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

20th January 2013
12:14 GMT

"The orbital fire doesn't look very accurate. Or was that-?"

"Deliberate."

"Herding people-. No. Introducing a random element. The people knew they could die at any moment, but Kalmin didn't want them to adapt to it."

I see the flakes of intent behind each crater and glass-bowl.

"Yes. And the strikes would wake people up, or would occur at times of day when different demographic groups were in different places."

I point north.

"There's a series of strikes a few miles that way, where he destroyed every major transport link to this city, knowing that there was no way they'd be able to get food here in large enough quantities to prevent starvation. And that the people here would know that."

"So they'd tear themselves apart without him needing to intervene directly."

"He didn't care exactly how they responded. So long as they were motivated by fear."

And there was a lot of fear here.

"You hired him in case the Controllers tried backstabbing you."

"Not 'backstabbing' exactly, just… Being people I couldn't work with."

"But now that you know that you can, why is he still alive?"

"I knew what he was when I offered him a place. Those ships L.E.G.I.O.N. is using? Those are about seventy percent his design work. Even the ones designed to be built by less technologically advanced planets. You can see the data on their performance versus other designs of ship on the N.E.M.O. database. They're… A lot better. He's very good at what he does. And he's not murdering planets any more. Yeah, he… Objectively… Probably deserves to be put down like a rabid dog, but… There's no practical reason to do it."

Also, I rather doubt that killing him would be easy.

"How long did it take?"

"I'm not sure. There's…"

I try scanning for intact pieces of computer equipment. Once the civilisation broke down to the point that people in one place didn’t know what was happening elsewhere, the Qwardians-. Kalmin deployed some sort of pack-hunting robots, but they were only programmed to target people.

Ah.

"They used a virus of some sort on the computer systems. I'm not going to be able to get an exact timeline. Um. On a tangentially-related matter, I have a question about your father's training methods."

She turns her head away from a collection of burned skeletons which appear to have been flensed while seeking shelter in an alleyway.

"What?"

"'It is better to be feared than to be loved, if one cannot be both.'"

"Nice to know that Dad failed completely."

"Right… But I remember reading that… They did an experiment with dogs. If you're nice to a dog, then the dog remembers you and shows a bit more attention to you, but mostly does its own thing. If you're hostile to a dog, it avoids you. But the best way to make a dog attached to you is to mix the two. At random. It makes the dog insecure and so it-."

"I guess Dad never read a psychology textbook. There wasn't any variety. And there weren't any rewards."

"No, he didn't seem like the sort."

"Why are you bringing this up?"

"He's working with the Justice League at the moment. And… There's a good chance that when the current crisis is over, he'll-"

"Damn it."

"-get his sentence commuted. I doubt they'll just… Let him go, but he probably won't be in line for an execution anymore."

"How do I make them reconsider?"

"Defeat the Anti-Life-enhanced Bruno Mannheim yourself. Or… Otherwise minimise Sportsmaster's role in things. Or…"

She waits for me to spit it out.

"Or if he switches sides. Then he wouldn't be pardoned. But the world's governments accepted pardoning Doctor Sivana Senior, so…"

"Do you think I should try and get a leave of absence? I wouldn't mind a complete pardon myself."

"Not unless you've got a way to resist the Anti-Life Equation I don't know about. I don't care if Mister Crock gets brain damaged as a result of Anti-Life exposure, but I do care about you."

"I worked that out when you said that you wanted to wander the universe with me forever."

"I'd hoped that it didn't take quite that long."

"No, but I hadn't really thought through what you wanted. Out of us."

"Stable home environment, children, the opportunity to raise and nurture them, new professional challenges and opportunities and to do all that with you. Nothing particularly unique, except that it's us doing it."

"That sounds… Nice."

"You?"

"I never really thought I'd get the opportunity to step back like that. I don't think I'd do well being a home-maker."

"I'm pretty good at multi-tasking. I'm happy to take the majority of childcare responsibilities if you want to pursue a… Um, a legitimate career."

She folds her arms across her chest. "You didn't need to emphasise it like that."

"I think in this sort of conversation it's best to be as unambiguous as possible."

"Does the Justice League need a light recon-?"

A quiet noise, the scratch of metal on brick, draws our attention. Ring scans aren't producing clear results, which isn't too surprising given Qwardian technology.

The first… Predatory kangaroo-looking robot, stalks slowly into view. It looks like it's trying to give us a clear look while remaining too far away for us to immediately attack with weapons that this world would have had when Kalmin ended it.

Another clambers over the rubble a short distance from the first, joining it in watching us.

And then another.

That would be intimidating, if we were unarmed civilians.

"There might be something useful on their databases." Jade draws her sword. "Let's clean up Kalmin's work."

 

20th January 2013
12:18 GMT

Jade's maser hits one of the robots in the chest, melting through its control systems and causing it to collapse onto the rubble-strewn ground.

"They're trying to lead us somewhere, aren't they?"

I nod as my ring goes through the programming of one of the robots I grabbed intact. They clearly weren't designed with fighting Lanterns in mind.

