Team Omega (46 page)

“Yes, sir,” Jackson said.  The responsibility scared him—in some ways, it was more responsibility than Captain Lane had ever enjoyed.  He’d had the impression that the four Captains compared notes frequently, but he’d be alone.  Any other Captain would be junior to him.  “I’ll do my best.”

“I’m counting on you,” Harrison said, bluntly.  “The SDI has been devastated.  It won’t be long before someone with unfriendly ambitions realises that we’re critically weak in superhuman manpower; maybe we'll see another attempted coup, maybe something with more limited objectives.  We’re going to need your team in place to cope with it before the shit hits the fan—and it
will
, Captain.  The world was turned upside down when Hope struck Washington and the shockwaves will take a long time to fade.”

“Yes, sir,” Jackson said.  He couldn't disagree.  “How much freedom do I have?”

“As much as I gave Captain Lane and the others,” Harrison said.  “Just remember that you have to lead Team Omega into combat next time.  And try to learn some diplomatic skills.  You need them.”

Jackson nodded.  He didn’t feel up to the challenge; being a fire team leader in the Marine Corps was different from serving as a field team leader in any Special Operations Force, but Harrison was right.  There
was
no one else, unless he could find some retirees.  Even a former First Sergeant would be helpful. 

“I understand,” he said.  He hesitated.  There was something that had been bugging him.  “What are we going to do with the captured Saviours?”

Harrison frowned.  Gateway, Triple A and Warrior Girl had been taken alive; Lightning had been captured, but she had been crushed to a bloody pulp when the White House fell in.  Mainframe, Mimic, Hypersonic, the Redeemer and Hope were all confirmed dead.  Darkness and Flash Freeze had remained in the Congo and vanished shortly after Hope’s defeat and death.  Like the enhanced humans who had escaped South Africa, they’d probably add to the chaos gripping the continent in the future.  A number of lesser superhumans had also been captured or gone on the run, along with a handful of mutants.

“They may have been influenced by the Redeemer too,” Harrison said, “but the new administration isn't going to take that into account, not after everything else that’s happened in the last few days.  I understand that the leaders will be tried for terrorism—treason, too, for those who were born Americans.  Fireman suggested that the mutants could be exiled to the Congo and put to work there in the work gangs Hope founded to punish the former warlord supporters.  It may be the best possible solution.”

He shook his head.  “The world changed and we didn't really admit it to ourselves,” he said, flatly.  “We cannot let that happen again.”

Jackson nodded, but he knew that it wouldn't be easy. 

“We won’t,” he said, finally.  “Because for all their power, they’re still
human
.  And that means that we can beat them.”

The End

Afterword

“That’s the whole point of [superhumans], isn't it?  Something complicated; you make it simple, something you can hit, or else you just ignore it.  You stay as far as possible from the real world - which, let’s face it, can be a messy fucking place.”

-Billy Butcher; The Boys: Get Some (Garth Ennis).

Most superhero stories are instantly forgettable.

I think, to be honest, that that is a limitation of the genre.  The typical superheroes - Superman, Batman, Captain America, Iron Man - are heroes.  They rarely come to grips with realistic problems and, when they do, it tends to lead to some of the worst writing in comic book history.  Their stories show them punching something, as Garth Ennis noted in The Boys, to make a problem go away.  The real world doesn’t work that way.

DC and Marvel are particularly bad offenders because their mainstream comic books attempt to create an impression of superhumans in our world.  Superman and Batman meet real-world presidents, for example, and super-advanced technology co-exists with a world that isn't that very different from our own.  The failure to actually look at the concept of superhumans and how they might affect the world around them leads to stories such as
Panic In The Sky
and
Our Worlds At War
, which have a number of similarities (they both focus on an alien invasion) and yet are largely forgettable.  No matter what happens - Superman goes red and blue, Batman is accused of murder and becomes a hunted fugitive - their world never changes.

This became particularly absurd in the argument, after 9/11, of how the comic books should acknowledge the destruction of the Twin Towers.  To us, 9/11 was a horrific mass murder, a major terrorist attack; to the denizens of DC and Marvel, it’s merely another Tuesday.  The aforementioned stories above both featured far more damage, on a global scale, than the 9/11 plotters could hope to inflict in their wildest dreams.  And yet, 9/11 is still held up in both universes as a particularly horrific attack.

But what really undermines the mainstream comic book stories is the refusal to have superhumans genuinely change things, for better or worse.  Mark Miller sent The Authority to liberate a Third World hellhole from the clutches of an oppressive dictator, yet refused to focus on the aftermath.  (They later found a silver bullet in the form of a semi-reformed supervillain, who was sent to clean up the mess.)  One might as well cheer on American forces that liberated Iraq, yet ignore the bloody struggle to stabilise the country afterwards. 

This is, in many ways, the core problem with most comic book stories.  Having spent time and effort on settling up a universe, writers are reluctant to knock it down.  (And, at the same time, a radical change will often upset long-term readers - Spiderman’s
One More Day/Brand New Day
, for example - without adding more readers.)  Superman doesn't save the world from itself, Batman doesn't snap the Joker’s neck ... because either one would fundamentally alter the comic book universe.  There are very few moments of genuinely lasting change within both DC and Marvel (even Jason Todd came back to life).  And that is why most comic books are instantly forgettable. 

