52 Project #49: She's Got Diplomatic Immunity, She's Got A Lethal Weapon That Nobody Sees (Patreon)

The sky was completely dark – no sun, despite it being nearly 3 pm in this time zone, but no moon or stars either – when I arrived at the Watch’s headquarters. I could still see reasonably well, this being a big city with streetlights, neon signs, and well-lit buildings everywhere, but it was still eerie to look up at the sky and see total blackness. Or, to be completely honest, blackness smattered with very faint gray and pink, where the city lights were reflecting off clouds. The forcefield around the Earth was perfectly absorbent, no light reflecting off it, but it was up a lot higher than the clouds. It was late June, but I was grateful for the jacket I was wearing over my costume; it was chilly. And it was going to get chillier.

The thing about a forcefield that blocks EM radiation from reaching the Earth is that you’re generating it in space, from a satellite. There’s no other way to do it. It has to be in space to be able to encompass the whole planet, and to be honest you’ll likely need more than one. So to reach it with your own control signal, you either have to be with it in space, in which case how are you going to hear from world leaders if they’re ready to surrender? Or you have to be on the ground, and if so, how can you transmit your control signal? Most likely it’s using EM, too. So either way, you need to have a hole in the field to project through. And for various reasons, the poles are the best places to put such a thing.

The Watch, Odysseus’ team, was fairly heavy on science types – maybe not as much as the Teslanauts, but they were mostly about computers and inventions, whereas the Watch had more pure science going on. They’d identified where Dr. Spectrum’s base was, and they’d reached out to me rather than going to chase him down there themselves, bring in the Alliance of Good, or any of the other things they could have done.

“It’s in Antarctica,” Odysseus told me. “Normally with a villain’s base, we’d send Lynx in to do recon, but a cat isn’t exactly inconspicuous in Antarctica.” The cat, a slim tortoiseshell standing on the console next to him, meowed loudly. “Also, she can’t talk anymore, so it’s hard for her to give us any useful information.”

“You ought to get a telepath,” I said. “I think Zed’s freelancing now; they might be willing to work with you.”

He chuckled. “I think eight members is plenty. We’re not trying to turn into the Alliance of Good here.”

I winced. I used to be a member of the Alliance of Good, before… well, before they stopped being quite so good. At one point we’d had 27 members. Keeping track of what everyone was working on had been a logistics nightmare. “True enough. Is there a reason you’re hiring me rather than going after Dr. Spectrum yourselves?”

“No specific reason. You have an excellent track record and you talked Kage and Fallen Angel into quitting the Society of Sin; that’s how you ended up on our radar. And I always think it’s a tragedy when someone with a mind like Dr. Spectrum’s goes bad.”

I nodded. “Agreed. What’s the plan to get me in there?”

“Dr. Ray and the Mechanist have come up with an ice buggy that can camouflage its heat signature. Side benefit, it should keep you pretty warm. The downside is, you’ll be piloting on instruments only; there’s no way to open a port you can see through and still be able to keep Spectrum from detecting you.”

That made sense, given Dr. Spectrum’s specialty. “Instruments only implies radar. How would he not detect that?”

“Rasers,” Odysseus said, which I first mistook to mean razors, and wondered what thin, sharp blades would have to do with object detection. “Lasers using the radio wave spectrum. We aim the raser toward the ground. If it hits something, it bounces back and then you know there’s something there. If it doesn’t hit anything… it won’t refract and bounce off the ice the way a light-spectrum laser would. There may be some radio scatter, but not enough for Dr. Spectrum to be able to tell you’re coming.”

I hoped so. Dr. Spectrum was famous for using robots rather than human minions, and my martial arts skills were decent, but not really up to taking out robots. “Do I get backup?”

“We can be on the Antarctic coast near Belgrano II, ready to move if you call us, but that’s about 800 miles from Dr. Spectrum’s base. Max safe speed for the Ice Runner is probably about 80 miles an hour, 100 if we floor it. So… yes, but backup will be eight hours away. And we can’t give you a constant signaler, so you’d have to be able to activate the signal… and it’s Dr. Spectrum. If he isn’t running a full range of jammers, I’d be very surprised.”

“Why not closer? There are Antarctic bases closer to the South Pole, right?”

“We can’t fly over. No one can; he’s got a full range of drones with radar circling the pole and looking for flying vehicles, at an altitude of around 3 miles, we think. Nothing can get closer than maybe about 200 miles on land, and further out than that in the air. Amundsen Station’s gone dark – we think he’s probably enclosed it in a radio barrier rather than killing the scientists there.”

I nodded. “The radio barrier’s more Dr. Spectrum’s style.”

“We’re pretty sure that even if his drones can see the 800-odd miles to Belgrano Station… planes come in there all the time, so he won’t consider it something to worry about. And when we factor in elevation, ease of climbing up from the ice shelf to the height of the terrain around the South Pole, and distance, Belgrano’s the closest we can get. Vostok Station’s slightly closer and already at the correct elevation, but it’s significantly further away from us because it’s on the opposite side of the pole, and it’s on the eastern side of Antarctica, where the winter storms tend to be at their most fierce. Kunlun’s closer than that but not inhabited in the winter.”

“Okay… but is there a reason we need to land at a base? My understanding is, there’s a whole lot of smooth ice in Antarctica you could use for a runway if you had to.”

He smiled wryly. “So here’s the thing. The Ice Skater – the vehicle we’re giving you – is extremely light, heavily insulated to keep off infrared scopes – it’s rated for -71 C, and while it can get down to -90 C down there, it doesn’t usually. With that much insulation, it barely requires any energy to keep you warm, and it uses hydrogen fuel cells, and it comes with enough of them that you could circumnavigate Antarctica twice before refueling. And hydrogen fuel cells emit water as their waste product. Any steam the Skater vents will desublimate to ice almost instantly. Nothing visible.”

“Nice.”

“We don’t have any other vehicles like that. The only other zero emissions vehicle we have runs on solar, which wouldn’t work in Antarctic winter even if Dr. Spectrum wasn’t blocking the sun. Everything else that’s capable of making it across the Antarctic terrain is going to be very, very visible in infrared, and is likely to produce emissions that can be seen with the right spectrography. He’s going to be able to see the Ice Runner – our main polar vehicle -- as soon as it’s within 200 miles of the pole, maybe sooner. And if we go out to the edge of what we think is his visible range, outside the earth’s curvature vis-à-vis his spy drones, and hang around there waiting for you to call… we’d have to keep the Runner heated, which in that temperature will burn fuel almost as fast as driving it would. The Skater needs to generate very little heat and is carrying more efficient fuel.”

“So if you followed me inland and stopped where he can’t see you, you run the risk of freezing to death.”

“Right.” Odysseus nodded.

“Didn’t I hear there’s a highway in Antarctica? Is that where we’re going?”

“No, that connects McMurdo Station to the South Pole, not Belgrano. And we’re not using that because McMurdo has reported seeing drones zipping up and down the highway. Remote controlled cars, basically, a little bigger than your typical RC hobby vehicle. It’s fairly obvious he thinks McMurdo is where we’d be coming in at… which makes good logical sense; it would be the best route if he wasn’t watching it.”

“Then how do we know he isn’t watching the route from Belgrano?”

“Because he can’t. The South Pole Traverse is a road, made of compacted snow and ice. It’s only so wide. He couldn’t find us if instead of using the Traverse itself, we paralleled it a mile to the east, but there’s no point in doing that because it’s a significantly longer distance than from Belgrano. We can be reasonably sure that he’s not going to waste resources searching every possible route from the coast, or from anywhere a plane can land.”

The cat pawed at Odysseus, meowing loudly, and then pointed her paw at a large analog clock with glowing hands, which was making chiming noises. Three o’clock. I didn’t know what the significance of that was, but the cat – who from my understanding was the heroine Lynx, stuck in the body of a cat since her own had been killed – seemed to think there was something.

“His deadline’s in 24 hours, now, and we’re going to burn a lot of it getting there. Are you in?”

