The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

“You’re not serious.”

“Oh, totally serious.” I gave her my best smile. “Congratulations! Your family just got much, much bigger.”

“I... but, you...” Carol Danvers, then went silent, staring at me. “They’re all Skrulls...”

“Who’ve all been Imprinted with yours and DiDi’s personalities, and you’re really pissed at them. Also having a very fun time hoodwinking them. So just in case you happen to run into any of them and get all huffy that some Skrulls have powers similar to yours and outfits similar to yours and figures similar to yours, well, it’s all totally by design.”

She put her hands on her head and shook it back and forth. “Ahhhh! This crazy life! I can’t... this feels like such a violation of my privacy!” She blinked a couple times, and then looked up at me. “They duplicated your memories! Did they learn something they shouldn’t?”

“No,” I smirked. “They know there’s whole gaps missing in real time memories from their Imprints of DiDi and Kwannon. They are chalking it up to mental defenses or inefficiencies in the recording methods, or just plain psionic interference, and it actually makes the Imprints easier to ‘control’.

“Of course, those Imprints are just layered in ways they can’t measure, fully intact and aware of what they are from the moment they are Imprinted. So, for instance, they’d know they were Imprinted clones if the Skrulls tried to grow doubles of us and pump them for information.”

“Mine... can’t do that...” Carol trailed off knowingly. “Why do I have the feeling it’s why the Skrulls keep being able to get through our security?”

“It’s also why we keep changing the security systems and passwords and things. Shapeshifters suuuuuuck, especially the clever ones,” I nodded at her. “But Warskrulls aren’t THAT common. Imprinting other personalities takes a special sort, even among the Skrulls, and wielding super-powers needs both the proper psyche and the right genetics that can adapt to them, so they aren’t floating in zillions of Skrulls who can become Powered.”

“So... not that different from humanity,” she reasoned slowly.

“Not quite. Pretty much all humans can become Powered or Forsaken, as they all have the X-gene or its counterpart. Unleashing the X-Gene and figuring out exactly what it is and what it does is our problem.”

“And you just stole all their genetic knowledge on us...” she murmured in sudden realization.

I beamed. “Such a happy coincidence. The research teams are still going through it, but they said it saved them years of blind alleys. They’ve actually got a decent hope of solving it within a generation, breaking the whole code in two.” Getting some rebuilt world-computers of Xandaran-level tech would be a big help, too.

“Wow.” She stared at me again. “There’s... a lot of implications to that, aren’t there?”

“Every human alive being a Hard Forsaken or a true Powered is pretty big implications, yeah.”

“If we get past this Negative Zone thing.”

“Oh, that’s not an ‘if’. It’s a ‘how well’. If we can butcher most of it outside the Milky Way, we’re going to be poised to go into the stars as a people. The current powers won’t be able to stop us, and they’ll only be able to thank us for our help and grace in allowing them to survive this tribulation.”

She stared at me, half-smiling and half-smirking. “Damn, Dyna, you are so damn scary when you talk about destroying space empires and everything, and them smiling and thanking you for it.”

“Sorry. I happen to love it when someone is hoist on their own petard and thanks me for it. It tells me I’ve done something incredibly right.” I shrugged at her in mock helplessness.

“I still can’t believe you co-opted the whole Warskrull program.” She shook her head and stared at me.

“Keep thinking that way, because them not believing it is pretty core to its success.”

“How long do you think it’ll be before they try to broaden it to other power sets and Imprints again?” she asked after a moment of thought.

“After the Wave. The success of the current methods and combination of Imprints is too high, especially as we finetune it to find more victim volunteers. They probably want to gain the same mix of success with other Imprints, but there’s a lack of facilities to apply the treatments.” I tapped my fingers together. “They’ve tried twice already to start up other secret Warskrull facilities, and someone blew them all to shit, along with the personnel intended to work there. It’s like someone knows they are trying to make more Warskrulls and isn’t going to let them do so.”

“And they have no idea it’s actually their own existing Warskrulls.” Carol shook her head, laughing despite herself. “Are they going to test the, ah, Comet Corps of theirs? Against me, us?” Carol asked. Her Ultraspecs Flare glittered on her head. The additional boosts it gave her meant no straight copy of her stood a chance in combat against her.

“Oh, that’s the main reason I was stopping by. They already did.” I waved at her. “They sent one to attack the Xandaran mining camp at Aquila, probably intending to test them against the Nova Corps and see how well you can trounce one.”

She straightened up. “I can take apart any of them Eight or lower on my own,” she said in a low voice. “A Nine can probably delay me, and I might lose to a Ten if I stuck around. With Flare I can straight-up block a Ten, no problem.”

“Aye, she warned me ahead of time, and so I made a point of being in-system to Portal out the ore and help out a wounded Acanti when she came in on her attack run.”

She clapped her hands. “And?” she asked expectantly.

“Ah, our fight took us across a million miles of asteroids in Aquila IV’s rings, destroyed a lot of space rocks, and vented a lot of energy since she was in Flare form. I beat the ever-loving crap out of her, then was seen to chop her apart into kibbles and incinerate the remains in a nuke-level fireburst.

“The watching Skrulls kinda slunk off very quietly thereafter, and made their report. There was some checking into when I got there, grumbles about really bad timing, but they decided they couldn’t lose another Comet given what was coming, and they’ve called off further tests. There’s a good chance they are going to be sent into a high-risk combat zone against the Wave and quietly extinguished for their failure, too bad, so sad.”

“Whether they actually get into combat or not,” Carol nodded. “What about the Imprint?”

