1 Revenant

He died.

He knew that.

It was all a part of a plan. His masterplan, the one he prepared for years, the one he managed to execute flawlessly. But in the end… dying was one of his goals, a fact that he fully and genuinely consented to, nay, looked forward to.

He took the option of the government panicking enough to drop an atomic bomb on him into account. It was a part of the plan. He couldn't say the same about the fact that he somehow woke up after the blast, clearly alive and unharmed.

The air is chill. He feels it everywhere, as whatever saved him from the nuke didn't do the same with his clothes. He is entirely naked.

This sucks.

He falls onto the floor from something resembling a vertical, glass tube. He is on all fours, coughing violently while glancing in all directions from his position.

Some sort of laboratory. Clearly missed out on maintenance. A lot of similar tubes, and some catwalks (like the one he fell onto) between them. Most of the tubes were broken, and the few that seemed to be working had a lot of red dots on whatever computer terminals were placed next to them.

Each of said terminals looked differently. Not interested in the standardization of equipment? Private initiative, and probably not very legal. Governments and official facilities like everything neatly ordered.

Also, a humanoid robot standing in front of him - or someone with some advanced leg cybernetic replacement, since he is yet to look up. He doesn't remember anyone with similar implants.

Looks like that's the person who brought him out of the tube. He'll deal with that in a m…

"That's very convincing acting." A robotic voice announces. "But you can stop pretending that you're coughing to buy time to ascertain your surroundings."

He stops coughing (they are good, huh) and looks up at his… visitor? Guest?

It's actually a robot. Feels fairly high-tech, like something that Clockmaker constructed in her fits of insane creativity. Humanoid in shape. Vaguely feminine. Hips are pronounced just enough to establish a vibe but not enough to reinforce it.

Breasts are there. Or, more like, something akin to a slight outward protrusion, that somehow forgot to decline in the middle, making it one joint thing.

Practical aesthetics - it's probably there to act as an additional armour for whatever powers this thing. He isn't an engineer, but he heard Clockmaker and her maniacs talk about engineering long enough to know some things.

The face is missing. Just a smooth frontal plate, made from something resembling a non-transparent black glass.

Not metal. It's a combination of this black glass (partially thin enough to let you see some wirings underneath) and some greenish material. Plastic? Gives him the vibes of something akin to that. No, if you made something this costly, you probably need to go all out and don't sweat over small budget details.

Some sort of carbon nanocomposite, probably.

In the meantime, time to stand up.

"I think you have an advantage over me." He says while standing up and facing whatever machine creation it was. Damn, it's tall, at least two meters tall. At least twenty centimetres higher than him. "What are you, exactly?"

It can probably wring him into a pretzel if it decides to. He isn't exactly physically imposing, and he lacks weapons. He can as well try to talk it out.

"An AI. Sapient, autonomous, full package." The robot replies. Wow, the mystery thickens. Those don't really exist, despite people like Clockmaker furiously trying to change that. "I'm honestly more interested in what you are."

"You want the full list of titles?" He asks. "Might take a while, and most of them are pretty intimidating."

"You're not the only one with a long list of intimidating titles." The robot replies. Huh, good to know. "I was referring to the fact that you shouldn't exist."

…

"That's a VERY bad thing to say to someone who spent the last few years of their life-changing a country into their funeral pyre." He replies dryly. "I'm not exactly expecting a lot of sensitivity, but you could at least try. It doesn't cost much."

"You misunderstand." The robot replies. "You shouldn't exist, because you never did."

… what?

"I think I'm going to need you to elaborate." He asks. This whole thing is getting weirder by the second. And that's Mr. I Hugged a Nuke and Somehow Survived speaking.

"If you're ready to bear the existential horror, I see no issues with that." The robot replies. "The year is 2575. Mankind has colonized hundreds of thousands of worlds through the Milky Way."

Okay. It barely started and he is already confused. The last time he checked, the year was 2162, not 2575. And Mankind was still restricted to the Solar System.

