The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

Everyone spasmed in shock, some of the Leaguers more than others, even getting nosebleeds at getting the Word of Creation smacked across their souls. I noted Oliver Queen was hit a little harder than most of them.

Instant obligatory superhero fight, prevented!

“I, I...” Kal-El of Krypton murmured, not knowing what to say as he sank back down, his eyes wide.

“What’s the plan, Dynamo?” Primus asked shortly, still seated, still expectant.

“We have the wherewithal to recreate universes,” I went on shortly, as Superman slowly took his seat again. “This effect cannot harm 1832 unless we allow it to, because our future is not fixed. However, every other universe out there is tied directly to the End of Time, and that Time shortens every time another universe dies. Even if you destroy other Terras before they can conjoin, eventually the End is going to catch you.

“The solution is thus not in defying the End, because the End is the End. It is letting it happen, and then simply recreating what is destroyed in its wake. An artificial ending is only the cause of an artificial beginning, after all.”

“You can actually recreate an entire universe?” Princess Diana asked, impressed.

“Me, personally, no. We have access to cosmic tools and powers that can, however.” I turned my eyes up to their world, spinning slowly beyond the dome. “I know that you do not want to allow your world to be destroyed, and I have a solution for that as well, to stop us from fighting among ourselves.” I turned my eyes on Sersi. “A Uni-mind of their entire population hiding in a pocket dimension would avoid the destruction, and they can simply be returned to their world upon its recreation. In the event of active opposition to such, we can simply resettle them on a new world, yes?”

“We definitely have the resources to do so,” Sersi agreed. “And a Uni-mind will be able to endure the wait effortlessly.”

“Wait, wait! Why can’t you do the Uni-mind thing and just recreate your world, if there’s going to be a reboot?” Green Arrow protested brashly, saying what was on their minds. “We could use the cosmic doohickey to do the job!”

“Your world is doomed, regardless of how many others you destroy, Mr. Queen,” I told him calmly, pointing at the hologram. More lines came up, hundreds of them, and they began to die, sometimes one at a time, sometimes two, but as they did, the End of Time grew closer and closer to those remaining. “Even if you are the last timeline standing, the End of Time will be no more than a day or two away at that point, and you will die.”

The thread that was 1832 continued forward, ignoring the shortened End of Time completely as the timelines compressed and detonated, again and again and again, a ruthless purging of alternities that left nothing standing but the one lone thread it could not touch.

A Cube filled with stars spun in the void. Galaxies sparkled as six crystalline suns gleamed about it, and colors wove together, reforming the timelines from the one lone thread, up and down the scale, restoring all as it was.

“The Wielder of the Cube of Eternity is even now taking a picture of the multiverse, a frozen moment in time, of all the timelines and possibilities, and will recreate them all at the appropriate moment, undoing what has been done. Even if specific destructive attention to this timeline took place, they could exit this dimension into a higher plane and still perform this duty.

“Something might try to stop this from taking place,” the Batman reasoned. “They want to do a clean wipe... to recreate things their own way?” he predicted.

“Or this could be a machination of the Void, and they simply wish our multiverse to cease to exist forever,” I replied calmly. “Or perhaps some other power wishes there to be only one universe it will create and be lord over. It is all possible.

“Stopping them is our job.” I surveyed them all. “Anything which can arrange this is on the cosmic scale of power, and even its servants will not be pushovers. Those who can’t persist in combat at, hmm, Wonder Woman’s scale, should instead form the core of the Uni-mind which will succor your planetary population.

“I say this in Truth, Hope, and Valor.

“Trust us. We are the High Guard, and we will do the job right.”

They all quivered despite themselves at the power of the three Words of Creation, their eyes wide. There was no way not to believe me if I could say those words.

“Do you know who is doing this, and how?” Batman ground out, finally opening his eyes after long moments, a sole drop of blood falling from his nose.

“No, but I know where to look.” My smile was quite grim. “And that means I know where to begin the hunt!”

Despite themselves, everyone there grinned like wolves.

Someone wanted to destroy the multiverse? The High Guard and the Justice League were on it! Woe be them!!!

--------

A blizzard of things happened rapidly thereafter.

Sersi went with the balance of the Justice League to their world to form a Uni-Mind and broadcast to the whole planet what needed to be done to save them. There were understandably some of them who refused to join the Uni-mind, others panicked, there was chaos and murder, and yet the vast, vast majority of the billions of people on Earth-383-44 were drawn up into the Uni-Mind, increasing its power and the rate of absorption as they joined it.

By the time the few hours remaining had passed and the End of Times arrived, all who were going to join the Uni-Mind had done so.

Several super-geniuses had died abruptly after they deduced that destroying our Terra would grant them a short reprieve, and made plans to that effect. Lex Luthor and Brainiac were among them, the latter totally surprised at how quickly we got through his defenses and shut him down.