"Their behaviour is emergent. The actual program is relatively simple."

Like a shoal of fish. Or a flock of birds. There's no program which requires them to communicate with one another, just a programmed behaviour which is slightly altered when they can see one another.

Jade pauses for a moment and checks behind her, spotting the flankers who are supposedly driving us forward. "You mean that they're leading us around without an actual direction?"

"They were probably only released once organised resistance had broken down. Even if they ran into a group of soldiers, harrying them until they started to break mentally would be a viable tactic."

Jade accelerates, using her exo-mantle's thrusters to charge after the flankers. Immediately, the main mass from the front of us starts to close in where before they had been falling back.

"Reminds me of a book I read once. A fortified base has flamethrowers set up around the perimeter, and because they thought that the dangerous animals-"

Jade fires, hitting one of the flankers in the head. It doesn't collapse, but denied its sight organs its behaviour changes. It attempts to burrow into the ground, presumably so that it can use its seismic sensors to carry out an ambush later.

"-might work out a regular pattern of firing, they had it fire on an irregular pattern with… I think it was four? Interval changes. Any human who found themself caught outside could wait for the longest interval before trying to pass, but animals would be stuck."

"What are they doing now?"

Scan.

"The flankers are spreading out slightly, and some from the edge of the main mass are being drawn off."

Which replaces the flankers without anyone being designated as 'flankers' by a control program. I generate a plasma initiator construct and turn the majority of the oncoming wave into energised plasma. They weren't designed to be particularly resilient; their survivability as a group comes from their numbers.

"And now they're falling back."

"Because their behaviour changes based on how many of them there are around." She uses her flight system to drift slowly back towards me, while keeping an eye on the remaining flankers as they fall back. "So they wait until they're back up to a critical mass, then their behaviour will change back."

"Yes."

"Do you think Kalmin put a factory on the planet, or just dropped a few billion robots off?"

"Having a drop off point sounds easier to control, and there would be a small chance that a factory could be located and destroyed."

"He could just replace it. They didn't have any defence against orbital strikes."

"Sinestro's been to Earth a few times, but he's never made use of Dr. Crane's fear chemical. With a power ring, he could have found out about it very easily."

"Does it work on aliens?"

"It's… Generally affective against humanoids, though less so than against humans. It's not exactly a subtle thing. Against non-humanoids it usually doesn't do much."

"Space-faring species usually have better atmosphere purification technology than Earth. It wouldn't be as effective. And it wouldn't fit his strategy."

"Being a dick to Jordan doesn't require gas attacks, I agree."

"He hasn't done that for years. Supervillains can bear personal grudges while still pursuing a wider agenda."

"So he's got it, but he isn't going to use it until he thinks it's time to make large-scale attacks. And he's handing out replica rings because he's trying to find good recruits."

"Or he's trying to work out what makes a good recruit. Clarissi Dox is still doing that for the Orange Lantern Corps."

"Dox is trying to find out what makes an ideal recruit. We already know what makes good recruits."

Comic Sinestro had… Fear lodges? Recruits were exposed to their greatest fears, and then had to make a powerless ring spark, something like that? There was a significant die-off rate, and… That was on Qward, with Weaponers forging new rings for the recruits and presumably building other equipment as well. Because the Green Lantern Corps weren't watching Qward despite Sinestro's repeated involvement with them it came as a complete surprise. And that's not the case with us. While Qward's weakened state means that he probably could conquer it… No. There's no organisational structure to put himself at the top of. He'd need an army to actually take and hold the place while he upgunned his recruits and created a new power structure.

"Do you really think that Dox thinks that 'good' is good enough?"

"Oh, I know he won't settle for it, but he's recruited people who are just 'good' without having an aneurysm."

"Impressive."

"I thought so."

Hm. The robots are still falling back, still too clumped up for their 'stalk' program to activate.

"Jade-. I realise that your first try put you off the idea of using an orange power ring, but…"

"Do I want to try a yellow one?" She pointedly looks around at the devastation surrounding us. And then back at me to make sure that I was following her line of sight. "I'll pass."

"This.. is a Kalmin way of creating a yellow ring. I don't believe for a moment that this was actually essential."

In the comic, they ended up mass producing them in factories, so they must have worked out a way to avoid needing mass murder each time. If only because the Weaponers would have been much more cheerful if it was still required.

"If I had one, would seeing this start feeling good?"

"I… Don't know. Several Yellow Lanterns have responded positively to seeing fear, but they were probably the sort of person who would like that anyway."

"And Kalmin would see it as a feature."

"Almost certainly. Or he wouldn't realise that there was another way to respond to it. H-?"

"How about another colour?"

"I met a parallel universe version of you who used a green ring. She was pretty good with it."

"I doubt our lives were that similar."

"Almost identical until you ran away from home."

"So do I kill Stewart or Savenlovich?"

"I could ask Malvolio? I don’t think he's made any rings, but it should be well within his abilities."

Jade considers that for a moment. "I… Wouldn't mind a green ring. Depending on what the conditions were."

"Then I'll ask him. Now, let's try this world's rural areas."