What Have You Been Doing With Your Life?

[Avenger Assembled]

Summer 2016 

 

In bed next to Steve, Gina Evans dreamed, blue sparks playing over her body in circuit board patterns from time to time as her powers hummed along at low levels. 

 

She was floating in space in low Earth orbit, somewhere over North America, - but Earth was vastly transformed. The green-brown of deep forests stretched across eastern North America, deep and rich as it must have been before the arrival of Europeans, but this was no primordial vision. The silvery glow of cities stretched up and down the coast and inland as far as the Appalachians, the towering bulk of what must have been vast arcologies holding hundreds of millions in spaces that had once held a tenth that. The calculations, given a basic grasp of geometry, were easy for her. This North America had a population perhaps twice that of her own, but the cities were self-contained, tucked away amid a carefully-built-to-be-untouched natural splendor like so many jewels. Silvery lines connected the cities, and stretched across a vast blue Atlantic, and everywhere was the hum of a worldnet that sang and crashed like the music of an ocean. The Moon was changed too, as she saw looking upwards, dotted with domes like Farside City rebuilt a dozen-fold, scattered across the Lunar surface like so many jewels. She fancied she could just make out the blue of water beneath the largest of them. 

 

Turning her head, she found herself joined in space by a flickering form of multicolored electrical sparks - a form she'd met twice, and seen in the flesh only once. 

 

"Greetings, Gina Evans. I show you the works of humanity." 

[Electra]

Gina nodded to her companion, surprised but not startled to see it there. "It's very beautiful," she said honestly, reaching an arm out halfway as though she could trace the water-drop curve of an arcology with her fingertips. "Is this a vision of the future?" she asked, "or an alternate universe? Or is it some of both?" Timeline theory and alternate universes were not a specialty of Gina's, but she remembered everything she'd ever read or seen, and she was very clever. "It looks so pristine." 

[Avenger Assembled]

"This is a shadow of what will be - a vision of commonalities among the manifold universes that survive into eternity." The emissary from the impossibly distant future hummed with satisfaction, seeming to cast its gaze on the planet below them without having a head, or eyes, to look that way. "After the end of your time; before the beginning of mine. The Great Work for which I was built in the last days of humanity has finished.The highwater mark of the Communion has come and gone. With the failure of their last great Incursion, in no probable future from now will they overrun the Milky Way." 

 

 

[Electra]

They hung in silence for a moment while Gina considered those words, then released a soundless sigh into the vacuum. "That's good to know," she said at last. "Such a painful battle, it's nice to think it was all worth something." Gina turned her gaze downward towards herself for a moment and was mildly surprised and relieved to note that neither of her physical shells had made the trip with her; she had no more corporeal form than her companion right now. It was a good feeling. "What will you do now?" 

[Avenger Assembled]

"I will fade from existence," said Tomorrow, its artificial voice not wavering, "as will all things of all natures, in time. I am more and less than biological. I was made for a purpose, and that purpose is ended. But I will visit my works before my dissolution, here on this planet and out among the stars. I am pleased with your doings, Gina Evans. Your mind is unbroken by your gifts, and you have sought to free others rather than bind them to your will." Gina knew perfectly well that the former had not always happened - and it was easy to imagine how someone with her power, especially on an advanced world that lacked heroes, might. "

[Electra]

Even without a body, Gina could still smirk, this time ruefully as she considered the work of her descendants' hands. "The power of my will isn't even enough to bring myself into line, much less let me determine what's best for other people," she told the glowing apparition. "You know what I was like, you know what I am. It would be hypocritical in the extreme for me to assume I can tell anybody else how they should live. But I like to think I've still managed to make some people's lives better. To use the gift you gave me and do some good, and not just change my own circumstances. Will you be all right?" Are you scared? she wanted to ask, but didn't. She didn't know if it could be scared, and if it was, she wasn't really close enough to ask anyway. 

[Avenger Assembled]

"I will be, until I am no longer. It is the way of things." Tomorrow hummed again, matching the music of the datasphere in which they were embedded, perhaps the vastest work of human beings Gina could perceive. "You need not justify yourself to me, Gina Evans. I know what you have done - in all your guises. You have built the future you see before you. It is sufficient." That seemed to be, from the tone of that electronic 'voice', high praise. "Your future is unfinished. Build in it - as you have."