“Jason,” Boris said. “What did you do?”
“You know we’ve been discussing how to demonstrate the power I’ll be bringing to bear, to deter the powers of Earth from doing something ill-advised.”
“I’d say that clearly didn’t work, given the impending arrival of cosmic pirates, but how and why do you already know who they are?”
“It started when a member of the Cult of the World-Phoenix paid me a visit. Now that the link between Earth and Pallimustus is repaired, Earth’s dimensional membrane is going to stabilise over time. The World-Phoenix sent me a courtesy message that she was easing restrictions on high-rankers accessing Earth, beginning with gold-rankers. The usual rules on invading domains remained in place, of course.”
“And?”
“Danielle Geller had an idea. The World-Phoenix owed me a favour, you see.”
“For what?”
“I stopped the Cosmic Throne from trying to turn her from her current form back into the Boundary. You know about the World-Phoenix’s original incarnation?”
“It was before even my time, but I have heard about it. You keep calling the World-Phoenix ‘her.’ It doesn’t have an actual gender.”
“She did when we were hanging out, so it’s a habit. Plus, using ‘it’ instead of ‘they’ as the gender-neutral pronoun seems weird to me. It feels like treating them as if they weren’t people.”
“They aren’t. Not in the strictest sense. In their true state, a great astral being doesn’t have a mind or identity as we understand it. They’re too alien. It’s why they have their prime vessels.”
“I don’t think that’s entirely true. Plus, I’m pretty sure most of them were getting into the whole mortal body thing, when they were in my soul.”
“Well, if they aren’t going to rebuke you for it, neither will I. You say the Cosmic Throne was trying to turn the World-Phoenix back into the Boundary?”
“It was a constant struggle, apparently. It was the reason she agreed to the sundering in the first place, and fought the restoration. But the restored throne apparently took her current state as the new baseline. No more issues. I didn’t do it that way on purpose, but she still saw it as a debt. Maybe she felt bad about killing me tens of thousands of times for what ultimately proved to be no reason.”
“I don’t know, Jason. I think that’s an opportunity many people would relish.”
“That’s a little hurtful. Anyway, that visit gave Danielle Geller an idea. We’d already been talking about how to manage a show of force on Earth, but there were several problems. If we picked a fight with any of the Earth powers, it would undercut the entire diplomatic approach I’m after. And even if I did, there’s no force on Earth that could put up enough of a fight that we could properly demonstrate our power.”
“I’m starting to see,” Boris said. “You need an external antagonist. Someone you can stand with the Earth against. You asked the Cult of the World-Phoenix to arrange one.”
“That was just courtesy on their part. The real favour was having the World-Phoenix open this universe up to gold-rankers, but keeping the ban on diamond rankers in place until I reach diamond rank myself. The ban wouldn’t be released immediately anyway, but I don’t want other diamond-rankers showing up before I’m ready to deter them.”
“That’s actually a good idea.”
“You don’t have to sound quite so surprised.”
“Jason, I’ve been on Earth all this time. I saw how you did things here on your last visit, and terrible ideas were kind of your thing.”
Jason’s expression turned hard.
“I had no idea what I was doing. I was forced into bad choice after bad choice, and I didn’t see you out there helping, Mr ‘I was here the whole time.’ Where were you, and your army of high-ranking messengers, Boris?”
“Doing more to help you than you will ever realise. Some of us simply manage it without making a grandiose spectacle of ourselves. Did you ever notice how none of the threats you ran into were quite more than you could handle? Almost as if someone was quietly eliminating any threats that would kill you instead of pushing you to grow stronger.”
“Some of those threats did kill me. Because I took on things no one else could. It’s not like there was an army of angels who could have dealt with it.”
“We have to maintain a low profile, Jason. If the Orthodox messengers find us here, that’s all the pretext they need to invade this world. And, against our best interests, we were preparing to reveal ourselves and intervene when humans kept harvesting reality cores. Fortunately, the transformation zones stopped forming. Thank you for that, by the way.”
“You’re welcome,” Jason said angrily, and the pair sat in sullen silence.
After a while Boris spoke up.
“When is Anna getting here?”
“She’s on the road now.”
***
Sitting in the back of a car driven by one of Jason’s blank, shadowy avatars, Anna sighed as she reflected on what her life had become. On one hand, there was no question that she was at a crux point for the future of the world. The chaos of the last couple of decades had calmed, the changes approaching a culmination point. Decisions made in the next few years would shape the next age, both for the planet and for humankind.