In the real world, things are different.

There is a fundamental difficulty between ‘equal opportunities’ and ‘equal outcomes.’  As an indie book writer, I am in competition with every other indie writer for the coveted number one slot on Amazon.  We all have the same shot at it - may the best writer win!  But only one of us can hold the place at any single time.  There’s no such thing as an equal outcome; writers are ranked according to sales and only one of us can be at the top. 

This is true across many fields of achievement.  A person who wishes to be a top violinist must work to master the instrument; they must practice, practice and practice.  Everyone can be given the opportunity to learn, but not everyone will make use of it.  There is no guarantee that giving two people the same opportunity will lead to the same outcome.  Child One may stick with the violin into adulthood and go on to play in concerts; Child Two may decide very quickly that he/she doesn't want to be a violinist and find something else to try.

I was brought up to believe, and still do, that we are all born equal, with equal potential for good and ill.  Our lives are determined by what use we make of the opportunities presented to us as we grow older.

But when superhumans are involved, everything changes.

Batman is the peak of human perfection; he’s strong, intelligent and frighteningly good at picking the weak spot to strike.  Given time to think and plan, he’s almost completely unbeatable (one of the few JLA stories I recall had him besting a trio of White Martians though deduction and careful planning.)  You could easily imagine Batman serving as a Navy SEAL, if things had been a little different.  But he isn't a match for Superman.  He’d get swatted aside casually if Superman really wanted to kill him.

(One of the few comic book series I actually remember is Irredeemable, where the two Batman-counterparts get killed very quickly.  One of them, in particular, is a genuinely brilliant deconstruction of the Badass Normal trope.)

If humans are born equal, what does it do to society if superhumans genuinely exist?

Call me a cynic if you like, but I don’t think it would be a very pleasant world.  A superman-type character could make himself the ruler of a nation and no one could stop him.  Or, on a smaller scale, a mind-controlling superhuman could build himself a harem or mentally dominate an entire city and, again, no one could stop him.  What does it mean for humanity if a bullied schoolboy develops superpowers and tears apart an entire school, killing thousands of innocent children?  And what happens if no one can bring him to account for his crimes?

Humans have a tendency to develop tribal attachments.  Why wouldn't superhumans have the same problem?  They may have powers, but they’re still human.  It probably would not take long for superhumans to start banding together - and tribes can easily become echo chambers, where contradictory ideas are rarely tolerated.  Some superhumans will consider themselves ... well,
saviours
; others will think of themselves as superior to the mere mortals under their feet and able to do whatever they like to people who cannot fight back.  Why not?  If mundane humans can engage in schoolyard bullying even as they grow into adulthood, why not superhumans?

As a character, Superman is simply too mature to be believable. 

And so, as I noted in the foreword, I set out to ask myself what sort of world might be shaped by superhumans - and how would the world respond?

I hope you enjoyed the story.  If you liked it, please feel free to leave a review.

Christopher G. Nuttall

Edinburgh, 2015.

The World of Team Omega

The first (known) superhuman appeared in Sudan, in 1979.  According to the reports (which were not believed at the time) the superhuman was a young female who was to be burned to death by her family for an unspecified offence.  She somehow took control of the flames and used them to incinerate her village before vanishing into the vast continent.  None of the stories sounded plausible until 1980, when a New York fireman fell from a burning building and sparked into a superhuman.  Several others, including a Polish dissident, sparked later in the same year.

It was not long before they started having an effect on world politics.  The Polish superhuman ended up leading a revolt against Russian dominance, something that was bitterly resented by the Polish population (and the rest of Eastern Europe).  This superhuman, powerful enough to tear through tanks with his bare hands and bring down aircraft with his gaze, was eventually killed by a heavy nuclear bomb (the Russians vastly overestimated the required blast) that devastated Warsaw.  Russia became a pariah internationally as the Soviet Union eventually disintegrated into chaos.  The appearance of the first Russian superhuman came too late to save the USSR.

Other sparking events continued to reshape the world.  The Falklands War created the first British superhuman, Invincible, and the Iraq-Iran War produced an Iraqi superhuman, although he remained largely undercover until much later, when he overthrew Saddam and took control of Iraq.  The United States attempted to remain in the lead by forming the first superhero team, headed by Fireman, which would be heavily involved in tackling the first supervillains to appear in the world.  These included Slaughter, a serial killer, and Jim Crow, a racist with a pathological hatred of non-white people. 

It was not long before research into superpowers started in earnest.  Foremost among them was Dr. Wouter Basson of South Africa, who became known as Dr. Death.  He experimented on captured black superhumans, eventually pioneering a technique for transferring superhuman organs from a superhuman into a normal human, granting some form of superhuman abilities.  While these techniques rarely produced anything that could compete with a natural-born superhuman, they
did
give the Apartheid regime an answer to increasing black unrest.  Dr. Death followed up this success by creating drugs that could inhibit superpowers, as well as a retrovirus that he claimed would eliminate the superhuman gene altogether from the black population.  Field tests of this virus achieved nothing more than the mass sterilisation of countless black women.

