The Advanced Class

In the middle distance, a brief roar rippled through the forest. Indistinct shouting answered it, and silence returned. The shuffling mass of students shuffled a bit less, though what shuffling remained tended to open the distance between themselves and the forest’s edge. 

 Nervous whispers became the dominant sound, and an occasional thump from the direction of the roar. After a few minutes, a more regular thumping could be heard, and shortly after that the source of the thumps revealed itself: the hustling steps of Hogwarts School’s Care of Magical Creatures instructor, Professor Rubeus Hagrid.*

 He jogged ponderously around a last couple of trees and approached the students.

 “Right then! Sorry for the delay, things were a little, er, stressful for a few minutes. But it’s all settled now and here I am.

 “Since you’ve covered the basics and intermediate creatures in previous years, we’re not going to spend a lot of time studying them. This year we’ll be studying some of the most fascinatin’ creatures in the magical world, and maybe even get to know a few of ‘em.”

 Another unsettled whisper made its way through the group. Having studied with him for at least four years, each of these students was well aware that Hagrid’s idea of fascinating usually was synonymous with murderously dangerous to anyone else. And Hagrid also enjoyed those creatures which could be described, preferably at a distance, as very fascinating.

 “So! We won’t be bandying about it, we’re going to need some protection. But not too much, because you want to be quick on your feet too. Everyone got their fireproof cloaks? Dragonhide gloves? Good, good.” He suddenly pointed to one small figure at the rear. “You there, Lorcan! Where are your iron-soled boots?”

 “They’ve not got any in me size, Professor!”

 “Ruddy…well, don’t dawdle if you have to run and try not to run through anything that’s on fire, right?”

 “Right you are, sir!”

 “Muggle trainers. If things get hot those’ll melt on your feet, you know? They’re made of plastic, lad.” 

 “D’yer want me ter go an’ change, Professor?” 

 “I’m half of a mind for it but we’re behind already. Nah, let’s get goin’.” He turned and began leading the way into the forest, the students following at some distance but Lorcan pushing to the front of the group. 

 “So what are we going to start with, Professor?” 

 “Yer a bit keen, aren’t ya Lorcan? I remember last year you passed the class with one hundred and twelve percent, did me proud, you did. Well what we have to start off this year is probably hitting the ground running, as it were. These beasts are about as big and, er, strong-willed as anything you’re ever likely to encounter, and the Ministry classifies them as quintuple-X, completely untrainable and impossible to domesticate.”

 Lorcan thought that over for a bit, his lips moving as he appeared to silently recite learned excerpts from lessons. Finally he said, “Blimey, Professor, there’s not many beasts that fall under quint-x.”

 “No indeed. There’s manticores, chimera, a few others you won’t ever encounter in these parts. But these you’ll spot from time to time. Here we go.” 

 The class of seventh years rounded the last bend in a faint path and entered a clearing in the dark, dense forest. In spite of the clearing, the ancient trees still crowded overhead so the patch of sky visible wasn’t as big as the patch of ground below it. Sprawled at the far end of the clearing lay the class’s subject for the day, and they could see why the roar had been so loud. 

 “Right. Now, everyone, stay quiet. She doesn’t see very well but her hearing is fine. This is Blanche.” 

 Blanche was a dragon. Mottled pale grey and bearing scales down her back the size of dustbin lids, she stretched over a piece of ground half-in, half-out of the sunny part of the clearing. From her shoulders back she lay in sunlight, but her neck and head receded toward the forest’s gloom. She stirred at Hagrid’s voice, and snorted. 

 “It’s only me, calm yourself,” he called toward the creature. The massive serpentine tail swished a couple of times and was still. One wing rustled. 

 “So Blanche is, as you can see, a dragon. We’re going to spend some time learning about dragons in general and Blanche in particular. Blanche spent a lot of time living in the caves under Gringott’s…” the class gasped at this “…and as a result of livin’ too long in the dark, her eyesight is pretty poor. Dragons’ eyesight isn’t the best in any case. It doesn’t have to be when you hunt nothing smaller than a modest-sized goat. An’ she’s got a great sense of smell, too. If’n yer can’t smell a goat at a hundred yards yer’ve got no business bein’ a dragon in any case. But livin’ in the caves bleached her hide, too, and yer can see that her color’s not as true as yer’d expect.” 

