually a delay on that part. But once someone was stable, healing of the actual wounds was fairly quick. The other difference was that hospital gowns had a freaking back. Someone realized that if you have an open sore on your back, a laundered gown is preferable than bare skin against a bed that may or may not have been watched.
Then I noticed Nerissa's arms around my chest with one hand on my breast form, and more importantly, her legs were wrapped around me. "Hey," I said, "You're kinda spooning me." She opened one eye and said, "Go back to sleep if you're not interested, then." Then she proceeded to cuddle with me some more. Now, if I were still hung up on Bookworm, I would probably have balked at this, but I had gotten used to Nerissa and the others casually touching me. Her touch felt safe, comfortable, and pleasant. With Bookworm there was always the sense that I was second best in her eyes. I didn't want to put up with not being a first choice anymore. I wanted to be noticed. And so I decided that here was no harm being loved, as long as it was by my dearest friend. "Nah," I said, "I think I'll stay up this time." Both of us were fighting off weakness from loss of blood, so we didn't do anything too strenuous. Sorry, no bump and grind. That isn't to say we didn't do anything. It was long overdue, after all. We kissed, we touched each other, and things slowly escalated from there. By the time the nurses and such had entered, she had slipped under the sheets. The nurses asked me questions while Nerissa sucked me off, and I tried to keep a straight face and not make any sounds over give it away in my face. I probably blushed like crazy though. Nerissa stayed very still as the nurse asked about emergency contacts, started licking my shaft as they asked about any allergies I had, and while they took a blood test to make sure my body wasn't rejecting the transfusion she put her lips around my cock. As soon as they went out, we went at it in earnest, and she mounted me and rode until I came inside her. The nurse came in, saying, "I just have one last… question," right as she noticed the scene here. Everyone blushed.
If this were a film, the very next moment would cut to the door, and us being 'escorted' outside. Indeed, it felt about that abrupt. "Our hospital does not charge hourly rates!" the nurse said, fuming at us. In any case, I'd like to say that our trip back home was uneventful, but that wasn't quite true. Nerissa was making call after call on the phone, telling a bunch of people what happened to me. Seriously, I was embarrassed enough, not only being attacked but also having my girlfriend tell all about my private life! My girlfriend. The realization dawned on me that we might be a couple. "...Are we a couple?" I asked her. "Well," she said, "I'm not seeing anyone else, I don't plan to see anyone else, and we just slept together in both senses of the word? Nah, probably not." She smirked. Smartass.
But the real reason it was not uneventful was what awaited us when we got home. "I thought so," said Nerissa, seeing a huge crowd of thugs waiting for us. I tried to push past them, but one of them gave a staged fall, and they all shouted after me. "See? She's a villain! She just used violence against a crowd of defenseless people!" one said. I didn't even use much force, you fakers! And what kind of crowd of defenseless people carries clubs and bricks? In fact, a pile of bricks was recently dumped to the yard near my house. Totally a coincidence!
In any case, this time I tried to defend myself. We had been trying to do better, so I didn't want to fight these people (even though they very much wanted to fight us), but I would damned if I let them hurt me. And so, while they attacked us, I blocked, knocking their weapons away before they hit me. Nerissa had taught me basic martial arts, but while she was a pro, I was maybe blocking every second or third attack. She jabbed a few of them in the stomach, did a leg sweep with another, and a blow to the groin for others. I decided to try that, just to get some of the guys to stop attacking me. But then I got to some woman, and she tried it on me. Despite being tucked, I had a very real reminder that while there were people who could hurt me, I couldn't hurt them. And my heart was soft, so I wouldn't hurt them either. I had too many weaknesses. They said as much, "You villains think you are invincible, but you are weak!"
CAPTAIN DOOM
I and the other superheroes were able to destroy the last robot rather easily. They tried the whole liquid mercury thing but our powers just blasted the last of them to smithereens. Then Kyō went back in time, and dealt with Skynet before it started. Our team of superheroes were among the few who didn't fall for the paranoia hype that infected most of the heroes. Heroes were supposed to be role models for the public, but lately they had proved that they were no less led by fads or peer pressure than the rest of the public.
I had always taught my team to ignore the media, and to form their own opinions. So when I heard this smear campaign by Darsha Klotho, a known media shill that seldom reported the news correctly, I decided to do my own research. What I found instead was the restriction of freedom, the rise of technology to a scary point, and some sort of creepy zombies. We had taken care of the robots, and talked some of the people behind all the surveillance tech into maybe toning it down a bit, but now we had this mess to deal with.
The graveyard was a shambles, as shambling beings rose up and walked the graveyard. "Zombies," I said, though I had only actually heard of such beings in books and movies. They had all the signs of being this though, a diseased rotting look about them, the walk of a decaying corpse brought back to a mockery of what would be called life, and soulless eyes where whatever once animated the body through the grace of God no longer occupied it, replaced instead by a malevolent will and a need to consume the brains and bodies of the living. As large a problem as heroes fighting each other were, as large a problem as regular people fighting what most likely were not villains at all, we had a far more pressing concern. If the living dead were among us, the world of living things was at immediate risk. These things needed to be cleansed from this world.
Our team of heroes had a name theme, as all of us were related to the concept of death and doom. There was myself, Captain Doom of the punches of destruction, which had just made quick work of a massive army of robots. There was Deadly Flames, who used her fire powers to burn the Skynet factory to the ground. Kyō Wa Shinda, whose name literally meant "today is dead", had powers over time travel. There was Lethal Voltage, whose electrical powers were invaluable for most missions. And lastly, there was Phantom Samurai, whose blade conferred instant death to those he struck. Oh and he was good with a sword too!
