GRAIL:
Devastation From
Scott Summers' Personal Journal:
Ideologues are
never detail men.
When William Stryker
tricked Charles Xavier into assaulting the world's
mutant population
telepathically, he gave no thought to the consequences to non-mutants.
Likewise, when Erik
Lehnsherr reversed the process, targeting non-mutants, he didn't stop
to think about
consequences, either. As a result, an estimated 11 million are
dead
worldwide, over 70% of
those in industrialized countries. And that doesn't count the
maimed
and wounded.
Cars, trucks and
buses collided on highways, interstates
and autobahns. Some pileups were so
massive, it took days, not hours, to clean them up, with fatalities
hitting triple digits. Planes fell
out of the sky or crashed into runways, killing hundreds at once when
their mutant or non-mutant
pilots lost control. Heavy machinery chewed up life and
limb. The
injured and ill and elderly
succumbed to heart attacks or strokes. Hospitals filled, and
rescue
workers and EMTs couldn't
possibly get to everyone in a disaster of such magnitude.
No doubt Stryker or Lehnsherr would have called all that "collateral
damage," anesthetizing
human loss into meaninglessness.
Third-world countries fared best, and maybe it's time they got a break,
but the simple fact is that
falling on the ground for five minutes of encephalic agony when herding
sheep or cattle is rather
less catastrophic than seizing at the wheel going sixty miles an hour
down Interstate 95. Chance
had a great deal to do with who lived and who died.
So
what's one more death in all of that? What's one more empty
bed? Perhaps I should have felt
solidarity in grief, but I just felt dwarfed in my loss.
On the upside, we could avoid explaining exactly what had happened to
Jean. Police
departments were overwhelmed, and they took my report that she was
missing and had been on
the road at the time, and added it to their pile. Meanwhile, we
ran one
of the mansion cars off the
highway, through a guard-rail, and down a bank into the Hudson. I
got a
call three days later that
her car had been found, but no body. They'd keep looking, however
. . .
I played along. I'm a pretty good actor when I have to be, and I
was
still in a state of shock that
wasn't fake. The whole scenario wouldn't have held up under
normal
circumstances, but these
days were anything but normal, and there were a lot of white crosses on
highways. Even without
the body, the case was shunted aside and regarded as closed,
informally. They had too many
cases, and no reason to suspect this one was anything but what it
appeared to be. Certainly no
one at the mansion was telling them to look at the bottom of a lake on
the other side of Canada.
The most tangled aspect of the whole worldwide disaster involved who to
blame. Almost every
government was howling for blood, and while William Stryker made a
conveniently dead
scapegoat, there was still the matter of just who'd authorized Stryker
in the first place? The U.S. and Canada both wound up on
the block since Stryker had been U.S. military but his base had
been Canadian. Many apologies were made, a number of Pentagon and
white
house
functionaries lost their jobs, and at least one U.S. army
general's
career went down in flames.
It still wasn't enough. The U.S.'s world reputation sank further
while Canada's barely stayed
afloat, conspiracy theorists had a field day, people all over the world
still suspected mutants, and
President McKenna essentially gave up all chance at re-election.
I'll vote for him anyway. Why? Because he made the hard
choice -- he
took it on the chin and
prevented a mutant pogrom by concealing the damning truth. There
are
some things the public
doesn't need to know. I guess that makes me an elitist, but my
general
experience has shown me
that people shoot first and ask questions later when they think they're
threatened (whether or not
they actually are). McKenna had a choice -- rise to the occasion
and be
remembered as a great
man in retrospect even if he sacrificed his political career now, or
play the coward, try to save
himself, and wind up with a lot of innocent blood on his hands.
So far,
he seems to be trying for
the first option, which makes him a president worth having, in my
books. Too bad most of the
public can't know, and won't for a good long time if we're to avoid
civil war.
In none of the trials, debates, or international media circuses has
mention of the professor or the
school -- or Magneto -- come up. It's known that Lehnsherr broke
out of
prison, but he hasn't
been connected with the attacks, and Stryker's assault was explained as
a "machine," intended to
target mutants, that malfunctioned. Stryker's own paranoia has
worked
in our favor. Only a
handful of trusted operatives knew what he was actually up to, and most
of them died at Alkali
Lake. The three who didn't have had their memories erased.
In fact, a number of people have had their memories tampered with, at
least marginally. Anyone
whose discretion isn't certain no longer knows enough about the school
to be a threat -- that
includes parents and siblings, maintenance people, and even the UPS
man. The professor may be
an idealist, but he's a pragmatic idealist. After all, his school
hides
the base for a mutant strike
force -- not usual operating procedure for an ideologue. He's not
Stryker, or Lehnsherr, and he
pays attention to details and collateral damage. Soldiers may
have
attacked us once, but they
damn well won't again, and whatever face he turns to the students,
however reassuring he tries to
be, they don't know how he sits in a dark office after the sun goes
down, staring out the window
at ghosts. He may know intellectually that he was forced to do
what he
did, but that doesn't
change the fact that he caused those millions and
millions of
deaths, worldwide. And he feels it. That's why I'm still
here --
because he feels it.
But I'm not talking to him unless I have to
-- because he didn't
force Jean to get back on the
plane.
Understand
-- it's not that I'd (romantically) rather be dead with her
than alive without her, not if
the cost would have been everyone else trapped there, including the
kids. I'm not stupid, nor
sadistic.
No, what makes me so mad I can't see straight is that she didn't have
to die. There were options. She ignored them, and Xavier
let her.
If she could power the plane from outside, she could have fucking well
done
it from inside, too. If she
could pick up several tons of titanium and
steel and hold it
in the air until the engines cut in, then
her own one-hundred-and-thirty-eight pounds wouldn't have made a spit
of difference. If she
could hold off a goddamn tidal wave, splitting it like
Moses,
then she could have managed to
hold it for another few seconds while Wagner teleported her to
safety. Xavier tells me all that's
hindsight, that she made the best choice she could at the time, people
don't think straight in a
crisis, and I shouldn't let my grief take away her bravery.
But dammit, I
thought of
those things. The truth is that she
locked me up in the plane like I was
three instead of almost thirty and didn't let me command because she
didn't want to survive.
That's the choice
she made. And I seem to be the only one who's willing to speak
the
truth.