2103:12:22:10:11:12

  The car ride was a quiet one, the both of us having exhausted our topics conversation and now content to simply enjoy the road for however long it took to reach our destination.

  It was more enjoyable than the car ride I had with Amber late yesterday night, and much more enjoyable than the horse ride – with me as the horse, of course – towards Nth-Sight’s secret barn. I’d already suspected Amber was exaggerating when she said she ‘knew how to drive’, but her swerving and swaying made me doubt she actually knew anything before entering the car. To be fair, it was late at night, and on an unlit road that was barely used and not well maintained, but still. The number of times we nearly crashed was more than my hands could count.

  I’d hoped that I could transform into the car and drive myself, but alas, it wasn’t functional, not even after siphoning some energy from the real car. The form did give me a sort ‘road sense’ through which I can see all connected roads in a kilometer to where car-me was. Might be useful in a pinch, but was basically outclassed by any navigation app out there. Then again, there might be a secondary function I didn’t know, but that was something to discover on a later date – if at all.

  What made my current ride towards the Seattle Crater Lake more enjoyable was that I’d managed to wrangle control of the music in the car, allowing me to listen to anything else but Mom’s nostalgic synth-pop from over two decades ago. In its place I put on an album of ‘frenetically slow glacial jazz’ music performed by, among others, members of The Charm Symphonic. Jolie’s recommendation; her mom was part of the orchestra.

  It accompanied perfectly a book Amber had recommended to me: Serpents Amidst Smoke. It was a slow-going detective noir story set in Los Angeles during the Interstitial, the period of time right after the end of the Great American Civil Wars and right before warlords swallowed the city, and the world, whole.

  So far, the book was a bit of a mixed bag. It was dark and edgy to the point of parody, the plot too somber yet told callously and, if my suspicions were correct, the ending would not be a happy one. The main character was a selfish, glory-seeking, arrogant asshole of a man, and it was difficult to read from the text whether the author was aware of it or swallowed by his own creation. Yet the writing style itself was better than it had any right to be given the way the story progressed, and it had a strange pull that kept me engage regardless of my criticisms. I needed to know how it would turn out despite its flaws, and not just for Amber’s sake either, nor for the sake of passing the time.

  Regardless, pass the time it did. Not that the drive towards the Seattle Crater was particularly long; the crater itself was only about a long hour away from where we lived, traffic permitting. Though the hotel Mom had booked was on the east coast of the Seattle Crater Lake, and thus we needed to follow the road along the rim of the crater for a couple extra hours. It did give us a nice view of the body of water as we drove, so that was a plus.

  After three hours from departure, Mom exited the freeway following a traffic sign stating ‘Roslyn’, and another ten minutes later Mom said, “There we are: Renton’s Crater Lake Suits,” and parked the car.

  Checking in and carrying our bags to our suites didn’t take too long. We were done around the time noon arrived, and so we went back to the main building, specifically to the bright, if all but empty, restaurant-annex-beach bar attached to it. It was lunch time and Mom was ‘starving’.

  About halfway through my sandwich, I asked the same question I had when I first heard where we’d be going. “Can you tell me why we’re here now?” If I sounded more mopey than usual, that wasn’t my intention, but it sure had an effect.

  Mom stopped eating briefly, then quickly put the forkful of salad into her mouth, chewed and swallowed. “We used to come here all the time,” she said. “Sure, we usually went in the summer ‘cause of the weather-”

  “Mom,” I sighed, almost whined. Almost.

  “What, is it so wrong of me to want to recreate memories with my daughter?” she said, smiling. I thought the smile I returned was nice and normal, but Mom must’ve seen something in it that made hers fall with a weary sigh. “Fine, fine. Yes, there’s another reason besides reliving the past, but all in due time. I… It needs a bit of context, some explanation, and I need to work myself up to it. All I ask for is a bit of patience.”

