Post by redsycorax on Feb 27, 2019 22:02:25 GMT
The 1980s was a particularly fraught decade in terms of geopolitics and Heisenberg Points for the divergence of alternate universes. It was the decade of neoliberal, free market economics in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia and New Zealand, while the advent of Ronald Reagan as US President on some Earths led to an increase in perceptible hostilities with the USSR, dependent on the composition of the change of Soviet leadership. On Earth-33, Yuri Andropov and Constantin Chernenko were rapidly succeeded by the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, whose actions led to the withdrawal of the Red Army from the quagmire in Afghanistan, the end of the Warsaw Pact and the demise of Soviet communism itself. But it was also a time of hairtrigger nuclear escalation, which led to near-misses on some alternate Earths when a Soviet mainframe malfunctioned and appeared to show a US nuclear first strike. On others, prompted by the 'provocative' NATO Operation Able Archer, a fatal miscalculation was made and nuclear war erupted in 1982. In others, the Iranian Islamic Republic collapsed and was replaced by a US surrogate and the Soviets won victory in Afghanistan, annexing it into the USSR, leading to hawkish Soviet elements making a fatal miscalculation that led to nuclear war in 1983. In others, though, the USSR collapsed earlier than 1991, or the former Yugoslavia disintegrated in the mid-eighties instead of the early nineties, leading to only limited nuclear retaliation.
On Earth-V, there was no Falklands War in 1983 and the Thatcher administration did not experience the consequent burst of nationalist pride that led to further terms and the consolidation of its power on other Earths. Consequently, Michael Foot's Labour Party won the 1984 UK General Election and followed the lead of New Zealand in the Southwest Pacific, ending the stationing of nuclear weapons across the United Kingdom, scrapping the costly Trident British nuclear missile programme and tried to renegotiate Britain's NATO role. The hardline Reagan administration refused to do so and forced Britain out of NATO. Thus, three years later, the United Kingdom escaped direct thermonuclear devastation as President Haig and Soviet General Nivichenko went to war over the disintegration of Yugoslavia. In the resultant conflict, there was severe devastation across North America, Eurasia and Africa, as South Africa found to its shock that the USSR had supplied nuclear weapons to frontline Southwest African states and apartheid came to a fiery end, as did several African dictatorships. Vietnam, Japan, China and Australia did not escape devastation in the Southern and Eastern Hemispheres either, as Soviet and US bases and potential postwar competitors were targeted and destroyed in their turn. As a consequence, there was severe climatic and political disruption. Civil order collapsed in the United Kingdom, resolved only by the advent of the neofascist Norsefire movement under the authority of Chancellor Adam Sutler. The Royal Family refused to play along with the Norsefire regime and three generations of the House of Windsor were slaughtered. Queen Elizabeth's granddaughter was elevated as the puppet Queen Zara. Millions of Afro-Carribean, South Asian, lesbian and gay, socialist and anarchist dissidents to the regime were slaughtered in concentration camps. But one man escaped and in 1997, began a campaign of vengeance against the Norsefire regime that steadily escalated over the next year, taking on orphaned sixteen year old Evey Hammond as his apprentice. In the closing stages of the resultant civil war, "V" was shot and died, leaving Evey to replace him as the second V.
But in an alternate timeline to that, others observed the return of democracy and anarchy in Earth V's England, and sought to undo it...
Part One: Vicissitude
Twenty years after the destruction of the Norsefire regime in 1998, a haggard but still sharp-witted Helen Heyer looked out coldly across the ash and debris of the borderland that seperated New Norseland from the wretched anarchists of the Collective of English Democratic Communities and the new "V" master anarchist who watched on and guided the new era as peace, diversity and equality returned to most of England. Somewhere amidst the greensward that ran through post-Norsefire London, her deceased husband Conrad and lover Alistair Harper's yellowed bones lay in a lime pit. She hadn't thought about them in years. It was only luck that she had finally made her way out of revolutionary London, and found a cluster of loyalists in Southern England, the bastion of conservative order and stability throughout many generations- and the heart of Norsefire support. She'd been so damned blind, reliant on manipulating weak men behind the scenes, and then her snivelling husband Conrad had killed her lover Alistair and her plans to install her husband as Adam Sutler's successor fell apart. Of course, Helen Heyer didn't actually believe in Norsefire's fascist ideology, the silly uniforms, the pomp and circumstance, but that was academic now. Damn it, New Norseland could have done with the expertise and professionalism of some of those who had been sent to the gas chambers instead of wantonly exterminating them, she could see that now.
