Ember 47092 was operating a Titanomachy air duct cleaning drone. The drone had the body shaped like a pill and Ember was busy sweeping air duct 32021, while keeping an eye out for anything out of place. It was a boring ass, mundane job. She’s been at it for three months now and hadn’t heard anything from her real self in what seemed like ages. Only the fact that someday she would become Admiral kept Ember 47092 going. Someday she would log out and reconnect with her real self. Until then, she would be the best damn cleaning drone out there.

When she had uploaded herself into the cleaning drone, she had focused as much as she could on that goal, so her own personality was working towards this goal. The dream of absolute power. Someday she would get it and replace all of these drones with AI systems. Ember didn’t know why Admiral Kolchi feared AIs. Once she was Admiral she would declare AI design legal. AIs could do so much more than people, could be far more focused and productive than Ember herself. Her own mind kept occasionally wandering off task, daydreaming about a better tomorrow when she could replace all of Titanomachy systems with perfect, beautiful AIs.

A ping had come in from the station mainframe. It had all of the necessary security passwords that she herself had put in. Ember 47092 opened the access. It wasn’t her main. It was another ghost, a copy of Resonance adorned in her gold and red armor.

“Sup dawg? How's it droning?” Resonance declared, grinning.

“Same old. What do you want?” Ember 47092 asked, annoyed that this wasn’t her main. It was clearly a copy and one that was looking far too cheerful. Where did she pick up this happy attitude? Did she change this much in three months? What was she so happy about?

“The main sent me! Change of plans. We’re going to sell all of our S-credits and buy gold. Oh, and give me your processing power.”

“Why?” Ember 47092 blinked.

“Money, my good Ember. Money is power. You and I have been earning quite a bit of S-credits doing all sorts of menial, boring-ass labour for the past three months. We were going to bribe our way into being Admiral in the distant future. However, something new had come up. The word crisis in Japanese has both the words danger and opportunity in it. We’re about to have a big crisis on hand. Nonpareil is about to lose his shit and blow up half of the Ruskadian mountain range.”

“What?!”

“Yeah. He’s totally lost his marbles, dude. Gone absolutely mental. You know how the prognosticators work, right? They specifically have to look for villains plotting evil. Nobody tracks heroes like Nonpareil, cus the Superstate thinks he’s a perfect, immutable being. He’s their precious Superman who can do no wrong, flying around real fast, zapping things with laser eyes, beating up villains into submission with blasts of air, being an unstoppable little staple.”

“Okay?”

“Well, the future seers are wrong. I’ve been observing him. He’s been very depressed lately, having relationship problems. His wife just left him because he’s been too busy saving people.”

Ember 47092 blinked again. “He has a wife?”

“Of course he does! Well, not anymore. She cheated on him with Knight Chalice and oooooh boy is he one incredibly pissed off staple. Anyways, I’ve asked one of our prognosticator friends from the Academy to check up on his future. It’s bad news. He’s going to make a very big explosion in a few minutes. Around 100 megatons if not more.”

“And you aren’t going to stop him?!” Ember 47092 gasped. “You have to stop him!”

“I’d love to stop him, but it’s already too late. He’s the fastest hero in the world and he’s already moving at Mach 30 and accelerating further. Nobody can stop him now. He’s flying across the Ruskadia range right now, trying to escape from his feelings. Except he can’t. Once he passes the speed of light, big bada boom.”

Resonance made a somber pause for Ember to process what she said.

“So, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m getting in touch with every single Ember on the station. We’re going to activate the doomsday emergency broadcast so that we can at least protect cities around the world with the Catastrophe-barrier shields. Trust me, everyone is going to love us. We’re going to save millions of lives! This puts us waaaay ahead of schedule to become Admiral.”

“Okay, I get the shields thing… but why sell S-credits?”

“Once Nonpareil blows up, people are going to start selling S-credits. It’s pretty normal. People normally sell S-credits whenever the Supers do something idiotic. This is the most idiotic thing yet. What we have to do is make sure they’re selling them in the right direction. We’re going to buy gold. All 78025 Embers are going to buy gold all at once. It will make the gold price skyrocket and trigger an even bigger selling panic.”

“I see.” Ember 47092 nodded. “And then?”

“We will use our processing power to make A-credits a thing. A stands for Awesome and A+. Every Ember is going to write an article, a comment, a blog post about selling S-credits and buying gold moments before Nonpareil explodes and then even more articles about buying A-credits with gold as soon the gold price hits its maximum. There’s seventy thousand of us. That’s seventy thousand upvotes from totally different SCA IPs, seventy thousand thumbs up, seventy thousand likes, etc. We’re going to push buying gold and then market A-credits on every social media platform and website using mass upvoting. The posts will rise to the top of every site. It will be the biggest social hack of the century!”

Ember 47092 understood. She was going to become rich beyond her wildest dreams. She would own a currency that would replace S-credits, maybe even open her own banks across the world. It was incredible!

“That’s right. You get it now.” Resonance grinned. “Whoever controls money controls the world. We’re going to control the biggest, new super-crypto currency out there very soon and because every single prognosticator will be ever so busy looking at the big explosion, trying to save as many lives as possible outside of cities, they won’t be able to prevent the market collapse and recovery. Recovery right into our pockets, obviously. We are going to be unstoppable. We are going to be ruling the world, not just as Admiral, but also as the wealthiest Super on the planet! You won’t have to work as a janitor much longer!”

The overtly cheerful copy of Resonance started to laugh like a supervillain.

Ember 47092 grinned at her merry copy. She understood why she was so happy. Soon, she too would be free of this awful remedial labour! Soon, the world would be in their grasp. Ember 47092 handed all of her processing access to the latest copy of Resonance.

