The Perfectionist, Part 2
Solving for utopia.
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Welcome to Olympus City, where super-powers, physics-defying tech, and unearthly creatures are all possible now. Human nature, however, remains unchanged.
No one is born a perfect superhero, but a few strive to live up to the ideal anyway.
Previously: After discovering that Dame Disaster was still alive, Miranda sought out the help of the only man in the world ever to prevail against her—Carey, the Golden Gladiator. He doesn’t think they can beat her, not on this Earth. But he has another idea.
Part 2
Carey led her outside Olympus City, to an island that was too tiny to appeal to any developers. It appeared much like it had when Miranda first saw it. The wide beach fronted a thick, healthy forest that had never known the touch of humanity.
There was no way those trees could have grown back already, not to those heights, not in only two years. Dame Disaster’s robot had razed half the forest with its laser eyes, and that was hardly the worst deed it committed here.
Headlights shining from his shoulders, Carey flew over the beach and landed at the forest’s edge. He waved a finger at the trees, like a man proud of his drywall job.
“Pretty convincing, aren’t they?”
It looked like nothing had ever happened here.
“Holograms?”
“Got it in one.”
Carey tapped a few buttons on his gauntlet, and the artificial forest cleared away, revealing a wasteland of fallen trees, severed stumps, and charred dirt. Atop a patch of barren soil sat a giant ray gun, pointed directly at Olympus.
“Um, Carey?”
He chuckled, and Miranda really wanted to be in on the joke.
“Now, now, it’s not what it looks like,” he said. “This here is no instrument of destruction. It’s one of salvation.”
A pair of narrow spotlights flanked the immense apparatus, somehow enough to erect a cone of daylight around the island. Afternoon visibility beneath a black sky.
Miranda followed Carey to the sleek computer console at the back. A hazy glow emanated from the cannon’s rear compartment. She wondered if that was where Carey loaded the ammunition, whatever the ammunition was.
“What kind of salvation comes from a death ray?” she asked.
“None whatsoever, because this is nothing of the kind. This beauty fires no force, no heat, no pain. I’d be surprised if anyone even feels a tickle.”
The console’s screen displayed crosshairs, centered right on a familiar skyline.
I should have talked to him, after Terran, after Ollie. I’ve never even asked him how he was adjusting.
“Your world has problems,” Carey said. “And that’s putting it mildly. You probably can’t even see it, and I can’t blame you one jot. It’s been your whole existence, so how could you?”
“I know we have problems.”
He set a hand on her shoulder, looked down into her eyes, and delivered his diagnosis.
“You live in a full-blown dystopia.” Carey cast his gaze across the water, where countless lights joined forces to brighten Olympus. It glowed in the darkness, a magical, fragile wonderland. “Breaks my heart every gosh darn day.”
A tear glinted as it slid down his face. His fingers, being encased in metal, were not available to wipe it away.
“It’s a state of affairs we can’t let stand,” he said, strength returning to his voice. “So, I put my mind to the problem. How do you solve dystopia? What’s different here compared to there? That’s when I started thinking of it like an equation. I wasn’t solving dystopia—I was solving for utopia. Or the closest available option.”
“The closest … what?” Miranda feared she understood, which only confused her all the more.
Carey described how his universe had altered this one when he and Dame Disaster battled between the dimensions. The changes, he claimed, went skin deep and not much further. Miranda’s own powers, for instance. Previously impossible, now possible. But she remained Miranda.
“Not much of a problem with you,” Carey continued. “Others aren’t as nice, though. An element native to my universe opened up new avenues of potential, but it stopped halfway. It didn’t build you all up for that potential. But it can. We can fix your world.”
His face lit up as brightly as the distant city, exuding an aura of benevolence as he discussed bombarding Olympus with a dense concentration of his universe’s element. This element, he explained, would sink deeper into the fabric of reality and finish the job it had started.
Miranda asked what that meant exactly, though she was starting to get the idea. Carey confirmed it.
“You would all become like the people of my Earth.”
A city of perfectly good people and utterly evil scoundrels. A simpler world. Impossibly simple. But maybe not impossibly.
“On your world,” she said, “good always wins, right?”