But for now, England was sundered. She lit a cigarette and pondered what she could do to overturn the anarchist collectives on the far side of the border. Damn it, Norsefire had been so stupid with its austerity and needless puritanism, given what now existed on the other side of the border. Women were free to have abortions once more, homosexuality and prostitution were legal, and so was regulated non-harmful recreational drug use. And that had led to a gender imbalance on her side of the border, with defections across the Iron Wall, no matter how much social liberalisation New Norseland permitted now. Suddenly, her scientific advisor, Donald Quilette knocked on the door, disturbing her reveries:
"Leader? It's the quantum tunneller. It seems to have made some contact in the distant future."
"How near?"
"The twenty fifth century."
Heyer laughed: "You might as well tell me that we've contacted Storm Saxon, for all the good that might do us."
Quilette cleared his throat and stammered: "Actually, Leader, th-that's exactly what has happened."
"Impossible. He was only ever pasteboard and animation, a cheap racist cartoon rip off of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers written by hack ideologues for the Old Norsefire regime."
"But still, he's waiting on the other end of the quantum tunnel vortex. And his account of his existence conforms exactly to the Storm Saxon storyline from the Nationalist Television cartoon series."
"This could be very useful, Quilette. Well done. At last, we may have a weapon against V and her infernal anarchist nightmare back in London."
Part Two: Valour:
Evey Hammond looked out across the railing at the greenwood that now threaded through London, with its horses and trains. She smelled tea from the kitchen as Dominic came in with a new brew from their greenhouse:
"You know, Dom, I'm beginning to wonder if I should hang up my cape."
"They still need you, Evey. You're an icon, a symbol of hope and aspiration to them."
"It's been a year since something arose that required my mediation, though."
"There's still that global exploration voyage across the Atlantic. What if it finds something in North America?"
Evey shook her head: "Florida's gone, we know that much. The entire East Coast and Texas' coastal cities are radioactive and unapproachable and the Determination's drones aren't detecting anything inland, at least not within their exploratory range. Not even a radio broadcast. The fallout seems to be everywhere, even when it comes to areas that weren't directly targeted. Perhaps they'll have better luck with Central and South America. Apart from Cuba, which is a writeoff."
"Wait, what's that?" Dominic pointed.
"Their quantum tunneller. Never mind that they're starving the elderly and disabled over in Norseland to fund that. Blazes."
"So why waste money on that sort of technology?"
"Because they want to upset the balance of power. They're trying to contact alternate probabilities from universes where the Third World War never happened, or where Norsefire crushed the Peoples Revolution of 1998."
"You never struck me as a physicist, Evey."
"They're obviously unable to obtain support from overseas, given that North America, Europe and South Africa are all charnel houses. So sideways is a logical, if attenuated, move."
"But how is it possible? If the technology were feasible, surely Heyer and her goons would have used it before?"
"We'll soon know, Dom. I have a sleeper agent in there and he's morse signalling to me using that mobile telecommunication device we established."
"2504. Storm Saxon. Must be garbled."
"Oh, hell. Looks like those old comic books from the regime are going to come in useful after all..."