“Of course,” I said. “Let your team know, and let’s get going.”

***

Most of the flight was spent over water, so we could travel at Mach 5 without causing disruptions on the ground. In a good part of the world, supersonic speed was banned over land, except for wartime applications, which superhero work technically was not. We left the coast of the US, went out to 30 west longitude or so, and then flew more or less straight south, nothing but water underneath us. Civilian craft can’t do that; they’d run out of fuel, but the Watch’s plane ran on something else. I didn’t ask any of them what, because they’d tell me.

It was over three hours in the darkness. Dr. Spectrum’s force field was at orbital elevation, so in a plane, we couldn’t get above it. And since there are very few sources of light out on the ocean, it was a much more complete darkness than I’d experienced on, say, redeye flights from California to the East Coast. After a few minutes of trying to look out the window and realizing how little there was to see, I returned to studying Dr. Spectrum’s manifesto… the demands he’d insisted needed to be met by 3 pm tomorrow, or he’d continue to block the sun.

The deadline was nonsense, of course. It wasn’t that the issue wasn’t serious. Every day of no sun meant the planetary temperature would drop about 5 degrees Celsius, or 9 Fahrenheit. In the Watch’s city, where it was early summer and the temperature had been ranging between 70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, it was now a brisk 63. By 3 PM tomorrow it’d be 54-ish. Two or three more days after that and there’d be frost in most places where there had been spring or summer temperatures, killing plants that weren’t designed to take it. By the end of the week everything humanity grows to eat would be dead or going dormant, and widespread famine would ensue later in the year.

But there was nothing special about 3 pm tomorrow. Places that had been cold enough to get below freezing by then were probably either not growing anything, or were growing things that could handle a sudden frost. It said something about Dr. Spectrum that his demand essentially translated into “give me what I want by my deadline or things will continue to get worse until you finally do give in.” Crops would start dying in large numbers four days from now. Not tomorrow.

The demands themselves were… interesting. I have a lot of experience in dealing with supervillains, and what they want out of their criminal activities, and the mad scientist type usually fall into just a few categories. To begin with, they never want money. It’s always more effective to use your super-science skills to invent things and then market them if you want money, and the few who are emotionally attached to the idea of being criminals… they join teams like the Society of Sin, or they make gadgets and sell them to other supervillains.

There’s always an emotional reason. Sometimes it’s nothing butemotion. Dr. Ultraviolet just wanted the world to recognize her genius… a lot of buried insecurity there. Sometimes there’s an ideology. Gaia’s Sword worked with War Horse, supporting him in his plans to destroy humanity, because she was an eco-extremist who thought humanity was poisoning the Earth, and was happy to work with a sapient, super-powered horse to eliminate us, despite the fact that she was human too. Usually the ideologies are a little more normal than that; several of the ones I’ve encountered have been libertarians, who felt that, while they could be very wealthy by going legit, they could become even more wealthy if they created a world where taxation didn’t exist, first. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you get anarchists like Dr. No, who feel that all government is illegitimate.

The ones who are easiest to work with usually have some combination – a cause that’s very important to them emotionally, generally because of their own past. The Relentless Robot (who, despite what his costume makes him look like, isn’t a robot at all) was acting out against a society that had treated him as less than human. Most of his original manifesto was impractical in the extreme, but we managed to satisfy him by cutting it down to just the demand that all forms of abusive child re-education be made illegal, including gay and trans conversion therapy, ABA for autistic kids, and “scared straight” bootcamps that locate themselves in places with no government oversight so they can torture and brainwash their “students”. The heroes who’d been getting ready to attack the Robot had agreed with me that this set of demands was both achievable and laudable, and that, as heroes, we would not stand against the demand being made. It turns out that when what villains want turns out to be something any person with both a brain and a heart should want, we heroes don’t tend to be too big on stopping them with violence. I mean, he probably should have tried a public awareness campaign first… but when this sort of thing happens, it’s usually a demand for a change that the majority of the public either supports, or would support if they actually understood what was going on.

Dr. Spectrum’s demands were extreme, even beyond anything the Robot had ever come up with (and the Robot had wanted to legalize child labor so kids could run away from abusive homes and support themselves, before I got him to see how much that would end up harming the people he was trying to protect.) I could sympathize with most of them; in fact I thought a lot of them would be good common sense ideas in a world that wasn’t this one, like “confiscate all sources of plutonium worldwide and use it to power space drone explorer craft”, which sounded great until you ran into the question of, how could you confirm or enforce that? Other of his ideas were ones I sympathized with but they were entirely too revolutionary to achieve the way he was trying to go about it. “Eliminate corporate personhood” – that would completely upend the world’s economic systems, which Spectrum saw as a plus because he also wanted to destroy capitalism. The fact was, the entrenched powers-that-be wouldn’t give up corporate personhood and capitalism, the sources of their power and wealth, just because the world was going to be destroyed otherwise… we had extensive proof of that already.

No one was going to give Spectrum total dictatorial control over the whole world. Ironically some might have considered it the lesser of two evils if Spectrum was just a megalomaniacal narcissist who wanted power, but since his manifesto explained what he would do with such power, and his ideals were radical and would be extremely destructive to pretty much all members of the ruling class of every country everywhere… it wasn’t going to happen, even if we all starved to death and then froze. My job was to convince Dr. Spectrum of this… and, since he didn’t get to be a supervillain blackmailing the whole world by being reasonable, I needed to get him to channel his passion into something that had some hope of working before we were all dead.

I reviewed the maps, again. Belgrano was indeed the closest coastal base to the geographic South Pole, and it had an airfield. I had considered being dropped off about 300 miles further inland, solidly on the glacial shelf that was near the same elevation as the South Pole, but it turned out that there wasn’t really a good way for the plane to airdrop the Ice Skater, and there was nowhere to safely land up there. I’d thought the ice would generally be smooth enough to let a plane land, but in fact runways were required, though they were made of artificially smoothed ice for the most part, or sometimes gravel. So it was going to be important to map a route where the grade was as smooth as possible; Odysseus assured me that the Skater could handle rough terrain, but there was a difference between “up rough terrain” and “up a mountain”. On the other hand it also had to be as direct as possible; I could ensure myself a pretty smooth grade if I went up the glacier that Belgrano sits on, back down into Coats Land, and then northeast until I was in Dronning Maud Land, then straight south… but if I was going to do that I might as well just come in at Norway’s Trøll air base near the north coast of Dronning Maud Land, because the distance would be the same.

***

The plane came into an enclosed hangar, with a sealed walkway into the base, just like at an airport. There were space heaters set on the edge of the walkway, blasting, but I could still feel the chill. Inside the base it was room temperature, though. They gave me plenty of warm food to eat, and warm drinks, and then bundled me into an astronaut diaper and an insulated black bodysuit with hood, goggles and a mask. Frankly I was more concerned about overheating at this point, since I’d been told the Skater was itself heavily insulated.

“You don’t have to wear the headgear in the Skater,” Dr. Ray said, “but you must wear the rest of it. Don’t try to take off any articles of clothing in the Skater; you won’t have room.”

Words couldn’t describe how much I didn’t want to be wearing a diaper when I confronted Dr. Spectrum. “Where do I get changed?”

“He’s probably taken over Amundsen Base; it’d be cheaper and easier than building his own. There’s places to get changed inside. Here.” Dr. Ray handed me a bracelet. “Once you press the button on the center, you are phased out of reality; only enough of your molecules interact with the world to allow you to move. You won’t be able to breathe while it’s on. It gives you one minute – approximately – to get through the walls and into the base. You’ve already got the heads-up display with the map pre-programmed into your goggles.”

“What if he did build his own base?”

“Then go into Amundsen anyway, find a place to get cleaned up and recharge the device, because you’ll probably need it to get into the actual base. It’ll need about three hours on the charger[AR1] , which is inside the Skater; we recommend strongly that you bring it in with you. There’s a second bracelet on the charger; it’ll make you more or less invisible. Be careful not to stand anywhere where the lensing effect would be noticeable, like on a border between two colors, or the edge of a shadow.”

