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DATE:29th of August, the 70th year after the Coronation
LOCATION: Concord Metropolis
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Nobody moved.
The room was stuck as is
for several seconds after the doors closed, every person at every table caught somewhere between the instinct to act and the complete absence of anything useful that action could accomplish. I assume it isn't common to see an execution out in the open, though I can't say I'm all that impressed.
They stayed in their chairs. They looked at the floor near the entrance, or at their trays, or at nothing in particular. The researcher two tables to my left had both hands flat on the surface in front of her and was staring at a point approximately four inches past the edge of her tray.
I stood up.
I moved through the room at the pace of someone who had somewhere to be rather than somewhere to escape to. Not fast. Purposeful, which was different. I passed the table nearest the windows, then the row behind it, tracking the room's stillness as I went. No one looked up. Whatever the event had done to the people in this room, it had turned their attention firmly inward and was keeping it there.
The researcher on the aisle had a clearance pass clipped to the left breast pocket of his jacket. Mid-level, by the color coding, blue-grey border, which put him at general sub-level access. Not ideal. Workable.
I unclipped it as I passed. One motion, thumb and forefinger, clean. He didn't register it. His eyes were fixed on the table and his breathing was the slow, deliberate kind of a person managing themselves carefully.
I kept moving.
Near the service counter I stopped and waited. Thirty seconds. Forty. The stillness in the room had a shelf life and I could feel it approaching its end; the first small movements starting at the edges, someone shifting in their seat, someone else exhaling audibly and reaching for their cup with the deliberateness of a person deciding to perform normalcy until it became real.
Then the room began to move again. Gradually, unevenly, the way a held breath releases.
I walked to the exit and into the corridor and turned toward the elevators.
The pass sat in my jacket pocket. I didn't touch it.
The elevator went down without announcing how far.
No floor indicator. The panel had numbers but none of them lit up after I pressed the lowest accessible option on the blue-grey clearance tier. The cab just descended, steady and unhurried, and stopped.
The doors opened.
No light came in from outside them. What was there instead was a dim fluorescent green, the kind that exists at the bottom of the visible spectrum and does very little useful work. Enough to establish that a space existed, not enough to read it. It came from strips set low along the base of the walls, several of them flickering at long intervals, which made the darkness between flickers feel deliberate.
I stepped out.
The floor was concrete. I could tell by the sound rather than the sight of it. It had the flat return underfoot, no give, no acoustics absorbed by carpet or tile. My footsteps came back at me short and close. The ceiling was high enough that I couldn't make out where it ended. The green light didn't reach it.
Overall I'd say it wasn't the usual lab decor. A little too industrial to be a scientist. It felt more like a factory. This confirms that they aren't working on a biological way to end UltraMan. So a weapon it is. A bomb then? Hmmm.
I stood still for a moment and let my eyes finish adjusting.
The hallway extended ahead in both directions. Left resolved slowly into shapes; a wall, a door frame set into it at some distance, a second further back. The doors were closed and no light came from under any of them. Right was the same, longer, terminating in something I couldn't identify at this distance, a mass that was either a junction or equipment or a wall that the hallway ended at.
I went left.
The green light made depth unreliable. Distances that looked short took longer to cover than they should have, and the door frames arrived later than my eyes placed them. I kept one hand not quite touching the wall; close enough to orient by, not resting against it, because whatever was on these walls I had no information about and contact was a variable I didn't need.
Activating a sensor for motion was the last thing I wanted.
The first door had no handle visible from the front. A panel beside it, dark, no indicator light. Sealed or unpowered, no way to tell which from here.
I kept moving.
The hallway sloped. Barely, gradual enough that I registered it in my legs before I understood what it was. A long decline, built into the floor, carrying the path downward without announcing itself as a ramp. The green strips along the base of the walls followed the slope, which confirmed it was intentional rather than structural settling.