  A flash of frustration washed over me. Why couldn’t she get it over with and just tell me now? It was, I thought, clear what she was going to say; if not in detail, then at least in scope: the source of the rift between her and Michael. There were few other subjects that could warrant such a look.

  But staring in Mom’s eyes and seeing her so tired, so nervous about the subject, reignited my ever-lingering feelings of guilt towards the woman. As always, I realized I didn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of sharing, or not-sharing, secrets.

  “Fine,” I said not-at-all sullenly. Mom gave me a slight smile and the both of us continued with our lunch.

  Afterwards, our first stop wasn’t the lake – we’d be doing that tomorrow night – but a building seemingly floating atop of it: the Seattle Memorial Museum. According to Mom I had been here before, as had every single other person born in Charm. It was a mandatory part of Charm’s education; a day-long excursion to learn about the past of the area in the time of pre-Dark Age America, Seattle, its destruction and the later foundation of Charm.

  The first of four halls showed the immediate history of the Seattle-One, scant as it was. The story of the thirteen villages, the People of the Lake and People of the Interior was brief, and the material exhibition in the museum was mostly photographs and artistically-licensed recreations of how it ‘must have looked’ back in the day. Though just as limited in what they could show of pre-colonial Seattle, the story of the settlement post-colonization was more structured, if less interesting.

  Beyond both the Dark Age itself and to a lesser extent the Unification destroying much of the past, Tyrannicus’ meteor hadn’t exactly been good at preserving what little was left of this time and these peoples. Besides, this was the Seattle Memorial Museum, not the Charm Historical Museum nor the Cascadian Regional.

  The second hall was really the first of the museum’s primary focus, which in this case was the destruction of Seattle the First.

  Unlike New Seattle, the death of Old Seattle had not been quick. Like many other places around the world – and especially in North America – it was the result of a long downward spiral beginning with the month-long stupidity that was the Fakeuppation in 2019, and the very real World Civil War that followed.

  It began with the United States government deciding that Quetzalcoatl needed protection from international persecution after it was revealed that he was Jerry Scott: American citizen, ex-armed forces, ex-PMC contractor and, allegedly, ex-CIA operative in Guatemala that went off-grid until emerging with powers and doing what he did. A stupid move that, if the Fakeuppation had lasted longer than a month, would’ve had real repercussions.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The stupidity continued when upon hearing that Quetzalcoatl was Jerry Scott, a select few politicians and public personalities decided that maybe the man had had a point and/or good reason for massacring the Yucatan, Mexico and further beyond. Then, either riding that logic or out of a genuine desire to stabilize the region – people still debated that to this day – the US president announced an allegedly temporary occupation of all the crumbling states in Middle America from Mexico to Guatamala.

  In another age, in the Golden Age of Superhumanity before governments tried nationalizing people’s powers, or even in a Silver Age before Jerry Scott, this move might’ve worked. Superhumans, be they masked, institutionalized, professional or otherwise, had rarely been used or engaged en masse in political engagements that weren’t civil wars, border skirmishes, protests, movements, terrorism, revolutions or organized crime. And before Quetzalcoatl, people, not even powered ones, hadn’t realized what someone with the right power could do when motivated.

  The American occupation ended a month in when a superpowered hero team from Mexico teleported in with the help of a villainous maker and proceeded to kill every politician, civil servant, and party operative they could find in Washington DC. Then, seeing its success, powered people from all over – even from within the US itself – went wild and tried the same everywhere else in the United States – and later all over the world. Ever since, the US federal government has effectively been dead and gone.

  If that was all, it would’ve gone the way of Africa or South America, where forced decentralization was what ultimately saved it from the worst the Dark Age had to offer. Instead, everyone everywhere, including those outside of the United States, sought to construct a new continent-spanning federal government for their own political project, resulting in the eruption of the Great American Civil Wars rather than something like the Splintering in South America.

