Better

"Of course," I said, "Everything is predicated on your plans being any good."

"What?" Acord asked.

He was angry at the insinuation that his plans were substandard, but I couldn't make a deal if he was just making pie in the sky claims.

"I need to take a look at your plans," I said. "Do you have a copy of your world hunger plan?"

"Citrine," he said.

He was staring at me as though he would like to kill me. I could tell that he really would.

The book Citrine returned with two minutes later was at least four inches thick. He'd had it bound in nice leather.

"Is this your only copy?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"I've got a power that lets me gain knowledge instantly, but it destroys the book I'm getting it from. Is that all right?"

Accord nodded shortly.

Placing my hand on the book, I assimilated it, leaving only dust on the table. I inventoried the dust before it could drive Accord into being even more angry.

Knowledge flooded my mind, even though I didn't get a named skill.

I frowned.

"I can see why they ignored you," I said.

"What?" Accord said. His face flushed.

"This is too complicated for a normal person to understand," I said. "It's brilliant, and it'd probably work, but it would require the politicians to make concessions that would be politically difficult."

He nodded grudgingly.

"You have to take human psychology into account," I said. "People are like horses; if you try to force their heads into the water, they'll fight you, even if they are desperately thirsty."

"You really understood my plan?" he asked.

"Well, I'm not really understanding why you chose to use Somali mercenaries to guard transports instead of government troops."

"Those mercenaries tend to become bandits when they're unemployed," he said. "Which means that by keeping them occupied I'm getting a service and keeping them from stealing food by keeping them content, or at least busy."

"The biggest problem with your plan was that you assumed that people really wanted to end world hunger," I said. "They say they do, and maybe they do in the abstract, but do they want it enough to actually sacrifice? Two hundred sixty billion dollars a year for fifteen years is a lot of money when it could go to some senator's pet project to buy votes."

He scowled.

"It's so clear! Why can't they see it?"

"If it doesn't personally benefit them, and especially if it benefits their enemies, they're going to hate it. A lot of people blame the poor for being poor, and they see them as freeloaders on the system."

I'd known poor people all my life; Dad and I had been working poor and so had everyone I knew.

"So, it can't be done?"

"You'd have to blackmail the people in power," I said. "Make it in their interest to do what you want. That would take a thinker of unparalleled power."

"A thinker who has a great number of other abilities to aid the process along."

I nodded.

"Unfortunately, I've got other priorities at the moment."

"Which are?"

"From a purely selfish perspective, I want my city to survive and thrive," I said. "It seems that the government is determined to discard it like a used facial tissue."

He looked intrigued.

"Brockton Bay would be a project that could be a proof of concept for my other projects," he said. "It might help gain attention and give me some measure of credibility."

"Plans are nothing without execution," I said. "People will always be doubtful until you have something to show them."

"I could have a plan for you within a couple of days," he said. "Assuming I knew what you have to bring to the table."

"I can create solar panels on an industrial scale, essentially for free," I said. "I've put a million dollars into a charity I control from the shadows designed to put plans into motion. You can probably figure out which charity it is, and who is working there, but you know what happens when people target people I care about."

You have no worries there," he said dismissively. "I understand that you have a propensity for violence, but that it is not without your own code."

"Ultimately no plan either of us makes will mean anything if the Endbringers are allowed to continue. They are systematically dismantling the world economy and killing people we'll need to make any positive change."

"The Endbringers are monsters who can't be defeated," Accord said. "Even if you managed to lead the Simurgh away."

"She followed me, for reasons of her own," I said. "And yet."

"Yet?"

"They can't be defeated…yet."

"There's no way to plan for that."

"Plan for afterwards," I said. "What will happen to society without the Endbringer Truces and with people finally starting to have hope? Will we start having more wars? I need to be able to take it all into account before I go blundering in."

He frowned, then nodded.

I could sense the incredulity of his ambassadors. I was claiming to eventually have the power to defeat the Endbringers when I wasn't even close to Alexandria's strength or durability.

If the Simurgh had wanted me to take her somewhere else, she wouldn't have wanted to actually kill me. That meant she'd probably tailored the damage to be enough to panic me, but not enough to actually take me out.

Was I anywhere close to being able to take out an Endbringer?

I didn't have any attacks that were even remotely strong enough. If I was able to inventory more weight, and then use my relative speed trick, it might be possible.

Even if I could inventory them, they could probably fight their way out like Echidna had. My best bet against Leviathan would be to simply carry him out of the atmosphere; I'd have to fly him out and he was strong enough to beat Alexandria.

I needed to increase my strength and durability to a point where I could not be hurt by an Endbringer. Even then, it might not be enough.

"I have some side projects," I said. "I want to terraform a world where all life has been destroyed by a massive asteroid, except for a few human survivors. Methods designed for that should scale to other worlds, including our own, without the risk of killing billions due to a mistake."