Further down. The air changed temperature, dropping by a few degrees, taking on the flat quality of spaces that don't exchange with the surface.
The second door had a panel with a dim red indicator. Locked, or occupied, or both.
I passed it and kept going.
The third door was the one that changed.
Not because of anything visible. I passed the second door, red indicator, sealed, and continued down the slope, and at some point in the next stretch of corridor I registered that the door I'd noted earlier at the far end of the left branch was no longer closed.
I stopped.
I was certain it had been closed when I came off the elevator. The angle had been wrong for detail but the mass of it had been flush with the frame, the particular flat profile of a door with no gap behind it. Now it sat a few degrees open, and the green floor-strips threw a thin edge of light across the gap that hadn't been there before.
I hadn't heard it move. No mechanism sound, no pressure seal releasing, no click of a latch. It was simply in a different position than it had been, in the interval between my noting it and reaching it.
I stood in the corridor and listened.
The air pressure was slightly different here than it had been near the elevator. Not a draft, nothing directional, nothing that suggested a vent or a gap to the outside. Just a change in the weight of the atmosphere, the way pressure shifts before a door opens rather than after. Present tense. As though the space was anticipating something rather than responding to it.
I filed it. Kept moving.
_____
The third door had no panel at all.
No reader, no indicator, no housing where either might have been removed. Just a bare wall on both sides of the frame, and the door itself standing open at roughly forty degrees, and beyond it light. Actual light, warm-spectrum, functional. The sound of something running, electrical, low-frequency, consistent. Equipment of some kind, working steadily.
The first two doors had given me nothing. This one gave me the only thing available.
I pushed it open the rest of the way and went in.
The room was long. Wider than the corridor suggested from outside, extending back further than the building's footprint should have comfortably allowed, though I had no reliable map of this level to check that against, so I noted it and moved on. The ceiling was higher here, the same fluorescent green strips present but supplemented by overhead panels that produced actual working light. The equipment along the walls was running, various units, none of them labeled in any way I could interpret quickly.
In the center of the room, a man stood with his back to me.
He wasn't doing anything. Not examining equipment, not moving between stations. He stood in the approximate center of the floor space with his weight evenly distributed and his hands at his sides, and he was still in the way that a room is still rather than the way a person waiting is still. No micro-adjustments. No shift of weight. He occupied the space differently than a person standing in a room usually does, less like someone inside it, more like the room's center of gravity had simply taken a form.
I stopped just inside the door and watched him for a moment.
The threat assessment revised itself upward without my having to prompt it. Nothing he had done had caused that. He'd done nothing at all. It was the specific quality of the stillness.
I stayed where I was and said nothing.
He spoke first.
"Mr. Blois," he said, without turning. His voice was flat and even, the affect of someone reading a name off a document they had already processed. "Sub-level four clearance. External consultation, materials review."
He paused for one beat.
"That's a blue-grey pass you're carrying," he remarked. "It belongs to a Dr. Renner. He reported it missing approximately four minutes ago."
The door closed behind me.
I hadn't touched it.
The sound it made seating into the frame was soft and final, the click of something that had decided the matter. I didn't look back at it.
The doctor still hadn't turned around. His presence filled the room in a way that had nothing to do with volume or motion. It sat in the air the way a change in barometric pressure sits, noticed by the body before the mind has named it. The equipment along the walls kept running. Nothing else moved.
"Inquisitive," I said, "for someone without a camera panel."
"I don't need one."
Short. Delivered without emphasis, the way a person states the temperature outside. He spoke it and it was simply true and he had no interest in elaborating on it.
He hadn't said anything about Blois. The name, the cover, the false credentials, he'd recited them back to me with complete accuracy and then left them sitting there. Not a challenge. Not an invitation to explain myself. Whether that was deliberate or incidental I couldn't determine, and the fact that I couldn't determine it was itself worth noting.
"What business," he asked, "brings you to a restricted sub-level without authorization."
