[Fateverse Side Story: NC Bundle] Trio
The Ringmaster: Chapter 5 of 13
Some of the greatest symphonies have trios in their third movements. Three new performers offer a view from the outside.
Warnings: Crossovers, fateverse, sci-fi, experimentation on prisoners, some Rule 63, a bit of a streak of swearing.
Disclaimer: Recognizeable characters belong to DC/Marvel.
Timeline: One month after Allegro.
It is edifying, but not completely necessary, to have read the Dark Nights: Metal event.
Visit The Fateverse Glossary for important terms, concepts, and people.
Notes: See postscript; linked footnotes may open in a new tab.
Trio: Harold Jordan DCM220
Hal hasn’t been doing this long. The Guardians recommended him highly for this job-basically the same job he’d already had, but across dimensions.
He has a kooky barcode implanted in his wrist (a non-toxic biodegradable compound, they assured him, temporary and harmless). He has an interdimensional communicator that looks like something out of a movie. He has (if he wants to wear it) a boring gray jacket with a weird patch on the shoulder and the number 2855 on the front.[ 1]
And at the moment, he has an unconscious Joker trussed up in psychic ropes (the Ring does its best, but sometimes Hal’s imagination does actually fail him) and tossed over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
The communicator (P-something…portable?) says the guy is Jack Napier DCH303, which means almost nothing to Hal. It also says the guy is a ‘category two violent sociopath,’ and a ‘mass-type three,’ and a ‘currency-type four.’ [ 2]
Hal’s new job may involve a lot more memorization than he’s really bothered with.
All he knows is that he got an order to catch the guy, they used their nifty transporter beam to stick him in the right world, and they brought him back once he was done.
The guards escorting him key open a door beside a placard that says ‘Auxiliary Cartography Lab: ACCESS RESTRICTED.’
“Uh…” says Hal.
“They’re expecting you,” an armed guard beside the door says.
The lab is dim and warm. Through a bay of windows in the far wall, he can see one of those fancy light-string projecty-things that shows these guys the shapes of timelines.
A pair of big men in medical scrubs takes the Joker from him (he lets the ropes disappear, figuring they have it under control now).
“Is that my new one?” someone asks, hurrying in from a neighboring room. “Welcome home, Jack,” the newcomer says to the unconscious Joker.
“Bruce,” Hal says, surprised.
Older than his world’s Bruce, and taller. But absolutely the same man, even if their faces are different.[ 3] Actually, he’s not sure why he’s surprised, when he stops to think about it.
“DCA088, Senior Theorist 905,” Bruce says. “Hold out your portable, Hal, and I’ll sign off on the delivery.”
A quick thumbprint, and the thing flashes green.
The medics (orderlies?) have left the room, and one of them comes back with a nifty future clipboard. “Stats are live, Dr. Wayne.”
Bruce snatches the thing up like a kid at Christmas. “Oh, look at you!” he gushes over a couple of graphs. “Gorgeous… He’s magnificent. Plug him in.”
Hal feels a little creeped out by this point.
“Come watch the fruits of your labor, Hal,” Bruce says, beckoning to the bank of windows.
The lab’s main room is more like an amphitheater, projector in the center with three neat rings around it housing recumbent figures. The medics put some kind of hood over Hal’s ex-prisoner, and after a moment the projection shivers into blackness before restarting.
“Absolutely gorgeous,” Bruce says again. “I knew fifty-one would be a good number. That’s my good boys…charting the unchartable.”
“Are those all people?” Hal asks, starting to feel like there’s something extremely wrong here.
“Close enough,” Bruce says. “They’re all Jokers with abnormally high resonance receptivity who were originally removed from their home branches in lieu of destroying them entirely. Most of them were in cold storage when I started-wasted potential, stuffed in a freezer.”
Hal is still stuck on the fact that Bruce considers them subhuman and is therefore completely fine plugging them into some kind of machine to use their brains for science.
“Your face is going to stick that way,” Bruce warns with a wry half-smile. “They’re stranded, Hal-they can never go home. It’s this, cryo, or erasure. This way, they’re helping us make better choices…better worlds. This way, their sacrifice has meaning.”