On the other hand, it felt like the man with his hand on the fulcrum of the world was incapable of taking it seriously. Looking out the window, the city was a mix of vampire movie, Raymond Chandler novel and the wet dream of a teenager with way too much eye makeup. There was an unreality to it, like passing through the pages of a black and white graphic novel. The type where the protagonist was always a grizzled man who died in some masculine sacrifice at the end, like a modern-day Spartan.
The car stopped and the avatar opened her door, holding an umbrella to shield her from the rain. She avoided looking into the single, giant eye it had in lieu of a face. It led her through the building and to the elevator, both of which reinforced the artificial, period-movie feel of the city. The elevator opened onto an old prohibition-style bar where she had to look around through the enclosed booths and dim lighting to find Jason and Boris Ketland. Neither was talking, which was odd for both, and there was palpable tension.
“Did I walk in on something?” she asked.
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“Just a difference of perspective,” Jason said. “Take a seat.”
Anna looked at the booth, and around at the bar. The patrons were indistinct in the dim lighting, and her silver-rank hearing picked up nothing but muffled murmurs. She suspected specialised privacy magic, tweaked to maintain the atmosphere. Sliding into the booth, she settled her gaze on Jason.
“There’s something we need to discuss before we get to whatever you brought me here for,” she said. “A larger concern that impacts our broader goals.”
Jason didn’t reply, but gave a jerk of the head indicating she should continue.
“This city is indicative of something that is only going to cause us problems,” she said. “Problems, Jason, that stem entirely from you.”
She waited for anger, or denial. Instead, he leaned back with a neutral expression.
“Please elucidate,” he said.
“You like to be distinctive, Jason. Irreverent. To pull people into your own pace, and take them out of their own comfort zones. To act strangely, and make people put up with it, which they do because you have the power to make them. And the more powerful you grow, the more elaborate you get, like this comic book city.”
“I’ve found that the people of Earth are already more than eager to exploit me, Anna. If I stop doing things my way and start toeing whatever lines they want me to, that only tells them that I’m within their ability to influence.”
“You’re wrong, Jason. When you don’t take things seriously, you’re telling people that you aren’t to be taken seriously. That you’re unwilling to compromise, to meet people halfway. Combined with your power, that makes you come off as a toddler with a rocket launcher. You told me that you want to approach things properly. It’s an assurance that, without which, I would not be a part of this.”
“Then don’t be. I can have you back in New York City this time tomorrow.”
“Jason—”
“I am fully aware that I need to wear a suit to meetings and not talk about Knight Rider, Anna. I will act with respect and comport myself with appropriate reserve. Does that meet with your exacting standards?”
Jason’s curtness was uncharacteristic to Anna’s recent encounters with him. She didn’t know if it was his growing proximity to Earth or whatever conflict he’d just had with Boris, but knew when to pick her fights.
“Let’s move on to what brought you to ask me here. I’m assuming it was our visitors from the Unites States.”
“This world has been opened up to the wider cosmos,” Boris explained. “There are rules around intruding on worlds that have not declared themselves open to the cosmic community, that I will be happy to explain in detail later. What is important for now is that a powerful force will be coming here to deal with Jason, at the behest of certain members of various global powers.”
“How powerful are they?”
“Enough that, using the access they’ve been offered, they can plunder this world with impunity,” Boris explained. “Which is very much their intention. The US officials came here to warn us, and offer an alliance in dealing with them.”
“Can we deal with them? Even with the USA helping?”
Jason and Boris shared a look.
“Anna,” Boris said. “You still don’t understand what we’ve been telling you about the power scale we’re dealing with. Against the people that are coming, every essence user on Earth could form an alliance and they would still all be slaughtered. The only two forces capable of confronting them are my messengers, and the group Jason is bringing with him.”
“Are you sure? Aren’t these people prepared to deal with Jason specifically?”
“I was concerned,” Boris said. “Until I discovered that Jason was the one who arranged all of this.”
“What? Why?”
“Because it meets a need we’ve already discussed several times, without finding a solution,” Jason said.
“You mean the demonstration of power?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“So, to be clear, you’re saying that you’ve masterminded what amounts to an alien invasion so you can beat them to show off how strong you are?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t consider consulting me on any of this?”
“I did not. You would have taken a significant amount of time to talk around to this idea, if you could be convinced at all. Our window to initiate this was small. We worked through a group that is famously difficult to contact.”
