“Where do you get such conclusions?” Cecil persisted.
Even if my words so conveniently echoed his own thoughts about Nolan, he wasn’t rushing to take everything I said on faith.
That was normal.
I understood that my position needed some justification.
If I didn’t have memories from another life, how could I have come to this realization on my own, based only on what I could find out in this one?
Fortunately, I’d thought about this question before.
“Do you want to know where my father messed up?” I answered a question with a question.
“It’s simple.
The books.”
“Books?” Either Stedman really didn’t understand, or he was just pretending to be surprised.
“Your father writes travel books.
And they’re, well…”
“Complete crap?” I smirked.
“Well, let’s say they’re not exactly bestsellers,” Cecil said tactfully.
“You boost his sales, don’t you?” I’d suspected that before.
“Marketing works wonders,” the old man admitted.
“Got it,” I nodded.
“But I don’t mean the books he’s writing now.
I’m talking about his first three novels.
He wrote them under a pseudonym in the first few years of his stay on Earth.
Judging by the fact that they weren’t successful, your people weren’t watching him as closely back then.
They’re not easy to find now.
There aren’t even digital copies online, but with your resources, you can probably track down a couple of surviving print copies.
Since I could, you can too.
Read them at your leisure, and then we’ll continue this conversation.
And now…”
I demonstratively looked at my watch.
“I need to go home.
I don’t want my mom to worry.”
By this point, I’d gathered all my things and was ready to fly back.
“We have plenty of time,” Cecil noted.
“Debbie’s still at her friend’s place and will be there for at least…”
“Yeah, about that,” I added a bit more seriousness to my voice, interrupting him.
“Cut that shit out.
Now that we know each other and have found common ground, I won’t tolerate my home being turned into a fucking reality show for your spies.
The next bug I find in my room or bathroom, I’ll take it as a personal insult.
And you won’t like the consequences.”
With great effort, I held back the part about where and to whom I’d shove those fucking bugs.
Who even thought of putting them in the bathroom?
Sick fucks.
I wasn’t even sure I’d found all the surveillance devices in the house.
For obvious reasons, I was quite limited in my actions.
So I couldn’t even bring a girl over.
Any private conversations we had would become entertainment for the agents, not to mention anything more intimate.
The mere thought made me furious.
*
*
*
As Cecil had said, Mom wasn’t home when I returned.
I didn’t even have to come up with an excuse for another delay.
Although I have to admit, meeting Eve had a positive effect on my mother.
She’d become much more tolerant of my daytime and evening absences, apparently thinking I was hanging out with Eve.
She just sometimes tried to get confirmation of her suspicions about our hypothetical relationship.
And since Mom’s misconceptions only benefited me, I wasn’t in a rush to dispel them.
But I had no plans for today besides the underwater training I’d already done.
So I was going to spend the evening reading the last of my father’s three fiction books.
Then I could find Eve and beat up some villain together, or do some other good deed. This story is hosted at g.com.
That would be my reward for the torture of reading Dad’s writing.
Yeah, my father’s novels.
From a literary standpoint, they’re mediocre, derivative crap, and I’m being generous.
I understand he wrote them in his early years on Earth, when the language was new to him, as was human culture in general.
But even ignoring the poor language, the narrative itself…
“I flew to planet N and began searching for the Crusher.
When I found him, I immediately attacked.
I hit him with all my strength.
My blow sent him flying to the horizon, but he quickly recovered and hit me back.
We fought for several hours until I knocked out all three of his front eyes.”
And that’s the whole book.
Get a mission, fly to complete it, fight someone, go on another mission.
Minimal exposition, no humor, poor language, tautologies, terrible style.
His early books are bad in every way.
It’s amazing anyone agreed to publish them at all.
I suspect Dad pressured the publisher.
Even with such a limited print run.
And they were so hard to find!
Fortunately, a small fan community had formed around my father’s work.
To my surprise, Arthur Rosenbaum was a member.
I thought he had better taste.
The guy is smart.
Through a half-dead forum of fans of my father’s work, who mostly searched for deep meaning in these books, and surprisingly, among the crazy theories were some that almost perfectly described the real situation, I learned about offline meeting places and the real addresses of some club members.
From one such guy, who was convinced that these books were written by Omni-Man himself and were examples of Viltrumite culture, meaning if you think about it, he was accusing my father of plagiarizing his own people’s books, I bought these novels.
And the bastard charged me a pretty penny.
***
Reading the first chapter of my father’s writing clarified where the theory about the Viltrumite origin of the books came from.
The comic adventurer in Dad’s books had the full set of abilities inherent to that race.
He flew in open space, hit with the force of a meteor’s fall, and withstood the extreme conditions of deep space and more.
Not only he, but also his occasionally appearing colleagues and their poorly described employers could also fly in space without ships and communicate with the main character, for example, by hovering in orbit around the next planet.
And with such terrible writing talent, the whole thing became completely unreadable.
It might have worked as a comic or a movie, with bright pictures and special effects, but as a novel?
When the author completely ignores the emotional component, style, and detail?
Just brutal, endless action with minimal means of expression.
Immersion in the story and empathy for the hero of these books were at about zero or below.
Even understanding that it was all true and had happened to my own father, whom I still loved, didn’t help.
No wonder that trilogy was a commercial failure.
But I wasn’t reading my father’s writings for aesthetic pleasure.
I’d been convinced he was nothing as a writer much earlier when I skimmed his more successful, real-name travelogues.
The quality was better, but still nothing outstanding.
Except for the fact that the author could, in a couple of minutes or less, fly around the entire globe and gather a ton of reliable material.
The same applied to his earlier creations.
Their value was that they were almost certainly as truthful as his travel books.