“No, yeah, I get that,” Hal says quietly.
Meaningful or not, Hal’s not keeping his mouth shut about this.
~*~*~
Trio: Natalia Alekseevna Romanova NC201
Natasha clenches her fists as she stares at the plaque on the wall.
Senior Theorist 042
Wade Wilson DR811-ω
“Fuck,” she mutters, and walks away feeling like a damn coward.
People duck their heads and jump out of her way as she passes-the look on her face is probably the one that makes Loki go all slutty and seductive (or would, except the sorceress is giving her the cold shoulder right now[ 4]). Resting Murder Face. It’s not actually a resting expression, but try telling that to the Goddess of Annoying Everyone Into Capitulation…
Onto the lift, up twenty floors.
Competency and Academic Affairs
Concordat Chair
Virginia Hogan NC621
Natasha fumes for a moment, gathering her thoughts.
There is no Theory Chair at the moment, but Ginny will still prefer that any cases brought to her be based on questions of competency. Hearsay won’t win any favors with her. Rumors mean shit-all to her. Tasha has to stick to what she knows, what she can prove. She has to lay out facts and let Ginny (and maybe Director Samson) investigate properly.
Because Bruce could be doing the most evil things imaginable and still be in line with Network Operations, regardless of how unethical it is or how ‘skeeved out’ Hal is.
Loki treats the Timestream like a bonsai garden. The Savant destroys whole universes. The Auditor kills people-sometimes very nice people-at a rate of about two per day.
All to keep the highest number of worlds spinning.
She chimes the door. Almost immediately, it opens for her.
“Sorry, Tash, just finishing this curriculum review for the Warder cert,” Ginny says, eyes glued to a screen. “No Six-related messes today, so I promise it’s just a few more seconds.”
“Are you aware of Bruce’s little…project?” Natasha asks carefully.
“The joint thing with Hank and Freyr? Something about Bifrost particles, wasn’t it?”
“Not Dr. Banner-Dr. Wayne.”
Ginny glances up. “I vaguely remember something about entropic loci. The Senior Theorists derisively call it his ‘Unified Clown Theory.’ He only had two corresponding subjects, though, and a shaky thesis that had a pretty strong reek of obsession. I left it in the hands of the competency board.”
“And then he got a whole string of Priority Orders to give him everything he wanted.”
Ginny sets her work down with a frown. “But POs that come from anyone but the Sysadmin have to be ratified by at least three members of the Netcon within three days, Core time.”
“Might wanna check the grouch’s logs, then.”
“Ah. No point; we don’t review Dr. Wilson’s POs any more than we do the Sysadmin’s. For the same reason, actually, although it wasn’t explicitly clear until recently that the Sysadmin is a Wade.”
Natasha stares. “You don’t ratify any of it? Even though he’s not actually a department head?”
“We’ve tried to give him the title at least a dozen times that I know of, but he’s always-and I do mean always-insisted that it would be pure, catastrophic hubris to think anybody knew enough about all this to call himself a Head Theorist.” She throws her hands up in a helpless shrug. “And yet, as far as anyone can ascertain, the only living being who knows more about the way the Timestream works is the Founder himself. But basically, when we get a PO alert from him, we just automatically give it the go-ahead.”
“Wade’s been requisitioning everything Bruce needs for a lab. A very special lab. Access restricted. It’s called ‘auxiliary cartography.’ Do you know what’s in the auxiliary cartography lab?”
Slowly, Ginny reaches into a drawer of her desk, pulls out a bottle of cranberry vodka and a shot glass, and pours herself a drink. “All right, let me fortify myself against the monumental narcissism of rich orphaned geniuses in the traditional way…” [ 5]
Once she’s swallowed her drink, Natasha says, “Fifty-one comatose Jokers in a shared Fidelis trance.”
Ginny pours and drinks another shot. “Oh my god, Wade. Why would you let him-okay. Okay, cartography. I’m sure it’s… Shit. Fifty-one?”
“All from the Fridge, except the latest one. Hal brought him in on a Priority Order. He was pretty freaked out.”
“Hal?”