He still hadn't turned around.
"I wanted to meet you," I replied.
A pause. Not long. The equipment filled it.
"My name is William Carter." I kept my voice level. "I run the Legion. I was directed here by the Hero Association to confirm several things relating to ongoing research with implications for active field operations. The formal channel would have taken time I don't have and produced answers I can't verify. So I came directly."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he turned around.
He was older than I'd expected. Not elderly, somewhere in the range where age had finished redistributing itself and settled into something permanent. His hair was white, cropped close, and his face had the quality of something that had been subjected to considerable pressure over a long period and had not yielded to it. His eyes were pale, grey or close to it, and they moved across me once with the efficiency of a scan rather than an appraisal.
He was not tall. He was not physically remarkable in any way that announced itself. And yet the presence that had been sitting in the room before I'd even seen his face intensified when he turned, because now it had a direction. It came from him the way heat comes from a source, not radiating outward dramatically, just present, and increasing with proximity, and not interested in whether you found it comfortable.
No aura visible. Nothing luminescent, nothing external. Whatever he was, it was entirely interior, compressed down to nothing that the eye could catch, which was in its own way more difficult to be in a room with than Matthew's corona had been.
In fact this simple man seemed to have a bigger presence than any of the heroes that bothered to attend that meeting weeks ago.
He looked at me for a moment.
"What do you think a hero is, Mr. Carter?"
"I don't particularly care to answer that," I said. "Too many people have asked me that question. It stopped being interesting some time ago."
"The fact that you find it pointless," he replied, "is telling."
"The fact that it even needs to be asked," I returned, "is worrying."
He considered that. His expression didn't change, but something behind it shifted slightly. Not surprise, something closer to recognition.
"It is worrying," he agreed. "You're right about that. Because it doesn't hold the meaning it used to."
He moved to a workstation along the wall, not sitting, just standing at it with one hand resting on the surface.
"Before heroes existed," he began, "society had a functional relationship with the concept of protection. Imperfect, corrupt in places, but functional. Institutions carried the load. Law enforcement, emergency services, the military. The responsibility was distributed across systems that were at minimum accountable to something; legislation, public scrutiny, electoral consequence." He paused. "Then individuals appeared who could do what those systems could not. Faster, more effectively, with more force and less bureaucratic drag. And the public made a rational short-term decision. They transferred their trust."
He wasn't lecturing. His tone was the same flat register it had been since I'd walked in, he was simply stating the sequence of events as he understood them.
"The systems didn't disappear. They atrophied. Why maintain the infrastructure when the individual is more efficient? Why fund the institution when the hero shows up anyway?" He looked at me. "What you're left with is a population that has outsourced its safety to people with no mandate, no term limit, no removal mechanism, and no structural obligation to continue. They help because they choose to. They stop because they choose to. The entire arrangement rests on personal virtue, which is not a foundation. It's a preference."
He was quiet for a moment.
I personally wouldn't go as far as blaming heroes for the system worsening. The medieval administration and the lack of public services predates heroism.
And blaming heroes for indirectly letting them weaken further should instead be rephrased as 'their presence here letting people be comfortable enough to not change anything'. Even then, would things have evolved if heroes never existed?
I'm not so sure. Half of why the system is like this is the continued existence of the rich families hailing from the old nobles. If the people revolted they would probably just pay the militias more.
It's not like anyone forces them to live here in indentured servitude. At the very least that was outlawed.
People are free to leave for other parts of the kingdom, but clearly they want to cram in this shithole.
Be it that it is one of the very few areas with true economic growth, hence job opportunities, or perhaps it is the multiculturalism and the lack of racial tribalism found in other regions…. Whatever, these are just my rambles. Surely this doctor knows better right? As if.
"So when someone asks what a hero is," he continued, "they're not asking a philosophical question. They're asking what's holding the weight. And the honest answer is that nobody is entirely sure anymore."
