Resonance saw her coworker hero Pandora out of Alexa's eyes. She screamed for him to stop pacing like an idiot, for him to arrest Alexa, to take her back into Tartarus, to do anything of value! She swore and spat, but could do nothing at all except for raging endlessly.

[No swearing in my brain, pls. This is polite kitten society,] Alexa said petting 12 kittens all at once that were sitting on her lap in her imagination-space.

[You fuck! You horrible, awful fuck!] Resonance yelled. [You said you're going to put me into another server! Why the fuck am I inside your head?!]

[Yeppers. I am a bad girl. A supervillain. I don't know what you've expected. I warned you not to kill me… how long ago was this? Eighty thousand years ago? Eighteen? Eighty four? My brain is still kinda fuzzy after getting shishkabobed by Three. I gave you plenty of chances in the sim and yet you still chose the path of villainy. Had you simply chosen to be nice, none of this would have happened!]

Resonance screamed.

[But... I know that you are a baddie, Rezzy. I'ma call you Rezzy, k? You're the perfect minion inside and out. You're my key into and out of Tartarus. You've been using your avatars to find out everything about everyone while you've worked in this place just so you could pretend to be their buddy-buddy. You’re quite the sneaky little sneak. I would totally sort you into Slytherin.]

A sorting hat appeared on the head of Resonance. She tried to take the hat off herself, but her hands went right through it. She was utterly powerless here.

[I'm simply using the information you've gathered to socially hack Bob.] Alexa waved her hand at the pacing Tartarus officer. [Had you never seen the need to dig up everything about your coworkers, I wouldn't have had the upper hand.]

Bob was busy typing the number Alexa gave him into his wrist device. The bracelet flashed red, rejecting the number. Bob's eyes ignited with anger, but then the bracelet flashed green, displaying an aged face of Alexa, featuring the fake [Dr. Agatha Myriamm] ID.

[How the shit?] Resonance hissed.

[All thanks to you, bestie,] Alexa winked. [I know everything you know and you know a lot of Titanomachy systems, enough to inject my fake ID into the massive, bloated, corporate database that is the Superstate.]

"Ten minutes until the report is released and S-credits become nearly worthless for a while, Bob." Alexa told the hero who now saw her as a legitimate supervisor.

Bob stopped his frantic pacing and started to tap on his watch, whispering commands into it to transfer all of his savings into gold.

[See, what a good, obedient boy! Wish there were more like him.] Alexa grinned at Resonance. Her mindspace was now shaped like the interior car of the Hogwarts express.

Resonance let out another string of expletives.

[You know what? I’m replacing all the swears with kittens now. You’ve a very dirty mouth, Rezzy.]

[Fu...kittens! Kittens on Kittens and Kittens! Kittens!] Resonance screeched.

[That’s more like it. Polite kitten society! Now what was I saying? Right. You’ve been a very naughty little hero. Trying to poke your finger into every pie, Rezzy. You wanted to be the very best at everything. The SCA doesn’t use artificial intelligence, GLMs, aka Googolplex Language Models. They’re afraid of AI’s and for good reasons. What they do use are data ghosts, mental copies of trusty heroes!]

The data ghost of Hero Resonance growled. Alexa knew far too much for her own good.

[You were the youngest, most capable, most trusty hero from a good, reliable, respectable, stable family. Good citizens of the Superstate, all the way down to your great-great-great-grandfather that long ago caught and hung Spring-heeled Jack, the Terror of London.] Alexa nodded. [Your family had the very best officers, agents, infiltrators, prognosticators. So many accolades! But you... You wanted to be better than all of them, didn’t you? You wanted to outdo everyone. You donated your digital ghost to supervise, run every available system on Titanomachy, no matter how boring, mundane or repetitive the job was.]

Resonance stopped swearing and just stared at Alexa.

[My fractal engine couldn't access any of the station’s systems on its own, you see. It wouldn't be able to get anywhere without you. I needed you the most! My self-propagating code piggybacked on your avatars, used your passwords to get into every available system, until I had full control of the global emergency Doomsday Warning system. In mere minutes, every one of your avatars inside the Titanomachy systems will activate the emergency broadcast and transmit a very special show out to the world featuring you and me. Tun tun tun.]

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Resonance understood Alexa’s plan, then. She wanted to sink, to die, to disappear.

[You are the true supervillain here, not me. You wanted to manipulate the Superstate. You wanted to be number one when Admiral Kolchi retired. You wanted, dreamed of becoming an Admiral, wished to rise to the very top since you were fourteen. Your avatars have allowed you to learn faster than everyone, to be the very best and also to exploit the laziness of other heroes, to shove yourself into every hole, do every job that no other sane person wanted to do.]

Alexa petted her bundle of kittens and smiled at the horrified face of Resonance.