"So that's where Blasto disappeared to," Accord said. He steepled his fingers. "Restoring a complete ecosystem. An intriguing prospect."

"I recently saved another world from alien invaders," I said. "They'll receive reinforcements to wipe out humanity in twenty years."

I materialized a burner cell phone. I'd gone to great lengths to ensure that even though I had the pictures inside, it couldn't be tracked. I gestured toward Accord, and I quickly sent pictures to his telephone. He wouldn't have wanted to touch my telephone, even if I hadn't had a reputation as a disease carrier.

He was likely going to have his office sterilized after I left.

He stared at my alien invasion pictures.

"Is the size of these ships as large as they seem?"

"Larger," I said. "Their mothership was five thousand kilometers long. I barely managed to destroy it."

Accord showed the pictures to Citrine. The other Ambassadors were going to have to wait until after this meeting.

"I also may have to kill Scion if information I gained recently that he may be planning to destroy the world is correct," I said.

They were all suddenly silent.

"Don't worry," I said. "These are long term goals. It's not like I'm going to try to kill Scion tomorrow. I've got to beef up for a while."

"Perhaps you should wait until some of your other plans are complete."

Accord thought I was going to die against the Endbringers; against Scion I would certainly die. He planned to use me for as long as he could before either thing happened.

"Those are my main goals for the moment, other than killing Lung," I said. "You haven't heard anything about his location, have you?"

Nobody had.

"I think we can come to an agreement," Accord said.

He didn't offer to shake my hand, partially due to his own fastidiousness, and partially because of partially realized fears that I might have brought something back from one of the other worlds.

"I'll expect some preliminary plans the day after tomorrow. I'll text you the details of some of the patents I've got in the pipeline and the expected monetary return. I'd like to have at least some of the production facilities in the Bay."

"There's an issue with the stranded ships in the Bay."

"I'm disassembling them and using them for parts for other projects," I said.

He nodded.

"I keep this phone in stasis most of the time. You can have citrine email me the details."

"You have an email account?"

Killthemall@hotmail.com, I said.

Everyone in the room stared at me, as though I'd grown a second head.

"You think I should have gone with KillOrder instead?"

Citrine shook her head.

"MissMurder?"

None of them seemed to like any of my ideas.

"Perhaps something innocuous?" Citrine said delicately.

"The more outrageous I act, the more off-guard people are when I act subtly," I said. "Because they won't expect subtlety from a mass murdering woman in a hoodie. You can actually send it to Restorethebay@hotmail.com."

I actually had the killthemall and Killorder e-mail accounts, but I was pretty sure they were being monitored by Dragon. I only used Nazi phones for those accounts, and I kept a burner phone for the other one. Hopefully, the PRT would think they had all my electronic communications, and I could mislead them with false messages.

The potential for leading them around was too good to be ignored.

"We have an agreement," Accord said.

I nodded to him.

"I've got other business," I said. "So, I will take my leave."

I teleported to the roof of the building and listened in to their discussion over the next ten minutes. Once I was sure they wouldn't betray me, I blinked away.

The problem was that I had too many things to do, and some of them, like saving the Bay were complicated things that would take months to accomplish, if they could even be done at all.

I wasn't a planning genius like Accord, and I didn't have experience in planning a military campaign like Earth Het was going to need.

All I could do was try to deal with one thing at a time and hope I wasn't forgetting anything.

Blinking over to Cannibal world, I was careful to appear in Blasto's courtyard. I'd embarrassed us both by blinking in unannounced once, and he'd demanded that we never talk about the incident again.

It had been an education I'd neither needed nor wanted, and I was careful to respect his privacy after that.

I knocked on the door, and I waited patiently. Since it was a door leading to a courtyard, I was the only one who could be knocking.

"Hey," he said, opening the door. The interior reeked of marijuana fumes. "What's up?"

"Have you gotten the anti-zombie vaccine yet?" I asked.

Blasto had further changed the vaccine to replicate in water and to grow exponentially. We'd left the genital itching; it would go away once the vaccine had produced full immunity, and it wouldn't reoccur no matter how much of the vaccine someone drank.

My plan was to drop batches of the vaccines in the reservoirs feeding city water supplies in zombie earth. It had been more than a month since I had been there, and hopefully the survivors were still alive.

"Yeah. There's no way you'll be able to inoculate an entire planet," he said. "We just don't have the time to make that much vaccine even with Tinkertech. I worked with Panacea to make it airborne once people are infected."

Panacea had given her approval; I could see it in his mind.

"How do we administer it?"

"Still in the reservoirs," Blasto said. "It'll be a couple of weeks before people are fully immunized, but they'll be infectious for a while."

I nodded.

