In those two phone conversations, the President tried charm. But charm had proved useless. Ready to unleash stronger tactics, his helicopters landed on the empty parking lot. Flanked by high-ranking civilians and officers in dress uniforms, he met the empress in the front office. With a careful blending of rage and authority, he defined his level of scorn. Adrianne listened silently. Then he invited his aides to talk about various legal actions that might be appropriate. She interrupted with a raised hand, which amusingly was enough to stop every voice. Everyone stared at her. “Which laws have I broken? I would very much like to know,” she said. Then the ranking general outlined what his people would do if faced with a dangerous power trying to usurp the nation’s security. “Except that sounds like war,” was her response. “And I don’t approve of war. If I can find the words, I intend to make every army in the world obsolete.”
That brought a chill, and more rage.
Sensing failure, the President returned to charm.
“You’re a registered Republican,” he pointed out. “I’m assuming you voted for me.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve never voted for national candidates.”
“But you do vote, correct?”
“Only for local candidates. Bond issues. I have a tiny but real chance of making an impact. But I can’t pretend to have a role in presidential races.” The man needed to pause, giving himself a chance to recalculate. “Come over here, sir. If you would.”
He joined her beside a laptop.
“I’ve been working on a new blog. In fact, I intend to publish in the next few minutes.”
Some prior briefing came to mind. “It’s Saturday. I was told that you put these things out on Sundays.”
“Except I don’t have a normal job anymore. And with the change of fates, I think I need to embrace a more ambitious schedule. Which makes this is a good day to begin.”
Keys were pressed. The unpublished text appeared.
Stepping back, she said, “Read the piece, if you wish. Sir.”
The blog spoke about the dangers inherent in the aging nuclear fleets. Adrianne was arguing that the only wise course was to put the weapons to bed, today if possible. But she was afraid that people wouldn’t change their natures until they received a good clear warning. So at the end of the piece, she had written, “I want to see one of their swords pull itself out of its scabbard.”
The President hadn’t finished reading the piece.
“Lady, what are you talking about?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. Her heart pounding, she clicked the Publish button and stepped back. “I don’t understand what’s happened to me,” she said, quietly but not quietly. “I can make guesses. I doubt if anyone can decipher what’s true, not in the short-term. But there are clues. If you look hard. With the Three Gorges and the stardrive, I was fed information of something already happening. Which is one phenomena. But I wrote about oil. On my own. And whatever this power is, it needed time to make preparations before the quake struck, before we started this overdue collapse into economic ruin.
“Sir, I have a sense,” she said. “My very strong intuition is that simple directions are more likely to lead to immediate effects.
“Consider this blog a test.
“Both of us need to know. What marvels do I have in this hand?”
Moments later, an alarm sounded.
An Air Force general turned away, muttering into a sat-phone. Voices spoke of “the football”.
“It’s ours and it’s launched,” someone cried out.
The President looked ill, looked simple, his face drained of blood and most of its life. He glared at Adrianne. He stared numbly at his own hands. And then someone said, “No, the missile broke apart after launching. It’s down. It over.”
Adrianne turned to her people.
Winked.
Then looking at the visitors, she said, “I have six blogs written. They’re waiting on servers around the world. If anything unseemingly happens to me or to any of my people, those pieces get published automatically. And you don’t want those ideas getting loose on the world. Believe me.”
They believed, at least enough to retreat.
Then the Taser girl asked, “Is that right? Six blogs waiting to kill the world?”
The Empress didn’t seem to hear the questions. She seemed intrigued by the details in her own tiny hand. Then to the hand, in that calm dry voice, she said, “By tomorrow, there will be. Now let’s get to work.”
EVENTUALLY SHE WOULD be known as Adrianne the First. But in those early years, she was the Hammer, a respected and feared and often scorned entity sitting in a warehouse in the bleakest bowels of Ohio. She appeared on television when she wanted, which was rare. Her speeches and occasional interviews proved nothing except that she was no public speaker. And where the lowliest princess – some creature born with a good name and small inheritance – would have carried her head high, Adrianne became more and more like she had always been. Chilled. Collected. Long of thought, careful with words. Not the smartest person in a room, but the entity most likely to see exactly what was happening and what the next step needed to be.
During her brief, busy reign, she oversaw a thousand projects. Not every initiative was a success. Some were close to disasters, in fact. Urging Egypt and Jordan to annex the Palestine enclaves proved horrific, and her plan for paying the Jewish populations to emigrate to Canada was only a little more productive. But approaching her mid-60s, Adrianne saw lifespans expanding and the first eight flights of the infamous Hammer Drive. Words carrying her name triggered changes in tax codes worldwide. Small, tidy rebellions began and ended with her words, various authoritarian regimes swept away, and she was better than anyone else when it came to picking the most deserving winners. And more importantly, she was very quick to admit errors and change paths.
No, the lady wasn’t loved, but that didn’t stop people from building temples in her honor.
Her rational mind was the largest force among many, but the public talked about her magic for saving lives that she had never noticed.
Her stoic personality never failed. Early on, she told her core group that she was an agent in a very mysterious game. Aliens, machines, or demons from some unmapped dimension: Explanations were numerous and useless and why bother? But she accepted that she was too old to benefit from the new elixirs, and even if she lived a million years, she was still human. In other words, she was going to run out of good advice.
“Ten or twelve years from now,” she guessed.
She was wrong by a factor of two.
A very good guess, in other words.
On an ordinary Wednesday, she published a small blog about the desperate need for rain in northern Mexico. It was one of the little gifts that she gave to single places, and she didn’t expect instantaneous results. But that same day, in Capetown, a half Zulu and half Boer fellow published plans for a machine that would suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere – a simple and quick device powered by sunlight and the earth’s heat.
His machine was authentic.
Her rain never fell.
She retired, but not without some difficulties. Within a week, this woman who cared nothing for pomp and spectacle had little to fill her time, and perhaps that’s why she ended up in a serious depression. Returning to her old house, she drank. She slept too much. And then she didn’t sleep at all, weeping for no reason.