It Beats the Alternative

"Morning, Mr. Carson," the security guard said, nodding his head slightly as the huge man walked toward the elevator "Is everything okay, sir?"

"I've had worse days, Stan." Craig replied, turning briefly to face the guard. Stan Wiebe was a bit of a fixture at the night shift at Flux-Carson, Thundrax's company, an energy and mining firm. Stan was a reliable employee who liked the night shift. "Are the kids doing okay?"

"It's flu season," Stan answered. "Lynette's home with both of the little monsters."

"Ah," Craig acknowledged. The rangy security guard grinned sheepishly and then turned his head as he saw something out of the corner of his eye. Craig caught a glint of something reflecting off steel and glass, rubbed his eyes, and...

"If the pipes burst, I'm not sure that the insurance will cover the flooding."

When Craig finished rubbing his eyes, he gasped. He was no longer in the spacious lobby at Flux-Carson's office in downtown Millennium City, towering over everyone in his superhuman Thundrax form that he wore most of the time. Instead, he was in his normal body, his Craig form, dressed in overalls, sitting next to a plumbing kit, apparently working on the kitchen drain in a house he didn't recognize, while a woman in a housecoat with pink floppy bunny slippers yammered at him.

"Uh -- what?" he said.

"The flooding," the woman, a short Asian lady of Chinese ancestry told him curtly, then began yelling at a bawling infant in Cantonese. Even weirder, Craig could understand a few words of what she was saying.

Craig got to his feet and took in a deep breath. "Excuse me, Mrs. Fong," he said, not realizing he'd correctly identified her by name. "I need to make a few phone calls."

Mrs. Fong looked at him disparagingly. "Why do you need to do that?" she snapped. "The pipes."

Craig sighed, even as he examined the surroundings in an attempt to get his bearings. "This will be off the clock, I promise." he said. The sentence came easily to his lips, almost as if it had been a long-standing habit.

Craig ignored the woman's angry glare as he reached into his pocket and picked out his StonePhone. He dialed a number, suspecting he wouldn't be connected.

"UNTIL Command, Canada. Please speak your name, rank, and security code."

"Craig Carson," Thundrax answered. "Acting Captain. Security Code --this probably won't work-- Jack-Canada-Alpha-Twenty-Ravenclaw."

"Your voice print matches a Craig Alexander Carson," the UNTIL operator says. "But you only have a Security-1 access, and no acting rank. You're on the auxiliary list."

"Auxiliary list?" Craig wondered. "That's one hell of a demotion. I need to speak to Project Ourenos. My guess is that I'm either experiencing an illusory construct, a dimensional shunt, or a timeline fracture." His voice was oddly calm as he casually discussed phenomena that was normally beyond human comprehension. Thirty years in the world of superhumans has that effect.

"You have no clearance for Ourenos. You shouldn't even know about Ourenos."

"I know!" Craig blurted, slightly irritated. "The fact I know about it rules out the hypothesis that my previous superhuman life was a lie. When was my last previous transmission to UNTIL?"

"September 12. 1995."

"The current date is..." Craig looked at the display on his StonePhone. "July 26, 2011. Is that correct?"

"I can confirm that."

It was the same date that he remembered from the lobby of Flux-Carson in Millenium City. So this isn't time travel, he thought. Craig decided to ignore the implications of having not contacted UNTIL in sixteen years. A timeline where he lost his powers? Perhaps. He could always try to switch into his Thundrax body, but it would be better to find out more information first, just to make sure that choice wouldn't be a mistake.If Thundrax had been killed years before and he'd somehow escaped, transforming back into that body would probably be fatal.

"Okay!" Craig declared. "Just send a message to Ourenos's operations officer. I guess I need to hope that a long inactive Canadian's request for help won't be beneath their notice. My apologies for the unusual nature of this request. Five minutes ago, I was in Millennium, with all of the UNTIL privileges of a Captain... It's still Millennium City, right? Not Detroit?"

"Yes, Mr. Carson," the voice informed him. "But your GPS identifies your current location as Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada."

"Back in my old body, in my old hometown," Craig responded. "I'm even in my old job, plumbing."

"Mr. Carson, there's a crisis in New York that requires my attention."

"Understood," Craig answered, rubbing his side. "Good luck."

"Good luck to you, too, Mr. Carson.."

Craig shut off the phone and did a quick vanity search on wikipedia. Thundrax. Member of SUNDFR. Founding member of the second Northern Guard. Quit the team in 1995, shortly after the battle against VIPER where they met Dr. Nexum for the first time. Unlike in his familiar timeline, his identity was never outted by a lunatic UNTIL commander. The true identity of Thundrax was a mystery that not many people cared about.

The next step was to check on Flux-Carson Enterprises and the Carson Foundation, his corporate interests. Neither existed. Flux, his old SUNDER teammate, was still retired and running his small, very profitable, mining company, which (back in the "real world") Craig had taken over and expanded. Using his old SUNDER teammate, an earth elemental named Elemmus, to prospect for petroleum reserves and rare earths had made them richer than Craig imagined possible. fueling the billions that the Foundation granted to worthy causes every year. Here, though, the Foundation disbanded in 1995, and its much smaller charitable operations were taken over by a division of Doerksen Tech, run by Craig's old Northern Guard teammate Forceknight.

"Are you ever going to finish my sink?" Mrs. Chow complained shrily.

Craig, feeling as exasperated and as beaten as he would have against any supervillain, put away the StonePhone and finished working on the sink. It had two decades since he last worked with his brother in Carson Plumbing, but he found the work familiar and... oddly satisfying. A few minutes later, after installing a new fitting, he looked up at Mrs. Chow and said happily: "Job's done. You have a two year guarantee on labor, and a ten year guarantee on parts. Sorry about the wait."

Mrs. Chow sighed and signed the invoice. Craig scanned her credit card, completed the transaction, and departed. Checkling his GPS, Craig saw they were somewhere on East 37th. About four miles from home. He made up his mind to return, quickly cancelled his four remaining appointments for the day, and returned to his house.

