ic Unfair Science Fair (IC)

[Avenger Assembled]

The flying zippy robots shuddered under Glow's telekinetic assault, shells cracking and electrical lines sparking, they didn't quite fall down, but they were certainly losing their battle with the Australian teen. For her part, Danson wasn't doing well out of the battle either, blood was dripping from her nose, drip drip, staining her uniform and badge, but she was still breathing and twitching in what looked like sleep. Citizen tried to respond to Glow's suggestion, but he was too busy being attacked by humanoid robots! Another blast of flame scorched past him and incinerated a passing flier, the nimble Tronikian dodging and weaving to avoid taking hits from those powerful blasters.

Evidently the robots were getting tired of missing Citizen and Miss Americana, as they turned their attention to the other two heroes! One blast from the leering mechanical women flash-burned the wall behind Keith LaMarr without actually hitting him; another was closer, at his feet, driving him forward into the arms of one of the fire-tossing robot women. "Why didn't you stop her!?" it yelled, looking him in the eyes with a look of pure flaming hate, an instant before hurling a blast of flame that enveloped the sonic-controlling powerhouse.

[Gizmo]

LaMarr brought his forearms up to cover his face as the blast of fire washed over him, grateful that he didn't have much hair on his head to be singed off. His super-dense muscle tissue stood up to the heat better than a normal person would have been able to but his shirt was certainly ruined. Hearing Citizen's call and Glow's apprehension, the big man brushed some smouldering soot from his sleeve and strode purposefully across the room, shoving smaller robots out of the way. "May be this is the only way stop her controlling them," he noted grimly to the Australian teenager as he reached Danson's seated form.

Pausing for a moment, he sighed and rubbed the space between his eyes with one large hand. This wasn't his first choice by any means, but he's fought astral projectors and others with similar abilities in the past and sometimes there wasn't much of an option, unsporting though it seemed. "Sorry, girl, but I need you to snap out of this," he apologized to the police officer with a wince before backhanding her with an open hand hard enough to either knock some sense into her or knock her out.

[Avenger Assembled]

Danson's head rocked backwards against Wail's blow, and everything stopped. Robots large and small fell to pieces all around the heroes, while inside the mainframe Cyberknife saw Danson's defenses shiver to pieces all around her a moment before the officer herself blinked from sight. Even as Cyberknife stepped back into Miss Americana's body, she felt a great rush of power pass through her and by her, and as the others watched electrical sparks in blue and white and red, and then all the colors of the spectrum and beyond, rose from the fallen robot parts to shape themselves into a humanoid mass of vague size and shape. Protectively, Citizen stepped in front of Miss Americana as the figure took stock of itself. It was, Miss A could tell, the trapped intelligence she had liberated from the computer.

"Greetings," it said in a neutral, albeit not unfriendly voice, the multi-colored sparks that made up its body casting a bizarrely cheerful, multi-colored light over the small room. "You have liberated me from the prison made for me. I am TOMORROW. For freeing me, you have my thanks, and my apology for disrupting the natural order of your lives. I had intended only to be the genie for Danson as I have been for others among your number, but she proved unwilling to allow my departure."

[Electra]

Miss Americana opened her eyes and took a deep breath, seeming to come back to herself as she stepped away from the wall. "Nicely done, thank you," she murmured to Wail before focusing all her attention on the electrical being. "What did she do to you?" she asked the being, the first question of a million that filled her head. "Why did you want to be her "genie" in the first place? What was the point?" That question applied to far more than Danson's empowering, but there was no way to ask without revealing more than she liked.

[Avenger Assembled]

"Behold."

TOMORROW gestured in the air and images began to play above its outstretched hand, a view of black-walled, star-dotted space. As the heroes watched, though, they realized much of what they'd thought were stars were ships, insectile mechanical things as big as any Lor or Grue ship, swooping down in a vast and terrible armada towards a shining solar system dotted with life and machines with an all-too-familiar green and blue orb three steps out from a yellow sun.

"In a time as far from you as you are from your primitive ancestors, the worlds of the humanities will fall before the hordes of the Communion. A vast, cybernetic intelligence that lives to consume and transform all into its own image."

