With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

29th March 2013
16:23 GMT -5

"…deal to learn before I am ready to assume my proper station as your supreme autocrat. Vote Mister Atom Twenty Fifty Six." He leans slightly forward. "That is important. I will remind you again closer to the time."

Next to me, Kon snorts as Mr. Atom turns to shake William's hand. He looks slightly awkward about the whole thing. Mr. Atom might be rehabilitated but he isn't anything like resocialised. Or maybe he still feels a bit bad about the whole 'temper tantrum' thing.

"I guess that's an improvement."

I nod. "It wouldn't have occurred to him to need to remind people."

"I meant the way he's not trying to nuke the whole world or something. That puts him way ahead of Red Volcano."

"Interesting point." I frown. "I wonder why he hasn't ever attempted to build an even better robot?"

"'cause he doesn't want the competition?"

"I don't think he thinks like that. If he did, then he'd still be trying to destroy the Justice League rather than learn from them."

M'gann looks puzzled. "You.. know robots don't have reproductive urges, right?"

"Well, he doesn't."

"So why would he try making a better robot when he could just upgrade himself?"

Actually… "I don't think he has upgraded himself. Learned new things, yes, but his.. physical structure's basically the same as when he was built. Doctor Sivana was pretty literal about it when I asked him to rebuild him." I glance around-. "Oh, look out."

Catherine Grant and attendant film crew are heading towards us, presumably having finished filming Mr. Atom's induction.

Kon smirks. "Why do I need to watch out? I just read the autocue."

M'gann's eyes glow for a moment. "Uncle J'onn wants us to remember our media training, but he trusts us."

"Orange Lantern!"

I briefly look up at the heavens as Kon pats me on the back, pushing me forwards.

"Miss Grant. Glad to see that you're looking well."

"That's the makeup."

"Ah..?"

She notes my concern, and shakes her head. "All I got was a few grey hairs and a few new wrinkles. They had me doing propaganda broadcasts, so I was too useful to… You know." I nod. "I'm on the Botox waiting list, but cosmetic procedures aren't going to be a priority."

"Have you considered not injecting poison into your perfectly pleasant face?"

"Sure, but I actually like this job. Can you say a few words on camera?"

"Y-es, but I'm obliged to tell you that anything I say represents my own personal opinion and is not a-"

She nods, right hand resting on her hip as she waits for me to finish.

"-statement of Justice League policy, or representative of the personal feelings of any Justice League member."

"Do you want us to show the disclaimer?"

"It'll go up on the League website if I cause a problem. Is this going to be live..?"

Behind me, Kon snorts.

"No, if we use anything you say it'll get edited and played this evening at the earliest."

"That's a relief. I think Batman gets a notification if I get within a hundred metres of a media personality, and given how overworked he is he'll probably need the extra time to get into your servers." I rub my hands together theatrically. "Okay, let's go."

She comes a little closer, standing side-on so that the camera can see her face. The cameraman aims at us and then gives her a nod.

"Orange Lantern, how do you feel about Mister Atom joining the Justice League?"

"He made himself indispensable over the whole Anti-Life crisis and during the reconstruction. Making him a League member only made sense."

"What do you have to say to people who think that his criminal record should bar him from membership?"

"If they know someone better, they should feel free to nominate them. There's still plenty of work to go around."

"So as long as they need him, what he did before doesn't matter?"

"I wouldn't go that far. However, between the overwhelming need, his disinterest in reoffending and the fact that when he committed those crimes he was about ten minutes old, I think this is warranted."

"'Ten minutes old'?"

"He was activated about ten minutes before committing his first crime."

"And he started as he meant to go on?"

"He had no idea who he was, where he was or what he was for, and the only people who could have told him died when the workshop where he was built exploded. We didn't change his programming to make this happen. We just talked through his goals with him and convinced him there were better ways to go about them."

"Ruling the world?"

I shrug. "Everyone's got to have an ambition."

"And that hasn't happened already?"

"No, he'd sound a lot happier if he'd already taken over the world."