Part Three: Virulence
Storm Saxon blinked around him, stepping over the body of his vanquished girlfriend and companion, Heidi Blank. On his world, Earth-V3, the nuclear war had included Britain because Thatcher had stayed in power past 1983, but Ronald Reagan had gone insane at the next US election when it looked like he was going to lose to Walter Mondale after only one term in power. So, he launched a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union and NATO surged across the Warsaw Pact borders. It only took five hours for the conflict to escalate past the point of no return. The disgruntled right-wing military elements, political extremists and far right corporate backers who had formed Norsefire died from nuclear detonations above their headquarters and stockpiles. However, in this timeline, South Africa was targeted before it could launch its nuclear weapons. Here, Nigeria emerged as the centre of a prosperous but totalitarian Africa after the post-apocalyptic turmoil had subsided. In 2487, they had invaded the irradiated remains of England and Wales, deporting the descendants of its survivors to industrial or sexual slavery in the West African powerhouse. However, one figure had emerged to combat the Yoruban Empire's conquest. Unfortunately, his own ancestors had been surviving political extremists and he was poisoned by his own racism. Of course, Saxon didn't see things that way.
And also, because he was just one person against an empire, despite the inroads he made against the Imperial forces, there came a time when he was facing his final stand in a bunker, albeit after his truncated fictional adventures inadvertant final season was screened on Earth-V1. He had clasped his 'sacred' hooked cross and said a prayer to "Holy Adolf the Great" over the corpse of his companion Heidi, after she had killed herself rather than face execution or torture. Then he saw a coruscating halo of light and the form of an ancient British centre of lost technology wavered into view. Storm Saxon grinned. Perhaps he would live to fight another day after all. He walked toward the 'holy' light...
Part Four: Verification
As Saxon emerged, Heyer raised an eyebrow:
"So it is true. Storm Saxon, welcome to our world's 2019. I take it you are familiar with the concept of alternate universes?"
"Yes, as a fictional device. So you are telling me that this world is one which diverged from our own at a pivotal point?"
"Here, there was also a nuclear war, but it did not devastate the United Kingdom as it did in your world, ironically due to the extremism of the Labour Party and rejection of our traditional alliances with the United States and our kin in Europe. Those of our political persuasion even seized control for a few precious years, until a violent anarchist, known only as 'V', embarked on a career of terrorism, murder and machiavellean manipulation, culminating in the death of our leader, Adam Sutler. This...New Norseland...is the last fragment that survives under the authority of revolutionary nationalism in the British Isles."
Saxon frowned: "But the black butchers...?"
Heyer motioned to a viewscreen: "We disposed of dissidents and cultural contagion in purification camps."
"So there are none surviving here?"
"Africa was hit heavily during our Third World War in 1987. No, there are not."
"Praise Adolf! Who is leader here? Take me to him!"
Heyer raised an eyebrow: "Actually, that would be me."
Saxon knelt: "My pardon, lady. I should have realised, with the passion and knowledge with which you spoke. So, you wish me to retake and repurify England from those who have sullied it over the decades that have passed since the murder of Sutler?"
"With your assistance, dear Storm, England will once again prevail."
Part Four: Variation:
But Storm Saxon's appearance had not gone unnoticed. Krypton Woman and Catwoman were on duty in the Hall of Heroes as the alarm klaxon rang:
"What is it?"
"Earth-V, according to this. It's supposed to be one of the aleph-null multiverse worlds, like Earth-33 here in the Core Multiverse, which have no metahumans but whose inhabitants often have parakinetic abilities to affect alternate universes to their own. There aren't supposed to be metahumans there, either. They've just been through a nuclear war almost thirty years ago and in surviving England, there was a violent neofascist political regime called Norsefire in power during the nineties until assassinations and revolutionary uprisings caused it to fall apart in late 1998. And how can they have quantum tunneller techology?! That's usually developed in the twenty-fourth century in most datum alternate universes. This needs investigating."
"From what they told us during orientation, there might be a few trans-universal malignant metahumans who could be exploiting this situation and using Earth-V as a potential stepping stone to other aleph-null worlds. The intruder metahuman is named Storm Saxon."
Krypton Woman almost smiled: "Really?"
"He's a neofascist metahuman in a twenty-sixth century post-apocalyptic environment, a fictional character on Earth-V and a native of Earth-V3, an aligned alternate Earth within its sector of bleedspace. He has access to advanced weapons technology, but he'd be no match for datum metahumans from elsewhere in the multiverse."