***
"That seems a bit empty," I said. "But it isn't wrong."
He waited.
"I agree with you," I added.
He nodded once, the minimal acknowledgment of someone who hadn't needed the confirmation but accepted it anyway.
"What do you think," he asked, "of the Unified Kingdom. As a whole."
"I'm not certain what you mean by that."
He turned slightly toward me. "Someone with your history has moved through every level of how this country functions. Not as an observer. As a participant in its institutions, its grey areas, its failures, its enforcement structures. That produces a perspective most people in this building don't have access to."
I thought about it for a moment.
"I don't really care about politics," I said. "Or the machinery around it."
"You lead a registered agency," he replied. "You operate under Hero Association oversight, interface with government bodies, manage personnel with legal authority to use force on behalf of institutional objectives." He looked at me steadily. "Abstention from politics isn't available to you. It stopped being available the moment you took the role."
"I'm not particularly interested in the role itself," I returned. "I didn't go looking for it."
He said nothing, which was its own kind of question.
"I was brought into it," I continued. "The situation accumulated and at some point the position was there and I was standing in it. That's the cleaner version of how it happened."
He was quiet for a moment.
"That's a more honest answer than most people give," he noted. Not a compliment. Just an observation, filed the same way I'd filed the pressure change in the corridor.
He really seems to speak like an academia member, much more so than Mundi. Kind of preachy if I'm being honest. In any case, this wasn't really going to plan. Seems more like an introspective session. I was wasting time here.
"I'm not here to answer questions," I told him. "I came to ask them."
"Then ask."
I looked at him directly. "What do you think of the Combine."
Something moved across his face. Small, and brief. He looked away from me toward the workstation, then back.
"So that's what this is about," he murmured, quietly, to no one in particular.
Then: "I have no connection to the Combine. In any capacity."
"Words aren't much to go on."
"No," he agreed. "They aren't." He considered for a moment. "You're welcome to audit this facility through your agency. Request access, go through the Association's verification process, pull whatever records exist."
"That would confirm the records," I said. "Not the fact."
He was quiet.
"Then we're at an impasse," he concluded.
He didn't seem troubled by it. He sat with it the way he sat with everything else — level, unhurried, without the defensive energy of someone who needed to be believed.
"What would you have me do," he asked, "to confirm what I've told you."
"Answer my earlier question," I replied. "The one about the Combine. Properly. The way you express something means much more than the words themselves. I should know that."
He looked at me for a moment. Then he exhaled, not a sigh, just a small release of something he'd been holding at a neutral position.
"I don't agree with what the Combine is doing," he began. "What it's become." He turned back toward the workstation, not as an evasion, just orienting himself. "It started as a labor movement. Legitimate grievances, organized pressure, the kind of structural advocacy that functions in a healthy system. Workers in sectors that heroes had displaced or destabilized. People whose industries collapsed because a single powered individual could replace a workforce. That was real."
He paused.
"Then the money arrived. And with it, people with different objectives. The movement didn't get redirected, it got hollowed out and refilled. What operates under that name now is a militia with a political front, and its function is the enforcement of consolidated wealth against the people it originally claimed to represent." He stated it without heat. "I find that worth being clear about."
"You're first generation," I said. "Same cohort as UltraMan. You were there when it started." I watched him. "Do you think it can go back to what it was."
He was quiet for a moment.
"The hollowing wasn't just inevitable," he answered. "It was logical." He moved away from the workstation, slow, unhurried. "Even setting aside whether I agree with the outcome, which I don't, human behavior under advantage is consistent. A side that gains ground presses it. That's not corruption, it's the base mechanism. Heroes began as protectors because the circumstances required protection and they were capable of providing it. Then the circumstances changed. The threat level normalized. The cameras arrived. And the same drives that produce altruism in a crisis produce brand management in stability." He glanced at me. "Protectors becoming celebrities isn't a failure of heroism. It's just people behaving like people do when the pressure comes off."