Odysseus and Ray went with me out into the hangar. Despite all the gear I was wearing and the fact that there were heaters on in the hangar, the cold was like a punch in the gut. I sucked in a breath. “Nice and chilly, this.”

Odysseus laughed. “It certainly is.” His costume normally involved a lot of exposed skin, it being a sort of modern interpretation of what a Greek hero would have been wearing, but today he was dressed as warmly as I was. Though probably not wearing a diaper.

The Ice Skater was entirely black, which made sense for heat absorption and insulation, and as warned, it had no windows. There were two large ski blades under it. “How does it get up hills?”

“There are wheels. When you’re able to go downhill, you can engage ski mode, and the wheels retract. We recommend doing that as much as you can when you get close; we can’t do anything about the fact that a motor will always generate heat.”

“And its top speed is also around 80 miles per hour, you said. So this is going to take me ten hours to get there.”

He nodded. “We’re actually expecting it will take longer than that because you’re going to have to sleep, and the Skater can’t pilot itself. You’re well insulated enough that if you turn off active interior heating and just sit, it should take close to eight hours to drop to freezing… so you’ve got about five hours to sleep before it gets cold enough inside to be uncomfortable.”

“Right. In that case, I am absolutely changing out of this diaper before I go to sleep.”

“There really isn’t room—” Dr. Ray started to say.

“You have no idea how flexible I am. I want a couple of changes of diapers, wipes, and sanitary bags to put them in. What do I get to eat on my exciting journey?”

“Energy bars and cold sandwiches, mostly. Plus meal replacement drinks. There will also be water. Given, you know, the nature of diapers, maybe you want to stick with the meal replacement drinks over solid food as much as you reasonably can.” Ray had turned bright red.

This wasn’t the first time I’d gone on a mission into hostile territory wearing a diaper; the time I’d had to dive to reach Sea King’s base was memorable. That was probably the only other time that the environment itself had been as deadly as what I was facing now. Though the time with the hornets had also been pretty bad.

“Well.” The entire top of the Skater lifted, exposing the cockpit and dashboard. I climbed in. It was, in fact, an incredibly tight fit. “No time like the present.”

From outside, Ray explained how the controls worked. Engage drive, disengage drive, turn rudder left or right, back wheels left or right, front wheels left or right… I’d never driven a vehicle with so many different ways to steer it, but it was necessary. Obviously four wheel drive was necessary on icy terrain, and then the rudder was needed if you were skiing.

They closed me in, and away I went.

***

Navigating in Antarctica, in total darkness, by instruments only, is harder than you’d think.

Firstly, of course, no light whatsoever. Normally in Antarctic winter, there’s no sun, but you get the moon, the stars, and sometimes an aurora australis. But Dr. Spectrum had blocked off all electromagnetic radiation from the sky. This also meant that GPS was impossible, because GPS relies on sending signals to multiple satellites and receiving responses, and the satellites were above Dr. Spectrum’s barrier. Also, I couldn’t have used GPS anyway, because there was a reason he’d adopted the moniker Dr. Spectrum, and it had nothing to do with autism (that was the Robot) or rainbows. His specialty was manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum, which included detecting it, which included detecting that a small object several hundred miles away in the middle of nowhere where nothing ought to be was sending radio signals.

Next, there is no infrared. When you think about maneuvering in darkness, you might think of night vision goggles and viewing things in the infrared spectrum, since objects generate their own infrared signatures. Out of heat. That they radiate. Which they don’t do much of, in Antarctica.

Well, now, what about a compass? So here’s the thing: compasses use the geomagnetic field, and geomagnetic South is not the same as absolute South. The geomagnetic south pole currently isn’t even in Antarctica; it’s out in the ocean nearby. Also, the magnetic field of the earth is both vertical and horizontal, and the vertical portion gets much stronger than the horizontal portion at the poles, so a compass is going to try to point down. They’re flat, so generally they can’t, but this makes them pretty useless.

I had an incredibly detailed satellite map (that included the blocked-out areas around the Pole that are kept off of the Internet for security reasons), and a powerful on-board computer that could use the rasers it was pointing at the ground and directly around the Skater to calculate exactly how far I was moving in what direction at any given time, and by adding that movement to the map, it could figure out where I was through continuity. But if anything happened to the computer, a single momentary glitch, even a slowdown, and it could easily lose track of where I was, and there’d be virtually no way to get it back. Meanwhile, I was looking at a 360 degree screen all around my head, which translated what the rasers were “seeing” into visual imagery. But because of the danger of Spectrum detecting the rasers, the front forward rasers were only positioned to show me the next 50 feet or so, and that only if I was on flat terrain. If I was on an upslope it’d be shorter, because the rasers would adjust to decrease the likelihood of scattering into the sky, where Spectrum might be able to detect them.

You might ask, why not sonar, and the answer is, just because Spectrum’s specialty is the EM spectrum doesn’t mean he’s such an idiot as to neglect sonic waves. And on land, sonar isn’t great. Bats use it, but bats actually crash into each other all the time.

The first 300 miles or so were really easy, though. I was crossing the Filchner ice shelf, going past the Shackleton mountain range, toward a point directly northeast of the Trans-Antarctic Mountain Range. Ice is smooth, and pretty much 100% sea level. With global warming, the shelf might have been more treacherous in the summer than I would have liked, but deep in Antarctic winter, it was rock solid. The main issue I had was complete boredom. I was following my progress on the map to make sure I was going the way I should be going, but aside from that there was no information coming in. Nothing to see, nothing to do but keep skiing and every so often engage the drive long enough to give me a push so I could keep skiing some more. Ever go nearly four hours with nothing to see that’s any different than what you were seeing five minutes ago?

I’d go stir crazy in space. Probably not really a good candidate for a pilot, either, whether in air or on sea.

There’s a strait between Berkner Island – an island that isn’t really an island, it’d be underwater if there weren’t a ton of ice on top of it – and the main west coast of Antarctica proper, and I headed into that, into what would be a bay if, again, not covered with ice. Straight in front of me was the hilariously named Support Force Glacier, just northeast of the Pensacola Mountains, which then lead into the Trans-Antarctic Mountain Range. Glaciers, like rivers, flow… just very, very slowly. Sometimes, the flow leaves a fairly smooth section of ice as it moves.

The Skater probably couldn’t get up a mountainside proper, but using my map and my rasers, I was able to identify the mildest slopes ahead of me, and push the Skater up them. I was looking for two things: a gradual incline, and a smooth surface. You’d think all of Antarctica would be smooth, like an ice skating rink, after so much time for all the ice to build up, but actually new ice is being formed and forcing the old ice out into the ocean, slowly but steadily, all the time. The terrain had just as many divots and hillocks as land would, but they were covered with ice.

All directions that go toward the pole are south, and I was attempting to go pretty directly. I was tracking along the 45 W meridian, until things started to get a little rough and I had to bear southeast instead, crossing the 40th and then hitting 35 W just as I was reaching 85 S latitude. Because longitude slices the earth like an orange and latitude slices it like a tomato, I was able to cross 10 degrees of meridian while still mostly going south in only about 170 miles. But 85 S is a consistent distance from the South Pole, and the same distance as between all parallels. I had 5 latitudinal degrees and approximately 350 miles to go, if I went straight and didn’t have to re-route around rough terrain.

At this point I’d been driving for five hours. I’d been eating and drinking along the way, but I was wearing out, and I needed to be at my best to handle Dr. Spectrum. Time to make camp. By which I mean, since I couldn’t leave the Skater – aside from “why would I want to” and losing all my heat, there was a significant chance I’d lose it in the dark if I attempted to go more than two or three steps away from it – that I leaned the seat as far back as it went, contorted myself so I could get my pants off, removed my own diaper and cleaned myself up, and then got my top off so I could wipe my whole body down. Sweating when you’re going to be going outside in the cold is bad. Dr. Ray had thought there was no way I’d have room to do that, but I’m a short person and I’m flexible. It’s not a superpower or anything; I just know how to stretch and stay limber.