2651 Turner St. In the timeline he identified as his own, his old family home had been blown up by Deathclown, the self-proclaimed "Just for Laughs Icon of the 90s", after his secret identity had been outted, and had never been rebuilt. Except that in this reality, his secret had never been leaked and Deathclown was now performing his sideshow act in Stronghold North, thanks to Ravenspeaker. Good ol' Billy, Craig told himself. He wondered if Ravenspeaker was back in Vancouver, or still stuck in the North near Steelhead and the Cat's Cradle.

The drive home was an eerie experience for two reasons. First, it impressed on Craig how little driving he had done lately, since he left the political career he never had, he had never done anything except fly or let other people do the driving. Second, the avenues were full of ghosts. He hadn't been back to his old Turner St. neighborhood in a very long time. Some of the houses were gone, replaced by commercial properties as rezoning took its toll on the old neighborhood, but enough was intact for Craig to experience a strong case of deja vu. Part of this timeline seemed familiar to him -- he didn't know what he was about to face, but Craig knew that once he got there, things would fall into place as they had with Mrs. Chow. That thought scared him. Suppose this was an assimilating timeline -- the more he got in touch with the timeline as it happened here, the harder it would be to extricate himself?

Craig parked on the side of the road and did a little more fact checking. The world was still intact, so clearly someone else stepped up on those occasions when he was involved in saving the planet, but what about those other times? Did his absence make an impact?

Craig looked up a few more events on his StonePhone. Flight 164, which he'd saved in 1999? Crashed. 126 people lost their lives. 2002 building collapse in Toronto? 29 people. Mega-Destroid incident in Millennium? 41 dead, four of them heroes, including two of his closest friends, Darius and Erik. And Darius's death had driven Van insane -- or insanier.

Was that even a word?

"Damn," Craig shook his head as he processed the consequences of his absence. Probably over a thousand people over the course of his career directly owed their lives to Craig, and that's not including the impact on their families, or the lives that had been changed for the better by the charitable work of his Foundation.

Armed with a better knowledge of the stakes, Craig returned home, determined to solve the problem -- only to stop short when he saw a pack of kids playing road hockey in his driveway. His youngest son Raj, proudly sporting a Trevor Linden jersey, was hot dogging again, stickhandling past his friends and making a beautiful shot into the corner of the net. The kids cheered (and jeered) and traded taunts in Punjabi -- Raj's friends, like Raj's mom, were Indo-Canadians, proud of their Sikh heritage. Raj was twelve, but he looked closer to fifteen, combining the size of the Carsons with the graceful, natural athleticism of the Dhaliwals. He was the best athlete in his school and knew it.

"Dad!" Raj shouted, switching to English. "Aren't you supposed to be at work?"

Craig stood at the edge of the driveway and stared at the boy, mouth open slightly. He couldn't bring himself to speak.

"Dad?" Raj asked. "You having a stroke?"

Craig shook his head, still staring at the son he never had. He could feel his heart pound in his chest to a drumbeat he never imagined he'd experience. The teens continued to shout at each other in Punjabi, which Craig didn't know how to speak, except he was now completely fluent in the language.

"I'm okay," he finally said. "Don't break a window," he added; he wasn't really sure what parents were supposed to say, but it sounded parental.

"Only sucky Bruins break windows!" Raj yelled back, referring to the team that beat the Canucks in the recent Cup finals. They had replaced the Black Hawks as the team to rag on.

Craig tried to remain collected as he entered his house, but what he saw shook him to his core. The house destroyed fifteen years ago, returned to life -- and then aged a decade and a half, thin 90s carpeting replaced by wood laminates, a different chesterfield, colorful curtains that reflected his wife's ethnic heritage, and the house smelled of curry, strong and bracing. Over a tinny AM radio, the sound of World Music could be heard, a howling female voice singing in Punjabi to the relentless beat of tamborines.

"Craig!" Manjita Carson exclaimed, coming out of the kitchen. Dressed in a frilly blue skirt and a modest yellow top; her skin was a healthy bronze-brown, and she was as slender as a woman in her mid-30s who had two kids could reasonably expect to be. "What are you doing home so soon? What did you forget this time?"

Craig stared at his wife as another flood of vivid yet false memories crashed into his skull. It had only been a month after he left the Guard that he found her, abused by her first husband. He fought so hard to get her out of that marriage, fought even harder to win her affections, and the fight to reconcile with her family -- that was the hardest of all, and still ongoing (at least with her grandparents, though they loved the kids). Those had been the hardest struggles of his life, harder than fighting against Borealis or Firewing or Mechanon, but they were worth it. He couldn't help but smile at the discovery of an unexpected true love.

"What'?" Manjita questioned the dreamy look on her husband's face.

"I..." Craig's attention was diverted to the issue at hand. How do you say that? How do you possibly tell someone you love that you're really a long-retired superhero and that their entire life, including their children, is a lie, a timeline gone astray or an illusion? "We need to talk."

"Then talk." Manjita said. "What is it, Craig?" She was clearly sensing that something was wrong. Craig could see the wheels already turning in her head.

"It's something that happened years ago, before I met you," Craig stammered. Damn, this was hard, "It's nothing to do with you, but I have to deal with it."

"Dad's a bigamist!" Raj said, peering his head through the front door. "Is she at least hot?"

"Shut up, Raj," J.J., his eldest son, snorted, having appeared in the doorway near the bottom of the stairs. He was shorter than Raj and stockier, somewhat resembling Craig's brother Jack, after whom he was named. Always dressed in black from head to toe. the coke bottle glasses he wore gave him an artsy appearance. Punjabi goth, he liked to call himself, and unlike his brother, he wore a turban and had rejected Craig's Christian faith in favor of the Sikh religion. He was smart, quiet, and introspective, almost the polar opposite of his hyperactive brother ."This is serious." he insisted.