Part Five: Vilification
Storm Saxon turned and was knocked down by a highly athletic woman, who began pummelling him as he was forced back to his own world. As V watched in disbelief from her visual feed, another woman flew (!) from the wound in space and began destroying the quantum tunneller, deactivating its causal nexus to Earth-V. She faced Helen Heyer, who gritted her teeth: "Who are you? What are you?"
"Sorry, but you don't get to cheat at cards, lady. He doesn't belong here. You don't get a second chance to press the deathmask of repression on this world's survivors. No, I won't kill you. Unlike you, I don't believe in killing. I value human life, in all its diversity. Nor will I even overthrow your tinpot fascist scraphill here. That privilege belongs to the people on the opposite side of the border. What has it all been for? Your husband's dead, you don't even believe in the political philosophy you profess. Or is it power, absolute power, at any cost whatsoever? Like the millions of lives that your former regime destroyed?"
"All right, yes, damn you! That's all I've ever wanted. Is that so wrong?"
"Destroying other people to climb to the top of a pile of bloody corpses? Yes, Ms. Heyer, it is. There's a terrifying void where conscience and compassion should be within your life."
"And what do you intend to do about it?"
"Ah, that's not up to me. You see, I'm wired to broadcast this. Your neofascist loyalists will have heard about your facade and that you don't actually believe in this obscenity. However, that will also result in loyalists who believe in you personally staging their own uprising. Your derelict remnant regime ends here, Ms. Heyer. Goodbye." As the sounds of chaos and gunfire began to rise around her, a figure stepped from the shadows. Eric Finch fired as Helen Heyer said his name and died before she hit the ground. Without even a figurehead and amidst the chaos of civil war, the Norsefire nightmare finally ended.
Part Six: Vindication
Several months later, Dominic hugged his old friend: "Eric, it's been twenty years. Thank you, but why return now?"
"She had to be stopped. What she was doing only prolonged the nightmare. I thought I could escape it through fleeing to the North, but. No. Still, now it's over."
"They were down to shooting dissidents over there. Heyer's heart wasn't in it."
"What heart? All she ever wanted was absolute power, at first through her husband or lover, and then she realised she could do it for herself. Because of her, the remnants of Norsefire were able to rally and continue their existence in Southeastern England for far too long."
"What about you, Evey? It's all over, at long last."
"I'm taking this off. I'll never wear it again. It served its purpose but masks seal you off from the world. It's time for peace, freedom and reconstruction. I'll still be there in the background, but V's time is over. It's time for Evey Hammond to step back into the sunlight at last. It's time for a new world to be born, amongst these challenges we all face." And with that, V opened the curtains, unfastened her mask, took off her hat and went to change out of the carapace that she'd worn for half a lifetime. Twenty years after the first V gave his life, the second V simply faded away into the background of life in post-apocalyptic British anarchist society.
THE END
On Earth-V, there was no Falklands War in 1983 and the Thatcher administration did not experience the consequent burst of nationalist pride that led to further terms and the consolidation of its power on other Earths. Consequently, Michael Foot's Labour Party won the 1984 UK General Election and followed the lead of New Zealand in the Southwest Pacific, ending the stationing of nuclear weapons across the United Kingdom, scrapping the costly Trident British nuclear missile programme and tried to renegotiate Britain's NATO role. The hardline Reagan administration refused to do so and forced Britain out of NATO. Thus, three years later, the United Kingdom escaped direct thermonuclear devastation as President Haig and Soviet General Nivichenko went to war over the disintegration of Yugoslavia. In the resultant conflict, there was severe devastation across North America, Eurasia and Africa, as South Africa found to its shock that the USSR had supplied nuclear weapons to frontline Southwest African states and apartheid came to a fiery end, as did several African dictatorships. Vietnam, Japan, China and Australia did not escape devastation in the Southern and Eastern Hemispheres either, as Soviet and US bases and potential postwar competitors were targeted and destroyed in their turn. As a consequence, there was severe climatic and political disruption. Civil order collapsed in the United Kingdom, resolved only by the advent of the neofascist Norsefire movement under the authority of Chancellor Adam Sutler. The Royal Family refused to play along with the Norsefire regime and three generations of the House of Windsor were slaughtered. Queen Elizabeth's granddaughter was elevated as the puppet Queen Zara. Millions of Afro-Carribean, South Asian, lesbian and gay, socialist and anarchist dissidents to the regime were slaughtered in concentration camps. But one man escaped and in 1997, began a campaign of vengeance against the Norsefire regime that steadily escalated over the next year, taking on orphaned sixteen year old Evey Hammond as his apprentice. In the closing stages of the resultant civil war, "V" was shot and died, leaving Evey to replace him as the second V.