  As for Seattle, it was first captured by the Canadians, then Remnant California, Canada again, and the Japan-China-led United Nations. When that institution too collapsed in 2026, Resurgent Idaho took its turn, as did short-lived Deseret. Then, once the Warlord Era ‘officially’ started in 2036, a revolving door of powered warlords took control. First was George Maccoy, then Marielle Hei, the cult Apollo’s Gate, the villain Sepulchrist, and in its final years the Band of Ten.

  Each left their own horrible legacy, all of them displayed (inert) in the Memorial Museum. Autonomous war machines from the Civil Wars – a large part of the reason I had to hide my android nature – artificial diseases of superpowered origins, like Malonch and Dreamfreeze; lingering exotic power-zones with mutagenic effects on those that wandered through them, ranging from dubiously beneficial, to awful, to lethal and borderline cataclysmic ones; portal-spawned monsters, angels, demons and devils; the war-bees and ever-expanding drone-structure of Queen-Queen’s Under-Hive; and a dozen more that hadn’t been preserved by the museum.

  All these disasters, the museum explained, stacked on top of one another and made the city more and more unlivable by the year. Add to that the more mundane issues like lack of medical supplies, famine, general despondency and the worldwide shattering of the economy, and the city was on its last legs. When the Band of Ten got murder-suicided by a masked later named Brick Pewters, whatever leadership was left condemned the city. Gruesomely, some people back then had made a trophy of the man’s head by covering it in pewter – thus the name – which was showcased at the end of the exhibit.

  I was glad to get out of there. It wasn’t just the head; the whole litany of villainous doomsday devices gave me the creeps.

  The third hall, the largest, showed the resettlement of Seattle a couple dozen kilometers east and south of Seattle the First, and told of the troubles the settlers faced in constructing this New Seattle – food, water, infrastructure, the defense against outsiders and whatever monster tried following them out of Old Seattle, etcetera.

  New Seattle had only existed for twelve years, and had built itself and persevered through the height of the Warlord Era. It had been a much more, maybe even the most stable place of what would become Cascadia. Maybe it was because the worst that could happen already had in Old Seattle, or maybe it was just New Seattle and later Charm propaganda, but New Seattle was spoken of by the exhibit as a place of hope, of post-US American culture, and of humanity’s resilience in general. Sure, there was ubiquitous fighting and general lawlessness, fear and depression, economic despair, ever-present risk of famine and ubiquitous paranoia, but there’d also been immense resilience and a monumental amount of effort made towards building a brighter future for the next generation.

  This part of the museum ended with a replica of Tyrannicus’ costume – golden laurel crown, red mask, purple cape and regal black-gold-red ceremonial uniform – behind a glass display case, along with a broken-off piece of the man’s infamous meteor and a retrieved schematic of his maker dead-man’s switch. Accompanying it all was a timeline montage of video footage, pictures and artists’ impressions of the event itself.

  All the city’s powered – heroes, villains and those not bothering with pre-masquerade masking traditions – had come together and tried their hardest to stop the meteorite from crushing New Seattle. For three hours they managed to halt its crash and break off large chunks of it, allowing tens of thousands to get to relative safety outside the city and minimizing the damage.

  It ended with footage of the impact itself shot from far way, videos of the quaking and crumbling earth, and the eruptions of the Koma Kulshan, Takobia, Nechakay and Loowit. Scenes of billowing clouds of ash covering the sky, dark and poisonous rains and weeping men, women and children ended the reel.

  This hall, too, I was glad to leave behind, albeit for different reasons than the second.

  The fourth hall had little, but was perhaps the most interesting and innovative in what it showcased. There were three dioramas total. The first two were around five meters in diameter and showed the area from Vancouver city to the tips of Olympia and Vancouver Island, to Aberdeen, to Mount Tahoma and Koma Kulshan in detail at two separate times in the region’s life.

  The first of these showed Old Seattle and its surroundings from before the Civil Wars, pristine in detail and color. The second showed how much the environment had already altered before Tyrannicus’ Meteor had altered it further. Stretches of wasteland – some painted darkest black, some lightest white – dotted all over like scars, towns and cities disappearing in the transition between diorama one and two, and the waters of Lake Washington, the Salish Sea and the many rivers all subtly different as well. And above it all hovered a deceptively tiny orb.