That nameless adventurer in his books was himself, long before he came to Earth to spread good and deliver justice.
But looking at these notes about space travel, I didn’t find confirmation of Dad’s fairy tales about happiness for everyone for free and victorious communism.
Quite the opposite.
The poorly defined boss of the hero gives him missions to scout and, as a rule, destroy various threats.
Many of them hadn’t even moved from potential to kinetic yet.
The brave adventurer took care of that.
All of this fit much better with my memories of my father’s betrayal and indicated that this time would be the same.
***
I’d thought about this a lot.
About why he was really sent to Earth and about that whole story he told young me, Cecil, and everyone else.
My first thought was, did the rest of the world really swallow this shit?
But thinking more, and most importantly, gathering the fragmentary knowledge about our race that I’d managed to extract from my father over the years, he was generally very reluctant to talk about his past, I came to the conclusion that this scenario, with Viltrumite communism, was quite realistic.
More precisely, one of two most likely scenarios.
What do we know about Viltrumites?
They’re all fucking super-beings.
Literally all of them.
Each individual Viltrumite is a significant force on a planetary scale, especially if they use asteroids.
That’s something humanity as a whole can’t claim yet.
Despite all the hysteria around nuclear weapons and “Doomsday,” all the nuclear weapons on Earth, if gathered in one place, wouldn’t be enough to guarantee the destruction of the population of a single continent.
Moreover, judging by my father’s offhand comments, humans aren’t biologically a significantly backward race compared to most of the universe’s population.
There are stronger, more durable, smarter, more predatory, and ultimately more technologically advanced races, but it’s all within reason.
There are no others like the Viltrumites, as far as Nolan knows.
Once, Dad even let slip that Earthlings are surprisingly strong when you look at the strength and number of their most powerful representatives, superheroes and supervillains.
He was talking about them, and we really do have a lot.
Second point about Viltrumites: they can interbreed with other species.
I couldn’t get exact data from my father, but even if the genetic similarity between humans and Viltrumites is a plus, humans are certainly not the only race with which my father’s kin can have offspring.
He just couldn’t hide that, because from the very beginning he tried to pretend that the birth of a hybrid child of a Viltrumite and an Earth woman wasn’t such a big deal.
And Viltrumites live for thousands of years, and they become stronger throughout their lives.
And you know what that looks like?
A literally god-chosen race, each member of which could pass for an Almighty on some random planet, just look at Nolan.
So what kind of civilization would these godlike beings have?
What would other sentients be in the eyes of Viltrumites?
If you look at Earth’s history, you’ll notice that the worst atrocities on a state level happened when someone started identifying their people as a chosen race and considered everyone else second-class beings.
That includes the genocide of Jews and Slavs in Nazi Germany, slavery in America, the genocide of Native Americans, and many other examples from ancient times to the present day.
Though I have to admit, the roots of these phenomena were largely material, and ideology served merely as a convenient tool in the hands of capital.
But humans convince each other of their chosenness through religion, ideology, and other invented things.
Viltrumites see it, their chosenness, with their own eyes.
They are literally superior to others in every way.
And incomparably superior.
And in such a reality, when there exists such a powerful race of super-beings in the universe, everyone else can only hope that this chosen people will be united by a powerful pacifistic ideology.
So what could the society of super-beings, aware of their exclusivity compared to everyone else in the galaxy, be like?
I see two main options.
The first and most obvious: expansion and conquest on an ideological basis, rooted in the awareness of their own superiority.
Everything is obvious here.
The Viltrumites see that they are better and want to cement that by conquering all worlds.
Any measures can be used, because there’s no point in pitying second-class beings whose lives are so short and insignificant.
To be clearer, imagine that on our own Earth, it suddenly turned out that Labord’s chameleons, little lizards that eat insects and live only a year, were sentient.
Would people consider them equals?
It’s hard even to answer that for oneself.
And if you rephrase the trolley problem so that on one track there are five such chameleons, and on the other, five humans?
An obvious confirmation of this option is the words and actions of my father in the past.
Though I suspect he didn’t tell me everything.
For example, he never said why he waited so long.
And his explanation of the “one conqueror, one world” tactic is highly questionable, not to mention that he remembered the need to conquer Earth precisely when my powers awakened.
The second, more preferable but unfortunately unlikely scenario: cosmic communism and all sorts of useful activities where the Viltrumites act as some kind of higher power that helps others.
Roughly what Nolan talked about.
In favor of this hypothesis is that Viltrum has no purely material reasons for expansion.
The needs of an individual Viltrumite are even less than a human’s, we hardly need constant medicine, for instance.
Not to mention that any of us can fly into space and extract the necessary resources for our people.
And the example of some countries on Earth that moved quite confidently in this direction also speaks in favor of such a possibility.
But even here, not everything is rosy.
Even the strongest ideology doesn’t guarantee the absence of defectors, opposition, or ordinary criminals and psychopaths.
One human psychopath can kill a few people or, having obtained a weapon, shoot a few dozen.
A Viltrumite psychopath can single-handedly cause a global cataclysm on a single planet.
A group of Viltrumites who desire power can easily take over an entire system.
And everyone else should understand that perfectly well.
It follows that even the most pacifistic scenario has many dark tones.
Not to mention that others will be terrified that a Viltrumite version of Stephen Paddock might appear on their planet, or that a couple of young, hot tourists from Viltrum might have a fight, accidentally killing a few thousand locals.
And if the government of some civilization gets its hands on a weapon capable of killing all Viltrumites at once, what would stop them from using it?
Gratitude to their benefactors and their own morality?
I wouldn’t count on that.
But fear of the consequences, whether revenge from survivors or their own dependence on Viltrum, is much more reliable.