But in an alternate timeline to that, others observed the return of democracy and anarchy in Earth V's England, and sought to undo it...
Part One: Vicissitude
Twenty years after the destruction of the Norsefire regime in 1998, a haggard but still sharp-witted Helen Heyer looked out coldly across the ash and debris of the borderland that seperated New Norseland from the wretched anarchists of the Collective of English Democratic Communities and the new "V" master anarchist who watched on and guided the new era as peace, diversity and equality returned to most of England. Somewhere amidst the greensward that ran through post-Norsefire London, her deceased husband Conrad and lover Alistair Harper's yellowed bones lay in a lime pit. She hadn't thought about them in years. It was only luck that she had finally made her way out of revolutionary London, and found a cluster of loyalists in Southern England, the bastion of conservative order and stability throughout many generations- and the heart of Norsefire support. She'd been so damned blind, reliant on manipulating weak men behind the scenes, and then her snivelling husband Conrad had killed her lover Alistair and her plans to install her husband as Adam Sutler's successor fell apart. Of course, Helen Heyer didn't actually believe in Norsefire's fascist ideology, the silly uniforms, the pomp and circumstance, but that was academic now. Damn it, New Norseland could have done with the expertise and professionalism of some of those who had been sent to the gas chambers instead of wantonly exterminating them, she could see that now.
But for now, England was sundered. She lit a cigarette and pondered what she could do to overturn the anarchist collectives on the far side of the border. Damn it, Norsefire had been so stupid with its austerity and needless puritanism, given what now existed on the other side of the border. Women were free to have abortions once more, homosexuality and prostitution were legal, and so was regulated non-harmful recreational drug use. And that had led to a gender imbalance on her side of the border, with defections across the Iron Wall, no matter how much social liberalisation New Norseland permitted now. Suddenly, her scientific advisor, Donald Quilette knocked on the door, disturbing her reveries:
"Leader? It's the quantum tunneller. It seems to have made some contact in the distant future."
"How near?"
"The twenty fifth century."
Heyer laughed: "You might as well tell me that we've contacted Storm Saxon, for all the good that might do us."
Quilette cleared his throat and stammered: "Actually, Leader, th-that's exactly what has happened."
"Impossible. He was only ever pasteboard and animation, a cheap racist cartoon rip off of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers written by hack ideologues for the Old Norsefire regime."
"But still, he's waiting on the other end of the quantum tunnel vortex. And his account of his existence conforms exactly to the Storm Saxon storyline from the Nationalist Television cartoon series."
"This could be very useful, Quilette. Well done. At last, we may have a weapon against V and her infernal anarchist nightmare back in London."
Part Two: Valour:
Evey Hammond looked out across the railing at the greenwood that now threaded through London, with its horses and trains. She smelled tea from the kitchen as Dominic came in with a new brew from their greenhouse:
"You know, Dom, I'm beginning to wonder if I should hang up my cape."
"They still need you, Evey. You're an icon, a symbol of hope and aspiration to them."
"It's been a year since something arose that required my mediation, though."
"There's still that global exploration voyage across the Atlantic. What if it finds something in North America?"
Evey shook her head: "Florida's gone, we know that much. The entire East Coast and Texas' coastal cities are radioactive and unapproachable and the Determination's drones aren't detecting anything inland, at least not within their exploratory range. Not even a radio broadcast. The fallout seems to be everywhere, even when it comes to areas that weren't directly targeted. Perhaps they'll have better luck with Central and South America. Apart from Cuba, which is a writeoff."
"Wait, what's that?" Dominic pointed.