"Raj, tell your friends to go home, now." Manjita snapped.

"Hey guys, dad's having an affair and mom wants you all to go away so she can yell at him."

"Raj, cut it out or I'm beating the crap out of you!" J.J., smaller despite being a year older, had always been far more serious than most kids his age, and was also capable of handling himself when things got rough, including against his brother. It was not an empty threat.

"J.J., Raj, cut it out!" Craig snapped. "No one's fighting. But you'd better send the boys home. You call all be Alex Burrows some other time," he insisted, referring to the pesky Vancouver Canucks star. The drama subsided with the disgruntled future NHL superstars returning to their respective homes and J.J. and Raj staring daggers at each other.

"Craig, now that you've upset the entire neighborhood, what's this about?" Manjita asked. "And I want answers."

"Do we have a brother or sister we don't know about?" Raj smirked.

"No, but we could put you up for adoption," J.J. snapped back.

"Please..." Craig said, sighing heavily. "I really don't know where to start, and this is just making it tougher."

"Now you're scaring me," Manjita said. "Craig, you've told me about your parents and your brother. What could you have held back from us that would be any worse than what your dad did to you?"

Craig sighed. "It's difficult to explain. I guess I better show you. Everybody better stand back."

"You gonna do a magic trick for us, dad?"

"Yes," Craig replied. The biggest one I got, he might have added. He figured this wouldn't kill him -- if Thundrax had died in the line of duty, he'd have remembered a memorial, at least. He was willing to take th risk. "Now stand back as far as possible."

Craig Carson closed his eyes and tried to mentally get in touch with the Storm, the primal Storm of the world, that battered the planet in the days before mankind. It was very hard to do now, as if he really had been out of touch with the living thunder for over a decade. He struggled and strained for a few seconds, agonizing seconds when he thought the storm would never come -- but then there was a rush of wind, and a triumphant roar of thunder, and a flash of lightning that blew every fuse in the house. The weak body of Craig Carson was gone, replaced by something far, far greater.

Manjita's jaw hung open, as did Raj's. J.J. gave a slow nod -- did he suspect? Craig had never shared that secret with him.

"Dad!" Raj gasped. "You're buff!" He looked over Thundrax's old school blue and gold skintight costume. "And gay!"

Craig removed the mask he hadn't worn (at least in the real world) in sixteen years. It used to feel so comfortable, but now it was stifling. His friends from the other world would no doubt be horrified by the absence of his trademark mullet. "Raj!" Thundrax sharply stated in a tone that was familiar to his kids, despite it being spoken at a lower register. "How many times I have warned you about casual homophobia? You're grounded."

"Craig..." Manjita finally said. "Are we in danger? Is that why you've become... that thing?" It seemed to Craig, looking into his wife's huge brown eyes, that she had a different thought. Why didn't you tell me?

"I wish it were that simple," Craig sighed.

"Dad, what is this?" Raj said, ignoring (for now) the proclamation of his grounding. "When did you become a superhero?"

"Don't you know anything?" J.J. scoffed at his younger brother. "That's Thundrax. Old time Vancouver superhero. He was with the old SUNDER team back in the 80s and also joined the Northern Guard for a year before he retired. Hasn't been seen since around the mid-90s."

"Ancient history," Raj snapped back with a defensive huff, tugging slightly on his jersey. "Besides, the only superhero worth following is Lion Khalsa," he added, referring to the controversial Sikh vigilante that had waged war on crime in Vancouver for the last ten years. If the situation weren't so serious, Thundrax would have protested the lack of respect from his son.

"Craig, what isn't so simple?" Manjita said.

"I am so texting this to Gurhan!" Raj said.

"Do that and you put us all in danger," J.J. snarled at his brother. "And I'll break your fingers."

"Hey!" Raj objected, though he quickly put away his cellphone.

"Raj, I need you to hold off... just this once... keep this to yourself." Craig turned to his wife."Manjita, you know that a life as a superhero gets pretty crazy. That's why I walked away from it."

"What kind of crazy?" Manjita asked.

"The craziest." Thundrax said, rubbing his sides. "It's as though I'm running my life on two tracks at once. One of them is real, the other isn't. In one reality I left the Guard in 1995 and retired from the supes business, met you, and raised this family. In the other, I didn't leave the Guard and went on to a career with a lot of teams, then in politics, and then in business, as well as remaining a super."

"You were successful in all of those?" J.J. wondered

"Somewhat," Craig said. "The political career kinda sucked, but I spent six years in Parliament."

"Seems to me that's the fake one," J.J. replied. "Politician, businessman, superhero? Come on! This sounds like a villain giving you a wish fulfilment fantasy. It's classic comic book. Of the two realities, which is the more believable one? This one."

"Dad, you have got to be--- kidding." Raj added, biting his tongue as he was about to use a much stronger word. "For one thing, no one can fake someone as awesome as me. And for another..." He paused for a second and completely abandoned his argument as another thought came to mind. "Dad, if you're a superhero, does that mean we can all become supers too?"

"Don't think so," Thundrax said.

"Craig?" Manjita said slowly. "What do you intend to do?"

"Find out the truth. And set things right."

"What if we're both true?" J.J. asked.

Craig sighed. It wasn't impossible that both realities were real, rather than the Familyverse being the illusion, Craig could be the lynchpin holding everything together. Alternate realities was almost as big a headache as time travel. "I need to find out first. J.J.." Craig said.

"Dad... you can't be serious," Raj said. "You know we're the real ones, right?"

"Raj, my memories of this timestream are a lot hazier," Craig answered. "It's as though my memories of this timestream -- and you guys -- are being superimposed on the real ones."

"Dad, take it from the superhero fanboy geek," J.J. stated. "Here's what really happened. Some old villain from your past targeted you. Maybe Thorn or Brainstorm or one of the other telepaths you faced in the old days. Or maybe one of your old enemies hired one of the newer telepaths, like Menton or Headspace."