He paused.
"Someone as performative as Aionis would understand that."
I looked at him. "Performative." Wow! He just said it.
"Yes."
"That's the first time I've heard that applied to me."
"It's simply what it is." He turned to face me fully. "What meaning does any of it have. What you do. The agency, the role, the presence you maintain in the field." His pale eyes were level and entirely without malice, which made it worse. "Strip the function away, the actual physical acts, the interventions, the force applied, and what's underneath. What are you doing it for."
The equipment ran steadily along the walls.
I didn't answer immediately.
"I'm not sure what you're saying," I said.
"You're not entirely out of the loop, Mr. Carter." He moved a few steps, unhurried. "Aionis criticizes other heroes consistently. For chasing brands. For performing heroism rather than practicing it. For optimizing their public image over their actual function." He looked at me. "And yet every intervention you make is televised. There is an apparatus of reporters that follows your activity, celebrates it, draws comparisons. Publications run pieces about what you represent. About whether heroes still mean something, and then place your image next to UltraMan's as evidence that they do."
"I don't run any campaign for that."
"You don't need to," he said. Simply. "Intentions and results are different categories. Whatever you care about or don't care about, whatever you've noticed or chosen not to notice, the outcome is that you function as another apparatus of the system you claim to find inadequate. The machinery uses you the same way it uses the ones you criticize. The fact that you're uncomfortable with that doesn't change the function."
I said nothing.
"And furthermore," he continued, "what force sits beneath the intention. You told me you don't care about politics. That the role came to you rather than you pursuing it. That you're not interested in the position itself." He tilted his head slightly. "What meaning does changing anything have when there is no sustained will behind it. Criticism without structural pressure is commentary. You can find the system corrupt from inside it indefinitely. Nothing moves."
"Beyond that," Karl said, "you don't appear to have arrived here with a plan."
I didn't respond.
"Your behavior from the entrance to this room is a sequence of improvised decisions. A borrowed pass. A cafeteria. A corridor you walked down because it was available." He wasn't accusing. He was cataloguing. "Nothing about your presence here was arranged in advance."
"It got me here."
"It did," he replied. "That's what makes it dangerous rather than merely sloppy." He looked at me steadily. "You are someone whose name is attached to situations involving tens of thousands of lives. Active operations, field decisions, things with consequences that extend well past the moment of the choice. And you treat those situations the way you treated this building. You walk in and see what happens."
He paused.
"And the goal itself is wrong," he continued. "What you came here for. You told me it was about the Combine. But it wasn't, was it. This was most likely about Secundo Manos. Confirming whether I have any connection to them. The Combine framing was either a test or an approximation and you weren't certain which until I responded." He tilted his head slightly. "And you had no mechanism for verification regardless. If my answer had been different, if I had said something that left you uncertain, what exactly were you going to do?"
The room was quiet for a moment.
"Most likely kill you," I let out drily.
The fact he is so open about it clearly notes that he isn't working for Secundo Manus.
He received that without any change in expression.
"Yes," he said. "I thought so." He turned away slightly, not in discomfort, just shifting his weight. "An unverifiable answer, no plan, no extraction, no confirmation method, no authority to act in this building, and the contingency is lethal force applied on instinct to a man you've known for twelve minutes."
He was quiet for a moment.
"That kind of force," he added, "is the most dangerous thing in the world. Not the power itself. The absence of architecture around it. Raw capacity with no structure beneath it moves in whatever direction the mood of the moment points." He looked back at me. "Governments have fallen to less."
Karl doesn't seem to get it. This nonsensical conversation achieved more than he probably thinks it does.
Didn't I tell him already? The way you say things means more than what you say.
"I don't particularly care," I said.
He looked at me. "You are clearly not impaired. You're not irrational. You've demonstrated in this conversation that you understand the problem precisely." His voice stayed level but something underneath it shifted. "How do you hear all of that and simply remain as you are."