"Their quantum tunneller. Never mind that they're starving the elderly and disabled over in Norseland to fund that. Blazes."
"So why waste money on that sort of technology?"
"Because they want to upset the balance of power. They're trying to contact alternate probabilities from universes where the Third World War never happened, or where Norsefire crushed the Peoples Revolution of 1998."
"You never struck me as a physicist, Evey."
"They're obviously unable to obtain support from overseas, given that North America, Europe and South Africa are all charnel houses. So sideways is a logical, if attenuated, move."
"But how is it possible? If the technology were feasible, surely Heyer and her goons would have used it before?"
"We'll soon know, Dom. I have a sleeper agent in there and he's morse signalling to me using that mobile telecommunication device we established."
"2504. Storm Saxon. Must be garbled."
"Oh, hell. Looks like those old comic books from the regime are going to come in useful after all..."
Part Three: Virulence
Storm Saxon blinked around him, stepping over the body of his vanquished girlfriend and companion, Heidi Blank. On his world, Earth-V3, the nuclear war had included Britain because Thatcher had stayed in power past 1983, but Ronald Reagan had gone insane at the next US election when it looked like he was going to lose to Walter Mondale after only one term in power. So, he launched a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union and NATO surged across the Warsaw Pact borders. It only took five hours for the conflict to escalate past the point of no return. The disgruntled right-wing military elements, political extremists and far right corporate backers who had formed Norsefire died from nuclear detonations above their headquarters and stockpiles. However, in this timeline, South Africa was targeted before it could launch its nuclear weapons. Here, Nigeria emerged as the centre of a prosperous but totalitarian Africa after the post-apocalyptic turmoil had subsided. In 2487, they had invaded the irradiated remains of England and Wales, deporting the descendants of its survivors to industrial or sexual slavery in the West African powerhouse. However, one figure had emerged to combat the Yoruban Empire's conquest. Unfortunately, his own ancestors had been surviving political extremists and he was poisoned by his own racism. Of course, Saxon didn't see things that way.
And also, because he was just one person against an empire, despite the inroads he made against the Imperial forces, there came a time when he was facing his final stand in a bunker, albeit after his truncated fictional adventures inadvertant final season was screened on Earth-V1. He had clasped his 'sacred' hooked cross and said a prayer to "Holy Adolf the Great" over the corpse of his companion Heidi, after she had killed herself rather than face execution or torture. Then he saw a coruscating halo of light and the form of an ancient British centre of lost technology wavered into view. Storm Saxon grinned. Perhaps he would live to fight another day after all. He walked toward the 'holy' light...
Part Four: Verification
As Saxon emerged, Heyer raised an eyebrow:
"So it is true. Storm Saxon, welcome to our world's 2019. I take it you are familiar with the concept of alternate universes?"
"Yes, as a fictional device. So you are telling me that this world is one which diverged from our own at a pivotal point?"
"Here, there was also a nuclear war, but it did not devastate the United Kingdom as it did in your world, ironically due to the extremism of the Labour Party and rejection of our traditional alliances with the United States and our kin in Europe. Those of our political persuasion even seized control for a few precious years, until a violent anarchist, known only as 'V', embarked on a career of terrorism, murder and machiavellean manipulation, culminating in the death of our leader, Adam Sutler. This...New Norseland...is the last fragment that survives under the authority of revolutionary nationalism in the British Isles."
Saxon frowned: "But the black butchers...?"
Heyer motioned to a viewscreen: "We disposed of dissidents and cultural contagion in purification camps."
"So there are none surviving here?"
"Africa was hit heavily during our Third World War in 1987. No, there are not."
"Praise Adolf! Who is leader here? Take me to him!"
Heyer raised an eyebrow: "Actually, that would be me."
Saxon knelt: "My pardon, lady. I should have realised, with the passion and knowledge with which you spoke. So, you wish me to retake and repurify England from those who have sullied it over the decades that have passed since the murder of Sutler?"
"With your assistance, dear Storm, England will once again prevail."
Part Four: Variation:
But Storm Saxon's appearance had not gone unnoticed. Krypton Woman and Catwoman were on duty in the Hall of Heroes as the alarm klaxon rang:
"What is it?"