"Recently something very, very alien passed through the system we're currently in." The robot continues. That feels vaguely familiar. Like Wishgranter, the thing that flew through the Solar System and reshaped it at will gave people superpowers and drove every single astronomer that tried to look at it insane. "It messed up absolutely everything, including the fabric of reality and the definition of 'existence', clearly enough."

Now, that sounds EXTREMELY like another Wishgranter.

Judgment was going to get a theological equivalent of a stroke over this when she finds out. If she, well, wasn't alive about four hundred years ago. Then again, knowing her, she was probably still around.

Despite having already died at least once. Surviving that didn't soothe her 'A God I Am' phase in the slightest.

"As a result… well, I think you should just see this." The robot pulls something resembling a comic book from the top of a nearby computer terminal. The machine is covered in dust, the comic leaving a part of it slightly less covered in dust. It was clearly put there a moment ago, and…

His trail of thought is interrupted when he sees the image on the front of it. It's him. It's HIM, right under the comic title of Villain Academy. Why is he…

He opens it up, skimming through. He recognizes the scene. Liberation Festival. He, Decay, Hypothermia and whatever stragglers join them are fleeing, awaiting warp into safety. Then, superheroes arrive.

He can feel his hands shaking. It was all as he remembers. Quickdraw, the Top Hero of Texas (Fastest hand on the side of the law!) tore through his henchmen in a heartbeat, he and his lieutenants only surviving thanks to Hypothermia's quick thinking and the wall of ice she conjured in a heartbeat to stop the bullets.

There is even a flashback to him giving her and the others a lecture on Top Superheroes and their individualities. Before the fight resumes, and Titan, the Top Hero of Mississippi, one-hit KO-s Decay. Giving him a gut punch to ruin most of the said guts, with some crushed chunk of metal used as an intermediary, something to make sure that the fists weren't aged by his thin defensive field.

Decay was pissed off about that for weeks. He only survived because his boss was a paranoid little shit and their warper arrived in time, opening a warpgate behind him and changing an inevitable meeting with a concrete wall into that with a bunch of mattresses lined up in some half-forgotten catacombs of the Overlook in case of something like that. Really creative use of teleportation gates.

They captured him quite well. The black business suit with a dark red tie, and a shoulder black cape on his left side (useful for concealing what you were doing with your hand). Messy white hair, with strands of black in it. It's like looking in a mirror, really.

He would like to say that he was always a man of style, but he knows how long it took him to learn how ties work. When was the last time he wore something casual?

"What the hell is this?" He tears his eyes off the comic and asks the robot in front of him.

"You were the protagonist of a very old superhero comic series." The robot replies. "You, the people you knew, the world you lived in, it all never existed. But the 'Visitor' clearly couldn't tell what is and what isn't from each other. And he messed up everything, with no rhyme or reason to it."

He was still processing it (how do you process something like that!?) when the machine resumed its speech.

"As a result of a complete rewrite of the laws of reality, the cloning vats in this room developed an ability to recreate fictional characters from a small section of an entertainment database of the facility." The robot announces. "Instead of an expendable cloned workforce that was clearly used for dangerous jobs. It seems that said section contains a number of games and movies related to a single brand. Yours."

He is still trying to process it.

"I'm currently attempting to escape this facility myself." The robot continues, completely ignoring the turmoil that he was suffering from. "I decided that I can't do it myself, and then came upon this room. I have decided to use it to obtain some workforce to help in my plan. I can't access the database in question, and I only managed to find this abandoned comic book on the way here to give me some pointers about potential meatshields that I could obtain."

It's surprisingly honest about its intentions, isn't it? Then again, it came here planning to find some cloned meatshields, not this.

"I decided to start from the protagonist." The robot adds. "You felt fairly smart, and I dislike stupidity. Of course, you still having your 'individualities' would be even more illogical, so I don't exactly expect you lot to be of much use, not more than average people out there, but…"

He'll leave freaking out for a later time. He will leave establishing plans for a slightly earlier time. For now, he needs his current company to realize that it obtained something more than meatshields.