 “Expect? What would we expect, Professor?” 

 “Oh! O’ course, Blanche is a Ukrainian Ironbelly. Biggest breed of dragon there is, but she’s a bit stunted. Caves, lack of food. She didn’t have a proper environment to attain her full size, see. But Ironbellies are naturally much darker than this, got a lovely ruddy slate grey, almost like, er, good steel gone a bit rusty underneath, yer know.” 

Blanche’s color was nothing like Hagrid’s description. Rather, she was more the color of gravel by the side of the road. 

 “So is she trying to get her color back, Professor?” 

 “Ar, I dunno about that. I dunno if she can even see color. Nah, I reckon she just likes feeling the warmth. I think being in the dark for so long has made her eyes really sensitive to too much light, she keeps her head in the shade all the time, more or less. But the rest of her she stretches out like a big cat in the sun, and snoozes.” 

 Hagrid gave the class a few minutes to observe the dragon at length, answering questions but keeping them well back, though Lorcan kept trying to gain a few more feet whenever Hagrid looked away. He seemed quite captivated by the dozing beast. 

 “Poor thing,” he said. “Are those scars? Is that scarring on her legs and neck?”

 “Aye. When she lived under Gringott’s, the goblins kept her chained up. And as you can imagine they didn’t change which leg the cuff was on very often, so her hide ulcerated pretty bad. I’ve been treating it for years though and it’s loads better.” 

 “That’s better?” Lorcan squeaked. “It looks awful!” Even from this distance, now that they knew there was something to be observed, all the students could plainly make out the discoloration and altered texture of hide that had endured long term damage. 

 “Ar, well. It looked a lot worse. Couldn’t hardly touch it at first. Downright sensitive.”

 “And the neck?” 

 Hagrid’s normally open, pleasant expression hardened. “That was how they controlled her. Classical conditioning, the muggles call it, train her to associate an experience with something else and after a while they wouldn’t have to do both at the same time. So the goblins had these noisemakers, see, and they’d poke and burn her when they made the noise. Pretty soon the goblins didn’t need to poke or burn her at all, just make the noise and she’d stay away from them. Very convenient for them, I’m sure.” But even as he said it he made a fist with one hand and as it tightened, they could clearly hear a couple of knuckles cracking with a sound like walnuts shattering. “It’s taken a long, long time for the old girl to trust me.” 

 A couple of the students whistled, but left off immediately when the dragon’s head shifted to focus on them. 

 Lorcan couldn’t get enough of the creature and asked, without looking away, “She trusts you? She’ll let you get near her? How did you do it, Hagrid?” 

 Hagrid relaxed a bit. “Ar. You know how it is. You meet a critter what’s had a hard time, yer got to go easy. 

 “So I brought her a half a steer and set it where she could find it, but I stayed upwind too, see, so she could smell me and know I was close by. So she had a nice dinner and knew I was there, there but not threatening, see? Did that a few times over the course of oh, I guess it was a month or so, until she was eating with me standing right there. And a couple of weeks after that going little by little, like, she let me touch her.” 

 There was a whispered, “oooh,” from the class in general. 

 “And no, before any of yer ask, we’re not going to be doing that today. Especially not,” he said, as he reached out an immense hand and hauled Lorcan back from the several steps he’d taken toward the dozing dragon, “you.” 

He set Lorcan on his feet. “We might be able ter at some point. Blanche is special, having long contact with humans has altered her behavior from what’s natural. But so much of that was bad, ‘s no surprise she takes a lot of time getting used ter a new person. Usually when a human meets a dragon, the dragon has a light snack. After all those years under the bank Blanche doesn’t see humans as something ter eat anymore though, see? So we have an edge to pry up there, a way to get past her instincts. But she’s still tetchy.”

 He thumped Lorcan on the shoulder. “Yer a good lad. I like your gumption. But I also like yer mum, great with thestrals, and if I has ter bring Luna what’s left of her kid in an ashcan, well, it’ll be a bad day. So pace yerself.” 