It was 68 degrees Fahrenheit inside the Skater. With all my cold gear on, that had gotten to be unbearably warm, and at times on the trip I’d fantasized about opening up the top to let the cold air in. With my clothes off, it was a little on the chilly side. I stuffed my cold gear onto one of the heating vents to dry it out, opened up an emergency blanket – which was much, much fluffier and bulkier than I had expected before I pulled it out of its vacuum pack – and told the computer to wake me up in four hours.

There was no way to report back. I had a radio, and with so little in the way to block it, the signal might actually get all the way back to Belgrano… but it was also very, very likely to reach Dr. Spectrum. In fact he was probably closer, in terms of miles. I’d told the Watch my plan, though. Very few human beings can do a ten hour drive and then jump into action, and it was midnight my time by now. So we’d worked eight hours of sleep into the time budget, but it had to be broken up because the Skater couldn’t keep me warm enough to be comfortable for eight straight hours if I turned it off, and if I turned it on and then didn’t move, sooner or later enough infrared would leak that Dr. Spectrum might be able to see me.

The emergency blanket was actually more like a sleeping bag, and it had the ability to zipper myself in, but rebreathing my own carbon dioxide gives me headaches. So I didn’t close it. As the temperature dropped, my exposed face would lose heat, but that was fine; in four hours the temperature would be in the lower 50’s and the chill would help me wake up.

I didn’t sleep well. Given the stress of the situation and the fact that I was stuffed into a sleeping bag inside a space only about as big as the driver’s seat in a compact car, I didn’t expect to.

In my dreams, I was trying to talk to Dr. Spectrum, except he was simultaneously other villains I’d had to talk down in the past, and no matter what I tried, he ignored me or read into my words things I’d never said or meant.

Toward the end, he was inexplicably my mother.

***

Four hours isn’t enough sleep. I headed toward the pole for another three, then another sleep. When I got back into my now-nice-and-toasty winter gear after my second nap, I dropped the temperature within the Skater to about 45 degrees. Much warmer than the outside would be, but cold enough that I wouldn’t sweat the last two hours of the drive. Also, reducing the potential for enough infrared leak that Dr. Spectrum could see me.

It ended up being the last four hours of the drive, because I became very concerned about operating the rasers so close to Spectrum’s base, and turned them inward, giving me only about 20 feet of visibility, which meant slowing down. At times I felt like I was caught in Xeno’s paradox, going slower and slower the closer I got. And then, once I was really close, I almost ran into one of his robots, missing it by literal inches. The rasers told me it wasn’t stationary, but I couldn’t get any impression of how fast it was going or in exactly what direction before I was out of range.

The moving robot was a strong argument for there being some type of light outside the Skater – it might not be visible light, but there might be infrared or something in use, because if the robot was patrolling, it needed to be able to see where it was going and what it was encountering. I turned around and drove about a tenth of a mile away, hopefully out of the range the robot was patrolling, if in fact that was what it was doing.

I was going to have to get out and walk.

Oh, what fun.

***

The area actually blazed with light up ahead of me. Where I was, the darkness was, well, very dark; the only illumination came from the camp more than a football field’s length ahead of me. The terrain of the South Pole is fairly smooth, though. My boots had extendable snow cleats that I’d kept folded in while I was driving, but I extended them now as I hiked. Despite the goggles and the face mask for my nose and mouth, the cold felt like it was digging little channels of ice into my skin. It hurt in a way I’d never imagined cold could hurt before coming to Antarctica.

I laughed softly to myself. When my mother had wanted to move to the Yukon, in Canada, I’d begged and pleaded with her, and we’d ended up in Texas instead, out in one of the western counties in the great range between El Paso and the middle of the state. It was still pretty empty, but not nearly as empty as the Yukon. If we’d gone to the Yukon instead I might be prepared for this. Where we’d lived, some winters it had hit nearly 0 Fahrenheit, and I’d thought that was cold. Belgrano had been close to that level of cold, at negative 5, where we’d landed. But this was somewhere in the range of minus 70. It was so cold, I was breathing through a snorkel that snaked down to a spot right to the side of my arm, so the cold air could travel through my warmed clothes before getting into my lungs. I could feel the snorkel tube, ice cold against my otherwise well-protected body.

The ice made crunching sounds as I walked on it. I wished I’d brought snowshoes instead, something to distribute my weight instead of digging in. This seemed like a serious oversight. If I ever had to sneak up on a supervillain’s base in a polar region again, I’d have to remember it.

As I got closer, I saw the robots. They reminded me somewhat of Daleks from Doctor Who, or maybe enormous Roombas. They were silver, and glittered in the light of the multiple banks of stadium lights mounted all around the South Pole area. I didn’t know whether the researchers had those lights up so they could see when they left their base in the winter – did they even leave their base in the winter? I wouldn’t – or if Dr. Spectrum had put them up. The robots moved in patterns; I watched them for ten minutes, pacing back and forth to keep my muscles from locking up in the cold and forcing my body to make more heat. I’d been enormously lucky; the robot I’d almost crashed into had been facing away from me. I could tell because I could see the tracks I’d left, and I could see the robot moving, and when it moved back into the position it’d been in when I’d almost hit it, it was facing away. I didn’t know why Dr. Spectrum had built his robots only to have eyes facing front, like predatory animals; why hadn’t he put sensors on the sides and backs of the heads, as well? They weren’t humanoid, so there was no design reason why he couldn’t have.

Possibly he wasn’t actually that good a roboticist. Standard brain modules for robots that circulate on the supervillain black market are designed for robots that look humanoid, with eyes in front. Maybe he’d just dropped a standard module into his unusually shaped robots. They did seem to be pretty stupid. The one I’d almost hit had ignored me despite my nearly hitting it on its blind side.

Under normal circumstances, you test this kind of thing by throwing rocks to see what the robot does. In Antarctica, there really aren’t any rocks. Anything that has broken loose from the rock the continent is made of has gotten buried under layers of ice.

Spectrum had, in fact, built himself a new base. Perhaps he hadn’t even interacted with Amundsen Base, short of cutting off their radio. We’d all thought he wouldn’t bother, with an existing base already where he needed it, plus the effort of having to dig in Antarctica, but he’d managed it somehow. The building looked like it was made of rock. It was a single story, maybe not even quite, a squat small building that wasn’t there on any of the top secret satellite maps. He must have been blocking the satellites from seeing him, somehow, even before he’d put up the barrier. But that was less surprising, from the man whose entire career had been about controlling and rerouting electromagnetic radiation, than the fact that he’d bothered to build himself a base at all.

I had a suspicion why he’d done it. Spectrum was the kind of villain who surrounded himself with robots rather than have minions. Most of the people who do that are expert roboticists who trust their ability to tweak an AI into total loyalty more than they trust goons who are in it for a paycheck. But judging from the quality of his robots’ observational skills, Spectrum plainly wasn’t that good at it. Which suggested that he just didn’t want to be around people. And there were misanthropic supervillains who hated people and didn’t want to be around them, like Gaia’s Sword. But Spectrum’s manifesto made it clear that societal injustice and the suffering brought on by poverty bothered him enough to invest millions of dollars in a scheme to take over the world so he could stop it. That wasn’t a misanthrope.

This guy was shy. He had built a second base rather than take over Amundsen because he hadn’t wanted to interact with the scientists. That was my theory.

Well, he was going to interact with me whether he liked it or not.

I waited for the moment where the robots’ pattern meant I had a brief straight shot at Spectrum’s base. Then I turned on my invisibility bracelet and ran, as fast as I could on the slippery ice, my boots giving me traction but also making me very, very loud. The ice crunched like the world’s biggest potato chip, and I ran out of invisible time while I was on the move, but that was all right. I was close enough.