"Okay," Craig said, agreeing it was a plausible scenario.

"He or she telepathically finds out your identity. He then gives you amnesia, and telepathically superimposes an alternate timeline to manipulate you, and when you start remembering the real one, it feels like it's a fake. The resulting turmoil tears your life apart, and wham! Revenge! Served slow and twisted! It's a believable scenario."

"Huh?" Raj said in response to his brother's hypothesis.

"I don't think so, J.J.." Thundrax stated. "But it's not outside the realm of possibility. In the supers business, not many things are."

Majita sighed, finally breaking a long, contemplative silence. Pursing her lips slightly, in a tone that seemed as reluctant as Craig's at the start of the conversation, she said "Craig, I trust you to do the right thing. That's what you've always done. But your first responsibility is to this family. To the promise that you made to me when you rescued me from..." she hesitated to say the name. "To the promise."

Craig had no words for that. How do you tell someone who loves you that you never made the most important promise of your life? This is insane, Craig thought, and he tried to focus on those who he saved in the other reality... no, in the actual reality. He couldn't afford to accept this.

"You're all crazy!" Raj spat.

"Dad's grown six inches and put on a hundred pounds of Schwartzenneger," J.J. retorted. "This may be crazy, but it's fricking real."

"How do you intend to look into this?" Manjita asked.

Craig pondered for a second. "The timelines diverge in 1995, right around the Guard's battle with VIPER and Dr. Nexum. Something happened at that time that caused this. Justiciar's the most accessible member of the old Guard. I'm going to see him and find out what went down."

"Uh dad," Raj asked. "Isn't this kind of short notice? What makes you think a bigshot like Justiciar is going to want to see you?"

"When I'm like this, your old man has a way of getting into the places he wants to go," Thundrax answered, pointing to himself. "Don't worry. I'll get my answers and come home." He moaned as the logistics of the situation occurred to him. "I guess I'll have to cancel tomorrow's appointments." he said with a sigh, and then he realized this was only the beginning of his logistical problems. "I'll have to fly under my own power. Man, I hate these long cross-country trips." Craig knew they didn't have a lot in savings to waste on a plane trip -- a far cry from the wealth he was used to enjoying, and the transporter credits he had with UNTIL for these sorts of emergencies -- and the four hours it'd take him to fly from Vancouver to Toronto wouldn't be a picnic. "But dad, what happens if we're the lie? You rewrite the last fifteen years?" J.J. asked. "You're going to just... snuff us out?"

Craig paused, a sick feeling in his stomach. "J.J., an awful lot of people are dead in this timeline who should be aliv. Thousands. Looking at you, I could trade this timeline for the real one in a heartbeat. But keeping you alive while others have suffered and died... I can't do that. If you could trade your life for the lives of a thousand people, would you make that trade?"

"It would suck," J.J. said.

"Crazy," Raj said. "You're both frigging crazy!" he spat and stormed out of the room. With a nod, J.J. followed his brother, muttering something about keeping Raj from acting even more like Raj than usual.

Manjita turned to Craig. Now that they were alone she could finally speak her mind freely. "I should curse you," she said, the emotional wounds fully visible at last. "You never told me. How could you not tell me?"

"I honestly don't know why I didn't," Craig replied. He knew the accusation was coming, and it was deserved, but it still hurt worse than a gut punch from Grond. "I might have had a good reason. Or maybe I was a coward. Maybe I was just running. I didn't run from villains, but I have been known for not facing up to my personal demons all the time."

"I have noticed," Manjita concurred and the disquiet that had come over her deepened even further. "You know Craig, it's hard to think of myself and my entire life -- our life -- as an illusion."

"Trust me, it's hard for me too," Craig answered. "But you existed before 1995. Therefore, you must exist in the other timeline," he speculated.

"I see," Manjita's expression darkened. "I remember my life before you came. It was not pretty. You took me away from the living hell that was my marriage to Bindi. I don't even want to think about what my life would have been without you."

"I have to believe that any woman who's had the strength to keep me on course for fifteen years would have the strength to escape," Craig said.

"Bur Raj and JJ will be gone," Manjita stated. "At best, they'll be different children, with a different father."

"I know," Craig sighed, avoiding looking directly at his wife as he said it. "I'm sorry."

Manjita shook her head, waves of frustration coming out. "What did we do to deserve this? What did they do? Craig, the strange thing is that this..." she poked him in his chest. "...doesn't really surprise me. You're a superhero. You've always acted like one, always had that code. And the numbers Craig, the numbers. You've always pushed yourself -- and us -- justifying that we have to do the greatest good for the greatest number, hosting dinner parties we couldn't afford, working for the causes."

"I thought you were my partner in this." Craig responded. "You've worked harder than I have for the causes. I've seen you push yourself in ways I never could."

Manjita started to cry. "Craig, I can't play numbers with my children! A thousand lives for my childrren? I'd take that trade in a heartbeat. A million? I'd take that one too."

Craig instinctively grabbed her and held her. She bristled for a few seconds, but quieted, her body softly sobbing in his arms, gentle spasms softly embraced in his Herculean grip. "Manjita, JJ might be right. This may be the real thing. If it isn't, and the worst happens, I'll find you. I promise. I'll find you. I'll meet you again for the first time."

Craig Carson released the embrace, and then bent down and kissed her. She looked so small, he thought, keeping in mind that Thundrax was much taller than Craig. Then, tears streaming down both of their cheeks, Craig walked out to the backyard patio, quickly accelerated to about 200 mph --- fast enough that neighbors wouldn't notice the blue blur, climbed to an altitude of 20,000 feet, then hit Mach 1 and went hurtling eastward to Toronto.

He could feel the Living Thunder inside him sing, ecstatic to be used after so long. Craig ignored that feeling. There were too many other emotions welling inside him.