 He motioned the group to back away from the clearing a bit. “Now. Open yer books ter Chapter Seven, ‘Dragons and Related Large Reptiles.”

* Characters and places established as features of The Wizarding World by JK Rowling are the sole intellectual property of their creators, including those participatory creators besides Rowling herself.

Procrastination Is Indicated

 "So how long did it take to decode it?" The brows under the peaked cap knitted. Hands, surprisingly delicate fingers flipped pages back and forth, looking for explanations in the dense, nearly indecipherable text.

"Pretty long, actually. We might not be right about exactly what it says but we're pretty sure we've got the basic meaning: returning to origin, goals achieved, anticipation is high.'"

"Okay, that certainly does paraphrase the romanticized version well enough."

"Yes, ma'am. But wringing that out of the pure math of the original signal, well. The computers were smoking before they were finished. I mean, shoot - we've developed some entirely new math just making sense of that little message. It'll inject some new life into AI development. The algorithms..."

A hand waved, not quite dismissively. "I don't want to know. I didn't like Al Gore and I don't like algorithms. One sounds too much like the other and neither of them ever made much sense to me."

"Uh...okay?" Belatedly she realized the young Lieutenant didn't know who Al Gore was. God, she was getting old.

"But what's this note at the bottom? 'Ping time 4.14 e16 ±1.13e15 seconds?' The hell is that?"

"That's, uh, that's the estimated time the signal has been traveling."

"What, you mean like pinging the router on my computer?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Doesn't pinging usually mean you send a signal out and wait for it to get back?  Never mind.  Four point one-four...ten to the sixteenth. Wait, there's. Damn. Eighty-seven hundred and some hours in a year, times thirty-six hundred seconds in an hour is...well, shoot, that's about thirty million seconds in a year. How many ten to the whatsis is that..."

"That's three times ten to the seventh, ma'am."

"Okay, so a year is Oh my HOLY are you telling me this is...sonuva...hold up. That's a lot of zeros."

"It's a little over a billion years, ma'am. About one-point-two billion."

"Give or take."

"Yes, ma'am, give or take. About thirty-five million years, one way or the other."

"Couldn't narrow it down any closer than that?"

"Colonel?"

"Never mind. Can you leave this here?"

"That's your copy, ma'am."

"Okay. Dismissed."

"Thank you, ma'am." The lieutenant saluted crisply, pivoted out the door and closed it behind him.

A billion years. A Billion years! One billion years. She could feel herself shaping the word differently inside her head, but it didn't impart any new meaning. Just imagining the span of her own life started to lose context if she tried to consider it all in one big lump, this...this was too much.

Give or take, of course.

She clicked open a new window and started searching the internet.

***

"General, I can't begin to tell you what is coming, but I can say this much: whatever it is, it isn't human."

"You're sure about that?"

"One hundred percent certain. Beings we would recognize as anatomically modern humans only go back about a quarter-million years or so. Pre-human hominids go pretty far back, a few million years. But even that's just a drop in the bucket, this signal predates dinosaurs. This signal, sir...it predates damn near everything."

"What, even trilobites?"

"Even them. It predates plants. About the only thing it doesn't predate is simple, monocellular lifeforms like cyanobacteria, bacteria, that kind of thing."

"What were conditions like on this planet back then?"

"There wasn't hardly any oxygen in the air. If we were to land in those conditions, we'd fold up and die. It wouldn't take long."

"And this message has been in transit since conditions on this planet were like that?"

"That's what the analysis says. I think it's looking at perturbations in the signal, Doppler shifting, maybe even some polarization."

"How can they guess at that stuff if they didn't know the exact signal construction in the first place?"

"That will take a way more technical answer than I can give you. You're going to have to go a bunch of pay grades below me before you find someone smart enough to answer that. If you need me to, I know a guy."

The General chuckled. "Heh. Okay." He tapped the cover sheet of the report. "Let's think about this reasonably." He pulled a drawer open and propped his feet on the stack of books within it, carefully arranged there specifically for the purpose. He'd had this desk for a long time. "This signal has been traveling for over a billion years, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Planetary conditions are not what they left, if we assume they were from here originally. Right?"

