We’re watching a dumpster fire in real time, but what would it be like somewhere else? Set your vibrational frequency from Earth Prime to Earth 1, and read on…
(This was written before Elon changed the name of Twitter to X, and before he pivoted to running the US government and made any prediction of his original intentions woefully optimistic.)
The downstairs extension was ringing as Bruce pulled the car into the bay. Down here in the cave the echoes were distinctive, but the phone handset filtered them to make the caller believe it was being used in a small office in a stately manor house. Some WayneTech boffins had thought they were designing that filter to drown out the sound of beach partying, bless them. Bruce took a moment to remove his cowl, then answered. “Wayne.”
He took a moment to recognise the voice on the other end. A woman, very businesslike, no nonsense. Mercy Graves! “Mr Wayne, my employer wishes to reach out to you to discuss, in his precise words, ‘one of our number who has gone off the rails’.”
One of our number? Lex knew who Bruce was — who he really was — but he was following a twisted code that separated secret identity from public persona, even at disadvantage to himself. Bruce often wondered why. Compartmentalising like that could be risky to one’s mental health, Alfred would say, but Alfred said a lot of things he thought Bruce didn’t hear. So “one of our number” could only mean one thing: another billionaire. A very particular billionaire. “Lex is worried about the prodigal then? His sometime-friend from South Africa who recently bought a certain social media platform?”
“That is so, Mr Wayne. He would like to arrange a meeting. Say… an hour? At the place you and he first discussed the issue of immigration?”
The issue of immigration. That was Luthor’s personal code for any discussion of a certain blue-clad Kryptonian. Clark was off world with Adam Strange and the Hawks, Bruce knew, trying to broker some sort of cease fire in the endless war. That gave Luthor more leeway to travel. Still, his choice of venue was on the nose as always. That man could never just reserve a boardroom! The first time they had clashed after Lex revealed that he knew who was hidden behind the mask, it all went down in a particularly poignant location for Bruce. He had expected to see the place demolished in the ensuing fight, but that never happened. Luthor had seemed to think their shared occupation should translate to a shared world view, and had spent the time trying to convince him that Superman was the real enemy. It didn’t work, but it was a memory that clearly meant something to him. All right then: Crime Alley it was.
A billionaire industrialist returning to the scene of his parents’ murder would attract attention from the wrong tabloids, so Bruce took a moment to change into someone more comfortable. Fifty seven minutes later, “Matches” Malone stepped out of the late dawn shadows into the light of one of the exceptionally well-maintained street lamps Wayne Electric supplied the neighbourhood. Luthor was there, impeccably dressed as always.
He didn’t dither, even to comment on Malone’s natty moustache. “He’s become a problem, Bruce. We need to deal with him.”
“We’re talking about your South African friend, for a change? I’ve seen how you deal with people you consider a problem, Lex. I won’t allow your usual crude methods, regardless of how you two may have fallen out. Or do you have a more subtle attack in mind? Are you sure you want to lose another hand to radiation poisoning?”
Luthor winced. “My prosthetic is perfectly serviceable, Bruce. And I learn my lessons. This is indeed a time for subtlety.”
“I’ll let Lucius know we won’t be needing to break out the construction equipment at the Texas office then.”
“The global headquarters are in San Francisco.”
“So they are. Well, Wayne Construction’s Metahuman Mitigation Division has had a branch there since the Titans moved in. I’m sure they can be ready in case your idea of subtlety doesn’t match the dictionary definition.” He was testing Lex, obviously. This sort of needling would normally send the narcissistic “genius” into a rant, but something else was evidently pushing the man’s buttons more than usual. More, perhaps, even than the Kryptonian. Interesting! “All right then, Lex. What do you have in mind?”
“He’s in debt to some powerful organisations, and he’s destroying a resource we all rely on. His companies are all about to –” He stopped. He looked suddenly wistful. “You know the moment when your booster or your leap takes you to the top of your arc, and for just a moment you float, before gravity asserts her dominion and you begin downward? It’s different with a cape, I imagine, but some of my later suits have had a glider option just so I can experience it. That moment of weightlessness before the inevitable dive to earth.”
Bruce nodded. This was unusually poetic for Lex. “I know it. The cape does make a difference.”
“Well then. His companies don’t have capes. They’re floating in that moment right now, but they’re about to fall.” He paused for dramatic effect, old hack that he was. “They will fall hard.”
“He has fifteen hundred staff in his various businesses in Gotham.”
“Over three thousand in Metropolis. But many more all over the world.”
“They’ll be disadvantaged, certainly.”
“Badly, some of them. Health insurance. Visa conditions. There’s no guarantee whoever picks up the pieces will want to do anything with them. I mean, come on. Life-sized toy sportscars and space rockets I could have built when I was six? Please!”
“Still, that’s nothing for you. LexCorp could snap them up and give them better pay and conditions. You must have some vacancies in your Ruling The World division, after the last dozen times a judge reduced your head count.”
“Barely. But it’s not just the staff. It’s the lost resource. He’s taken a massive communication channel and destroyed it. My ‘Ruling The World’ division, as you put it, still needs to coordinate. To share knowledge. To make our plans for domination! You don’t think we do all that by shining a big light in the sky, do you?”