My original plan had been to clean up and change clothes within Amundsen Base, but that was before I’d figured out that I could clean myself up; I’d wiped up before leaving the Skater. I didn’t need extensive invisible time on the inside. The goal was to get to Dr. Spectrum and talk to him, not to sneak up on him and knock him out or something; that would have been a job for a completely different hero. I activated my phasing bracelet instead.

My heads-up goggles showed me the phase time I had. I’d given myself 24 seconds for a margin of error, given that Dr. Ray had said I had “more or less 30 seconds”. If I wasn’t through the wall in 12 seconds, I’d have to turn around and go back out, and find another strategy, because I had no way of knowing how much further the wall would go after that and I couldn’t risk still being in the wall when I phased back in.

You can’t run when you’re phased. You’re basically swimming, upright. Gravity has only the lightest of holds on you, so you slowly drift upward, which is better than slowly sinking downward but it means you have to get what you’re doing done as fast as you can, and maybe exert some force into trying to stay down. I swam through the base wall, fighting to go as fast as I could and still stay more or less at ground level. Eleven seconds later my head was out, and in three more seconds I’d managed to pull all the rest of my body free, and turn off the phase bracelet. I dropped about six inches, the amount I’d floated into the air while I was phased.

You can barely see when you’re phased; there’s basically “light, you are free of a solid object” and “dark, your eyes are inside a solid object or maybe it’s just dark”. I saw the shadows up ahead but had no way to even guess what they might be until I turned off phasing and saw there was a circle of robots all around me with some kind of energy weapon pointed at me.

So much for stealth. “I’m here to see Dr. Spectrum,” I said, a little hoarsely because I hadn’t spoken in eighteen or so hours and also I’d been out in the cold. I cleared my throat. “He might be expecting me.”

***

Dr. Spectrum was a skinny middle-aged guy with a full head of blond hair in a very 1970’s shaggy cut. He was wearing a reflective silvery full-body suit that looked like something from 1960’s sci-fi. It fit him loosely. The room was tiled like it had been outfitted for mainframes, with an elevated white tile floor and all the wires running underneath it, but there were no mainframes. There were banks of computer monitors all over the room with locked screens and retinal scanners, but no visible hardware controls for his devices aside from the power cords that went down directly into the floor. Each of the monitors was hooked to a very, very small desktop computer. These were probably remote interfaces, with the real computing power somewhere else, though why he’d decided to set up ten or eleven remote interfaces when he was working alone, I couldn’t guess.

“So you’re the Envoy,” he said. “I thought you’d be…”

“Taller?”

“I don’t want to be rude,” he said, which probably meant he was about to be rude. “But most superheroines are, well…”

“Sexy? Tall? Wear skin-tight spandex, or dress like Indiana Jones, or they’re all in leather?”

“I honestly thought you’d either look like a traditional superheroine, or you’d be pushing late middle age with a sensible politician haircut.”

I grinned. “I’m glad you thought of the politician haircut. It’s pretty obvious if you think about it why I don’t look like a superhero – aside from having to wear all this gear to get here in the first place. Can I take it off, by the way? Your office here is probably a little chilly, but I’m dressed for negative Centigrade and I’m overheating badly.”

“Uh… you’re not trying to seduce me or something, are you? Because that won’t work. I’m asexual.”

“I am nowhere near hot enough to have seduction in my bag of tools,” I said. I’m very average. People have a hard time telling me from other women. I’m not ugly, and when I want a partner, I don’t have a hard time finding one who wants me, but I blend into most crowds. It’s not exactly a superpower, but it’s helpful sometimes, if deeply irritating at others.

“But, I mean, you have clothes under there, right?”

I laughed. “Of course. I’m not going to strip naked in a supervillain’s base.” I pulled off the ultra-cold-weather gear and set it down in a pile on the floor. Escaping Dr. Spectrum’s base hadn’t really been an option before; I’d known I was coming here to talk to him, and the bracelets were both out of charge, so turning invisible or walking through walls wasn’t happening. Given those factors, it made no difference whether I was wearing clothing that would let me survive Antarctic winter, or not; I wasn’t getting out into that winter until I was done here. I was hoping that taking off the outer layer would reinforce the idea in his head that I wasn’t here to fight him, that I didn’t have weapons. Also, I really was overheating.

“Can I ask what happened to the researchers at Amundsen?”

“What do you think?” Dr. Spectrum said sourly. “They’re fine. They don’t usually leave their base in the winter, anyway. I’m just blocking their radio signals.”

“That’s good to hear.”

He scowled at me. “If you have mind control powers, they won’t work either,” Dr. Spectrum said. “I’m wearing antipsionic tech.”

My understanding from the telepaths I’d known was that antipsionic tech wasn’t really great, and most good telepaths could get around it, but it didn’t matter. “No mind control powers, or any other kind. You want a blood sample to test? I’m 100% baseline human.”

The scowl deepened. “That can’t be right. They say you’ve made every supervillain you negotiated with back down. That’s not possible unless you have powers.”

“Well, it’s also not true. I nearly got trampled to death by War Horse. Dr. Ultraviolet was willing to stop that particular scheme, but I’d been trying to get her to quit supervillainy entirely and obviously that didn’t happen. And when I tried to talk to Executive Dysfunction, I completely forgot what I wanted to say and just rambled inanely while he laughed at me.”

“If War Horse had really wanted to trample you, he would have.” Dr. Spectrum said this as if it were some kind of gotcha that disproved what I was saying.

“There were circumstances. I’m fairly sure he wanted very badly to trample me, but didn’t want to have a fight with the heroes who were my backup.”

“So, if you don’t have powers, how do you talk supervillains out of what they’re doing? Because maybe whatever tricks you use work on weak-willed people, or people who were just in it for money or fame or proving a theory anyway, but I have a cause I believe in. I actually rather resent that people are calling me a supervillain; I’m out to save the world. But I can understand why that perspective isn’t making it out into the media, and of course, you so-called heroes will do anything to protect the status quo.”

I smiled wryly. “ When I succeed, it’s because I know how to listen. Now, I’ve read your manifesto, but there might be some nuances I didn’t pick up, or some ideas you’ve had since announcing it, so can you tell me about your cause?”

He sneered. “If you listening to me talk is how you expect to defeat me, then why would I talk to you?”

“You know why. You don’t want to have to have a battle with superheroes any more than they want to fight you. Even if you’re sure you can win, you’re not here to prove how badass you are or how easily you can dominate; you have a cause. You want to stay focused on that. So tell me about it.”

“No, you tell me. How do I even know you read my manifesto? You tell me about it.”

I shrugged. “Okay. You’re demanding an end to corporate personhood and the dissolution of all existing corporations, their assets to be equally distributed among the people. You do not trust any existing government to be able to carry this out without corruption, so you demand control of all world governments for the transition period. Individuals who have too many assets will also have to relinquish the extras, which includes landlords, and it will be illegal to rent out real estate. You didn’t state specifically what counts as too many assets—”

“Well, it’s going to be different for different countries. A country that’s very impoverished, maybe one man having a lot more cows than his neighbors is bad. But in the US, once we break up big agribusiness and restore family farms, it won’t be cows that are the issue. More like extra cars, fancy yachts, and the extra houses of course.”

I nodded. “Mm. You never actually said the word ‘communism’, but what you described is very similar to communism, if not identical. The things that people need will be manufactured or grown, and people should work at manufacturing or growing those things if they don’t have more valuable skills. Everyone will be given what they need. Also, unrelated to communism, immediate cessation of the use of gas-burning cars, all power plants that burn oil or coal should be shut down and converted into clean energy plants, all nuclear plants should use radioactive materials that can’t be repurposed to make bombs, and you want all the world’s plutonium to be collected and used to power spacecraft.”

“It’s not going to be like Soviet communism and the Five Year Plans,” he said. “Democracy will still exist at the local level, and it’ll be local governments that figure out what people need, based on surveying them and consulting with them. Like, the mayor’s office in a town or small city. Manufacture and farming will be based on what localities actually need, not what some bureaucrat in a different city thinks they should need.”