“He’s not wrong,” Boris added. “The Cult of the World-Phoenix finds you, not the other way around. Not unless you can get into Interstice.”
“Interstice?” Anna asked.
“We’re not going into that right now,” Jason said. “It’s too much. Boris will explain, after we’re done. Which is better, since he’s actually been there.”
“I will,” Boris said. “But I also would have liked to weigh in on your decision in this, Jason. Cosmic attention on this world is dangerous to my people. You can fight one dimension ship full of pirates, but not a full-blown messenger invasion. Even if they are restricted to gold rank.”
“Invasion?” Anna asked.
“Again, for a later explanation,” Jason said. “Look, Anna, the decision has been made. Now we deal with it.”
“There’s not much point in being your political consultant if you aren’t going to consult with me, Jason.”
“I know,” he conceded. “But sometimes that’s just how it’s going to work.”
“That’s just how it’s going to work? You arbitrarily staging an alien invasion? That isn’t something you can just decide for the Earth, Jason.”
“Yes, Anna, it is. Your job is to keep people from starting a war over it. This plan wouldn’t have worked if the people of Earth weren’t willing to sell out their own planet for a chance to get rid of me. We both remember what happened last time I was here. How many times did you apologise for the Network coming after me? For any of this to work, the world has to accept that I can’t be controlled and I can’t be eliminated. You were the one who said I needed a common enemy to fight, like the Americans unifying against the vampires.”
“I didn’t mean stage an alien invasion!”
“I didn’t. I engineered a situation where the people of Earth and a manageable enemy happened to find each other. It could easily have happened without my intervention at all.”
“That’s true,” Boris said. “The Jakaar fleet is always on the lookout for weak and exploitable worlds, and this is within their realm of operation.”
Anna shook her head.
“I need time to process this. Space pirates? What the hell kind of—”
She cut herself off and let out a long sigh.
“You can’t just play with the world like this,” she told him. “Are you so powerful that you can do whatever you want, without consequences?”
Jason glanced at Boris, then back to Anna.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m letting old memories colour my behaviour, when I told myself I wouldn’t. Boris, can you please go over everything in detail? Answer her questions about the pirates, and the cosmic community. You know it better than I do anyway. Anna, we’ll talk again when you have more information, some time to process it all, and I’m less on edge.”
Before anyone else could speak, Jason’s avatar vanished and Anna let out another sigh.
“If he’s going to be like this,” she said, “none of this is going to work. I thought he was working on improving his diplomacy. If he’s going to do things like this, without consulting the people he gathered specifically to consult, it doesn’t matter how polite he is in meetings.”
“In fairness, he did consult with his people,” Boris said. “Just not the ones here. But yes, this was not Jason at his best. I have to take at least partial blame for that. He and I have never really discussed the fact that I was here during his last visit. That I remained hidden while he felt outmatched, betrayed and alone. Helpless to watch people die around him.”
“It doesn’t matter what he went through. It’s not about what’s fair. When things go wrong, and he starts alienating nations and the magical factions, he doesn’t get a do-over because he has a sad backstory.”
“No. And he knows that. He’s frustrated because he could conquer the world in a long weekend and start running it how he sees fit. He knows how bad an idea that is, but it’s a tempting one, believe me. When you have power beyond a certain level, it feels strange that there are any problems you can’t just crush. This planet has been my home longer than any human being. I see the injustices, and I get the urge to unleash my people, take over and put things right. But that’s not how it works. As much as it feels like you can go in and make things better, you can’t impose positive change from the outside, using your own principles. Everything you do will turn into poison, usually sooner than later.”
“You’re saying he’s that powerful? Waltz in and conquer the world powerful? He keeps saying it, but it’s hard to take him seriously when he talks as if he were some kind of god-king.”
“Then you should take him seriously, because he is one. It’s complicated, because it always is with him, but to my people, it’s simple. We have what we call astral kings, but god-kings is essentially what they are. That’s one of things Jason has become, and my people acknowledge that, even when most of them are his enemies. They respect him. They fear him and my people don’t fear a lot. When they see him, they try to kill him in a frenzy, run for hills, or kneel down in worship.”
He slid out of the booth and looked over at the bartender.
“I know Jason has told you a lot,” he said. “I’ll try to explain what he hasn’t, and give a different perspective on what he has. That’s going to take a long time, so I’m going to order some food. And some drinks. Would you like a drink?”
“I think I’m going to need one.”