"Assuming they came from Earth, right. Whatever they breathed, it wasn't oxygen. Not back then. Or else they didn't need much oxygen." She paused.

"And that's just how long that signal has been in transit. Nobody knows how long they were on the outward part of their journey, exactly how long they've been gone in total.
What kind of signal was this? Radio, X-ray, gamma rays?"

"Radio. UHF, a little higher."

"That implies that whatever speed they're traveling, they can't be closing in too closely on the speed of light, right? If they were moving at relativistic velocities, a radio signal would get compressed into something higher frequency, like a gamma burst."

"Unless they're transmitting at ultra-low, and we're getting UHF. They might be cooking right along, sir. Ultra-low isn't a bad choice either, its attenuation isn't bad."

"Takes an antenna miles long to generate it, though. Sure, okay. But even then. If they're moving at ninety-nine percent the speed of light, and they transmitted this message the moment they started back toward home, what's one percent of a billion years?"

"Wait, I know this one." The Colonel sat back in her chair. "That's ten million years."

"So if these people, whoever, whatever they are, did whatever they were doing, turned around and burned rubber to come back here, even at point nine-nine C, they're still ten million years away. Does that sound like a fair estimate?"

"Yes, sir."

"And of course, we could simply be the hapless lad at the airport not realizing that the pretty girl smiling and waving at him is actually smiling and waving at the guy behind him."

"Sir?"

"This message could be intended for someone else.  We just happened to pick it up on its way to whoever it was intended for."

The Colonel frowned.  That was a possibility she hadn't considered but of course it made sense.  In the countless eons since the message had been transmitted, the entire Milky Way been gracefully turning and swirling.  The beam spread of even a tightly collimated beam must, at this kind of transmission distance, be utterly vast on a human scale.  As big across as...she couldn't even guess.  It was pointless to guess.  The entire Solar System might simply be standing in the way, ignorantly blundering into the path of an email sent between gods.

The message might not even be for them.

The General carefully removed the staple from the corner of the report, then dropped the report into the shredder at the corner of his desk. The Colonel watched the sheaf of paper writhe and crinkle into the gnawing rollers without comment. When the machine shut itself off as the last bit of paper was macerated to bits, the General lifted his feet off the drawer and shut it.

"How do you like Air Force's chances?"

"We're going to get creamed. The Middies' quarterback is actually good and their defense is sheer genius. If we score at all it'll be a miracle."

"Damn. I had some hopes. Well, maybe next year. Lunch?"

"Okay." She got to her feet, glancing briefly at the shredder.

"Not our problem. Just let it go."

The Winner

 It's been about 200 years since the Lotteries picked up. The first couple of generations were understandably resistant and the draconian measures taken to enforce the Lotteries were...harsh. Usually the severity of punishment doesn't really have much bearing on whether the punishment will affect future breaches, but there are times when I think people lack imagination. There are ways, and there are ways to make people regret their transgressions, and some of those ways really make an impression on the witnesses. When the government controls your education, your employment, even your reproduction, their scope for retribution against malefactors can be pretty broad.

How the dissolution of human society happened at first was not much. People were still starving. People were still standing toe to toe. Cities were big and getting bigger, farms were enormous and growing to encompass entire counties as agricorps swelled to ever larger proportions to exercise economies of scale that kept food growing while keeping it affordable. Same as last year, last decade, last century. So to try to reel in the seemingly unstoppable expansion of human population, a worldwide Reproduction Lottery was adopted - yes, I use that word with my tongue firmly in cheek - and enforced, like I said, harshly. In general you have about a ten percent chance of winning the right to have a child. Not in any one year, ever. And of course, you can't have a kid by yourself. You have to find someone else of the opposite sex to have a baby with you, and it helps if they're compatible with you, and you can see how this could really pare down the birth rate. And it did. But the population wasn't really going down very fast.

Thousands of years of medical science will do that. Humans live pretty long lives anymore. With sufficient food, shelter and access to necessary care, you can just putter along, getting older and older but never really dying.

Then after about four generations of Lotteries - call it a hundred years, that's close enough - we started to see some changes.