"Earth-V, according to this. It's supposed to be one of the aleph-null multiverse worlds, like Earth-33 here in the Core Multiverse, which have no metahumans but whose inhabitants often have parakinetic abilities to affect alternate universes to their own. There aren't supposed to be metahumans there, either. They've just been through a nuclear war almost thirty years ago and in surviving England, there was a violent neofascist political regime called Norsefire in power during the nineties until assassinations and revolutionary uprisings caused it to fall apart in late 1998. And how can they have quantum tunneller techology?! That's usually developed in the twenty-fourth century in most datum alternate universes. This needs investigating."
"From what they told us during orientation, there might be a few trans-universal malignant metahumans who could be exploiting this situation and using Earth-V as a potential stepping stone to other aleph-null worlds. The intruder metahuman is named Storm Saxon."
Krypton Woman almost smiled: "Really?"
"He's a neofascist metahuman in a twenty-sixth century post-apocalyptic environment, a fictional character on Earth-V and a native of Earth-V3, an aligned alternate Earth within its sector of bleedspace. He has access to advanced weapons technology, but he'd be no match for datum metahumans from elsewhere in the multiverse."
Part Five: Vilification
Storm Saxon turned and was knocked down by a highly athletic woman, who began pummelling him as he was forced back to his own world. As V watched in disbelief from her visual feed, another woman flew (!) from the wound in space and began destroying the quantum tunneller, deactivating its causal nexus to Earth-V. She faced Helen Heyer, who gritted her teeth: "Who are you? What are you?"
"Sorry, but you don't get to cheat at cards, lady. He doesn't belong here. You don't get a second chance to press the deathmask of repression on this world's survivors. No, I won't kill you. Unlike you, I don't believe in killing. I value human life, in all its diversity. Nor will I even overthrow your tinpot fascist scraphill here. That privilege belongs to the people on the opposite side of the border. What has it all been for? Your husband's dead, you don't even believe in the political philosophy you profess. Or is it power, absolute power, at any cost whatsoever? Like the millions of lives that your former regime destroyed?"
"All right, yes, damn you! That's all I've ever wanted. Is that so wrong?"
"Destroying other people to climb to the top of a pile of bloody corpses? Yes, Ms. Heyer, it is. There's a terrifying void where conscience and compassion should be within your life."
"And what do you intend to do about it?"
"Ah, that's not up to me. You see, I'm wired to broadcast this. Your neofascist loyalists will have heard about your facade and that you don't actually believe in this obscenity. However, that will also result in loyalists who believe in you personally staging their own uprising. Your derelict remnant regime ends here, Ms. Heyer. Goodbye." As the sounds of chaos and gunfire began to rise around her, a figure stepped from the shadows. Eric Finch fired as Helen Heyer said his name and died before she hit the ground. Without even a figurehead and amidst the chaos of civil war, the Norsefire nightmare finally ended.
Part Six: Vindication
Several months later, Dominic hugged his old friend: "Eric, it's been twenty years. Thank you, but why return now?"
"She had to be stopped. What she was doing only prolonged the nightmare. I thought I could escape it through fleeing to the North, but. No. Still, now it's over."
"They were down to shooting dissidents over there. Heyer's heart wasn't in it."
"What heart? All she ever wanted was absolute power, at first through her husband or lover, and then she realised she could do it for herself. Because of her, the remnants of Norsefire were able to rally and continue their existence in Southeastern England for far too long."
"What about you, Evey? It's all over, at long last."
"I'm taking this off. I'll never wear it again. It served its purpose but masks seal you off from the world. It's time for peace, freedom and reconstruction. I'll still be there in the background, but V's time is over. It's time for Evey Hammond to step back into the sunlight at last. It's time for a new world to be born, amongst these challenges we all face." And with that, V opened the curtains, unfastened her mask, took off her hat and went to change out of the carapace that she'd worn for half a lifetime. Twenty years after the first V gave his life, the second V simply faded away into the background of life in post-apocalyptic British anarchist society.
THE END