"I mean, the United Nations General Assembly hasn't had a proper meeting since the.. Anti-Life affected everyone. The world is still in chaos and the Justice League is rebuilding without consulting world governments." I nod. It is and we are. "And with the Justice League issuing its own currency, it's not clear that it still needs UN funding. Do you think it's fair to say that the Justice League has 'gone rogue'?"

I hear M'gann's intake of breath. "I'll call Batman."

"Already did."

"The founders of the League didn't need UN permission to fight crime individually. They didn't need it to coordinate their efforts when they founded the League. The charter is legally helpful, but anyone who thinks that they'd stop if they didn't have it is deluded."

"So you're saying they'd always been rogue?"

"'Rogue' is what the people who think they're in power call those they don't control. Are you saying that the League are doing too much good?"

"But surely you can see how it could be a problem if they're not accountable to anyone?"

"Has having leaders accountable to the electorate every four years prevented corruption? Think of it as.. a locus of power issue."

She's trying not to smile too much. "What do you mean by that?"

"The political establishment has power. The fact that the makeup of the establishment is split down the middle between two -or more- competing groups doesn't matter, because that means that everyone participates and accepts the system as legitimate. Don’t like the person in a particular office? Wait four or eight years and there'll be someone else. Might even be you. And in a roundabout way, that's why the United States military shuffles its officers so much these days; to prevent them bonding with a particular group of soldiers and potentially form an alternate locus of power through personal relationships."

"Superheroes are worse. Individuals who have the power to stand against the state, self-selecting for selflessness and public service. That's attractive. And they don't work for the state, so that good feeling doesn't link back to reinforce government authority or power."

"So do you want the Justice League to take over the world?"

I shrug with both arms. "It's not about what I want. What do you want? What do you think a world run by the Justice League would actually look like? What do you think the League would do that they can't do now, and would that be good or bad?"

She nods, more in gratitude for getting something controversial than because she actually understood the point I'm making. "That's definitely food for thought. Orange Lantern, thank you for speaking to us."

 

27th August 2013
Midday

I'm learning.

The people of Syrania understand what 'technology' is. It's the wheels on their carts, the bellows in their forges and the sails on their windmills.

Glowing rings that let their 'god' transform a muddy track into bricks, or fly in the air, or know what an animal on the other side of the world is doing as it does it is not 'technology'. That is 'magic'.

And magic is for gods and their priests.

That's actually useful, as it's an orange power ring and I was a little worried that I'd end up with people fighting me for it. That's what happened to Larfleeze, and he'd had a lot longer to adapt to his ring than I've had to adapt to this one. I'm a reasonably intelligent man who's seen power rings in comics, not some sort of veteran Lantern; I can't guarantee that a sufficiently avaricious person couldn't take it from me.

I've also learned that travelling at faster than light speeds with a power ring is easy and that the whole 'most star systems are the star plus a couple of gas giants' thing isn't an exaggeration. None of the nearby systems have small rocky worlds, let alone inhabitable small rocky worlds with liquid water on the surface. I… Also remember that tectonic activity like the Earth has is a product of our unusually large moon and that it probably wouldn't be replicated in other places, though I don't know if that has any relation to the development of complex lifeforms.

I gave up on finding someone or something by exploring yesterday. Today, I'm in the bowels of the-

"Through there, Divine Mammon."

-underground palace. According to the local priests it used to fly, though I'm not sure if that means 'hovercraft' or 'spaceship'. The general shape is.. trapezoid. Imagine taking a pyramid and slicing the top third off. The pattern of damage is actually nothing like that even, but if I had to guess I'd say that it fell out of the sky while being shot repeatedly in the upper parts of the hull.

And from the priests' descriptions of the death curse on some parts of the structure, I'd guess that something in here is still emitting dangerous amounts of radiation. The priests have devices which can detect 'dangerous magic', but they don't have any way to deal with it. They've actually been talking about evacuating their entire civilisation because they've got no idea how dangerous the magic is.

If I can deal with it -and I should be able to- then that'll do a lot to put their minds at ease.

Ring, I don't know what sort of radiation we're looking for, but have a crack at showing me anything dangerous.

Ah, yes. That's quite a lot of radiation. Seems to be somewhat contained by whatever these walls are made of, but…

"Thank you, Menelik. Return to the surface. I will have to remove some of the-" Uh. "-protective magics in order to access the source of the poison. For you to remain would endanger you, and you will not be able to assist me further."