Others had their own ideas.  Looking for a low-cost way to destabilise communist gains in Latin America, the CIA set about recruiting from the handful of captured supervillains in American custody.  Slaughter was sent into Latin America with orders to spread terror, but the serial killer slipped his leash and went rogue.  By the time the outside world learned what had happened, several years later, he was responsible for thousands of deaths. 

1986 saw widespread changes in the law as America struggled to adapt to the existence of superhumans.  The first parts of what would eventually become SARA were written into law, insisting that active superhumans register with the government and—more controversially—banning the practice of dressing up as a superhuman without actually possessing superpowers.  On a lighter note, DC Comics won a lawsuit against ‘Superman’—a superhuman who wore a Superman costume—and managed to convince another superhuman to act as a mascot for the company.  Finally, the first version of the SDI was brought into existence by President Reagan.

The first Superhuman Era came to an end in 1987-88 when Slaughter’s activities in Latin America became public knowledge.  Fireman, then the leader of the ‘Americans,’ left his post to track down Slaughter and publicly beat him to death, following up with a press conference that placed the blame for the rampage on the current Administration.  Vice President George H.W. Bush, formerly Director of the CIA, took most of the blame, torpedoing his chance of succeeding President Reagan.  Fireman quit government service altogether and vanished somewhere into flyover country. 

This led to a series of tectonic shifts in global politics.  Most notably was an alliance between Latin American superhumans against the United States, who served as the front men for an anti-American alliance that eventually included every Latin American state.  In Iraq, Saddam was overthrown by a superhuman in the wake of the disastrous Iraq-Iran War, who proceeded to put Iraq on a more stable footing for the future.  Almost every country in the world saw superhuman activity, some managing to cope with it successfully, others almost losing control of their affairs to superhumans. 

President Cheney’s election in 1992 can be fairly said to start the second Superhuman Era.  Cheney oversaw the strengthening of the SDI, the creation of what would eventually become Team Omega and the creation of a legal environment that worked to channel superhuman energies in more productive directions.  Many superhumans would become celebrities, famed for being superhuman rather than anything else, with corporate backing that ensured that they got a wonderful life in exchange for toeing the line.  Superhumans more willing to enter government service were directed towards the SDI, or a handful of ‘black’ units that took advantage of superhuman abilities.  Given the fact that there were roughly 5000 superhumans in the world at the time, it served to prevent a greater upheaval.  Other nations were less lucky.

1995-1996 saw the final collapse of South Africa, isolated after news of Dr. Death’s experiments became public.  Thousands of whites fled the country as South Africa fell apart, while hundreds of superhumans went north, hiding themselves in sub-Saharan Africa.  Dr. Death himself was taken into custody by an American SF unit and eventually vanished under mysterious circumstances. 

It was merely the first wave of chaos that threatened to tear the world’s fragile balance of power asunder.  Russia started making its first steps back onto the world stage, backing the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and providing arms and equipment to Latin America.  Saudi Arabia finally collapsed into chaos and was largely annexed by Iraq.  America and Iran started mending fences that would lead to a reluctant alliance to maintain the balance of power in the Middle East.   Bangladesh, of all places, became a major regional power.  China started reforming, only to be threatened by demands for more reform from its underclass. 

Disaster nearly fell in 2009, on the verge of a United Nations Conference on the African Situation.  Put simply, a superhuman with a unique power—the ability to turn off superpowers possessed by others—was pushed into involvement with a plot to trigger a superhuman crisis that would reshape politics in the United States for years to come.  The power-drainer would kill several victims, including Marvin Lofting (America II), before finally being stopped by Matt Tracker of the SDI.  Much of the truth of the affair was covered up by the SDI, which resumed its search for a second superhuman with similar powers.  The UN conference failed, unfortunately, paving the way for Hope’s creation of the Saviours. 

There is no clear consensus on the origin of superhuman powers.  Theories range from Nazi experiments back in World War Two to the unlocking of previously-dormant potential in the human genetic code, or meddling by aliens or other advanced entities.  There is also no way to predict who will become a superhuman, or what powers they will develop.  All that can be said with any confidence is that the transformation normally occurs when the victim is pushed right to the limit. 

Generally, superhumans are classed according to strength and resilience, ranging from Level 1 to Level 5.  The handful of superhumans with powers that seem to defy the standard scale are classed as Level X and regarded (rightly) as extremely dangerous.  Mostly, superhumans are classed by the SDI when they register and undergo training to prepare themselves for a superhuman life. 

The Superhuman Activity Regulatory Act (SARA) provides the legal background to superhuman registration and control.  Superhumans who wish to use their powers in a public setting are required to register and undergo formal training, which can lead to a career as a public servant and deputized police officer.  Those who have higher-level powers are generally encouraged to join the SDI.  Superhumans who wish to remain unregistered are expected to refrain from using their powers in a public setting, a rule that has been harshly criticized by, among others, the ACLU, on the grounds that it discriminates against superhumans.