The population started to really fall off. Not the little half percentage or so you'd expect in a year, but one-and-a-half, then two, then suddenly three percent. Three whole percent of the entire human population died in one year! In one hundred years of Lotteries, the human population had stopped growing, but it wasn't until just a hundred years ago that the trend had really started to move in the other direction, and suddenly it wasn't just a trend.

Three percent of thirteen billion people is nearly 400 million. Four hundred million people dying of various causes - mostly old age but not exclusively - is about eight times what it was in, for instance, the year 2000.

Some things got cheaper. Food got a lot cheaper for a while, but then the agricorps started to lose cohesion. Three percent is a lot in one year and you kind of expect it to be an outlier, so you absorb the losses and keep on going with your usual production except there's another year, and another, and another with the global population shrinking to the tune of an entire large country's worth of people not being there anymore and when you're a global agricorp, there are no other markets to expand to. The entire planet is your customer.

So the agricorps start digging into each other's market shares. Things get heated and pretty soon it isn't just corporate espionage we're reading about on the newsfeeds, it's corporate incursions, corporate assassinations and even outright corporate warfare, a strange, mostly bloodless war that doesn't assault humans but the fleets of rolling stock that sow and tend and harvest the world's food. The biggest corporations have all the money and are de facto governments, controlling the flow of the most basic staples that feed entire continents.

And in the face of these conflicts, the Lotteries continue. Fewer and fewer babies are born, people continue to age and die at the rate they have been for decades.  The median age of a human being is about fifty-eight years old, which I'm told is downright alarming. 

Healthcare was, if not a growing field, then a field whose share of the job assignment market was growing. There weren't as many healthcare job assignments needing filled as there used to be, but there were substantially less of other roles. The proportion of the population that is too old to care for itself was growing fast; even as the oldsters were dying off by the millions there weren't anything like that many babies being born to grow up and mature into the job market.   So more and more of us got slotted into the role of taking care of our burgeoning elder population.

When the last global agricorp had won its decades-long war against its remaining competitor, it filed bankruptcy and dissolved less than five years later. Faced with monopolistic control of the entire market, the last agricorp decided it could charge whatever it wanted, learned the hard way that it couldn't, and was violently dissolved by enraged governments. But before they fell, the company's leaders destroyed the factory that built new harvesters and completely scrambled the control network for the existing ones.  The bastards.

There's a small but vigorous group of hackers struggling to work their way through the palimpsest of security measures and obfuscatory code that makes up the control systems to get even one harvester working.  A single harvester could do the work of a hundred strong workers.  But the security codes are self-adjusting and the hackers have to do their regular jobs too.  They say they're a couple of years away from cracking the codes, but they've been a couple of years away for about twenty years.

So now we skip ahead another few years and here's where we find ourselves. For every able bodied adult currently walking around on this planet, here's about fifty-sixty senior citizens unable to provide for themselves . A lot of manufacturing is automated, thankfully, so medicines and geriatric care equipment isn't dependent on there being enough of us youngsters to crank out walkers, wheelchairs and Lisinopril. You can live a long, long time and that's your right as a citizen.

You're also guaranteed your right to food. That's where I come in.

This is the other sector of the assignment market that's gaining share. As the world still has to eat, and there aren't enormous robotic armies of seeders and sprayers and cultivators and harvesters to produce the food, there have to be enormous human armies of workers to tend the fields. There aren't many kids being born though because even now the Lotteries are still in effect, so there aren't many new, young backs coming on to help share the load.

I'm a pretty smart guy and I could build a tractor, given the time and equipment. It doesn't even need to be good equipment. It wouldn't be a good tractor that resulted but it would be sufficient to replace me and probably about twenty other workers. But the Assignment Bureau doesn't have a job labeled Tractor Builder or Factory Builder and frankly they're so swamped with everything else I'm not sure they could spare the time to create the occupation. Because the need for food never really goes down, you see. People age at the rate they always have, but new workers to replace them aren't appearing at anything like the same rate.

These are the things I think about in the endless days of hot sun, dragging plows, swinging hoes, toting baskets, pulling carts. A radical shift in the balance of birth and death has skewed everything else. As people get older and leave their old jobs, their burden on the means of production that keep them alive continues, but there aren't enough workers to take up those tasks. And now we, the workers, suffer the real hell that is 100% employment. We go where we're sent, and can't question the sending.