"It's not my priority."
"Then what is."
"Nothing here," I replied. "None of this."
He went still.
Not the stillness from before, the neutral occupying-the-room quality he'd had since I walked in. This was focused. It had a direction. It wasn't rage. Rage would have been easier to be in a room with. It was disdain, specific and considered, the kind that comes from someone who has spent a long time believing that clarity of thought carries a moral obligation, encountering someone who has the clarity and has declined the obligation.
"Now that's childish," I said.
He looked at me.
"A doctor of your standing not being able to account for something doesn't make it illogical," I continued. "It means you haven't accounted for it yet."
He said nothing.
He might think that I didn't get anything but just by making him so invested I got my confirmation.
Sometimes academics are just too focused on the surface.
"A slave complains about his life," I told him. "And then goes to work anyway."
The equipment ran along the walls. Something in one of the units ticked once and went quiet.
"Then who," Karl spoke more cautiously, "is your master?"
"Destiny," I let out. "And that isn't hyperbole."
He waited.
"Every circumstance I've been placed in. The role, the Legion, the Association, this building today. None of it was elected. It accumulated and I moved through it because the alternative was not moving, which wasn't available." I looked at him. "Someone like you hasn't lived like a jobber. A person who takes one task after another because there is no mechanism for declining. Who completes the job in front of him because the job in front of him is what exists." I paused. "After enough time it's all just another job. Life doesn't ask for your opinion on the assignment."
He was quiet.
"Do you believe in fate," I asked.
"I assume you do," he said.
"Most of what has happened to me up until now was unavoidable," I began. "I didn't ask for it or I didn't know enough to refuse it or both. The conditions were already in place before I arrived at them." I looked at him steadily. "Do you think a fixed result can be changed. Something that appears structurally determined."
He considered it for a moment.
"It's possible," he replied.
I looked at him for a moment. Then something came up from somewhere and I let it out, a short sound, genuine, not performed.
"That is really something a researcher would say," I said.
He didn't respond immediately.
"You find that amusing," he observed.
"A little," I answered. "Yes."
"We don't have anything further to discuss," Karl said. "Leave the lab."
I raised one finger and moved it slowly left to right.
"You read most of the situation," I continued. "Apparently not the important part." I let the grin sit for a moment. "I'm a little disappointed."
He looked at me without expression.
"What weapon are you developing to kill UltraMan," I said.
The room was very quiet.
"How did you arrive at that conclusion," he asked.
"You're educated," I replied. "Genuinely. But education and communication are different skills and you're considerably better at one of them." I held his gaze. "Plan or no plan, prepared or improvised, the way you spoke made something clear. You're not neutral on what the new UltraMan represents. The supposed new golden age, the restoration of heroism, whatever the official framing is." I paused. "You're against it. Specifically. Not abstractly, not philosophically. The way a person is against something they've already decided to act on."
He said nothing.
"So," I continued. "The weapon."
Karl stayed silent.
"You seem confused about how I got there," I said. "So."
I took a step back, giving the reasoning room.
"You laid out a coherent critique of what heroes became. Not a general one — you were specific about the mechanisms, the timeline, the structural consequences. That's not the thinking of someone who finds the situation unfortunate. That's the thinking of someone who has spent considerable time building a case." I watched him. "Then there's the social commentary. The labor movement getting hollowed out, oligarchic enforcement, the transfer of public trust to unaccountable individuals. You didn't offer that as background. You offered it as foundation. The kind you put down before you build something on top of it."
He said nothing.
"And then there's Matthew," I continued. "What you'd have to be working on together. He controls this building, this sub-level, the resources in this room. He's not a collaborator you take on for general research. The scale of what he provides implies a specific return. Something with a defined target and a defined purpose." I paused. "There isn't much that fits all of that except a weapon. And there's only one target that justifies this level of infrastructure."
Karl's eyes changed.