"My life is yours, Divine Mammon."

I look back at him, trying to affect an expression of paternal concern while looking at a man at least twice my age.

"Then your life is an investment that I will realise only when it is profitable to do so. And that is not now. Go."

He bows and then beats a retreat back towards the entrance tunnel. I've got to try and work out how to ask whether the people who live here are descendants of the crew or if they lived here already, but I can't think of a way to ask without undermining the whole 'god' thing. I wouldn't have thought that a ship this size would have had a crew big enough for a sustainable population, not without a lot more congenital deficiencies that I've seen so far. I'd also have been a bit surprised if there'd been enough women on board, but maybe that's cultural prejudice on my part.

I walk to the access panel which controls the bulkhead door and wait for Menelik to get past the open bulkhead door at the other end of the section. Access, close that one and open this one. Other than the door being open there's no real visible change, the irradiated corridor on the far side looking much the same as the one I'm standing in.

Neutralise radiation.

Orange light strobes out into the area around me. With a radiation source still emitting radiation that won't make the area safe, but if there's a hole in the shielding somewhere it should reduce the leakage.

Would this much radiation damage the ship's computers? From what I could tell, the ship doesn't have an integrated computer system, but I don't know if that's a design feature or a result of the massive damage it took. Why would anyone make a pyramid-shaped ship? Alright, for a dedicated spaceship there are some advantages to a geometric shape. If it isn't supposed to go into an atmosphere and air resistance isn't an issue it wouldn't need to be aerodynamic. And if it didn't use gas thrusters or ion engines but rather… Manipulated gravity or something? Then it wouldn't have to worry about stressing the hull.

Perhaps it was a space station? I'm not sure that the locals would understand the distinction, and if they don't have a separate word for it then I doubt that the ring would translate the two uses differently. More likely they don't know, they just have a vague cultural memory that it used to be something other than a buried wreck.

I turn a corner and… Look at a buckled section of hull. Where the corridor was is now rock and metal. Examining an interior map, it looks like this part of the ship struck the ground first and broke, loose rock and soil filling in the hole after the ship was buried. I could just go around it, but removing sediment and straightening up the walls is well within my abilities.

Ring, any sort of data storage device this way?

Glowing orange arrows appear in my visual field, pointing the way both to the radiation source and… What appears to be an archive of some sort. I'm not totally sure-.

I have no idea at all how the ring designates things like that, but I doubt it's wrong. I'll deal with the radiation source first though, as that's actually dangerous to people and I doubt that any data that's survived this long will be damaged by being exposed for another minute or two.

The radiation source is…

Um.

I assumed that the main engine would be like something out of Star Trek, but between the broken pedestals and the snapped off columns containing yellow crystals in various states of fracturing I've honestly got no idea what any of this does. On the grounds that the crystals are probably supposed to be in one piece I scan their atomic structure and use broken parts to repair broken crystals. Once they're whole again I slot them back into the slots in their columns, the… Circuitry? Within, glowing faintly as local power is restored. Fix the wall, fix the… Uh, Scan the intact columns and use that as the basis for restoring the snapped ones.

Radiation emission is… Lower, but not safe. Scan for radioactive material. Okay, and… I've got no idea what that's supposed to be. Transmute it into something that isn't radioactive, neutralise radiation and then check again.

Safe! Excellent! Now I just have to worry that by repairing the… Batteries? Generator? That the broken parts of the ship are getting power again and the drive is going to activate and tear what's left apart?

Not much I can do about it unless I can find some sort of manual. So that's where I'm going next. Fly.

The corridors zip past and then… A vault door-. A vault door with a powered force field. Shut that down and open the door. The interior walls have thick armour, and I can see where it's slightly deformed from the impacts taken on one side. The interior space consists of armoured shelving units which I guess as designed to survive this sort of event. The rings thinks that one holds a database, so… Open.

And there's a crystal. Small, oval and unlike the engine crystals, orange. Thematically appropriate, I suppose. Alright. Ring, download and give me the highlights. I need to know what I've gotten myself into.