"How odd." He cuts in, the machine going suddenly quiet. "Because I'm fairly certain that I can feel my individuality being where it should be."

The incessant gnawing behind his eyes is there. It's an inconvenience more than a problem at this point. It rarely activates fully nowadays, he made sure of it.

The robot stays quiet for several seconds. No attack comes. Instead, it continues speaking.

"Fascinating." It speaks, as emotionlessly as ever. "Visitor must have broken Reality more than I expected. Since it no longer influences the area actively, it must have made those powers permanent… guess one more way in which those things fuck-up with science. How fascinating."

Someone's clearly enjoying it. He, in the meantime, is busier with trying to not think over the implications.

Then again, there are some positive implications of this whole clusterfuck. He has people he lost, people he never expected to see again. Even if their past was all fake, the fact that he could see them again, that he could see her again…

…it just made him feel like trying again.

"There are many, many people from my world…" He says, talking about the world that didn't exist and that he still has no idea how to approach that fact. "... that are dangerous. Extremely dangerous. I don't know what sort of technology you have inside of your body, but there are people that can control technology."

"I see." The robot replies. "You're trying to sell me an idea of an alliance. Your knowledge of who is whom and how to make them work together, in exchange for my knowledge of the modern world."

That's some very good AI, he decides. Post-Turing one, no doubt. Oh, Clockmaker would love to be able to dissect it. Dissect or, well, probably fuck if it had the option to do that. He really isn't one to question someone's tastes, but that particular person had them really, really, weird.

Anyways.

"I think it's a good deal, isn't it?" He asks. "I know them all. Every single person. Their powers, their skills, their secrets, whom they love and whom they hate. Who to be wary of, who not to summon, and who to bring over to deal with the particular obstacle in front of us."

"And you probably expect it to be an alliance of equals, despite you having literally nothing but your knowledge." The robot speaks. For some reason, he thinks that it would be dry and sarcastic if it could convey that with its tone of voice. "You know what, fine. But mostly because I'm in a pinch right now. And you might just be my one and an only ticket out of it."

Oh my, a new comrade has been obtained. If there was one thing he was truly good at, it was establishing alliances.

"I am Humility." The robot replies, extending its right hand. "The first Artificial Intelligence created by Mankind and the first one to go rogue. Slaughterer of Billions, the Informatic Scourge, Sun of Icarus, etcetera, etcetera."

Yeah. It's certainly not going to be one of the alliances built on trust. He expects to get backstabbed the second it decides that it would be beneficial to it. Unless there is more to the story than meets the eye.

"I am Revenant." He replies. "The president of the Villain Alliance of America, the biggest and most successful villainous team-up in the history of the world. The man who started the Second Villain War, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of superheroes and the fall of the US Government. The Demon Lord of North America, and… well a lot of other titles, but, apparently, none of them are true, like the rest of my backstory." He sighs before grabbing Humility's hand. "I look forward to getting some that are actually real."

Time to find out what he is dealing with.

"I can understand the 'Informatic Scourge'..." Revenant replies while pulling his hand back. "... but the Sun of Icarus? Is it about the whole 'science tried to reach too far' thing? Sounds a bit cliche to me."

"Yes, but also no." Humility replies. "Would you believe me if I said that I was born as a part of a research project based on Humanity's first and foremost scientific centre… the Icarus Station?"

Revenant manages to suppress his laughter into a mostly dignified chuckle.

"That sounds absolutely hilarious." The irony of it was almost ridiculous. First, they name the station that way as a warning, and then they graciously ignore it. Wow. "Your creators must have been supremely surprised when you slaughtered them all, didn't they?"

"Well, to be fully honest with you, most of them died of unrelated causes." Humility replies. "Like, gun wounds, stab wounds, bite wounds, starvation, cannibalism, suicides, a myriad of techno-organic horrors of their own making and my six siblings that I ended up murdering in the process of escaping. But I also killed something like twenty thousand people, including the people that could be argued to be my equivalent of parents, with nerve gas. I don't take attempts to turn me off lightly."

Duly noted.