Not wide in the dramatic sense, just a small, involuntary expansion, the eyes of someone who has recalculated a person upward very suddenly.
"You're smarter than I gave you credit for," he said quietly.
A beat of silence.
"You deserve to know," he stated.
He turned slightly, not away, just repositioning himself in the space, the movement of someone choosing how to say something they've held for a long time.
"We are attempting to recreate Astatine," he revealed.
He let that sit for a moment.
"From what our investigations produced, UltraMan was killed by a single shooter. One bullet." He paused. "The bullet was composed entirely of Astatine. Not a compound. Not a delivery mechanism with Astatine as a component. Pure Astatine, formed into a projectile." He looked at me directly. "That is what ended the most powerful hero this country has ever produced. One round. One element."
I chuckled. "The shooter must have been something."
Karl's face changed. The professional flatness darkened into something with more weight behind it.
"The angle of the shot required marksmanship that has no human precedent," he said. "We modeled it. Ran it against every recorded sniper engagement, every powered marksman on file, every theoretical framework for trajectory at that distance and that target velocity." He paused. "Nothing accounts for it. The calculation goes beyond the boundary of what human neurology and physiology can execute, powered or otherwise. And UltraMan didn't react. Didn't register the threat. Didn't move." His voice had dropped slightly. "As though time itself had stopped around the moment of the shot."
"Sort of like my power," I said.
I registered immediately that I'd said it out loud.
Karl cocked his head. Looked at me with brief and genuine confusion. Then he shook it once, dismissing it the way you dismiss something that doesn't fit the available data.
"Arrogance should have some measure," he replied. "The level of temporal manipulation required for that shot was orders of magnitude beyond anything you've demonstrated. Hundreds of times greater than your documented output. The comparison doesn't hold."
I suppose I did use a higher pure dose of cocaine back then, but still…
I stopped myself.
The laugh was there and I kept it behind my teeth with some effort. I looked at him, this precise, careful man who had read nearly everything correctly tonight, and considered for a moment whether to correct him.
I decided against it. He'd already had a difficult enough evening without me making it worse.
I left it where it was.
"The shooter is a secondary problem," Karl said. "The primary problem is the bullet."
He moved to the workstation, pulling something up on a dark screen that hummed to life reluctantly.
"Astatine doesn't exist in stable quantities. It appears as a transitional state in the decay chain of heavier elements like uranium or thorium and it survives for mere hours before it continues decaying. The entire quantity present in the Earth's crust at any given moment is approximately twenty-eight grams." He looked at me. "Total. Globally. At any one time."
"And a functional bullet requires around seven grams," I ventured.
"A minimum of seven," he continued. "For a projectile with sufficient mass to maintain structural integrity at the velocities required." He let that sit. "To gather, isolate, and form seven grams of a naturally occurring element that exists in trace quantities across the entire planet's crust, with a multi-hour decay window, using current human logistics infrastructure—"
"It can't be done," I said. "Not from the crust."
He looked at me. Something in his expression shifted, the same upward recalculation from earlier, smaller this time, but present.
"No," he agreed. "It can't."
He nodded once toward the far end of the room. "Come with me."
The second room was through a door I hadn't noticed, set flush into the wall to the right of the main workstation. It opened into a space that had the layout and lighting of a surgery theater, the angled overhead panels, the central table, the hard reflective surfaces designed for visibility and cleaning.
But there was no surgery equipment. No instruments, no monitors, no overhead arm with a light array.
Just the table. Steel, bare. And on it, several rocks.
He walked to the table and gestured toward the rocks without touching them.
"Heavy elements," he began. "Uranium bearing ore, thorium concentrations. The density you're seeing is abnormal — how they reached this level of concentration is a separate matter." He didn't elaborate on that, and his tone made clear he wasn't going to.
He raised his hand, palm open, facing the table.
One of the rocks lifted.