It was a relatively uneventful flight, though Craig expected that Transport Canada was probably going to try to corner him at some point and give him a lecture about transcontinental flights at speeds exceeding the sound barrier. A news story he'd looked up on the Internet placed Justiciar in Toronto. It was not his favorite city: in his accustmed timeline, despite living there for years during his Guard and Starforce dats, he wasn't a native son, and plenty of Torontonians had let him know that over the years, especially in the mayor's office.

David Burrell, Justiciar, however, was a different story. During the first adventure of the Guard, the attack of the Gadroon in Northern Canada, they were sidetracked into investigating the smuggling of Gadroon technology, which led them to the lair of a villain named Cyberlord. Justiciar, one of his experiments in cyborging, had been held in stasis for a decade. In the conflict between the Guard and Cyberlord's mercenaries, Justiciar was accidentally released; recognizing Forceknight's costume, he immediately joined the heroes and fought fearlessly at their side. From the moment they first met, Craig knew the man was something special. He and David became close friends almost immediately. It had been less than two years since Craig had lost Jack in the destruction of Detroit, and David entered Craig's life at precisely the right time, assuming a surrogate role in place of his big brother. For his part, Justiciar leaned on the big Vancouverite as a trainer, sparring partner and a confidente, appreciating his intelligent conversation, his love of adventure, competitiveness and dry sense of humor. Anyone who knew them could have guessed they'd be a natural fit as best friends, to the point where some people made sniggering jokes about them, the David and Jonathan of the superhero set. Craig couldn't fathom any circumstance that could set them at each other's throats.

Craig intended to drop in at Burrell Industries and see David in his office, but it was evening when he arrived in the great lakeside metropolis, so he turned his attention to the large lump of iron that Celestar had landed in Toronto years ago that was now Starforce headquarters. The entrance was well-lit; as he approached a recording of Justictiar's voice shouted through a loudspeaker:

"Target identified as Thundrax. Do not move. You have no authorication for entry."

"Bob!" Craig shouted at the loudspeaker, knowing the base's AI could hear him. "Emergency code: Assiniboine-24-Finger" Hopefully, the change in worlds didn't affect the code.

"Emergency code accepted," the AI said. However Bob wasn't a stupid AI and had some discretion built into his protocols. "Additional query required. Explain how you came to have this code."

"That's a long story," Craig answered. "It's an educated guess based on the knowledge of that code for this base in an alternate timeline. I guessed the code would remain the same here."

"Explanation is beyond acceptable perimeters."

"Look. Just tell David to get his shiny chrome butt out here." Thundrax stated. "Or if he's not here, give me lodging for the evening. You can inform Dust Devil that I'm challenging him to an arm wrestling match for his room. Or something."

Craig was expecting to Bob to correct him, that Justiciar's cyborging had left his buttocks mostly intact, but the AI decided to drop the argument. A couple of minutes later, Justiciar came out, accompanied by Prism Girl (in all seven of her colorful forms). "Craig?" he said, gasping in amazement. The change in timelines hadn't seemed to have worn on Justiciar's appearance. Some suspected that his periodic hibernation cycles preserved his youth, or perhaps he had the Dick Clark gene. In any event, David Burrell was the same as he ever was, a craggy yet boyish face which more often than not, bore a toothy grin, and a scraggily scruff of reddish-blond hair, the sort that Italian mothers loved to muss. His eyes were wide open in amazement, a sight Craig wasn't used to seeing, given how eternally composed the Canadian champion seemed to be.

"Hello from Vancouver," Craig smiled back, waving sheepishly. A flood of memories had come back to him the moment when he first saw David. He remembered a very embarrassing drunken brawl at Forceknight's wedding. He remembered a couple of times when Justiciar had called him on the telephone and Craig angrily hung up on him. But he didn't remember the quarrel that caused such an unexpected rift between Craig and someone he considered to be among his closest friends.

"Hello from Toronto," David replied, smiling. "Uh -- are you okay? Why on earth are you here Craig?"

"Looking for some answers. Look, Kathy," he turned to Prism Girl. "I promise I won't try to kill the boss. Could I just have a few moments of privacy? I have a feeling this is going to rehash some stuff that happened a long time ago, and there's no reason for you to get mixed up in this."

All seven Prism Girls squinted and gave Craig a dirty look. "How do you know my name?" three of them asked, two simultaneously.

"Educated guess," Thundrax answered, telling himself he needed to be more careful with knowledge gleaned from the other timeline. It didn't help that Craig had once been quite intimate with the free-spirited Greek-Canadian heroine. "Don't worry," Craig said, almost blushing at that memory. "Your secret is safe with me, scout's honor."

"Go on, PG," Justiciar told his teammate. "This conversation is long overdue."

Prism Girl nodded and returned inside the headquarters. Craig turned back to Justiciar. "First, what little I remember of our last few conversations in this timeline aren't very pleasant. I'm sure I was an ass. I want to apologize."

"Accepted," Justiciar said without hesitation. "You just used the word 'timeline'. Do you know how many alarm bells that sets off?"

"Yeah, sixty," Craig answered back. "David, one moment I was in Millennium City, in my corporate office, in a reality where I never left the Guard until we all broke up in '98. Next thing I know, I'm a plumber in Vancouver in a reality where I left the team in 1995 and retired from superheroing completely. Something happened that caused it."

"Craig, you don't remember?"

"Nope. Memory of that time is foggy. But the timelines diverge there. The last thing I remember clearly in both timelines was our fight against VIPER, the first time we faced Dr. Nexum."

"That's not what caused you to quit," Justiciar stated. "It was what happened right after that one. Our fight with Professor Alternative."

"Alternative?" Thundrax said, incredulous. "The joke villain? The one who wanted us to experience alternate lifestyles, so he shot us with a gay ray?" Thundrax almost burst into laughter.

"Yeah, that's the one." Justiciar said, glumly.

"I don't remember what happened in this timeline," Craig explained. "In mine, he seemed to think that ray would increase our libido as well as change our orientation." He shook his head. "All we did is look at each other funny and tell bad jokes at Alain's expense after the effects wore off." Alain was, of course, their teammate Voyageur, who fashioned himself as something of a lady's man.