  The third diorama was nearly twice the size of the other two, and accompanied by many texts, aerial photographs and videos. It showcased the present – or the present of when this diorama was built at least – and wasn’t limited to the destruction those included in the Seattle metropolitan area like Tacoma, but also places like Victoria, Vancouver and Portland. Though the impact crater of the meteor itself was limited to New Seattle, its destruction had not been as limited.

  In appearance and lay-out, it was radically different the other two for obvious reasons. The huge crater lake, a collapsed mountain range, cities beyond the Seattles themselves disappearing and others popping up; it might as well have been on the other side of the world for how much the pre- and post-impact dioramas resembled each other.

  Mom and I, along with a handful of other visitors, circled this final diorama in near-complete silence, with only a few children excitedly talking as they tried to spot their own homes in the model. Then, we left the final exhibit and entered the gift store.

  “Want to get something?” Mom asked.

  I did a quick scan of the shop for anything I wanted. I always found museum shops a bit weird in how it compared to the purpose of the building itself, but I felt it especially strongly this time. We’d just gone through a monument built for a world deemed lost, and now I was confronted with things like bag charms in the shape of Tyrannicus’ crown, t-shirts and baseball caps with ‘I LOVE SEATTLE’ and ‘I LOVE SEATTLE 2’ blazoned across, a squeezable stress ball in the shape of Tyrannicus, and many other equally strange things. There was even a cartoonish fridge magnet of Tyrannicus’ Meteor itself, complete with flaming tail that it had never possessed in reality.

  To be fair, there were also many, many books – comics, pop historical reads, scientific ones and picture albums – that dealt more seriously with the history the Memorial Museum portrayed, but that only served to add to the confused impression of it all.

  I voiced as much to Mom. “Doesn’t it seem a bit… tasteless?”

  Mom blinked and looked at the shop for a second. “Does it? You have to remember that Tyrannicus’ time was more than fifty years ago. Sure, there are still people alive that still remember their lives there, but…” She shrugged. “For as horrible as it was, it wasn’t that far out of the ordinary, so it’s just another weight on an already too-heavy burden. The only thing remarkable about it is the crater, really.”

  “Really? People’s homes got destroyed, right?”

  “Of course. I’m not saying it wasn’t bad or anything, but New Seattle lasted only twelve years. If you’re old enough to have clear memories of New Seattle, you probably also remember or were at least told stuff about Old Seattle, so it’s really the loss of Old Seattle that got stuck as the tragedy. Despite how the museum portrays it, New Seattle was just one more hastily-constructed refugee city that bit the dust in a long line of destroyed refugee cities. And when you compare it to things that happened to all of Europe, or some places in East Asia or elsewhere in North America… well, the scale of the destruction wasn’t that large. There was still plenty of land around, so no need to go continent-hopping or anything.”

  I stared at her in silence. How did she even know all this?

  I didn’t even need to voice my question for Mom to say, “Your Dad and I went and learned about the area before we moved to Charm. Besides, I had history as an elective in high school for a reason. Even if not all of it stuck.”

  “Ah,” I ah-ed.

  “Sooo… you don’t want to buy anything?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Alright.” She took out her phone as we moved toward the exit. “Then let’s go get dinner. There’s a nice restaurant we always used to go. Should still be around.”

  X

  Dinner was nice, and so was the rest of the evening. There wasn’t really anything we could do – this place was really more of a summer than a winter destination – so we sat on the couch and continued watching our usual lineup of shows, though we did briefly take a peek at the glowing lake. Not enough to spoil tomorrow’s view, but how could we not when the lights were that obvious?

  And though I did my best not to show it, all that time I waited for the needle to drop. For Mom to finally open up about whatever was going on. For why we were here in the first place.

  But no such moment came. Tomorrow, then.