“A Green Lantern. The first Network Field Agent out of the DC trunk.”
“I thought the trunk was still red-locked since the entropy bubble exploded. Because we can’t even get into it.”
“His branch initiated contact,” Natasha explains. “His old bosses basically donated him to the cause, and he apparently can’t get back into the central branches now.”
“Fuckfuckfuckfuck, Wade, what the fuck…” Ginny takes a big breath and massages her temples. “Okay. Okay, we have no reason to believe this isn’t in the best interest of general stability. And I’m sure they’re taking precautions against the number one side effect of synchronous trances, according to Six, Dr. Rogers’ senior application work[ 6], and Fifteen’s theoretical dissertations. Hell, Fifteen wrote most of that after reading Wade’s work. Fuck. Wade, please, please, know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, this whole place might actually literally fall down around our ears, oh my god.” She downs another shot.
Natasha frowns. “Side-effect. This is worse than just having a bunch of prisoners enslaved, potentially unsafely, by a clown-obsessed crackpot who used to dress up as a giant bat, on the authority of a man whose incorruptibility must be absolute?”
Ginny laughs mirthlessly. “Synchronous trances cause personality bleed. The subjects sharing the trance begin to acquire one another’s memories, traits, and tendencies. Fifty-one Wades? You’d probably never even notice. Fifty-one Lokis would sulk, plan an elaborate prank on the nearest Thor, and go host a celebratory orgy. Fifty-one of the guy who can keep up with Batman and is his number one fan in a twisted way? They’d probably start rearranging universes to spell love letters or draw pictures. Harmless as long as they’re captive, of course, but if even one were to escape, we’d have a very, very big problem.”
Natasha shrugs. “Might wanna interview one or both of them about the lab, then.”
“Interview one of the three people most integral to our entire way of life[ 7] and the guy who’s apparently caught his interest enough to risk creating an undefeatable monster,” Ginny says. “Yay me.”
“You could bring Loki.”
“God, no…she’d probably take Wade’s side.”
“You should know, fifty coma patients would require medical staff, especially since they can’t be put in any kind of long-term suspension and still be in the trance. I’d definitely interview them, too.”
~*~*~
Trio: Virginia Hogan NC621
Ginny glances at the profile in her hand. High-drive, high-focus, leader personality, caretaker type. As she understands it, his counterparts are usually jaded mercenary killers…but this version of Floyd Lawton is a talented nurse.
“I’m not up for ethical profiling for another five months,” he notes casually. “And I’m not up for competency review for eight.”
“We don’t have very many medics with your clearance, do we, Nurse Lawton?” Ginny asks with a little smile.
In a blink, his posture tightens. “I’ll need to see your credentials before I respond to that, ma’am.”
“Of course.” She presses her thumb to her datapad and pulls up her ident.
He reads it meticulously before relaxing again. “I think you and I both know that there are thirty nurses and five surgeons on active duty with the Network who are cleared to work on access restricted patients.”
“Tell me about the Auxiliary Cartography lab, Nurse Lawton.”
“My only assignment, currently, and a lot less stress and effort than I’m used to putting out. I’m the primary caretaker of Ring One-I provide typical health and hygiene care for seventeen low-response, pseudo-conscious patients. I feed them, clean them, cycle their caths, stretch and exercise them…coma care, basically. I talk to ‘em some, but there’s not a lot that gets through, according to the EEGs. They always perk up at the boss’ voice, and they like knock-knock jokes.”
“And they’re all thawed inmates of the Null-Resonance Incarceration Facility?”
“Couldn’t speak to that, Madam Chairwoman,” he says firmly.
They didn’t tell him, and he didn’t ask.
Ginny makes a note. “And they’re all in good health?”
“Dr. Wayne would break bones if they weren’t. I dunno if you’ve met many of them, but Bats are possessive, especially when it comes to the clowns. My home branch, guy held him captive for three years, playing house, before the Justice League found out.”
She looks at her list.
Nurse 3088, Floyd Lawton DE887ρ, AR
Nurse 3290, Leland Tompkins DCB212, AR
Nurse 4011, Harlon Quinzel DCF267γ, AR
All men, all from the DC trunks just outside the Maelstrom.[ 8] High-drive caretakers.