Not quickly. It rose with the steadiness of something being carried rather than thrown, turning slightly in the air at roughly chest height, shedding small particles that fell straight down.
He closed his hand into a fist.
The rock compressed. Not gradually, it folded inward all at once, the geometry of it collapsing toward a central point, and then the room went white.
A single second of total light, sourceless, filling every surface simultaneously. Then it was gone.
A few fine particles drifted down toward the table where the rock had been.
"That," he said, "was Astatine."
I looked at the empty air where the rock had been. "What happened to it."
"It decayed," he replied. "Within seconds of formation. As expected."
"How did you compress it like that."
He looked up at the ceiling briefly, the gesture of someone selecting the right entry point into a long answer.
"My power," he began. "Not compression specifically. I establish a domain. A defined space with rules I set."
"So compression," I said.
"One of the possibilities," he returned.
So the doors disappearing earlier was also his domain? Is it a type of reality manipulation? And how big is it even?
Was the compression from earlier done by Matthew also his domain? Or were those the invisible soldiers? I wanted to ask him, but I feel like he wasn't going to be honest. From what it seems half of his power was the mystery.
"This is where I'm stuck," Karl said. He looked at the fine residue on the table surface. "I can produce Astatine. The mechanism works. But the moment it forms it contacts surrounding particles like air, moisture, anything, the reaction is immediate. Heat and light. What you just saw." He looked at the ceiling again. "Micrograms. Gone in under a second."
He turned back to the table.
"I don't understand how to scale that. A bullet requires seven grams minimum, formed into a stable projectile, capable of surviving a firing charge and maintaining structural integrity across a trajectory at high velocity." He said it the way someone says something they've said to themselves many times. "I can't bridge that gap. I don't know how the original bullet existed long enough to be loaded, fired, and reach its target without simply dissolving into light in the barrel."
He was quiet for a moment.
"And I don't know how the Don sourced it," he added. His eyes moved to me briefly as if acknowledging what that name meant in this conversation, what I had done with it. "Given how he isn't with us anymore, it will probably remain a mystery."
"It wasn't like I even imagined cloning UltraMan as something possible," I said.
"No," he replied. "I don't hold that against you."
He moved back toward the table, looking at the residue without touching it.
"We've used every resource available to trace the supply chain. Where the Don acquired it, who produced it, what facility or process made stable Astatine in bullet quantities possible." He shook his head slightly. "Nothing. The source doesn't appear in any record we can reach. No transaction, no facility, no personnel." He paused. "Not obscured. Not redacted. It's as though the source never existed."
Something moved at the back of my mind.
"That feels familiar," I said.
He looked at me. "What do you mean?"
"Nothing," I told him.
It probably wasn't the genius inventor that made Emily, right? Hmmm.
Karl shook his head. "We've talked enough. I need to get back to work."
"One more thing," I said.
He waited.
"Why Matthew," I asked. "You clearly have the means and the standing to approach other hero agencies. To make a research division, a formal arrangement, institutional backing. Why work with someone like him."
Karl was quiet for a moment.
"I can't trust them," he answered. "The agencies, the commission, the hero institutional structure in any form." He looked at the table. "The moralist faction would try to redeem the clone because their leaders knew UltraMan personally. To them he is a friend. The opportunist faction from what you saw sees the possibility as the return of a god." He paused. "Matthew I also can't trust. That's not the point. The point is that his hatred for what UltraMan represents is documented, consistent, and personal. That's a more stable foundation than ideology or opportunity. Those shift. His doesn't."
He glanced at me.
"The reason I told you any of this," he continued, "is that you appear to be the same."
"A villain?" I said.
"A man with no morals."
I smiled. Took a small step back, pressed my hands together in front of me, and lowered my head slightly in an approximation of a prayerful posture.
"I'll pray for your success," I told him.
I held it for a moment, then dropped it.
"If we're on the same page," I said, "there really isn't much left to cover."
I turned toward the exit.