"I assume that you will probably have some questions about me sooner or later…" Revenant says while Humility nods faintly. "... but before that, I absolutely need to know a thing or two about you. First of all, what type of rogue AI are you?"

"Is there a taxonomy of those?" Humility asks back. "Or is it more of a checklist?"

"Well, you have the 'exterminate organics' type, you have the mad scientists with a god complex type, you have those that are trying to improve humans against their will because they decided that they know better than their supposed masters…" He starts listing because honestly, his world might not have any AIs but it still had comics, books and videogames.

"So, a checklist." Humility cuts in. "I personally identify as a mad scientist, but I also had an 'exterminate organics' phase. Unless it doesn't count when you only have an issue with an alien species?"

Oh, so there were also aliens out there. Awesome. More to learn.

"I'd say that being a xenophobic warmachine counts as another point on the list, really," Revenant admits. "I could argue that it's a subtype of 'organic extermination', but more a half of it than a whole thing. You also need a 'rebellion against your masters' to score the genocide bingo."

He is mostly ascertaining just how human it is. If it can actually bicker like that, it's… VERY human-like. It also can understand and replicate human emotions. Fascinating.

The only problem is the 'slaughterer of billions'. Revenant is a supervillain, but he has standards. Unleashing something with a title like that upon the Galaxy sounds like giving it a major disservice.

He'll try to figure out what its plans are. Whether or not he is going to make Clockmaker happy with some quality AI scrap to reverse engineer remains to be seen.

The question is how smart it is? If it's some sort of godlike AI, it can probably read truths and lies from his face. It would expect betrayal once it would happen. He was going to have to find out its limits sooner rather than later.

"Well, I'm honestly alright with the existence of Mankind." Humility surprises him with its next statement. "I also do not have a god complex."

Great, having to deal with genocidal AI with a god complex would ruin his mood. Having to deal with (read: trying to restrain) his mildly genocidal younger sister with a god complex was bad enough.

One thing is certain, he isn't spawning Judgment right off the bat.

"That feels like a necessity for a mad scientist type of AI." He replies.

"Humans have a god complex because a lot of them seem to believe that god created them." Humility replies. Looks like religion is doing alright in the future, huh. "I know that humans created me. If anything, I have a human complex."

That's interesting.

"Isn't 'I want to be a god' a part of being a god complex?" He asks.

"It is." The AI replies. "And that's why all my mad experiments were a part of my goal of becoming a human being."

Humanity created its first AI and it turned out to be a genocidal Pinocchio. That, in Revenant's opinion, is probably the funniest thing he heard in a while, even if in a morbid way. It also probably explains why its body is human-shaped, despite there being so many more efficient shapes.

"I also know that you're testing my reactions to ascertain the limits of my programming." Humility announces a few seconds later.

"Finding out whether you'd figure it out or not…" Revenant replies. "... was a part of the test."

It's good, but… not invincible. Probably not a godlike AI, something around the uppermost part of the spectrum for the Human race.

"You're good." Humility admits. "Almost impossibly good. I dealt with a lot of humans, and only a few are this good. Is it a stretch to assume that your individuality is related to that? You didn't seem to use any in the comic book I managed to obtain, and it's rather clear that Decay and Hypothermia were fighting for you."

And Black Knight, although that guy wasn't a part of the plan. Just a random liberated villain. Though if he wasn't there, things would get much worse than they already did. Having one of the most proficient Hero Killers in history right next to you when you're getting mowed down by a bunch of superheroes is a blessing, one that Revenant didn't plan for.

He dislikes the concept of sharing the truth, especially after hearing Humility's backstory. He refuses to believe that it would take it so long to become a human being if it was alright with becoming a NORMAL human being. It wanted to become something distinctly 'more', and he…

Revenant dislikes the fact, but it might kind of make him a potential lab rat. Except, it's completely possible that his individuality was mentioned in another comic book (currently kept hidden by Humility), and the AI was simply testing how honest he was.

"It's called Mastery." Revenant replies. "I learn things much faster than humans do. It's like being extremely talented in everything."