“That’s been our track record. You can never take victory for granted, but let’s just say that evil has a way of clouding the mind. Think about it, Miranda. I see how hard you work, how consistently you aspire to be the best superhero you can be. Well, we can get you across that finish line, and believe you me, Dame Disaster would be no match for that Ultra Woman.”
I’d be perfect.
Would she? She remembered Tuck’s warning. He had spent time in Carey’s universe. He experienced its effects. “People from here, people like us, well … we turn evil.” Or nonentities, he soon added. Good, evil, or bland innocent bystander who existed only to be saved. No spectrum of rich humanity, just three discrete options.
The ray gun dwarfed its target.
“This is too big,” she said.
“I’ve experienced bigger.”
All her life, Miranda had heard platitudes about changing the world, but this machine could actually pull it off. However much he struggled with the nature of humanity, Carey understood the strange science that held his own world together. If anything could zap a real Ultra Woman into existence, it would be this ray gun.
“What if you just zapped me?” she asked.
Doubts accompanied the question. It wouldn’t necessarily turn her into a pure superhero, she realized. It might kick her the other way.
“Doesn’t work like that,” Carey answered. “It’s an all-or-nothing proposition. Olympus City is merely the funnel. Once we bombard the city with the element, it will shoot into the upper atmosphere and spread from there.” To illustrate the effect, he pushed his flat hands straight up, then spread them outward.
Miranda watched the pantomime and saw a mushroom cloud. She said nothing as he continued.
“You don’t put a band-aid on a gash,” Carey said. “I’m not talking about fixing one city. No, I’m talking about fixing your entire world. You called it a death ray, but it’s the closest thing to a world peace ray you’re ever going to get.”
The whole world. Billions of people. Good, evil, or nonentity. But evil would always lose. World peace.
“Oh, shit.”
Carey blanched, then forced a smile. “That might be the last time you utter a word like that.”
“But …” The implications spun, sloshed, and swished around, a washing machine teetering with an imbalanced load. “What happens to everyone who’s not a superhero or a supervillain?”
“This won’t harm a hair on their head.”
“Their minds, though. What would happen to their minds?”
The question confused him. “They’ll still be people, if that’s what you’re asking. In most cases, they’ll be happier people who always know right from wrong.”
“Right. Evil. We’d be forcing some people to become purely evil.”
“You think people like the Terran haven’t already succumbed to that?”
The Terran certainly had. Others as well. Miranda had encountered far too much evil in her young life, but she had also met misguided crooks like Blowfish who had stumbled onto the wrong path and just needed help changing course.
“What does Sibyl think of this?”
“I’m sure she’d agree with me.”
“But you haven’t told her.”
The guilty look on his face confirmed it. Eye contact faltered. “This world has a way of confusing matters. People might not understand it … until they experience it. Then they’d know it’s the right move.”
Miranda took a step back, trying to remember the heroic man who saved her and Alyssa from sentient monkeys in an upside-down universe. The escape plan he had concocted was wild, nonsensical, and more than a little brazen. But it had worked.
“You know it’s the right move.” Carey lowered his voice, which gave it a rougher quality. “You saw what Warner Pinkney did with my old armor. I invented that technology to save lives, and he used it to end them. He killed. And you couldn’t stop him, not for over a year.”
“I saved some.” It sounded pathetic to her own ears. “Most.”
“Not all.” He pointed at the machine. “You’d never fail again. My armor would never kill again. We can make the world right.”
A life without failure. She tried to justify it, wanted to justify it. “That world … it wouldn’t be right, not for us.”
Carey turned to the city, then stared at the machine, all the while tapping a finger against his leg. The metal struck an almost musical note.
“Well, this is a darn shame. Was hoping you’d be on board, Miranda. But you’ll see. After the fact, you’ll see.”
He started toward the console. Miranda needed only to step aside, let the dice roll, give world peace a chance.
She slipped in front, blocking him. “No. I’m sorry, but I can’t let you do this.”
Carey whistled out a long sigh, then his brows tightened and forehead wrinkled. The fatigue vanished, replaced by steely certainty. The palms of his gauntlets brightened.
“Then we’ve got ourselves a problem.”