[Your avatars inside of various drones clean the toilets of the superstate, empty out the pipes, repair essential systems, exist to serve only one goal - to push you ahead of everyone. Titanomachy Admiral Kolchi was getting fed up with maintenance drone ineptitude. You had offered your services, showing incredible competence. You were in the right place at the right time, the very best for those horrid jobs that nobody else had wanted to do or did a shitty, half-assed job at.]

Resonance choked.

[And what a perfect, lovely plan it was! Once you became Admiral, you would slowly introduce GLMs into running the boring stuff, while you handled all of the Admin work as the absolute ruler of Titanomachy. Had you not been so focused, so greedy, none of this would have happened. It’ll take the heroes forever to purge you and my code out of the essential labor division! We are the proletariat of Titanomachy, now!]

Resonance was dismayed. All of her hard work had gone down the drain because she was caught and not by anyone in the SCA. A fourteen year old supervillain had somehow outplayed, used her!

Alexa clapped. [A job well done, team Resonance! It’s quite impressive, really. In mere months you’ve spread your ghosts all over Titanomachy.]

[You… how? How have you gotten my passwords?!] Resonance whimpered.

[Brain spiders. An invasive, parasitic alien species from world 2424. Your lovely brother put this one inside of my head. I call her Tickles. She is wrapped around my entire brain now. You’re currently running on her - she’s kind of like an organic supercomputer. I ate lots of sushi to make her big and strong, you see. I believe that these things are some sort of a weaponized organic life that evolved from GLMs after humanity perished as they’re busy terraforming world 2424. Regardless of what they are, they’re incredibly handy for extracting and manipulating information. Tickles knows everything that you know, Rezzy. She knows what you did this summer!]

[Tartarus… oh no,] Resonance whimpered.

[Oh yes. You told tech Agatha that Tartarus is an underground prison where they freeze supers, while transmitting their mental pattern up into Titanomachy supercomputers, to run the re-educational simulation. Titanomachy is perfectly safe against superpowers and supers, but it wasn’t safe from me. I was different. I didn’t fit the mold. I was information hidden within information. For me they didn’t transmit just one pattern - it was two. Me and my little brainspider. There was just enough of me in Tickles at that exact moment in time for her to seem like me.]

[What?! So all this time… I’ve been…] Resonance turned white.

[Torturing an alien spider from 2424! An empty shell of a person! An alien mind masquerading as a human! Such a good girl, Tickles - playing clueless Cassie was a breeze for her. Such a bad girl, Resonance. Torturing a parasite from 2424 for answers she never had! Tickles never told you my plans because she was just a GLM roleplaying a broken, miserable teenage girl!]

Alexa lifted a black kitten from her lap and nuzzled it. Numerous silver eyes bloomed upon the kitten's head, peering at the hero and judging her. The other kittens scattered across the train compartment.

[No, no, no,] Resonance retreated away from the alien-looking kitten.

[Rezzy - meet Tickles! The girl you've been tormenting for thousands of years! You’ve tormented an alien life-form for answers, getting annoyed that none of your usual techniques were working, getting more and more impatient, until you started to straight up murder her in anger. Your re-educational fun camp techniques might have worked on numerous human supervillains, but not on an AI brain parasite. You’ve never encountered anything like Tickles. That’s why you couldn't break her!]

[Kittens Christ!] Resonance swore. [Kittens!]

[Uh-huh. Tartarus was built by human supers for human supers. It never expected to encounter something like Tickles either. She was sort of… like a tank, data armor wrapped around the real me. I rode into Tartarus inside her, knowing full well that you could never break or reeducate me. She endured all of the abuse, death and pain that you could dispense, while I slowly observed from the subconscious, slowly figured out how the sim worked and cautiously chipped away at everything until we established full control of Tartarus simulated space.]

[Kittens! Kittens!] Resonance tore at her hair, aghast at Alexa’s revelations.

[Division Three seems to give zero kittens about the rules too. Once their Agent had made the breach into the server where I was stored in an attempt to erase me, it was just the matter of spreading all over Titanomachy. The station computers run millions of times faster than the Supers who live in it. My code… runs me. I was cautious, slow, but in real life only minutes had passed as I spread all over the place, settling down wherever I could find you. I know you better than you know yourself. I’m socially hacking your ghosts right now in every system that you control, forcing, tricking, bamboozling you into obedience and cooperation.]

[Kitteny kittens,] Resonance muttered, hands covering her face.

[Kittens indeed,] Alexa said. [Now observe as I destroy the dignity of every super in the world.]

“Okay! I did it!” Bob turned back to Alexa. “I exchanged it all into gold. You better be right, Agatha.”

“Oh, I’m always right, my dear Bob. Except when sometimes I’m not.” Alexa nodded sagely.

The Doomsday Warning siren resounded throughout the underground train and then Alexa’s educational broadcast had begun.