The illusory ships spoke as one with a terrible purpose, closing in on a so-tiny-looking Solar System. "All is one within us. All shall be one within us." As the image faded, TOMORROW spoke. "Only Earth, the hearthworld of humanity, was left. I was sent back along the aeons to build a stronger humanity. One with the science and wisdom to defeat the Communion, whatever cost had to be paid. My purpose is to give humanity its tomorrow."

The hand dropped. "Danielle Danson's advancements in science will one day be part of the keystone of humanity's future. I...underestimated how far she had improved herself," the machine intelligence admitted without a glance at the still-twitching police officer. "Her desire for revenge burned hot enough to burn even the walls of time and space itself."

"Can't you fix her?" Citizen asked with a nervous glance at Miss Americana. He could sense something big was going on here, but his questions went in an entirely different direction from Gina's. "Help Danson have that power, without it doing this to her? Or take it entirely?" Mental illnesses were treated in Tronik far differently than they were in Freedom City, though that was more because Tronik's sciences were more advanced: the implant Danson would receive, or the gene therapy that would change her brain, was not likely to be available here.

TOMORROW's response was as cold and sterile as space. "She has become one of the most intelligent beings on your planet. Her work will one day be part of the keystone of humanity's future. That will be all that matters."

[Gizmo]

Wail had let out a short breath in relief when it had become clear that striking Danson had been the correct course of action, but as TOMORROW explianed itself at least in part, the sigh turned to a low, menacing grumble. "Your plan to save humanity from becoming part of an unfeeling machine is to throw the best and brightest of us to the wolves?" he snapped in a voice like sudden thunder, unexpected and close enough to rattle the floor. "Brother, I just hit an unconscious woman in a wheelchair on a hunch; what do you think I'm going to do if you keep going out of your way to tick me off?"

[Scuffles]

"Ugh, time travel?" Glow grumbled as she knelt next to the wheelchair to make check on the unconscious Policewoman. "And I thought that the stuff at the science fair was enough to give me a headache! Now I get time travel?"

The young woman stood and folded her arms across her chest as she regarded Tomorrow with a flat stare. "How can her work become a keystone of humanity if shes a stark raving homicidal lunatic?" she demanded. "We can't hardly let her do her work if part of that work is sending out flame-throwing robots to kill people!"

[Electra]

"There's no way you can know that for certain," Miss A pointed out, looking as profoundly uncomfortable as anyone but Sharl had ever seen her. "By going back to the past and attempting to change it, you have irreversibly altered the causality that created your future in the first place. According to current dimensional science, all you've accomplished is to create a divergent alternate universe of your own timeline, no matter how successful your mission is." She folded her arms across her chest, one perfect finger beating a rapid tattoo on the opposite wrist as she studied her strange benefactor. "How many people did you enhance like this?" she asked matter-of-factly. "Was it only in this time, or in other times as well?"

[Avenger Assembled]

"Your science will eventually advance to cure her neurological imperfections," replied the machine intelligence neutrally to Wail. "Her condition is regrettable, but it is the exception rather than the rule." The place where eyes might have been focused on Miss Americana, but they seemed to be staring somewhere deeper as they added. "I have empowered many beings in this era. All have used their knowledge and power to promote human technological development. Some have used their abilities to battle the forces of social and cultural entropy. Some have not. In either case, humanity will survive and prosper. That is what matters." It fell silent again, before adding more saliently, "With sufficient alterations over sufficient physical and temporal space, the home timeline will collapse into one of the new realities of human progress. The dead galaxy is a a necessary sacrifice. For humanity's TOMORROW."

[Avenger Assembled]

"Wait, so you're sacrificing your entire timeline for this?" asked Citizen, briefly knocked out of his concern for Danson by the possibility of the larger threat. "Everything, everywhere, all over your universe?"

"Areas untouched by the Collective will notice no change in a corrected history. The loss of a galaxy overrun by the Collective is no price to pay for the liberation of the humanities from cybernetic torment." Genuine emotion seemed to be creeping into TOMORROW's voice at that; perhaps it wasn't just an unthinking machine after all.

"But what about the human cost?" asked Citizen, shooting a worried glance at Miss Americana. What was going on that had Gina so tense?

"Someone must make the discoveries that Danielle Danson will make. That is a certainty. What else can be done?" Was that skepticism in the thing's voice?

