Strongman and the Super Hierarchy
The private journals of Frances Finch. Kept secure, with tenuous permission, and out of habit more than duty.
I started keeping these the same month I started sleeping with Gideon. Partly because I needed to keep some kind of record, given my job. Partly because did not trust myself to stay a reliable witness to a man I was that stupid about. This was the reporter in me hedging against the woman in me.
For years the two of us shared ourselves fairly. I'd write everything down at night, the whole unprintable truth of it, and then in the morning I'd try to make sense of it. Of what was publishable and what must stay private. I'd often sit with Gideon. Or sometimes with his teammate the Tactician. And we'd agree what the public could safely be told, and I'd file that version. But I'd always keep the rest of it here. The published Frances and the private Frankie. The private one was for me. I told myself it was for history. That it would be accessible after everyone was long since retired or laid to rest. Discovered by a new generation of heroes and recorders.
That changed after Marlowe's death. I don't know what this is for anymore. But I think it was vanity or naivete to assume it would end much differently than it did.
I should put down the basics while I still think of them as basics and not as things a stranger would need explained. I don't know all the details myself even, but I know enough to make sense of it for...whatever purpose this might serve.
Gideon can lift about anything, move faster than a car, take a tank round to the chest, and fly. That is the whole list. People used to think he could do more, or do the same things at a higher level, but none of it was true. Just mythology people invented for him over the years. There were men in those days who could beat him, and a couple who did. I have sat in more than one hospital the government built in secret to hold a man the public believed could not be hurt.
I write that down now because it stops mattering later, and I want the record to remember that it mattered once. He was strong enough to scare a country and not strong enough to beat an army. None of what happened after, happened alone. Six people were needed. It could not have been done by one. It could not have been done by five.
Gideon's codename was my idea. That part I can't undo and can't stop turning over. When I did the first long profile of him, back when he'd still let a reporter shadow him for a week, I wrote that watching a man that strong be that careful was like watching a jackhammer being used to sculpt Play-Doh, or railgun used to hang curtains. I called him "the strongman" in the piece as a joke, because a strongman was the kind of man he spent his nights putting to sleep or handing off to proper authorities, not the kind he was. He laughed at the article and kept the title with his new name in his wallet.
The country took the name and kept the humor of it for a while. Then the joke wore off a bit, and by the time I married him, it just meant him, and no one could tell you when it stopped being funny.
But his name is Gideon. I'm going to use it. I'm done with the other one, even if everyone else is stuck with it now.
I want to get the six of them down the way they actually were, because there's already an official version that turns them into statues, and they were not statues. They were a working crew who argued and breathed. They debated how to do the job and then blew off steam by bickering about where to eat.
There was the Tactician, which the newspapers named him and which he never once said out loud himself. Some copy editor needed two words to run under a photograph and picked those, and it stuck, the way my joke stuck. He hated it a little. He had no powers at all, not in the traditional sense. What he had was a mind, and it frightened the rest of them more than any villain did. It frightened everyone, at least a little—probably even him too, which is the only reason he stayed safe for as long as he did.
He'd come up as a costumed man working nights in Ashport, down in the mill district and along the docks, in a long dark coat and a half-mask, the papers running his silhouette for years before anyone got his face. He worked with the Ashport police, quietly, with two or three detectives who'd cover for him, because he understood early that a man who operates outside the law will get hunted by it sooner or later...unless he makes himself worth more to it as an ally. Worth more than the trouble he causes.
He would have stayed in the shadows his whole life if he could have. He told me that once. He said he never wanted the sky, he wanted an alley and a city he could actually finish. But the work kept scaling up on him, first to the team and then to the whole world, until there was no shadow left big enough to work from, and a man who'd wanted to be a rumor in one city ended up one of top ten most recognizable (masked) faces on Earth. He resented it and did it anyway. That was the shape of him.
I'll tell you a thing and mark it as uncertain: I called him John. He answered to it. I'm not sure it was his name. He was careful about his name the way brilliant and dangerous men are, and I never pushed. It's been so long, and now I can't ask. So, the Tactician on the record, a man called John in private, and neither one entirely certain.
There was the Remnant. She was not from here. She'd come off a war on some world that isn't there anymore, the last of a people she wouldn't name, and she'd survived that war by being better at killing than any person left in multiple galaxies. She wore a suit of alien tech that let her fly and augmented her reflexes. She carried a long blade that looked almost too big for her, and she rarely took any of it off. But when she did, inside the suit was a body built to different tolerances than ours.
On top of all that, she has a secret weapon. She did what no one else could: she felt violence a half-second before it happened. Not the future, she was strict about that distinction; just the coming of harm, the way your skin knows rain before the first drop, or a bug knows how to dodge a swatter. It made her impossible to beat. It also meant that her death toll was massive in that war, and that she could kill several more on this planet. She conscious of the difference between war and what she did now. She was careful about avoiding casualties whenever possible. But she did not perform, for our benefit, a grief she didn't feel. She and the Tactician were close, in the way I wasn't entirely sure of.