“And what sort of security measures are in place to protect you from your patients?” she asks.
“Every station has dual lockdown-physical barrier and Nullres. At the moment, they’re also outfitted with Anubis shards[ 9], rendering them vulnerable to near-instant nulling as well as potential erasure. And the lab itself can be locked down the same way.”
“Were you given an opportunity free of duress to choose whether or not you would participate in the project?”
He scoffs at that. “The Savant offers you a job, you don’t turn it down. You know how good his reference will look on a resume if I ever return to civilian life? Guy with over a hundred years of intensive neurological study, with a reputation for being the hardest of hardasses? I’ll have my pick of neurology wards. But yeah, they both made it clear that if I felt unsafe or uncomfortable, I could leave the project.”
“And what did they say was the purpose of the project?”
“Didn’t. But the clowns are writing something, and it’s definitely feeding into a TMS. Makes sense-y’know, cartography.”
The other two nurses give similar answers. Tompkins is almost exclusively concerned with the health of his patients (he expresses a distaste for the idea that they are being used, potentially without their consent…but consent is a nebulous thing, where the Network is concerned, and they were all previously arrested for violating Network Law, which forfeits several key aspects of their consent). Quinzel is fascinated by the project but clearly has zero knowledge of Timestream theory or analysis. Neither has been told the purpose of the project.
Before she can summon him for an interview, Dr. Wayne arrives.
He sits across the interview table and stares at her with a shrewd, calculating gaze.
“Good afternoon, Dr. W-”
“You’re upsetting my nurses. Not only is that rude, but it affects my work.”
Ah, so Lawton told him about their interview. She folds her hands on the table. “Funny, Dr. Tompkins seemed more upset by you than by me. He raised some ethical concerns, in addition to security and stability concerns already raised about your work. But if you’d prefer I simply revoke your credentials without a full investigation, I can do that.”
“My work is absolutely critical. I have proven that we’ve been decreasing stability through ignorance, and I’ve harnessed the fruits of that misstep to prevent a repeat performance. Would you like to explain to the Head Theorist why you endangered the stability of the entire Timestream?”
She smiles sweetly. “Your department has no head, Theorist 905,” she points out, omitting the senior title she never approved.
“And yet, he can issue Priority Orders.”
“Touché. Well, perhaps we can both take your concerns to the Chair of Medical and the Head Proctor? Or maybe the Chair of Defense and the Ward Commissioner? Or you and Dr. Wilson could simply submit to the appropriate reviews and we can all feel better about this.” She pretends to make a note on her datapad. “Let’s start simple: submit your senior thesis proposal according to established guidelines. For now, help me understand what it is you’ve accomplished and what you believe the significance of that is.”
“I told you in my initial requisition that multiple Joker subjects have presented with phasic doppling. Their natural resonance oscillates until it begins to align, and it can be solidified in that aligned state. Currently, my circus comprises fifty-one of them, synchronized to receive detailed chronometric vibrations from the DC052 and relay that data. Their unique relationship to the trunk lets them pick up those vibrations through the entropy phenomenon currently called the Maelstrom, when even the most precise mapping Nodes see only unintelligible gibberish. It’s too late to replace them in their native branches-their phase began to solidify the moment we thawed them and is now vitrified in a state resonant only with the Core bundle.” He leans toward her, focused and unblinking. “We, the Network, did that. We excised naturally occurring entropic loci-like Wades and other chaos entities-which we’ve come to know are necessary for overall Timestream stability. We may have nearly destroyed their trunk multiple times. At least with this, we can see into the fog and give some meaning to their sacrifice.”
She actually does jot that down: sacrifice. Does he think of them as dead? “I see this is important to you-beyond simple cartography.”
He hesitates, but she can see a spark of guarded enthusiasm in his eyes. “Do-would you like to see it?”
Predictable. Very much like a Tony Stark. After all, so many of these broken genius orphans are so very similar…
She smiles genially. “If that’s all right with you, absolutely.”