"It was more than that, Craig." Justiciar said. "I guess in this timeline, the "gay ray" was a little more powerful. Things got... out of hand. Then Ann saw us and came to the wrong conclusion." Ann was his teammate Snowblind, Craig's first crush. "She ran off, presumably to clear her head, got captured by Tilingkoot, who sacrificed her to bring back Kigatilik, who then went on a rampage. Over nineteen hundred people died in Vancouver."

"Huh?" Craig stammered. Unlike the other times things had been described to him, the memories did not come flooding back. How could he not remember something like that? He should have at least remembered seeing the memorials.

"The only way we could stop Kigatilik was to drop a building on him. Forceknight was down, so I was in command. I ordered you to do it and you did. And it worked. We stopped Kigatilik long enough for Billy to use his Haida spirit magic and banish him back into the Frost Tomb."

Craig took a deep breath. "A lot of people died, David," he said. "I can understand why I was upset, but quitting for sixteen years? Turning my back on all my friends?"

"The building you.. we... dropped on Kigatilik was an office tower. They hadn't finished evacuating and we knew it. But we were desperate, spent, we'd given everything we had, Celestar had shown up and almost turned the tide, but Lon wasn't really battle-ready, and he went down.

"In 1995? So soon after his nervous breakdown?" Craig noted. "Yeah, Celestar wasn't in shape for that fight."

Justiciar continued. "A whole platoon of UNTIL troops had been wiped out, and the Justice Squadron were off planet. You, me, Billy and Augury were all that stood between Kigatilik and the complete annihilation of Vancouver. But there were still over a hundred people inside that building. Over fifty of them died when you toppled it, and more were injured for life." Craig's jaw dropped. "That's why you quit. You surrendered yourself to the authorities, asking them to press manslaughter charges, but it was 1995. People were on edge because of the Quebec referendum. The federal government feared a major supers scandal, surrounding a team sponsored by the government of Canada, would give the pro-sovereignty forces the push they needed to divide the country. So the incident got buried. Everyone thinks Kigatilik was solely responsible for those deaths, and they're not wrong. Pretty much everyone from Prime Minister Chretien down to the Red Ensign told you to keep your mouth shut for the good of the country."

Craig took a deep breath."Damn."

"You always took a hard line on not killing people." Justiciar said. "Even more than I did. You couldn't continue after that. Ravenspeaker and I both quietly kept an eye on you over the years. I kept hoping you'd get over it. Every time I tried to reach out to you..."

"That I remember," Thundrax answered. "Man, it feels weird. David, I remember you as being probably my closest friend for years. Any reality where we are not good friends just has to be, well, wrong."

"So how much do you remember about this reality?" Justiciar asked. Craig could hear the slight buzz of the cyborg's diagnostics cycle kicking in, a noise that most who knew David Burrell were familiar with.

"Enough that the people I know exclusively here matter to me. Especially my family."

"You never married?" Justiciar wondered.

"I'm engaged to a beautiful and wonderful lady," Craig answered. "No kids as far as I know, except for a clone who uses part of my DNA." He shot David a long look. What a business we're in, he might have added. "Weird thing is, I'm happy. Really really happy. Being a dad and watching the little sperm banks grow into honest-to-god men is just absolutely incredible. Coming home from a day at work with regular hours, talking with Manjita about her volunteer work, being an elder at the church, watching you guys on the tube and making snide comments about Dust Devil's costume..." both men chuckled. "I didn't think the ordinary life could feel this good. I'm wondering if I'm in a mental construct."

"The old "perfect life" trap?"

"I wish Alan Moore had never written that comic book, too many low-grade hypnotists have plagerized that plot," Craig stated, referring to a classic Superman story involving a hallucinatory reality. "But I've been in plenty of ilusions. so far this seems internally consistent and I don't feel a telepathic presence. My guess is that only Menton and Mentalla are good enough to produce illusions of this calibre, and Menton's holed away in Stronghold, and I'm hardly a priority target for Eurostar."

"If Professor Alternative's the key, then it's more likely some of his crazy science." Justiciar said.

"He's outdone himself this time," Craig mused, folding his arms and laying the palms of his hands on his biceps. "An alternative timeline certainly fits his MO, but this is several orders of magnitude above anything he's done before. And last time I heard, he was out of action. He used a "sensitivity gun" on the Crucifixion of Crime, and the man responded by breaking every bone in his body."

"That's what happened here, too. Crucifixion's a real piece of work. You couldn't pay me enough to live in Hudson." Burrell spat as he mentally accessed the Starforce database. "Okay. Kivioq says that his injuries occurred five years ago. That's enough time for even the Crucifixion's brutality to heal -- mostly. Alternative's real name is Dr. Miles Walstrom. His parole officer's report mentions he's employed in a villain rehabilitation program at FutureScope in Millennium City. I have a home address."

"I'll take it," Thundrax said. "Thanks."

"2692 Grand River. Apartment 226. And anything for you, Craig," Justiciar said. "I'm just sorry it took alternate timelines to get the band back together."

"Okay McCartney," Craig replied. "I may as well head out."

"You need backup?"

"Against Alternative?" Craig laughed. "He's just an ordinary guy with weird ray guns who can barely shoot straight. This hardly calls for firepower. I do have one favor to ask though, David. And it's a big one."

"Oh?" Justiciar questioned. "Name it."

"Timelines are, well, beyond my comprehension." Craig said. "If I somehow manage to fix this, I have no idea what happens here, whether this timeline is dimensionally solvent so it just keeps on going without me -- let's call it the Everready bunny parallel dimension theory -- or if it completely blanks out of existence. If it does turn out that this timeline persists but I disappear from it, I'll need someone to look after my family. I don't want Raj cursing the father who abandoned him the same way I did with mine." Thundrax's dad had abandoned the Carsons when he was only five, and that memory -- and the rejection and guilt -- had haunted him for his entire life.