“Well, that’s certainly an improvement, but how do you get people to work if they don’t need money?”

“I thought of that too. It’s like Star Trek credits. Everyone gets what they need, but if they just want something, they do have to have money, or something like money. But there’s no credit system, no lending, no stock market – if you don’t have the money to get the thing you want, you just have to save it. Since everyone starts out with the same amount of money, it’s an even playing field. Everyone has equal ability to work and save up money for the things they want.”

“Except for disabled people who can’t work,” I pointed out.

“That’s true, but there are a lot of things that people can do that are pro-social that they wouldn’t have been paid for under the current system. For instance, if you can do ten hours a week at the animal shelter, or you can read to children whose parents are working, you might be able to do those things even if your disability would have prevented you from having a regular job.”

“But young and healthy people will still be able to work more, and earn more, so they can have more of the things that they want.”

“Well, there’s a cap on it. You can’t work more than a certain number of hours, it’s not healthy and we don’t want people to be hoarding this cash.”

“That’s a pretty interesting system,” I said. “If you could get a large number of volunteers to try to live that way for a while so you can iron out any bugs in the system, it might even be able to work, mostly. But you do see the problems with trying to implement something like this all of a sudden, right?”

“Yes, it means that the entrenched powers that be won’t have time to try to squirrel away their valuables.”

I sighed. “No. It means massive disruption and chaos. Because there’s going to be a transition period, while you’re building up your system of currency, and what work earns what amounts, and how to price goods, and to find out what’s needed by communities… and during that transition period, people won’t have food or medicine, because truckers won’t be hauling the goods, boats won’t be transporting things between countries, loaders won’t be loading and unloading…”

He frowned at me. “Why wouldn’t they? Once they know that those jobs are still valuable and they’ll still get some form of currency for them—”

“How quickly do you think you can get that information to eight billion people?” I shook my head. “Let’s imagine a best case scenario where the doctors and nurses are still going to work to take care of people. The pharmaceutical manufacturers will have shut down. In fact, given that Big Pharma is almost the epitome of what you’re fighting against, the wealthy executives might have their employees destroy manufacturing equipment and data so it will be impossible to make the medications, and you’d basically have to take a few years to reverse engineer things.”

“Why would employees carry out an order like that, if they’re not being paid?”

I sighed. “Because people are used to listening to their bosses. Because you would be, even if only temporarily, supplanting their national governments, which will make you very unpopular, so resistance to your orders will be considered heroic by a lot of people. Oh, and ‘unpopular’ assumes that the world surrenders within the next few days. If you let things go so far that the world is plunged into a premature freeze, and there’s massive crop death, and thousands of vulnerable people dying because the environment has become colder than they are prepared to handle… you’ll be hated. People will look at you the way they look at Adolf Hitler. At that point no one will do anything you say unless you start killing them if they don’t comply.”

“But… I’m trying to save them. The worldwide exploitation of the poor by the rich has to stop. I’ll be saving them.”

“You won’t be saving the ones who froze to death.”

“I mean, yes, that’s true, but how many millions of people does unchecked capitalism kill every year? If some people die at the beginning of the new regime, that’s really tragic, but everything will be better once things stabilize.”

I sighed. “You’re not wrong about unchecked capitalism. But see, that’s the danger people are used to. The one that most of them think they’ve sized up and they know how to fight back. Once you establish yourself as world dictator—”

“There would still be democracy! Just, local democracy.”

“Right, so you’d be world dictator, because it doesn’t matter if you’re giving orders to people you appointed or representatives that were elected by the people, if you’re the leader then they will still be following your orders, not what they think is best for their constituents. And once you establish yourself as world dictator, you’re an entirely new threat. You’re terrifying. Many people will be absolutely sure that if they don’t risk their lives to kill you or defy you right now, everyone they love will die or live in some sort of dire slavery.”

“But that’s not what I’m trying to do! They can read the manifesto!”

“You know what Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the first people to take power in North Korea all had in common? They all promised the people that everything would be better once things stabilized. That there’s a necessary period of chaos, and yes, bloodshed, but it will all work out to be a vastly improved society in the long run. And all of those leaders actually had a substantial number of people who were already willing to follow them and had already signed on to the changes, and believed in them. You’re going to be imposing this by fiat, on a world that doesn’t trust you. Even many of the people who believe in the principles behind your manifesto won’t accept you taking over the world.”

He sighed. “I can’t make them trust me except by being forthright and transparent, and doing the right things to save as many of them as I can, over time.”

“No, that’s how to make them trust you if you were a political leader that they didn’t vote for, or someone who got the position because the original leader died. Something like that. You’ll never get the world in general to trust you if you made thousands of people freeze to death and caused world-wide famine in order to get power, even if your goal was to use the power to make their lives better.”

“It’s not going to come to that.”

“Oh?”

“World leaders will surrender before the world freezes. They don’t want to die in the cold any more than anyone else, and they also need to eat.”

I held myself strategically quiet for several moments, looking down. I shook my head, slightly, once. Then I looked back up at him and said gently, “I believe that you believe that. Because you would do that, for the people you led, if you were a leader. But you’re overlooking something very important.”

“I think the fact that world leaders are human and also need to eat and be warm is going to be more important than whatever you say.”

“Doctor…” I leaned forward. “These are the people who are currently willing to cause the Earth to heat up irreversibly, causing millions to die and doing untold permanent damage to the environment, because it keeps them rich and powerful right now. These people already have sealed underground bunkers stocked with food and water for years. They’re expecting to have to go wait out a climatological disaster they brought about themselves, and they genuinely believe that with the amount of money, they can protect themselves from anything. What makes you believe they will ever give in?”

“If the planet gets cold enough, the underground water will destroy most of their bunkers.”

“By which point everything on the surface is dead, and life on Earth isn’t coming back from a disaster of that magnitude. I don’t think a man who wants to save the world from global warming and unchecked capitalism wants to destroy all life on it forever. You’ll back down before they do, because all the people you wanted to save would be dead otherwise.”

That was starting to get through to him. I’d hoped I could convince him of the serious problems with his plans, because it would have been ideal if he’d realized for himself the issues he was going to run into. But people who believe strongly enough in their plans that they’re willing to spend millions of dollars, launch a satellite into orbit (or more realistically, probably a lot of them), and blackmail the world with the possibility of eternal night… those aren’t really good candidates for changing their mind just because their plans have holes in them a ten year old might be able to find.

This tack, though… this ran close enough to what he already believed that it might work.

“Surely the people would rise up—”

“The same people who have not yet risen up, despite the fact that they also know that the world will be destroyed if things go on the way they do? Those people?” I shook my head. “World leaders aren’t going to hand over their national sovereignty until things are very, very bad, and they won’t get very, very bad until they’re so bad that mass numbers of people are dying. Large corporations and the billionaires who own them care even less; they’ll be hiding in their bunkers until it all blows over. I know you’re a compassionate man; I know it burns you up, the way the rich treat everyone else on this planet, and for that matter how they treat the planet. They will call your bluff, because you won’t let the whole world be destroyed, and they will. Because they’re dumb enough to think they can survive it.”

“If they’re in a bunker, they’re hardly in a position to stop anyone from surrendering to me. Maybe the President wouldn’t, because he has a position in a bunker, but surely the first politician in the line of succession who isn’t in a bunker would. And the world’s wealthy won’t be able to protect their wealth from within a bunker, not when it mostly exists as numbers in a ledger.”

“Doctor, if things get that bad… they’ll just drop a nuke on Antarctica.” I shook my head. “They don’t want to, right now, because obviously that will melt so much of the ice that the oceans will rise and expensive beach property will flood. But if they have to, they’re prepared to.”

He gave me a disbelieving look. “All that would do is destroy the communication channels to the control satellite and make it literally impossible to turn off the barrier.”