Real samurais have a moral code, and are marked by a sense of discipline and focus. Phantom Samurai, however, was what you would call a wannabe. His powers gave him an instinctive ability to focus on the vital points of living things, to attune to their qi and slice through it, instantly killing them. I groaned when I heard him say, "This battle will end in two seconds flat for me!" I tried to say something, but he already rushed forward. His powers used finesse rather than strength, so these were very light cuts. After all, unlike with the robots, he thought he was dealing with something with the same general physiology as humans. He gave quick slices to the group all in the span of a single second, expecting them to fall the next second. Instead, the next moment they tore him to shreds, leaving just enough of him left to live up to his name of being a Phantom Samurai. Those lifeless eyes stared back at us, as he marched towards us holding a sword. Kyō Wa Shinda tried to undo this past, but no timeline change could stop this guy from being a dumbass, and one of his trips must have gone horribly wrong, as the next moment, he too was a zombie.
Lethal Voltage tried next, but she should have known better. Electricity is often used to resuscitate those at the edge of death. It doesn't really have an effect in low doses, except maybe to stun them for a few seconds. "They just keep coming!" she said, gasping. By using much higher voltage than she normally dealt with she was able to incinerate a few, but she was getting fatigued. Deadly Flames helped her, but they could only either fan out their abilities in a short range cone, or focus at range in a straight line. If they fanned out their power, those beyond their reach would eventually close in after their powers gave out to exhaustion. On the other hand, the sheer numbers of these zombies meant that for every line of them burned to ash, more could close in around the corners. It didn't take knowing all of us had death or doom in our hero name to know that even our minutes left were numbered. We trusted in our own strength and it was not enough. And then, the last light of hope disappeared, and the horde came...
GEMINI
I was weak. I had no strength to defeat them! "That's not true," Nerissa said, "her strength comes from her having friends. You're not alone, Gemini. We got you." And off to the distance, I saw the others. Summer and Emily, I saw immediately. Emily summoned some kind of drones equipped with nets. Lately, she'd been leasing some of these to pizza delivery companies, as they could carry a large load. Summer rushed in and smashed some of their baseball bats with her bare hands. The fog cleared, and I saw they were not alone. Fundamentalist, Samsara, Green Pieces, Spherical Globe, and even Isekai had also been called. "This is why I was on the phone so much," Nerissa said by way of apology, "I tried to get in touch with Captain Doom, but all I heard at the other end was, 'Braaaaains….' I guess he was busy with something."
Anyway, the others helped out. Isekai summoned Link from Legend of Zelda. Normally, their powers restricted characters whose canon was still being produced, but since each Link was a separate cycle of reincarnation, she simply grabbed one that wasn't being used anymore. Link simply hit a bunch of them with the flat of his sword, and bashed a few others with his shield. He fired a freezing arrow at the ground, and froze some of them in place. Isekai mentioned they were heading off to a date soon, so they didn't stick around to really greet us.
Samsara had finally succeeded in uploading the Youtube video where they successfully proved that they were not in fact a Transphobe, but granted certain transgender people their deepest wish. They turned the video to this large audience, and asked for a show hands who would consent to this procedure, then went after those people. That night, Samsara's videos went viral, and soon she drove those fake "transgender" clinics that left sterile people out of business.
Fundamentalist used his elemental powers to separate the crowd, making hot feet in one location, using a rock wall to block off the bricks they were trying to grab next, and knocking them around with wind or water. "I finally understand what you meant, Unmasked," he said to me, "As the scripture says, 'God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.' There was no reason for me to worry about judging others, any more than to worry about whether I am condemned. As a hero, I have only to do my job, to save others from danger, and to be worthy of my calling."
But Fundamentalist was not the only one who had changed. Spherical apologized to us, "For so long, I had been led astray by Deep State, saying and doing things to mislead others. I'm done with that now." Emily corrected, "You mean the Deep State." He shook his head, "Deep State is a person. They've been around for quite awhile, leading world events in several agendas. Deep State has been behind wars for the last two thousand years, as well as the rise of state power. I know there has been a hype about heroes working for them, but I'm among the few who actually did. Believe me, they have few real friends." He handed me a sheet of paper that read an address, which he explained was the headquarters of Deep State. I looked around, and I realized that I had now changed out of my hospital gown, since we were kinda rushed out of there in a hurry, after all. After that, he turned his body into a large pancake-like form and jumped on the crowd, knocking them prone. As for Green Pieces, she caused the overgrowth of a nearby bush through some process I didn't fully understand, and she also thanked us, "I still believe in environmentalism, but you guys have helped me see the light. I realized that generations of being afraid to burn things led to the rise of build of trash, and particularly plastic. Just like a pack rat who doesn't want to get rid of anything, our fear of air pollution instead lead to solid waste pollution, where fish routinely gulp down plastic bags and suffocate to death. It's time for us to accept that crazy ideas don't work, and we need to understand that we can do far more for the Earth if we recognize that the plans for the environment are based on faulty science." She talked a great deal more, but it's better just to say that she found her own point of view, and the entangled them with vines, and just leave some of the finer detail out.
We left the entire crowd just sitting there outside our door, pinned to the ground by vines. It wasn't like they'd ever get free or attack us, or anything like that. Nerissa said, "You see? You didn't have to be afraid of the judgement of that crowd. What was it Fundamentalist said? 'Perfect love drives out fear'? You have friends now who care about you. Let the haters hate if they wish, but you've showed the people who matter that you are a hero. Now, let's go home. I want to finish what I started at the hospital before that nurse interrupted us..."