And it will only get worse. As long as the Lotteries continue to skew the birth-death ratio, the weight of the preceding generations will continue to pile ever more heavily on increasingly smaller subsequent generations, eating and eating.

This is the future that stretches out before me. This is the future that stretches out before the unborn baby represented by the slip of paper in my pocket. The Lottery announcement that congratulates me for being selected completely at random to produce a new person to slot into my old job, to prop me up, me and a dozen of my fellow former producers.

I can't think that this is the kind of future a human being is supposed to have, to work endlessly, nonstop until they're too old and infirm to work, and then to just...hang around...until their body finally stops working.  Surely we're meant for more than this?  Looked at one way, knowing without question that you will never be unemployed is a balm of sorts.  I've seen some of the old videos, read the accounts.  Economic disasters the result in businesses failing, people losing their livelihoods and subsequently their homes.  Despair brought on by destitution, crime, drug abuse, suicide.  All of it ghastly.

As awful as that is, there's a certain level of passion to be seen in those old stories.  People vie, they fight.  They struggle.  Sometimes they fail and their lives go wrong, but generally everyone gets by, more or less, well enough that they are, if not happy, then satisfied enough at the ends of their lives.

Now?  Well.  I will never be homeless.  Even as the population leveled off more tower blocks were being cranked out by the factory builders.  Even as the population shrank, the tower blocks remained.  Forget suburbs, those were outmoded as a wasteful luxury a century ago; we live in towers.  All towers, all the same, a hundred stories of identical flats, a hundred towers surrounded by scores of square kilometers of growing fields.  Each block contains 380,000 living units, all exactly the same.  At one time each living unit would house as many as a dozen people.  Now they mostly house only couples and singles, except those units that are set aside for the very aged.  For efficiency and ease of serving them, those generally house four or five at a time.  But suffice it to say, there is plenty of housing.  There are empty units everywhere, sometimes even entirely empty towers.  

And there is always work to be done.  Aged citizens to care for, food to be grown, equipment to be repaired.  Endlessly.  Forever.  I know more about the human body than I ever thought I would, from having to care for so many others besides my own.  I know so much more about machinery than I ever thought I would, cajoling rickety equipment down one more row of beets, of peas, of soybeans.

The dust of the soybean harvest can drive you utterly mad.  If you can avoid it, do so.  

There is no time left to be human.  There is only work, eat and rest, endlessly, until you cannot do those things for yourself anymore, and then you stop working and wait to die.

Endlessly.  

I shouldn't have read the stories.  I should never have watched the videos.  As desperate as some of those lives appeared to be in the old days, the days of wages and poverty and uncertainty, there was usually some kind of hope, too.  A fully employed populace, a long-lived populace with no new babies, doesn't have much hope.  Each new person's future is cemented as soon as they're born.  What is there to hope for?

The fellow in the row next to me pauses to lean on his hoe.

"You ever wonder if you're lucky to have been the product of a Lottery birth?"

"No. I know."

"Pretty cool, huh?"

"Sure."

I take the Lottery ticket out of my pocket and look at it.

"Hey, is that what I think it is?"

"Yeah."

"Congrats, man, that's great."

"Sure."

He goes back to hoeing. When he can't see me, I drop the slip of paper into the soil, till it under, and keep working.

Congratulations, kid. Your luck just changed for the better.

Surrogate state fair

 My phone's photo gallery feature evidently includes a yearbook, because it has been occasionally putting up reminders of what I was doing at this time last year.

At this time last year, I was in Minnesota visiting my parents, other family, and of course the Minnesota State Fair.  And therein lies a bit of a self examination.

I don't really remember living in Minnesota.  We moved away before I was big enough to form any memories.  My first memories are of being a very small child in Tennessee.  But Minnesota is where my family is from and so it gets an automatic level of fealty.  I understand why you have to be a native born American to be eligible for President, I love my home state and barely know it.  Imagine if I had grown up there.

And I did do some growing there, I have many indelible memories that helped firm up my current, less immature state that were formed in Minnesota.