“Oh, no, they can destroy your satellites. It’ll take time, but they’re probably working on setting up a space mission to do just that, right now. Your barrier only blocks electromagnetic radiation, not rockets.”

“And how long would that take? And how many would end up dead? What kind of sociopath would be in charge of a country, and not realize how much harm it would do to the world to do things that way?”

“The kind of sociopath who gets into politics because they want power.”

“So, what? Just give in?” He stood up, pacing, occasionally glaring at me. “They’d love that, wouldn’t they! You convince me I can’t possibly win because I have more morals than they do, you make me back down, and humanity continues to live under the boot of fascism and corporate control until eventually they boil the planet to death. Maybe it would be better if we all died, if that’s our only other option!”

“That’s bleak,” I said. “It’s a good thing that’s not our only other option.”

That stopped the pacing. “Oh, really.”

“Yes, really. There are other options. Good ones. They just don’t get you the immediate win you want, but to be honest… an immediate win is a terrible idea. You want to phase in the system you want to exist, and recruit other people who share your vision to help you make it happen.”

“That’s not going to save the planet from global warming! We need to make drastic changes now!”

“It’s a good thing Earth has a guy who knows how to rapidly cool the whole planet.” I leaned back in my chair and raised an eyebrow at him.

“Wait – no. No, you’re saying that because I did this, climate change will be stopped, but you’re wrong. I looked into that. I’m not stupid. A few unseasonably cold days isn’t going to stop a trend that’s been building for sixty years or more.”

“But if you’ve looked into it, then you must have equations that would tell you, how often to turn off the sun, for how long, to reverse global warming temporarily, to buy us more time. And I would imagine you already know how to attenuate the barrier, right? Make it weak enough that some radiation gets through, so the planet doesn’t die, but the sun’s a lot weaker?”

“I could do that, but I never expected the world’s superheroes to let me. It would take months of work. Years, maybe. Two or three days to chill the planet at a time. Maybe longer if the field was dimmed…”

“Why would the heroes stop you, if you were hired by the world’s governments to do just that? If they paid you a great deal of money to buy the Earth time—”

“It wouldn’t work. Because then they’d keep pushing off the deadlines, oh, Dr. Spectrum will save us, we don’t have to worry about burning fossil fuels, and nothing would change. Also, none of this does anything about capitalism’s stranglehold on everything.”

“Would this system let you redirect and beam solar power, I wonder?”

“I—uh, yes, yes probably. That would be something of a technical challenge, but…” I could see his eyes unfocusing as the technical challenge unspooled in his mind.

“If you could do that, you could redirect solar power away from deserts where it’s baking hot, to green energy companies. Take a small percentage for yourself and the rest of what you make goes to the communities whose sun you’re redirecting. Obviously, with community permission. You wouldn’t remove all the sun all the time, just… lessen it to cool down the desert a bit. Or when there’s a terrible heat wave somewhere, dim the sun for them and redirect most of the energy.”

“You keep talking about money. Do you seriously think I’m doing any of this for money? That I want to be rich?”

“Well, I know you are rich, because no one else has a few million dollars lying around to build an Antarctic base and launch a bunch of satellites.”

This made him redden. “I stole all that money,” he said, his tone a cross between a villain’s arrogant brag and a shameful confession.

“I know. That’s how you gained a name as a supervillain. Dr. Spectrum, robber of banks.”

“Most of the bank robberies were electronic, actually. I only did a few in real life. Mostly, you’re right, I did it for the name. No one was going to take Dr. Spectrum seriously when I set out to force the world into making things right, if they’d never heard of me before.” He started pacing again. “I just needed the money to do this. I don’t want to be rich.”

“I understand. You think the master’s tools can’t dismantle the master’s house, right? I don’t know why the saying goes like that, though, because you absolutely can break into a guy’s garage, take his chainsaw, and use it to start cutting through his walls.”

“I thought you were supposed to be a hero.”

“I didn’t say I’ve done that. But I know people can do it. More importantly – on a metaphorical level, it’s supposed to mean that you can’t defeat a system of ideas by participating in that system. You can’t escape Christianity by becoming a Satanist. Well, old-school Satanist that actually worships Satan, nowadays they’re atheists and Satan is a metaphor.”

“And you can’t defeat capitalism by becoming a capitalist!”

“That is actually where you’re wrong,” I said. “Because I think we both know that in this world, to get political and social power, you have to be rich. Rich people get to influence the media, they get to shape what people are talking and thinking about. And for obvious reasons, most rich people want very few constraints on their ability to get even richer, so they use the power of their wealth to work toward that.” I leaned on the table with my elbows, propping up my head on my hands. “Our side, the side that wants things to be better, that wants the world to focus on people living better lives instead of the rich getting richer? We don’t have that advantage. We can’t channel the power of absurd wealth because even if we pool our money, we still don’t reach absurd wealth.”

“’Our’ side? You’re on my side now?” he said skeptically.

“I always was. I don’t want you to destroy the world, but your end goals? Socialism, an end to corporate personhood, people no longer going hungry or dying of preventable disease or being homeless? I’ve always wanted that.” I stood up, making a decision. “My mom was a paranoid schizophrenic. She wasn’t dangerous, but she believed the government was out to get her. So we ended up homeless a lot, living out of her car, because she’d pack up and move us because a dog down the street warned her telepathically that the Feds were closing in on her.”

“I’m – I’m sorry.”

“We almost never had health insurance. One time her boyfriend put us on his insurance by claiming he’d married her, and she got meds, and she was sane for a while. She had her head back together. She was getting better. Then he cheated on her, so she put me in the car and we ran away, and she decided that he’d been poisoning her so she threw all her medicine bottles out on the side of the highway. I never saw a dentist, never saw a doctor for a regular checkup.”

“Your teeth look fine to me.”

“The Alliance of Good replaced them for me, while I was a member. People trust people with good teeth more.” I sighed. “I am on your side, Dr. Spectrum. I don’t agree with your methods, but I think you’re in a very unusual position, that you could switch to different methods that would give you a lot of leverage to get what you want for the world, legally.”

“You think I should sell my abilities, to become wealthy, so that I can, what? Influence politicians?”

“Yes, like you’re trying to do now. Except this way it’s much more likely to work.” I wanted to pace, but that can unnerve people, make me seem threatening. Somehow. I’m a five foot three woman who knows some martial arts and is physically fit. I have no superpowers. No one should be scared of me, but supervillains aren’t always that rational.

So I sat back down, looking up at him, my hands folded. “You form a corporation, but privately held, so no one can take it over and take it away from you. You offer your services to wealthy nations, to redirect sunlight away from them during heat waves, and to dim the world enough, often enough, to reduce global warming. They pay you. You redirect the solar energy to green energy companies, who convert it to power. They pay you. You develop some technologies like gamma ray shielding that could be used by nuclear power plant workers in an emergency. They pay you. Through this, you become wealthy, and also, the planet cools off and the worst of the disaster is postponed. With the money, and the fame you get from being the man who’s saving the world, you push the conversation in the direction you want. An incredibly wealthy man openly espousing socialism is news; the media will cover you, and give you a platform. And with that platform, and the money, you fund politicians who agree with your beliefs, you popularize your beliefs, you have the opportunity to speak about them in detail. You invest in green energy, increasing its effectiveness. And as the world hears more of your ideas, and you convince more and more people, you build up strength for a bloodless revolution, one where the changes are made through democratic means because so many people believe in them. When you finally get what you want, there are millions of people who love you and hang on your every word. You’ve been funneling all your money into doing good. Buying houses from large corporations that would have rented them out, and selling them to homeowners for affordable prices with covenants that they have to live there full time for fifteen years, they can’t buy another home somewhere else.”

“What if I just gave the houses away?”

“You could absolutely do that. There’s pros and cons to either approach. You fund nonprofit pharmaceutical development companies – which do exist – and buy patents from pharma companies, and hand them over to those nonprofits. You fund nonprofit health insurance in the US, or throw all your weight behind pushing for universal health care. You work with community leaders in the US native community and all over the planet on decolonization efforts.”