He’s almost boyish about it, this middle-aged man (who is actually in his nineties, according to the LE marker on his ident). He ushers her along toward the science annex, speaking in broken phrases as he edits classified information that he clearly wishes he could share. He’s all but vibrating when he scans them into his lab under the watchful gaze of two Warders.
The four additional Warders inside are heavily armed, but they say nothing when Bruce leads her into the next room. Overhead, an enormous, highly detailed TMS winds its way through the air. Below, three concentric rings of entranced subjects lie on medical lounges, legs and upper arms restrained, faces hidden under pacification hoods.
Bruce goes to a nearby work station and shows her a projection of brainwaves. “This,” he says, visibly excited. “This is him-them. The aggregate mind. Magnificent, isn’t he? So neat, so diligent… He has almost no thoughts, as we interpret them, just daydreams and distributed perception, like a concert pianist listening to his favorite concerto. Sometimes he hums little snatches of songs.”
Ginny tries to be interested instead of horrified. “Nurse Lawton said he likes knock-knock jokes.”
Bruce crouches beside one of the Jokers and beckons her nearer. “Knock-knock.”
“Who’s there?” Ginny asks gamely.
“Incompetent interrupting cow.”
“Incompetent interrupting cow who?”
“Moo.”
There’s a brief susurrus of giggling all through the room. It’s amazing and unsettling in equal measure.
“I thought you’d like that one,” Bruce says, and pats the subject’s hand.
“Before I can officially sanction your work, Dr. Wayne, I need you to find a way to monitor the aggregate mind,” She looks around. “We need to know if he ever plans an escape. And I’d prefer to have a plan in place to deal with a successful escape.”
He looks thoughtful. “Perhaps periodic evaluations of a snapshot? The Savant has said Programmer Four is a gifted Proctor for comp-ints…I would presume my project to be sufficiently similar for her to apply her expertise.”
“The Savant also calls her ‘the Demon Bitch of the Lower Libraries.’ However, I do think she and Six can help you come up with something. Have Dr. Wilson help you get in touch with them, just…please, Bruce, follow procedure. We don’t need the rest of the Concordat deciding that the two of you need to have your senior credentials revoked. I won’t deny that your project makes me deeply uncomfortable, but it provides us with a way to accomplish things we’d long thought we had to work around.”
.End.
Notes:
1 This Hal Jordan subject has recently been recruited (or, well...volunteered by the Guardians) to be a Network Field Agent.
2 For Network purposes, a Category 2 violent sociopath will use violence freely to accomplish goals, but does not engage in violence for its own sake and does not experience the loss of control associated with psychotic episodes. A Category 3 Mass-type killer conducts killing sprees (with or without premeditation). A Category 4 Currency-type thief engages in armed robbery.
3 This Hal is a Ryan Reynolds Hal, and his home branch's Batman is probably a Keaton!Batman; the Ringmaster strikes me as more along the lines of Clive Owen.
4 Natasha pissed her girlfriend off in The Coin (Realm-Slayer Chapter 6) by comparing her to Thanos. In fine hypocritical fashion, Fifteen refuses to forgive or speak to her until she apologizes, and has no intention of explaining what Natasha should be apologizing for.
5 I imagine that, as the Academic Chair, Pepper has to deal with several different Tony subjects, most of which are of the 'rich orphaned genius with unresolved daddy issues' variety (Six's father is still alive, and they occasionally have family dinners together, if Cartographer!Steve is around to drop very heavy hints at Howard).
6 Bruce and Mimi's buddy, Theorist!Steve, is focusing on the Fidelis Effect for his senior credentials.
7 Widely considered the greatest chronometric theorists ever to exist, the Sysadmin, the Savant, and the Founder are all directly responsible for the creation and sustained operation of the Network.
8 Bruce picked his nurses under the assumptions that they would understand the threat posed by a Joker but still be willing to provide medical care.
9 Node 142 Anubis is the Node used by the Null-resonance Incarceration Facility to monitor and retrieve any inmates released for work (the fastest way to introduce a precise amount of entropy to a timeline is by dictating the manner and time of the death of one or more sentient beings, so serial-killers can be quite useful to the Network).
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