At this time last year - last week, actually - I was touring the fair, touring the state, wandering around the Ensculptic and its grounds with my folks.  And in this pandemic reality, such visits are ill advised.

Fortunately, there's YouTube.  I'm watching videos of tractors, videos of people building pole barns, watching cooking and knitting videos, going through photos of family.  Give it a try.  It's not the real thing but it should tide us over until we can get back to life as it used to be, or something like it.

Wherever you are, be safe, remember family, and hopefully we'll all be back together again soon enough.

Area of Effect

 

Ever since I could remember, the stories of the metas had been captivating.  It really put some meaning into the cliche, "destined to do great things."  What can be more destined than having your superhuman abilities tied to a place?  Destiny tied to a destination is what that is.  

And it turns out that sometimes you can't really leave the destination, either.  There are a few A-level metas out there, truly super beings whose entire beat is pretty much the known universe.  There's B+ types who watch over the galaxy, to N-level who watch over an entire state, et cetera.  You get the picture.

So driving home from college two years ago I felt this tingle like you would not believe, like having a, um, very viscerally good reaction to oh let's just say a really fantastic dinner while taking a side trip, just getting off the interstate for a few miles, and boom.  Ohmigod.  Ohmigod.  Ohmigod.  Like that.  And knowing what everybody else knows, I thought there's, like, a really short list of things that could cause that, so I decided to check it out.  I had to get tested.

“Z? Zed? The last thing before the alphabet starts over?” On the A-to-Z scale of metahuman rating, A is essentially a god and Z is something you can imagine an Olympic-level athlete achieving, plus maybe a couple of esoteric powers. One can bend reality, the other can bend steel bars.

Maybe just aluminum bars.

“Yup. Sorry, lady.”

Ugh. Okay. I could work with this. The testing agency wasn’t to blame, it’s just the nature of the beast. He packed up his testing gear and laid out some of the ramifications.

“So what it means is that your powers are geographically isolated. Stay on your turf and you’re a meta. Go off your turf and you’re a normie.”

“How powerful a meta?”

“That varies from one instance to the next, and sometimes it varies from one encounter to the next, sometimes it’s contextual. I tested a lady last month, she’s almost a normie even on her territory except when facing drunk men or barking dogs. Then she’s pretty terrifying.” He zipped up his pack. “Your scores don’t seem to have much internal conflict, so on your territory you look like a pretty straightforward strongman – er, strongwoman - definitely in the super levels, looks like some night vision, and a bit of electrical manipulation. Nothing earth shattering but nothing to sneeze at either. You can’t pick up a car, but you could pick up a motorcycle. Pretty big one, if these scores are right. You’ve got potential. It’s modest, but potential.”

“And my territory is a street?”

“Yup. This street.”

“Morrigan Avenue.”

“Morrigan Avenue.” He shouldered his pack. “I’ve emailed you a list of exercises and practices so you can get a better idea of what your abilities are and, more importantly, your limits. Don’t try to be a hero until you’ve actually done everything on the list.  Really, seriously: don't try.  Heroism has an area of effect, and once you wander out of the area you're destined for, you lose your effect."

"So stay close to home?"

"So stay close to home.  Or choose not to be a hero."

Man.  I'm a superhero, a meta, but a Z.  You've heard of the D-list?  Just imagine the list had twenty-two more pages, and I'm on the last one.  It's cool, but cool like when you win a lottery prize and it's five bucks.

Like I said, that was a couple of years ago.  Some things have happened since then.  I've graduated college, found a house - just down the street, as it happens - and I've become involved in my local community.

I had read the email and gone right down the list. It did lay out many useful tips. It also recommended I seek out other metas and talk to them, pick up any practical advice they may have. They had quite a bit. Two other Z’s like me had the disheartening suggestion that I not go picking encounters with more than two people at a time.

What’s the use of being a superhero when you’re not that super?

But then when I got my house I noticed that my effects had become a bit more powerful.  Nothing huge, but noticeable to me.  A statistically significant bump.  And the only thing that had changed was that my association with my area had changed, had become more intimate.   It was more personal to me, its health and wellbeing more immediate in my worldview.