"I'm sure he never would.'

Craig smiled grimly. "You don't know my son," he said. "But if it's too much trouble...."

"Craig, when it comes to the people you love, there's no such thing as too much trouble." Justiciar stated. "I'll look out for them. I promise."

Craig gave Justiciar a long hug, something David Burrell never expected, but found extremely welcome, even without Alternative's ray gun. The floodgates of a long hoped for reconciliattion had opened at last, and Justiciar's eyes were watering, a rare occurence for the stoic Canadian hero. "I'll catch you back in Steelhead, buddy," Craig smiled. "You take care of that girlish figure of yours," he ribbed.

"Steelhead?" David wondered. "Why on earth would I be freezing my butt up there?" But Craig was already rising into the sky, a familiar sight in Toronto during his Starforce days.

The flight from Toronto to Millennium was far shorter than the earlier one, but Craig had even more qualms. This was a no-win scenario: lose a family? He had complained so much about the life of celebrity he had lived for the last two years, the frequent condemnation on political "news" channels, the daily lynching he took in the Free Press. He had complained that too many people looked up to him to be the leader he never could be. Now, he could escape all that. He could live a happy, normal life. All it would cost him were the lives of people that everyone dismissed as already dead, and the complete abandonment of his principles.

A thousand thoughts raced inside Craig's heads as he found the familiar lights of Millnnium City nighttime skyline welcoming him from the other side of the US-Canada border. He knew it as well as he knew his hometown of Vancouver. Not stopping at the border, he crossed over into Westside and after a quick search, came to a group of condos on the river. He had committed the address to memory, and it was not hard to find the building. He shifted to Craig form and waited for someone to open the front door of the condo and then snuck inside. He could have broken down the doors, but Craig, despite the emotional turmoil he was experiencing, wasn't yet ready to commit to violence. It was a dark, not exactly upscale domicile -- it would be hard for even an allegedly reformed supervillain like Walstrom to pass most background checks -- but Craig wasn't interested in critiquing the decor, or the bad smells, the smell of a swamp of the urban poor, which was ascerbated by the ongoing record heat wave. He found the door to Walstrom's apartment and knocked on it, hard. It took about six sequences of knocks to get any response, just before Craig was ready to break down the door,

The door creaked open and a bleary eyed man with short, greying hair, and a long blue housecoat answered in a timid voice: "What is it this time?" Behold the supervillain, who had already gone to bed. A morning person, Craig thought in disgust. Changing into his Thundrax form with a clap of thunder, he grabbed at the safety chain and snapped it like a string, then pushed himself inside, knocking Alternative hard to his back. The man howled and began to crawl backward toward a ugly, delipitated green sofa. Thundrax grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and shoved him -- though he was still careful not to slam him -- against a cheaply papered wall.

"Why me?" Thundrax asked.

"Please don't hurt me!" Professor Alternative begged. As supervillains go, he was not the most courageous of his lot. Craig didn't know the man well, probably no one did. A loner, a recalcitrant college professor, a discredited social scientist who believed humanity was too set in its ways to survive, he had devoted his life to one crazy scheme after another to force people to experience other points of view. It even had a hint of nobility about it, Craig thought, except that he was always pointing one type of a ray gun or another at people. Craig had no idea what the man's origin was, quite possibly a social experiment got wrong, expanding his consciousness so he could make his miraculous arsenal of empathy, while transforming him into an obsessed nutcase. He wasn't a hard man to defeat -- hell, once Gordon Lightfoot, the aging Canadian folk singer, put him down for the count. Professor Alternative was one of those utterly pitiable villains whom Craig felt deeply sorry for -- except under these circumstances.

"Just answer the question!" Craig roared.

"Because of the interview!" Walstrom stammered, shaking and close to tears.

"What interview?" Craig demanded.

"The on with you on the CBC on your country's national holiday. You and that Canadian reporter. The one where you talked about the pressures, the responsibility, and how you weren't up to it. How the press was making your life a living Hell."

"But..." Craig stammered. "That was just me venting. They caught me in a bad mood, and when I'm like that, I get introspective. My life's not that bad. But even so.. why me? And how?"

Walstrom straightened himself, sensing the possibillity he might escape the scenario without donning a body cast. "If i tell you, can you promise not to tell anyone else? Especially my parole officer?"

Craig snarled back, and the sound of thunder could be heard in the room. "I promise not to act like a frothing Hudson City vigilante!" he snapped. "Tell me!"

"Okay!" Walstrom said, again almost sobbing. "I borrowed a device uncovered by the government. The spider of realities. It was taken from some cosmic being -- Valak, I think, took it from something called a Galaxian."

"Galaxar!" Craig corrected, and his heart sunk. The Galaxars were cosmic entities of incredible power. But powerful enough to create a separate timestream? Even Craig had to wrestle with that concept. "But why me?" he asked again, almost pleading for an answer.

"Because... you of all the superheroes who ever spoiled my plans, were kind to me. You never hurt me or even insulted me, unlike that horrible Frenchman and that Hudson City psychopath. So I used the spider to make you a reality where you were maximized for happiness." Alternative explained. "Did it work?"

"Yes," Craig answered, letting the Professor go and shutting the door before the neighbors could disturb the conversation. "But at too high a cost. Too many other people were hurt in the alteration."

"Silly superhero," Alternative chuckled. "The world's still intact. Life still goes on. Why not enjoy it?"

Thundrax refused to respond to that remark. "Why didn't you use it to make yourself happy?" he asked.

"I tried. I couldn't. It only works for other people," Alternative said mournfully. "Would you like a cup of coffee? I could use one." He glanced invitingly into a dirty kitchenette, where unwashed cups and plates piled like an unstable jinga game in the kitchen sink. Craig really didn't feel like drinking from any of those, though he wasn't here to critique the man's housekeeping skills.

"Sorry Professor, I'm not letting you out of my sight," Craig said. "Until you've restored the timeline to normal."