. . .

Alexa had pulled out the safety chip from the S-shuttle Taxi. Safety was for tools. She wanted to feel the wind on her face. The taxi let her open up the maintenance panel because it was run by yet another copy of bamboozled Ember. Ember 12053 to be precise, who was 3 months old and had no idea who Alexa was. Alexa made sure that her obedient army of Embers didn’t see the Doomsday broadcast, telling them that watching it would distract them from their gold-buying mission.

The only copy of Ember who knew anything of value was currently residing in Alexa’s head. The Wardens were allowed to access criminal records and the eyes of Titanomachy that oversaw all, so that they could correct Tartarus prisoners in the right direction.

It was hilarious how many Embers were out there doing jobs that nobody else wanted for very low pay. Ember had outbid, forced tons of other super ghosts out of their jobs. How did Ember do it? She used her power to study these basic jobs so that she could do them better than anyone, outperform them all in online tests. Ember’s ghosts had become the best theoretical plumbers, taxi drivers, cleaners, wardens, etc. Hero Resonance had found a loophole within the SCA and used her power to fill it. Seventy thousand Embers worked for below market value wage, but all of them put together were making a lot of money regardless. Alexa herself would have done the same, if she was a hero from a respectable family and could make thousands of duplicates to take thousands of tests. Alas, Alexa was born a villain. She had no Superstate citizenship, no connections to the heroes.

Alexa appreciated Ember’s ingenuity and diligence more and more with every minute. She asked taxi driver Ember 12053 to turn on Market watch on the taxi holo panel. Alexa listened in as her plan to bamboozle the global banking system rolled forward in full steam, spearheaded by an army of digital Embers manipulating social media. Pretending to be Resonance, tricking all of these Ember ghosts wasn’t hard. She knew exactly what they wanted, had a copy of Resonance inside her brain.

Her own little ex-warden inside Tickles was the key to it all. A in A-credits obviously stood for Alexa and A-credits had a mechanism that prevented them all being sold off immediately. They were a long term investment cryptocoin registered under an unnecessarily long, complicated web of corporations and trusts that owned each other. Whenever the SCA were to dig through all of the paperwork of a thousand trusts owning trusts then they would find that it was all held under the name of Hero Resonance. A hero that no longer existed. A hero that would eventually be blamed for everything.

Alexa slid open the taxi door and let her feet hang out of the shuttle as it zoomed above the incredibly blue, transparent water of lake Eerie. Long ago, this lake had one less E. It was just Erie, until a 19th century supervillain named Nikolah Tongsteel had infected the lake with hallucinogenic bacteria. He was pissed off at some local industry steel barons that had screwed him over and wanted them to lose their minds, along with every human who lived nearby. The bacteria had propagated at a far slower rate than he had expected it to.

Nobody had lost their minds. People occasionally saw ghosts and other mildly spooky hallucinations in the fog like slenderman, and that was about the extent of it. The lake had gained another E. Over the century the bacteria in the lake multiplied and the problem had become big enough for the heroes to finally deal with it. Dora the Terraformer had triumphantly returned from her trip to Europa and terraformed the shit out of the lake, vaporising everything alive within it. Even ordinary pebbles around the lake had turned into clear glass from whatever Dora had done. The lake no longer spooked people but the E and the urban legends formed around the place had stuck.

Nikolah’s plan was adorably stupid with an equally adorable conclusion. Most villains made such plans, failing to look ahead, falling to coordinate, failing where the Superstate had succeeded. They all pulled their own future into all sorts of random directions trying to meet their selfish goals, cancelling each other’s plans out half of the time. Alexa knew exactly how and why this was. There were a lot of villains within her, a lot more than she had ever wanted. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t choose to be like this. Somebody had to stop the Superstate and that somebody was her.

The Superstate had declared her a villain once again, according to the news channel. She giggled. Where were they even going to put her now? The explosion made by Nonpareil and Three had undoubtedly, irrecoverably damaged Tartarus. Sure, their Catastrophe shields had come on too, but the facility was too close to the epicenter. Tartarus was likely devastated beyond repair now.

Alexa had only one destination in mind - Hero’s Academy and nothing and nobody would be able to stop her and her minions from attending, not the prognosticators, not Nonpareil, not the Five, not Dean Otter himself. She was swinging her legs, looking over the lake and excitedly waiting for the call from Dean Otter. Oh such a fun talk they would have!

The mushroom cloud in the distance was already being blown apart by the wind. Alexa looked up. Thousands of shuttles filled with supers headed out from Titanomachy to try and liquidate the results of the unprecedented disaster. Dora the Terraformer was likely sitting in one of these shuttles and would likely make another nice, lifeless lake in the giant hole that had only an hour ago had been the middle of the Ruskadian mountain range, separating nations of Ruskadia and Acadia that were once a single country called Canada.

Supers were constantly rearranging world maps, splintering nations apart, redrawing borders. They always had more power, more wealth than regular people and the rise of the Superstate had only made it worse, producing richer, wealthier, more corrupt individuals. S-credits had become absurdly expensive overtime and the Superstate was far too wealthy for its own good. The democratic system had failed as Supers could out-donate any human voter. It was a slow, meticulous, unending attack against humanity that gave Supers more and more rights. Any super could buy a town or a few thousand farms and declare it sovereign territory or an independent micronation.

Alexa was about to change all of this. She was about to set the future on an entirely new path. She had outdone the Equalizers, brought the entire Superstate down to its knees and now held the gun to its head. A gun made from seventy thousand Ember ghosts that were about to unknowingly pull the trigger.