The 383-44 Uni-Mind simply opened up a space to the Pocket, which was completely outside multiversal space between the Underweb, and watched from complete safety as we grimly went about our tasks.

Tracking the original timeline where this had happened was a process of elimination, as we simply went as far back as we could and measured for the missing timeline which should have been there. While it was impossible to find out what had happened, as the entire alternity was gone, past and future alike, it gave us a starting point for the energy readings, even as an unseen hand reached out and closed it on 383-44.

The detonation of the planet was beyond apocalyptic. The End of Times was brought forward instantly, some unlimited source of power detonating and collapsing all at once on the other side of the dimensional barrier. The entire universe collapsed instantly, drawn into the last point of Time, and the incoming Incursion vanished from our sight, having met its End and its whole future and past vanishing at the same moment.

---

The four Green Lanterns present all swore as their Lanterns dimmed and died. Without the central power battery on Oa, no power was being broadcast to them, and so they were naturally powerless.

“Take off your Rings and put them into the Eyes, gentlemen,” Zhuli advised them calmly.

All four of them looked at the golden Lanterns hovering over their shoulders, having been gifted them by the explicit permission of Eon after learning of their origins.

Kyle Rayner was the first to do so, inserting the Ring into the opening of the Eye so the Lantern symbol took up the pupil. Then he focused, and the Eye pulsed, forming a precisely defined green Corvette around him, which he promptly floored on the green road through the stars underneath him.

The others followed suit, looking a little relieved that they wouldn’t have to be throwing around yellow beams like the other Lanterns here would be doing. Zhuli just smiled and shook his head as he watched them testing out the utility of their new Eyes.

“You should be able to store your Power Batteries in hammerspace until they are needed again,” Zhuli suggested. The inert objects soon vanished into pocketspace storage tied to their Eyes.

The remnants of the Green Lantern Corps were still ready to serve!

------

The Alternity Watch was alternately both sent out and recalled. A monitoring station was set way up on the Infinity Abyss, the young Custodian there quite fretful and concerned about her Multiverse up and evaporating, and even the Abyss itself was shrinking as the reality it was bound to was being cut short.

Damn convenient place to look down at the rest of the Multiverse from, and the Custodian liked the company, lonely job that it was.

It seemed our Incursion had been part of the third series after the initial one, and they were picking up the pace across the multiverse.

From here, however, we could see the Incursions start, and move to take action. Moreover, we could see any common threads between them.

Like, the legions of robots that had started to follow them.

Some opportunist had decided to loot and pillage while the universes were going down, and armies of modified Super-Adaptoids were moving from world to world, looting them of everything valuable and extinguishing life down to the cellular level before leaving to find other worlds, sometimes detonating the world behind them to obliterate the timeline, sometimes using it as a detector to find another world to loot when the devastated one started an Incursion with another world, and the Bridgebuilder robots they left behind powered up a Gate to send them to the new world.

We weren’t the kind of people to sit by while that happened, nor were we the kind to run pell-mell into the middle of countless evolving Adaptoids even more powerful than the Mad Thinker’s original inventions.

We were totally the kind to find out their weaknesses, apply Banefire and Blooding so they couldn’t reassemble themselves, use Vampire’s Veil so they completely couldn’t see us, and then take them completely apart with super-speed and enough power that they couldn’t adapt to us.

Watching Superman, Primus, Prima, and the Flash have speed races zipping around chopping Mapmakers out of the sky during a Blue Shift Incursion/Invasion was instructive. I didn’t have quite that level of super-speed on my own (and didn’t bother to Mimic it), but I didn’t do too bad with Matter Manipulation disassembling the things completely in return.

Every world we saved was another one put to a Uni-mind, and if they had strong enough heroes, gave us more recruits!

------

“Cypher and the Mad Thinker broke their memory circuits wide open. We’ve got a map and record all the way back to their creation points,” Batman informed us. “We can finally determine the source of the Incursions.”

I received the record from him, as I was the hound for the hunting pack behind me. I displayed the data, and ran through it quickly, shifting it up to Nimue up in the Infinity Abyss, who instantly cross-checked it against the still-existing alternities tracked from up there.

“Five thousand one hundred and nine alternities,” I whispered. “Destroying worlds, using them to make more of themselves, and spreading on to other dimensions as they spread their destruction...”

I sighed. I was far too good at picturing such stuff. That was probably thirty-five trillion lives, just on alternate Terras. The dimensions fallen were uncountable in terms of lost lives.

“Nimue has verifications that forty-two hundred and four of those dimensions are gone. The ones remaining are scrapworlds waiting to be drawn to other alternities.”

======

As a side note, the Marvel version of the DC Universe does not actually have the Emotional Spectrum. Exactly what the Green Lantern light is made of was totally unknown before the emotional spectrum retconning in the 00’s (supposedly provided by the power of the Guardians themselves?). Since all those crossover books were before then... no emotional spectrum!

Also, there’s a Captain America in the Marvel DC-dom!