"But why?" Alternative said, a child's wilfulness present in his vocal tone.

"I don't try to take shortcuts with my life. If I change the world, I don't want it done by a magical or cosmic doohickey, like your spider," Craig paused, remembering some of the other insane McGuffins that villains had used over the years. "I want to change it through the force of my will, and by my abilities, and only by those. And I want to make the whole world a better place, not just my little corner of it. I will not take happiness at the cost of other people's lives. That's the antithesis of who I am. So change it back. Please."

"What about your security guard? He was affected by the happiness ray too!" Alternative informed him.

"What happened to him?"

"Um, I think he won the lottery." Alternative said.

"I'll think of something." Craig answered. "Look, I appreciate your attempt at kindness. But either you change me back and surrender the spider, or this isn't going to end well for either of us. I know I was belly-aching, but my life before this was pretty damn special, and even in the bad times, my friends always saw me through. I was living great adventures, making the world a better place, and I had more fame and wealth than I ever imagined when I was a kid."

"Yes, that I regret." Alternative said. "I could only change you from the time of our first meeting, not earlier. I couldn't undo your father's abandonment, or the deaths of your brother and mother. Fortunately, I could act before you lost your secret identity. It would have been more problematic if people knew who you actually were."

"I'm asking nicely, Professor." Thundrax repeated.

"Fine," Walstrom grumbled "This is the last time I ever do any of you heroes a favor."

"Thank God," Craig exclaimed.

Walstrom reached into a jar next to the cup where he soaked his false teeth and drew out a silver spider amulet, not dissimilar to the ones which warded against Qliptothic effects, He opened his palm and the spider suddenly animated and bit him, drawing a trickle of blood. The device required bio-energy for a trigger the effect. A light shone from the spider, quickly encapsulating Walstrom, and he fired a beam of light at Craig.

Craig mouthed the names of his children, and the world dissolved in a flash, and he and Stan were back in the lobby of Flux-Carson. Stan noticed the intruder, lurking in a corner in a lab coat, and immediately drew his pistol. A little late there, Stan, Craig thought to himself, smiling. Craig warded him off, and held out his hand. "The spider, Professor. Now."

"What do you intend to do with it?"

"It's a Galaxar object, so I can't destroy it," Craig said. "I'll put into a robominer and tell it to bury it in as deep as it can go." On the moon, he added, silently to himself.

Like a child forced to return a stolen toy, Alternative placed the spider in his hand. "Hope it bites you," he said, muttering to himself.

"Now go. Stay out of trouble." Craig said. The professor dolefully trundled back to his condo.

"Aren't you going to arrest him, Mr. Carson?" Stan asked, holstering his pistol. Craig shook his head, strode to the front desk, grabbed a piece of paper from a pile of stationary, and scrawled on it with a fancy pen emblazoned with the corporate logo. "IOU, ten million dollars." He signed it, and passed it to Stan. "Uh-- why did you just do this?" the puzzled guard stammered.

"The money will be transferred into your account in the morning," Thundrax said. "Call it compensation."

"I didn't realize you were such a kidder, sir," Stan said.

Craig smiled. Let the guard find it in his account the next time he checked his balance. Oh, to see the look on his face, he thought to himself.

"I've got things to do, Stan," Craig told him. "See that I'm not disturbed for anything short of the return of Dr. Destroyer."

"Yes sir," Stan said and Craig went up to his office. He ignored the pile of emails and reports and went immediately to search the Internet for Manjita Dhaliwal. It didn't take that long, though the emotions welling within Craig made it seem like an arduous process, digging in the morgue of Vancouver newspaper and Sikh community sites, searching piece by piece in an emotional jigsaw puzzle, putting together a final picture that was sunk like a knife into Craig's soul and wouldn't stop twisting.

His name was Ramanjit Dhillon. He was a social worker for the provincial ministry, who took Manjita's case upon referral from a woman's shelter where Manjita had fled after a miscarriage. They fallen in love -- it was so easy to fall in love with that woman -- and he'd help her escape from her first husbamd. They married. Craig saw pictures of the wedding. One boy, 6 lbs., 3 oz., named Gurinder. Born August 21, 1998. It looked like they'd be happy. Unfortunately, this was not to be. Although Bindi, the abusive creep of a first husband, had been put in jail, his parents were both wealthy and incensed at the disgrace of their son. On May 7, 1999 they hired a pair of contract killers, who shot and murdered the couple in their Richmond home.

Their deaths sparked outrage, especially in the Sikh community, particularly among women, as Manjita had been a tireless volunteer for local women's groups. Now the tigresses of the Punjab, as Manjita had called her female friends, were roused. They marched on her behalf, twelve weekends in a row, each rally bigger than the last. By the twelfth week, the premier of British Columbia was marching with them. They used money they raised to build a woman's center in her name. They continued the tradition and held one memorial rally every year. They demanded justice and the politicians promised it, but no charges were ever laid. Money? Influence? Diplomacy? (Bindi's family had powerful roots in India). Craig could only specualte. it took the murderous intervention of the vigilante Lion Khalsa Singh, who killed the alleged hit men and Bindi's grandfather in 2003, to finally bring closure to the tragedy. If bloodshed truly was closure, staring at those newspaper articles, it didn't feel very closed to Craig at all.

Gurinder had been spared from the massacre and was being raised by Manjita's parents. That was good to know, as Craig remembered them as being good people, once they'd gotten used to the marriage. The marriage that now had never been. He left another message for the Foundation CFO, arranging for an extraordinarily generous donation to the Manjita Dhillion Center, and setting up a scholarship fund for her son. When he had finished what needed to be done, he finally allowed the emotions to sink in. He buried his head in his arms on his desk and remained in that pose for hours, until dawn finally broke over Millennium City. Craig's personal motto was "strive to make every tomorrow better than every yesterday". This coming tomorrow, however, might be a very hard one to salvage. Some tomorrows are like that.