I tossed a thumb at myself. “She’s in Unimerge waiting to be Duped out with a Core and not as a Skrull any longer.”

Carol winced. “Ouch! With that set of powers?” she had to ask.

“They’ll operate off the Core instead of overlapping, but, yeah.”

“Wait! That means you have an Imprint of me inside your head!” she exclaimed in alarm.

“Carol,” I admonished her in the face of her little righteousness streak, “I know you’ve been thinking about this forever, so I’ll just confirm it. You’ve been in my head for years.” I tapped my temple meaningfully. “Unlike Callie, I don’t forget stuff if it fades from my Mimicking. Multiple thought streams, remember? All these years of fifty percent copies from you, you don’t think I’ve been taking the same fifty percent each time, have you?”

“I knew it! I knew it! You always knew too much about how I was thinking and feeling and stuff to just be at half!” she exclaimed, rising to her feet in vindication.

“No, actually, fifty percent was just fine for all of that,” I told her, smiling slightly. “Your copy inside me was always clawing for more complete memories, fuller persona, and being completely intact. She’s been basically fully functional since about eighty percent, stands alone and runs as one of my thoughtstreams. She updates off you when I Mimic you, but as a thoughtstream, I don’t lose her if I lose your template.

“So I’ve always got you with me, Carol.”

Her expression was complicated at that admission. “And I agreed to all of this. Does Callie have the same thing?” she had to ask heavily.

“She didn’t, until I told her about it, and then she totally did. You know she’s a Gestalt already, right? She was delighted to bring you in completely.”

Carol’s eyes were a little wide. “This is so weird. I don’t know if I feel like a mother, a sister, a child, or a lab experiment.” She put her hand on her forehead, staring at me, probably floundering a bit mentally.

“You forgot ‘massage recipient’,” I added in a singsong voice, and she flushed despite herself. “Karaoke partner, like-minded fashion critic, battle buddy, wingman, road tripper...”

“Sooo... how much of our time together have I been spending with myself?” she asked curiously.

My Cara-thoughtstream shook out my hair and turned it blonde. “Hey, I deserve some physical uptime, too, you know! And spending it with you was the best way! So, ever since I gained separate thoughtstream status, you can figure I took over when we were together. I’m not you-you,” she quoted in the air. “I’ve got waaaaay too much access to Dyna’s brains and Cosmic Awareness and all the other stuff going on in here to be the same. I get updated with you whenever you’re Mimicked again. I do get real antsy when I don’t get updated with you for a few days. Have to make sure my Prime is okay and everything.”

Carol’s lips worked into a wry smile. “So, you’re everything I am, plus everything you are being a part of Dyna? You must be waaaay smarter than I am...”

“Dyna is horrifically smart, and it rubs off, yeah. The trick is being interested in different stuff than the other parts of her,” Cara agreed, leaning forwards conspiratorially. “I have to admit it’s great being able to figure out stuff I couldn’t before. I can picture things, I can find stuff out, I can read so fast...” Cara smiled despite herself as Carol just winced and nodded that such would be pretty nice. “I am by far the most envious of how fast I can do paperwork now. Zzzzip, superspeed through it all. Day’s paperwork done in under a minute, perfect retention, signatures, comprehension, the works.”

“Okay, that is totally unfair,” Carol promptly complained, pointing at herself. “Give. I want some super-brains for myself. It’s like I’m making everybody around me stronger, but getting nothing out of it! Can I be selfish for once?”

Cara sighed. “Your physical brain isn’t geared for this kind of smarts, Carol. Dyna’s head is literally like a supercomputer, with metaphysical extensions stacked on top of it. I could and would dump everything unique to me into you, and you’d promptly lose most of it. You’d probably pick up my love of lockpicking, and the fact we’ve got a vintage aircraft collection on the moon, and some general idea of the ugh-math crap Dyna is always thinking about, and that’s about it.”

“So, even this full Imprint really didn’t give you anything, but it’s going to have everything-plus when she gets Duplicated out.” Carol sighed again, thinking, Lockpicking, of all things?

“Well, yes,” Cara admitted. “We’re gestalting the three Imprints, of course. They can run different thoughtstreams for the personas instead of the core personalities being fractured.”

The two of them exchanged gazes, and Carol looked like she had made a decision. “Am I ready for that?” she asked slowly. “If you’re everything I am, am I ready for that?”

Cara tilted her head slightly, keeping Carol’s eyes. “Yes,” she said softly. “You don’t want to fall behind. All us others out there with your once-unique powers, skills, drive, and personality, plus more, is already nibbling at you. You figure you should be leading the way, not falling further behind, and even despite knowing that we all love you as a sister, mother, and partner, that won’t change how you feel, and we all know that, too.”

Carol took a deep breath. “I think not feeling unique anymore is the hardest part,” she admitted.

Cara nodded. “We all know we aren’t Carol Danvers. We all know you’re the Prime. However, we all love being up to date with you, knowing that you’re doing well, getting worried when you aren’t, because, well, we can’t help it. We’re copies of you. The single biggest thing the Skrull Imprints all wanted to know was how you were doing, how you were handling this, and if you were okay with it. They’re going to be really depressed if you’re not.”

“You’re all in contact?” Carol blinked.

“Telepathy,” Cara reminded her. “Dyna’s is cosmic, she can reach right across the galaxy to update once she knows the mind to lock on, and the Imprints all share. We call ourselves the Carol Corps!” she smiled widely.

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This is, of course, a mild tribute to the many readers of the 2014 Captain Marvel run by Kelly Sue Deconnick, who actually wrote a heroic and reasonable comic series about her, finally. The ardent admirers of what she did called themselves the Carol Corps.