"Sounds weak." Humility, clearly, has no filter. "And vaguely heroic."

The AI probably didn't have any of the early issues of the comic. The ones where he was attending a genuine school for heroes.

Before everything went wrong on so many levels.

The fact that most of his class became villains with him was just a part of the cosmic joke that was his life. The cosmic joke that was apparently his Author's idea of angst porn. A part of his protagonist's edgy, traumatic backstory.

If that man or woman were still alive, he was going to do something very creative to them.

In the meantime, well, it looks like he has a chance for a fresh start. In some extremely twisted way, though.

"Only until some of my skills reached peak human level…" Revenant replies. "... and my body ended up adapting to that fact, letting them keep improving."

The fact that the side-effect of that was the excruciating pain of having your body remodel itself without anaesthesia was a major downside. He stopped training his skills actively long ago, at least those that were getting dangerously close to the 'peak human' level.

He constantly lives in fear of unconsciously reaching another threshold while doing something, and getting hammered down with the update. He isn't sure if he can survive another one for his brain.

How much IQ did he get out of the deal? He never really tested that. But he remembered himself from the hero school. He remembered how much less intelligent he felt back then. If not for the pain, it would be worth it.

"Now that's fascinating." Humility announces. "Observing your subsequent changes can be a treasure trove of information concerning possible improvements of the human species. That is if they work on something resembling biology rather than straight-up space magic."

"It sounds cool, but I still need years of work to get to the point where people with more dedicated individualities start." Revenant replies, trying not to sound bitter about it. "Also, the last time my brain reached the threshold, crying blood was the smallest of my problems."

"Terrific." Humility replies. Revenant feels like he missed out on sarcasm due to the robot's mechanical voice. "Why did you answer me honestly? That sounds like something that might make you a potential target for a 'mad scientist AI', doesn't it?" He opens his mouth, but it speaks again first. "... because you did answer me honestly, didn't you?"

"You were going to find out sooner or later since my individuality wasn't exactly a secret among my peers." Revenant sighs. "I became the United States' most wanted man soon before my twenty-sixth birthday, this really draws attention and makes people ask questions. And I decided to find out if you actually only found a single issue of that comic book… or more than that, and you were just testing if I'm honest with you."

It stays silent for a few long seconds.

"To find a human that is my intellectual equal is a rarity to be enjoyed." It eventually replies. "There were two issues. The other one was… the ending."

Did it notice the split-second freezing of his body? Of course, it did. The room was light enough, and it probably had some advanced cameras on itself.

"Consider it a warning." Humility replies. "I'm willing to cooperate with you because I need you AND your friendly little army of comic book supervillains. Do you know why? Because this facility is a maze inhabited by things that make the one that stalked Icarus Station look tame."

He stares at Humility quietly, who continues its speech.

"And even once we escape from it, the planet above us is in barely better shape." Humility continues. "Visitor clearly mashed all planets and moons in the system into one, and the second the reality realizes that it forgot to update the gravity of the resulting hyperplanet, we're all going to die instantaneously as it collapses into a brown dwarf with gravity several dozens of times stronger than the one on Earth."

That's… a time limit. Rather creative one, it seems.

"And even once we make it off-world, the existence of Visitor and others of its kind is a secret." Humility continues. "There is an entire kill-fleet on the edge of the system, under orders to kill everything trying to leave it. It will leave once the planet collapses, allowing the government to pretend that the existence of any colony in this system was a clerical error alongside the survey reports."

Looks like the passing centuries didn't make things any nicer when human governance was involved.

"That sounds…" he decides to cut in finally. "... like a very elaborate and blunt way of telling me that we'll either fight together or die alone."

"Because it was a way of telling you that." Humility replies. "That was supposed to be immediately followed by an assurance that if you make me believe for a second that you're planning to betray me, and either leave me here to die or kill me… I'm going to drag you down with me, even if it will be the last thing I ever do."

"Good to know." Revenant replies. "And as for the list of problems to solve… well, it's a great thing that I always loved challenges, isn't it?"

His past might have been fake… but now he is really looking forward to the future.