I was overselling this. He would likely never be thatwealthy, because he wouldn’t hire thousands of people for dirt wages and exploit them. But I could see the gears turning in his mind, the vision of becoming a person who could bring about the world he saw, safely and legally.

He shook his head. “Me, running a corporation, though? I’d be worried it would corrupt me.”

I laughed sharply. “And yet you thought you could safely rule the world? I’m sorry, power over the entire planet would be far, far more corrupting than running a corporation. And with a corporation, you can hire people who really understand business to help you, and many of them, they’re in professions where if they stab you in the back they’re unlikely to get another job. Whereas when you rule the world, people who stab you in the back end up ruling the world, and then no one can bring them to justice for betraying you.”

“I… I suppose you’re right about that. I mean, if I could hire trustworthy people to do all the business part of it, so I could focus on my scientific studies and the pursuit of my cause.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what you do. If you’ve got anything left over from building this base, you should hire a lawyer and an accountant immediately. They can sign NDAs so they never get to talk about your plans unless you grant permission, and they’re both in professions where if they try to take advantage of you to make themselves rich and shut you out, they can literally be thrown out of those professions.”

He sighed. “No. I can’t do any of it. I’m a criminal. Remember? A bank robber.”

“The Watch can talk to the president to get you a pardon, if I ask them to.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Sure. That’s part of my job. There are actually groups that specialize in helping former villains redirect their skills into pro-social activities. I can connect you with them.”

“I… I just don’t understand why you’d go out of your way to helpme. If this is what you do, then… why do they let you? Why don’t the heroes just come in, guns blazing?”

That had actually been the next step if this didn’t work; the nuke would have been a final resort. “Odysseus, the leader of the Watch, says you have a great mind, and he’d love to see that mind turned toward good goals. For my part, I already understood that your goals were good, it was the methods that were a problem.”

“He said that?”

He’d said it in a much more negative way, but I wasn’t sharing that with Dr. Spectrum. “He certainly did.”

“I… I don’t know what to say.”

“Say that you’ll accept the deal. Let the sun come back, and let me radio the Watch to tell them what we’ve worked out. They’ll come to pick me up, but it’ll take them a while, so I may prevail upon your hospitality for some warm food, if you have any.”

***

A lot of people ask the question Dr. Spectrum did, how do I do what I do without any powers.

I spent my childhood being dragged around by the one human being who had total power over where we lived, what food we would eat, what I was allowed to do. I was a child; there was no way I could resist my mother. I could throw temper tantrums, but that never got me what I wanted. And she couldn’t be convinced with logic and reason, or common sense.

So I learned. Everyone has a perspective, and if you understand that perspective, if you truly understand them, then you know what they want, what they’re going to do. Insane people are perfectly rational, to themselves. When you know what they are experiencing, what connections their mind is making, the things that they do in response make sense.

And once you’ve learned how to understand your delusional mother, so you can talk to her in ways that make sense to her, so you can understand her perspective and work within it… it’s relatively trivial to do it for anyone else. “Mad” scientists aren’t mad, there are just things that they want that they’re willing to go to extreme lengths for.

It meant learning foreign languages, it meant getting a Ph.D in psychology and then never asking anyone to call you Doctor because Doctor in front of your name makes you sound like an expert, and experts don’t listen, they lecture. It meant endless practice, negotiating truces between roommates who hated each other, lovers who’d betrayed one another. It meant working suicide hotlines, using my skills and honing them.

Until I was good enough to use it in hostage situations. And from there, supervillains.

All the big superhero organizations in the world have an understanding. For something like this – a hostage situation, an attempt to blackmail the world, an invasion – call me first. Ever since I talked the Suruvians into not invading Earth, they look at my skills as if they’re something supernatural. Or superpowerful, at least. People are convinced there has to be something going. I have to have powers. Telepathy, or mind control pheromones. Or an implant that gives me powers. Or alien tech. They’ll believe a hero can be an expert martial artist who can take down supers because he’s trained that hard and that well, but they won’t believe a hero can be someone who talks people down.

It does not, in fact, always work. I managed to convince Gaia’s Sword that indigenous human populations were responsible for incredible bio-diversity and that wiping out humanity for the crimes of capitalism and colonial exploitation was shockingly unfair, blaming the victim, and an indication that she’d fallen for white colonialist propaganda, an accusation that most white people will do anything to prove untrue. But I couldn’t get anywhere with War Horse, because ending human exploitation of animals was only his excuse for his boundless rage against humanity. He was one of three alien children sent to Earth in pods that would cause them, as infants, to outwardly appear as clones of whatever touched their pod first, and his “siblings” speculated – and I agreed – that their homeworld must not have had any domesticated animals wandering around free, because it seemed to have never occurred to them that a non-sapient being might touch the pod first.

War Horse was intelligent, superpowerful – and a horse, who’d grown up seeing his family and loved ones treated as livestock, while being horribly isolated from them because they weren’t sapient and couldn’t speak a language. And nothing I’d said could make any of those facts not true, or compensate for them in any way. I’d only survived because he’d mellowed with age and wanted to make his superhero “siblings” – both of whom appeared as humans – appreciate that he was trying, at least. If they hadn’t been with me, I was fairly sure I’d have ended up dead.

There have been others who refused to talk to me, or refused to treat me as human. I don’t go to talk misogynists down. I know what to say, but it won’t help because they won’t hear it from me. And there are people so blindly narcissistic that you can’t talk them out of anything because what they want is totally incompatible with what would be good for anyone else, so there’s no deal I can offer them, no compromise they’re willing to make.

But I’m good at it. Most villains want something, and it’s not always all that hard to get it for them, or some substitute they’re willing to accept as a certainty rather than the gamble of achieving their goals on their own.

***

It wasn’t a hard sell, to get Odysseus to agree to the terms I’d offered Dr. Spectrum. He’d deal with the politicians; the heroes generally handle that part themselves, unless the politicians are being recalcitrant.

Turning the sun back on didn’t do very much in Antarctica. The moon wasn’t up and the lights around Dr. Spectrum’s base were too bright for me to see the stars, so I couldn’t really see the difference, but now that we could use radio, Odysseus assured me that the sun was back. But they still couldn’t get a plane in over the South Pole in the winter, so they were coming for me in the Low Skimmer, which was apparently an antigrav vehicle that could float over terrain and hit speeds of 300 miles per hour, while being close enough to the ground that the winds that prevented planes from getting near here weren’t as much of a problem. I had time to eat a meal with Dr. Spectrum. It wasn’t a good one; he’d been living off frozen microwaveable dinners. But after almost a full day with nothing but sandwiches and trail mix, I’d eat anything if it was warm.

I radioed Amundsen to let them know that everything was copacetic. In the winter, they really don’t leave the base unless they have to, but they keep radio contact with the rest of the world; it must have been fairly terrifying for them to suddenly lose that. It turned out Dr. Spectrum hadn’t even told them what he was doing; they were on the verge of sending someone outside to try to fix whatever was wrong with the external repeaters for their radio signal, since they’d already taken apart and inspected all the equipment on the inside.

By the time the Low Skimmer reached me, I’d gotten word from my agent – they don’t technically call them agents in the world of superheroes, they call them assistants, or sometimes, sidekicks, though that’s usually reserved for people who go out in the field with them. Mine takes messages for me and book the jobs I go out for, so I call her my agent. Apparently the Teslanauts wanted me to mediate a dispute. An intra-team dispute. In virtual reality, because the Teslanauts are physically located all over the world; they’re the premier team for super-cybercrime, and using cyberattacks against supervillains, and they don’t have a headquarters, they have a VR hangout set up on redundant worldwide servers. As the Envoy, I’m the best recognized superhero in the world who does what I do, which means I don’t get a lot of days off.

I emailed her back to book me in a few days unless lives were on the line. I absolutely needed a few days off, after this one.

[AR1]Have her ask if it's USB, facetiously