[Electra]

Miss Americana shook herself out of her reverie enough to glance over at Sharl. she told her protege. Though Danson was unconscious, at least she seemed to be in less distress this way. What her mental state would be like on awakening was anyone's guess.

"Your motives may be good," she told the energy entity carefully, "and I have to appreciate your willingness to share your power and knowledge with people who can put it to use. But the power you gave her is obviously destroying her mind and her sanity. How will she make those discoveries you expect from her if she's sedated in a hospital for the rest of her life? You're hurting her, and she's going to hurt other people, and there's simply no point to any of it. If there are discoveries to be made, someone will make them. Maybe not as quickly as you like, but we humans are a resourceful bunch of people. And surely the ones you've already empowered are sufficient to the need."

[Avenger Assembled]

Silence from the cybernetic entity stretched on forever before it seemed to come to a decision. "Very well. I concede that it will assist the progress of human history if I continue to empower minds with a greater interest in combating the cultural forces of entropy. I will remove the augmentation from Officer Danson's mind." It reached out and put a hand to the semi-conscious woman's forehead; it was all undramatic, there was a slight flare of light, and then Danson slumped into genuine sleep. For the first time since they'd arrived, she looked at peace. "But the progress of science will brook no delay. The discoveries that Danielle Danson would have made WILL be made." It turned and looked significantly at Wail. "I will give you what you seek as well. Now it is time for me to leave."

[Gizmo]

Wail made a brief sound of appeasement when TOMORROW relented to Miss Americana's reasoning and reversed what it had done to Danson, evidently restoring some semblance of stability to her mind in the process. At the warning comment directed at him, however, the broad-shouldered educator's expression darkened. "I'd be careful about picking a fight with yesterday, brother," he noted in a similarly uncompromising tone. "History has a way of knocking those who don't learn from it on their luminous asses." The artificial entity's intention might have been noble, but its tampering had led directly to a robotic wrecking ball of fury and fire coming down atop a gymnasium full of his students and that was something LaMarr would not forgive. "You drive safe, now."

[Scuffles]

Glow straightened, her hand resting on the handle of Danson's wheelchair as she looked back and forth between Wail and Tomorrow. The science of time travel and the possible consequences of Tomorrow's actions might be completely beyond her limited knowledge, but she could still see problems with what the machine intelligence was doing.

"Wait, come on, she protested as she indicated Danson's still comatose form. "How can we be sure she's not going to still be a crazy person when she wakes up? And if you're going to keep on.. doing this whole augmenting thing to other people, how can you be sure that they won't go mad too?"

She glanced over at Miss Americana with a slightly frustrated and confused look on her face. "It can't possibly know what the consequences of this stuff will be, right? After all, anything it does here messes up its own timeline completely!"

[Avenger Assembled]

"When Officer Danson awakes, she will again be herself. Brilliant, but no longer neurologically unstable. Most of those I have empowered have maintained their stability even with the influx of new powers and knowledges. Many even have...grown from it. With guidance for those who remain, all will be well." Turning to address Wail again, the cyberintelligence said, "You misunderstand me. I do not strike the hand you have extended into history. Instead, I take it." TOMORROW extended its hand to Wail, reaching closer and closer, and then finally faded from view as it had never been there at all.

[Avenger Assembled]

Eventually the deed was done and a revived, thoroughly stricken Danielle Danson was taken into custody by her colleagues. The heroes had a lot of explaining to do, but that was easy enough with the beautiful Miss Americana on the scene. Citizen and Glow both had quite a lot to put in their report about their ridealong with Miss Americana that day, even if Sharl had the idea that more had gone on with Gina than she was willing to talk about just yet. For most people, it was just another day in Freedom City, albeit one particularly problematic for the FCPD.

A couple of nights later, Keith LaMarr's phone rang late in the evening.

"Hey, uh, LaMarr? Thanks again for saving me and my grandson. But could you come over to my son's place some time?" Standing at ground-level, Peter Grayson looked up at his smiling grandson as circuit boards and electronic parts whizzed around him in the air like an virtuoso computer's musical notes, the teenager hovering in the air on his antigrav board. "He says a genie came to him last night, and now he's got these superpowers he wants some help with..."