System Supervillain, Book 12 Epilogue

Epilogue – Elsewhere

Director Max Hopkins frowned as he looked over his files in the new North American Headquarters of the Superhuman Defense Initiative. He hated the new office. It wasn’t any smaller than his old one, and no less comfortable. Even had the exact same shape and dimensions, and he’d had all of his old furniture moved over. But it still felt… diminished.

The last few years had not been kind to the SDI, to be honest. Just after the Initialization, the Tokyo branch of the SDI had been exposed, thanks to a run-in with Iceblade, and his technopath partner, Web Mistress. Japanese supers had converged on the base, forcing the base commander to order an evacuation. The data cores had been wiped, infrastructure and technology that couldn’t be taken away was destroyed, and the facility collapsed in a controlled demolition. However, the base was still lost, resulting in a massive setback to the SDI, and crippling their actions in Japan and China.

That had been bad, sure, but it was the Asian Headquarters’ problem, not the North American Headquarters. In North America, the instability caused by the loss of the White Knights during the Blackreach Riot had initially strengthened the SDI’s position, as people saw the need for strong defense against supers. The subsequent supervillain attack on a sitting Senator during a live speech on the Capitol floor, the fall of the Squadron Supreme, and the creation of Devastation had all boosted SDI’s importance in the minds of those who knew about the organization.

Unfortunately, that’s where the good times ended. The Chicago branch had been completely wiped out by Storybreaker once the Squadron Supreme was out of the picture. True, the Chicago base was more a filing and data research center, rather than a more ‘active’ base, but it had still been critical in their work against the superhuman menace, freeing up resources and personnel at bases devoted to tactical response or research and development to do what those bases were meant to do.

The Gel-Nak had been the big trouble, however. Just in the North American theater, his old headquarters building in Houston had been exposed by the alien invaders. Whether they had meant to or not, they had parked their landing craft less than a hundred feet from his old building. With supers, police, and military closing in following the neutralization of the local alien threat, they’d been forced to initiate full shutdown sequences, like they’d done in Tokyo.

Worse, from a strategic point of view, the alien menace had undermined the very support structures of the SDI. Despite efforts to control the narrative, news outlets and social media had caught on to heroes and villains working side by side to throw back the Gel-nak. In every city targeted by the aliens, there were hours, even days, of footage showing the damned supers fighting aliens.

The fact that Devastation had shown up in several cities could be written off as Iceblade letting his pets have a treat, and as a PR move, for the most part. The threat to Cairo and the Seal of the Immortal King was another part that could easily be written off as pragmatism. Anyone who knew about the Seal knew that unleashing an undead horde upon the world was a bad idea. With the System in place, no one could control an undead army that big.

The big problem was Iceblade. Even before the invasion, word had begun filtering out that he was the mysterious System Administrator that had been running things since the System came online. The fact that he had largely been ‘hands off’, instead of using his newfound powers as he pleased, undercut the messaging about supers being uncontrolled and uncontrollable threats to be taken down, for the good of normal people. His broadcasts from the Gel-nak fleet, and how he took the head of the Gel-nak Emperor had further reinforced the subversive narrative that supers, on either side of the law, were a good thing for the people of Earth.

The sale of the enemy fleet to the UN was also complicating matters, beyond the public perception problem. The different member states of the United Nations were retasking funding that normally would have gone to SDI through black programs and line-items in budgets to refitting and rebuilding the alien ships, so that the newly-created United Nations Space Command could get the ships crewed and ready to fight. The existence of verified external threats outweighed the potential of future internal threats, in the minds of many politicians around the globe.

Worse, he couldn’t argue against the move. Most supers were useless in space combat, and were potentially more dangerous to their own ships than the enemy in shipboard fighting. To most people, this made the UNSC a clear area where pure humans were superior to supers, which he agreed with. Unfortunately, it also meant that it was an argument against the SDI’s position that supers were a threat to human potential, since here was an area where humans clearly held the upper hand.

Then, there was the manpower issue. The SDI had lost a lot of good people in the different cities attacked by the Gel-nak, and not just from the fighting. The Eastern European Headquarters in Moscow had been wiped out, as had the Western European Headquarters in London. Branches in Paris, Warsaw, and New Delhi had all taken heavy losses. Desertions and resignations were up 207%, globally. The entire South American Headquarters in Rio di Janeiro had resigned and turned over their base to the Brazilian government, after seeing how Sibila had rallied the defense of the city!

The biggest hit, however, came when the news about the Gel-nak’s full plans for humanity came out. The slavery issue was problematic, sure, but that wasn’t something that would harm the SDI’s goals. However, more than a few people had drawn parallels to how the Gel-nak ‘ordered’ their species (and others), using retroviral weapons to remove mutations and enforce purity on their genetic lines, and the SDI’s stated goals of trying to ensure pure-human dominance by ridding Earth of the superhuman threat. The result was that public opinion amongst pure humans was overwhelmingly against the SDI, currently, and superhumans of all stripes were gaining popularity.

Essentially, the SDI’s mission had been set back at least twenty years thanks to the Gel-nak invasion. Probably more. The SDI would have to scale back active containment measures for the time being, and switch to some of the passive programs. There was promising research in using the medical system to try and ‘adjust’ the birth rates of those with genetic mutations. More miscarriages and the like would help stop the spread of the deviant genetic lines, and would be harder to pin down to the SDI.

Of course, one of the researchers came up with another idea. With space opening up for exploration and eventual colonization, there were opportunities there to guide the development of colonial programs without risking exposure. Ensure that most of the colonists to the Moon and Mars are pure human, while guiding those with deviant genetics to colony sites in the asteroid belt or the outer system. Mining colonies with harsher conditions would naturally favor superhumans over pure humans, so there was a plausible reason for the split. If it worked, within a generation or two they could have a law passed where superhumans were automatically emigrated to the outer colonies, where their deviant genetics couldn’t be passed on to normal humans, and their powers would be less of a threat, especially since they could work on keeping the navy pure. It was a long-term plan, but a workable one. Director Hopkins added his signature of approval for the plan, and sent it to the other regional directors for review and implementation.

Earth belonged to pure humans, and the existence of aliens did not change that.