It's nothing major when you look at it.  It's a small town to begin with, and this isn't the main street either.  No, no - that's where most of the businesses are.  No, here we have some houses at this end including my own, the convenience store, two churches, the bookstore, a lawyer’s office, then the library and the park, and finally, after about two blocks of park, the city office, fire station, police station and the end of town.  All the stuff that doesn't make much money or draw much traffic, but you still need it.  This isn't the main street - it's one block over.  About three-fourths of a mile in all, fifty feet wide, houses and businesses on either side. That's plenty for a low-rent superhero to haunt.

Except there was the town council meeting. And a movement, and a vote by electronic poll, and now my little low rent superhero territory is going to be widened into a boulevard. It turns out that electrical manipulation, once you’ve done some of the practices, can be pretty handy.  Those voting machines are pretty neat inside once you know what you're feeling and smelling.

It's not really feeling and smelling but I can't really describe it to a normie so there you are.  I can feel how the voting systems work, smell how their programming is baked together.  And a few touches here and there, a quizzically raised brow at the logic trees and you can make the electrons dance to whatever tune you like.

I have no idea whether these changes would work if you took the machines out of town.  Area of effect, and all that. Might have to test that.

Long story slightly less long, my quaint little Morrigan Street is going to be renamed Morrigan Boulevard, and we're changing the name of the park to Morrigan Park.  The street will be wider and it'll actually connect to the highway now.  About one-third of the work is done and we've had two new businesses open up already.

So I went back into my email inbox and found that list of exercises and self-tests the agency guy gave me to do, and I did them again.  And would you look at that, my numbers are up across the board.  It appears that, to a degree at least, you are indeed the master of your own destiny.

And as good as being a low-rent superhero has felt all this time, stopping petty crimes and whatnot, the power bump feels even better.  I could do more, become more.  I just have to increase my territory.  I wonder if I could get the town council to length Morrigan Avenue beyond the park.  Why not?

Y, indeed.  

MTV Lairs

"What. Is. UP my friends and we are back at the den of Gritch Flammenwerfer am I sayin that right, man?"

"It is close enough."

"Gritch, he's been haunting this volcano for a while now and he says it's way overdue for an update and ain't that the truth! Look at this. This kind of decor went out in the Seventies. Seventeen-seventies, amirite, Gritch?"

"I would not know. I have not kept abreast of interior decor trends. I only know the look on the face of the last maiden I brought here. She appeared...nonplussed."

"Aw, dude! That ain't right. But we're gonna hook you up with some of the hottest designers with their latest ideas and bring some heat back to the hearth, nowhatimsayn?"

"Stop speaking in this fashion. You are virtually incomprehensible."

"Dude. Talk into a mirror, you sound like a congested dictionary. Anyway we got Laney Todd supa fresh from Milan with a stopover in London, first takes, Laney!"

"Hey Timo, hi, Gritch!"

"Greetings, morsel."

"It's a real challenge to work on such a large place, Gritch.  The bigger the space, the bigger the decor, you know?  This is a recurring issue in designing for large spaces, and this is even bigger than Biltmore Estate. Did you know Biltmore is the largest single house in the US?"

"How large is it?"

"It's over 170,000 square feet! That's, ummm..."

"A little over twelve square wingspans. I suppose that's a bit large for you monkeys."

"Hey, don't be calling no names now."

"But it would be far too cramped for me.  I need to be able to stretch.  Elaine, I want you to take out the north wall of the caldera so I can expand my hoard pile for proper lounging."

"That'll be a really big job, Gritch. I was thinking of maybe playing down the gold pile, too. It's a bit over-the-top, you know?  Ostentatious isn't really fashionable anymore, not even among the super-rich.  It's all about subtleties and keeping it low key."

"You better 'pologize, y'hear?"

"Silence, morsel. Elaine. Attend me. Can you do it?"

"Sure, but I'm going to need to call in some help. It's cozy to you but to me it's, well, a volcano."

"You hear me? I ain't playing with you, Bitch!"

"I said shush." <munch> "And it's pronounced 'Gritch.' I was afraid this show would be in bad taste and I was right. Bleah. I am hosting this show now. Elaine. Tell me what you need."