“Very amusing, Lex. What do you propose then? You’re the genius supervillain. What evil plan do you have in mind?”
“I see two options. One would involve the assistance of an old flame of yours. Fishnets and tophat…”
Bruce started. “Zatanna? You want her to mind-control him?”
“Not just him. All the staff who have left already. They’ve lost too much institutional knowledge with the layoffs and redundancies. They need to come back. They need to want to come back.”
“No.”
“Just like that? Hmmm. Not surprising, I suppose. Your opposition to the technique is well known.”
“As is hers. Even if she could do it, she wouldn’t. And don’t bother suggesting Fate or Constantine or the Spectre. Or any of the Green Lanterns. They’d laugh in your face. In some cases, they might leave your face attached to your head as a courtesy.”
“As expected. All right then, Bruce. That leaves us with Plan B.”
Bruce raised an eyebrow. Lex began to outline his plan. After a few minutes, Bruce did something Lex had never, ever seen before.
He smiled.
Finance Director Vasily Likhachyov had left instructions never to be interrupted during dinner. When his secretary knocked at his door, he was about to have her redeployed to the Anadyr branch when she waved a sheet of paper under his nose and squeaked, “He paid it back.”
Likhachyov exploded. “He what?” He glanced at the sheet, then read it thoroughly. Billions of dollars, including the considerable early settlement penalties, in one transaction. The entire loan repaid in one fell swoop. Their perfect pawn — lost to them! “How?”
The secretary cowered. “He said he got a little help from his friends.”
Likhachyov goggled. This was a disaster! He might find himself redeployed to Anadyr. He began making phone calls. After an hour he knew it was all true.
He began making different phone calls. These ones would be to furriers and bootmakers. The Bering Sea coast was cold this time of year.
The news broke on other platforms first, of course. Given how badly the one platform was behaving since the debacle began, it would be lucky to get sports results. The consortium from LexCorp, WayneTech, Queen Industries, Holt, Kord and a few others had made the laid-off employees a very generous offer. Health insurance was a step up, and the visa issues of the foreign employees were being efficiently handled by staff seconded from the Themiscyran embassy, who had experience dealing with the Washington bureaucracy.
The employees returned to their offices and data centres to discover a surprise: a massive upgrade in security and reliability, courtesy of some software additions from a small team of unseen developers led by one Doctor Will Magnus. The servers seemed to be behaving far more intelligently than before. Magnus explained that all the source code was right there, but very little had changed, apart from the security improvements and, controversially, the name.
Ah, the name. The old one was poison, of course. Had been for some time. And Bruce had known that Lex would want to leave his mark. The consortium had paid off the prodigal and set him adrift with a retirement package he couldn’t resist, but no single company held all the cards. It seemed the old villain had an altruistic streak after all — but he still had to have one last dig. There was always one twist before the knife was extracted; it was in his nature.
Still, whatever the name, the communication channel itself thrived. With the consortium paying such close attention, past bad habits would not return. What one man creates as a toy, a team of much more heavily involved men and women can turn into something much more. In Lex’s case, the “much more” was clearly meant as a reminder to one individual that true power lay in the hands of human beings, working together. The irony was that the particular individual already knew that, and loved the fact. The one thing Luthor would never understand about his alien nemesis: he loved humanity, and loved to see them prosper.
At a desk in a newspaper office in Metropolis, recently returned from his vacation, senior columnist Clark Kent logged in to greenrock dot com with a smile, and began to write.
On a bright September morning in the year 3014, a glass bubble blipped into existence beside the House of El exhibit in the Smallville Museum, in the outer suburbs of the Metropolis/Chicago/New York/Toronto megacity. Two men stepped out. One, a balding man in a cheap looking but expensive suit, opened his mouth to shout in glee. “It’s the future! It really is!”
The other, dressed in a longcoat, smiled at the man’s joy. “That it is. Nearly a thousand years after your time. I would have gone a little further, but I happen to know there’s a celebration of twenty-first century technology at the museum this month, and I thought you might like to check it out. Remind you what you’ve left behind.”
“Left behind?” the man snorted. “Mr Hunter, I’ve left nothing behind. This is the future! A future I helped to create! And I get to see it, for the paltry cost of a few successful businesses sold off at a discount.”
Hardly a discount, Rip Hunter thought, but he kept it to himself. Luthor and Wayne and the rest made strange bedfellows, and Rip didn’t quite know what would come of their partnership, but they had the money to splash on overpaying this manchild for his nearly-bankrupt vanity projects, so they would probably do all right. When he got a chance he’d pop back to a couple of decades after he left and see how it all turned out. In the mean time…
A tall youth in a red and blue suit of strange design approached the pair. “Ah,” said Rip. “This is Gim. He’s here to offer you a ride to your destination, if you’re still interested.”
“Mars?” the man said. “Of course I’m still interested! I suppose there must be people there now.”
“I was born there,” Gim said. “Eighth generation Martian. You’ll love the place, I’m sure. If you’d like to come with me?”
Rip watched the man being led away by the tall youth. He was in for a shock when he saw how little his life in the twenty-first had influenced this future, but that was revelation that had no interest to Rip Hunter. The problem was dealt with, and the Earth would abide. That was all anyone could ask.