Blasto had built bladder like sacs filled with the virus in a liquid suspension. The bladders would dissolve in water; the liquid on the inside had an enzyme to keep it from dissolving. However, once immersed in water, the whole thing would go, delivering its payload.

He'd only managed to create a dozen bladders the size of thirty-gallon buckets, but he assured me that each one would be enough to contaminate the reservoir of ordinary cities.

"As long as people keep flying and moving around, I'd expect the whole world to be infected in about four months," he said. "And places too remote too be infected probably don't have to worry about zombies either."

I inventoried the sacs, careful not to touch them too hard.

"All right," I said. "Is there anything you need?"

"A root cellar to keep beer in, and some stairs down to the town you've got downstairs. There's a chick downstairs that's really cool."

"I thought you were going out with Bad Apple?" I asked. "Or Poison Apple, or whatever you're calling her these days?"

"It's kind of an open relationship," he said. "And I think she'd like Lizzie. She's skinny, but she's cool."

"If I build stairs that means you might have kids crawling around up here," I said. "Getting into your stuff. Maybe an elevator?"

"You can't build a house, but you can build an elevator?"

"I can build a house," I said defensively. "Mostly. I probably couldn't do any of the tile work or the carpentry or anything like that without eating a lot of skill books, but I could."

"But an elevator?"

"It doesn't even have to be a box," I said. "It could just be a frame with counterweights."

"You're kind of cheap for a millionaire," he said.

"I grew up poor!" I said. "If I blew money on building fancy houses for everybody, I'd go broke and everybody would still be outside when winter came."

He grinned.

"It's not like I care, as long as I've got my herbs and some beer and maybe a little stuff on the computer."

I sighed and handed him a memory stick.

"Don't blame me if that thing has viruses," I said. "I programmed the bot to scan the web for the stuff that you like. I haven't seen it, and I don't want to see it…again."

"It never happened," he said looking straight ahead.

"Right," I said. "Well, I'm off."

I switched to new, disposable hoodie and sweatpants. I planned to disinfect myself by taking a bath in a volcano afterwards, and then inventorying whatever hardened lava appeared on my body afterwards.

Hopefully the refugees were still alive. I might never find them; it had been more than a month since I'd seen them last; maybe two.

I appeared in the air over Racoon City.

-1 HP.

+1% RADIATION DAMAGE.

The whole city was gone. Had they nuked it?

-1 HP.

+1% RADIATION DAMAGE.

I dropped lower to examine the damage. I wasn't worried about the radiation damage; at its current speed my regeneration could handle it, and since I was likely to eventually fight Behemoth it was actually helping me.

-1 HP.

+1% RADIATION DAMAGE.

They'd deployed six overlapping nuclear weapons in an overlapping pattern, destroying all the buildings in a ten-mile radius.

It was the best they could do at this tech level, anyway, and hopefully it would have removed the threat.

-1 HP.

+1% RADIATION DAMAGE.

RADIATION RESISTANCE IS NOW 12%.

It added to my physical resistance, anyway, which was why my trips to space hadn't been damaging to me. If I was taking this much damage, the area must still be hot.

I had a feeling that the refugees we'd helped hadn't survived. The city had been locked down as far as I could tell.

The buildings had been completely destroyed. I walked around on the surface, ignoring the rubble that crunched under my feet as I absorbed radiation.

I only gained another 7%, reaching 19% RADIATION RESISTANCE before I stopped taking damage.

Blinking to the location of the volcano on Harvester world, I plunged into it. Lava was heavy, and a normal person wouldn't have sunk inside; they'd have simply burned to death on the surface.

I plunged down inside the lava, and to me it felt like warm mud. I made sure to dunk my head and hair inside, although not for long; I couldn't see inside the lava.

When I felt I was decontaminated, I flew out, naked and then inventoried all the lava on my body.

It only occurred to me then that I could have simply inventoried all the radioactive dust on my body at once.

Blinking back to an area outside the city, I flew.

Hopefully they'd managed to burn out the infection. I flew down the highway toward the next large city; it only took me five minutes at a thousand miles an hour.

There were zombies all through the city.

I dropped the package in the reservoir anyway.

There were zombies in the next city, and the city after that. I spent the next five hours looking, and it appeared that there were zombies in every city, even when I flew up to the Bering strait and crossed over into Russia.

Had this already happened before we'd developed the vaccine, or had I had the opportunity to stop it and had simply forgotten about an entire world?

The five hours I spent after that, killing as many zombies as I could was ultimately futile. There was no way I'd be able to kill six billion zombies without killing the human survivors, if there were any.

As far as I could tell, the disease had spread even to the birds and the animals. I was attacked by a zombie cow in Minnesota, and I gained +3 STRENTH, bringing me to 37.

Other than that, the trip was a bust.

I couldn't afford to keep making mistakes like this. Even through whatever protection's Gamer's Mind provided, I felt guilty.

I was going to have to do better.