There was Sergeant Fantasy, older than any of them but Gideon and John. He'd been a Marine, saw real combat, and then the government took him and made him into a living superweapon: he runs on some kind of hard radiant energy, throws it, flies on it, walks out of things that should end a normal man in seconds. That's the short version of a program I was never cleared to understand.
What matters about him isn't the power. It's that he was a soldier who'd been made government property and still believed, painfully, that an oath to a country is not an oath to whoever's currently running it. He followed orders. He believed in following orders. He'd also seen what a bad order costs, up close, in the field, and carried the two beliefs at war in him for thirty years. The war in him is the thing that ends up mattering.
There was Aquela, the youngest, who didn't fully know her own origins. Something in the sea, further back than the countries that fished it. She moved water, which is what the public knew her for, and she moved minds, which is what almost no one understood. She could reach into a frightened crowd and take the fear out of it, or set fear into it, or just lower every raised weapon at once, softly, the way you settle a room full of children. In the old days she ended standoffs without a shot and everyone called it mercy. I called it mercy too. It took me years to think hard about what kind of mercy it is to have your own refusal taken out of your hands before you can use it.
And there was the Understudy. He could be anyone, or any object. In those days he was the one the cameras loved, a shapeshifter with a stand-up's timing. A man who went on the late shows and did the impressions and made a crew of genuinely alarming people feel lovable to the public. He was funny, he was friendly. I'm putting that down on purpose, because of what he turned into. When people ask how a country became what it did, the answer is that the watchmen had a face they'd laughed at.
They were six, and looking for more. A seventh, an eighth. They were our greatest heroes all working together for our benefit, and it was a visionary idea at the time. The whole crew was called the Assembly, back when a name like that still sounded aspirational.
Marlowe is running for president, and he is going to do better than anyone at my old paper wants to admit. I covered him for ten years before this, back when the wire services still called him the Sovereign, which is the name he gave himself in the days he was building war-machines and breaking out of every box the Assembly put him in. He is the smartest man alive and has spent his whole life being told that in this country the smartest man alive is a kind of criminal, and I think somewhere in there is the wound the whole thing grows out of. Marlowe is the plain name he's campaigning under. Reformed-man cosplay. The grandiosity's still in there, he's just learned to wear a suit over it.
I went to the rallies. God help me, he's good. He says the right things, that's the trap of him. He tells them the people in the sky have never once asked their permission for anything, which is true. He tells them the Assembly answers to no one. That he's a man they can vote in and they can vote out, which is true. He tells them he's the only man alive those gods can't just brush aside. I sat in the press pen and could see the sentences land for the crowd. He builds the whole act out of true things stacked to hold up a lie, and I used to tell my writing students and interns that the truth defends itself. I will never be able to say that to anyone again.
Gideon comes home gray. He keeps asking me what he's supposed to do, and I keep telling him: nothing. That's the entire point of you. You're strong enough to run this country and yet you don't. You're not a politician, certainly not a "strongman" in the pernicious geopolitical sense. Sometimes self discipline is the only thing standing between everybody and a boot. He believes me, and I believe in him.
John agrees, when we ask him about it, but he worries too. He's an institutionalist, despite everything. Or maybe because of everything. He's advocating restraint but planning for worst case scenarios. He's been good on this subject for years. I want to trust him, and the Assembly, to navigate this properly. I want to trust the public to make the right choices too. But I'm getting nervous.
Marlowe won. Clean. I need to be plain about this in a way the official record is built to keep anyone from being: there was no fraud, no secret trick with advanced technology or mind control. I looked. John looked. It was the thing we all looked hardest for, because it would have been the easy exit, and it wasn't there. The people were asked, on the normal day, in the normal way, and they picked him. The pick was theirs and it was fair. Whatever gets said later about what needed to be done or not, the people's choice stays true. You can't call Marlowe the man who stole the country. He was the answer the country gave when it was asked to decide. Maybe his ascension was a referendum on more than just mainstream politics.
The Assembly did nothing, because there was nothing to do. He was the president. You don't get to undermine an election by brute force. The Tactician saw this first and it hollowed him a bit. Yet he stuck to his guns. He told the others, more than once, that the day they reached past a lawful outcome because they didn't like it was the day they became the exact thing he'd spent his life fighting. The thing he and Gideon were keeping them from being. Everyone agreed with him. At that point everyone still believed we could survive it.
Marlowe went after the Legislature first. They were easy targets, lowest approval ratings in living memory. He said they could work with him or against him, but that he was the will of the people. He filled out his cabinet, and later vacancies in the courts, with people who seemed completely normal on the surface but were loyalists underneath. He signed more executive orders than any president had prior. He started testing the guardrails within months of taking office. Mostly they held, at first, and he would back off. But sometimes he exploited weaknesses no one noticed until it was too late. Norms we took to be rules were proven to be hollow, and he would hollow them out even more with each passing day.
Eventually, a few years in, he made his big play. He wanted to end the informal partnership between heroes and the government. The understanding that let Sergeant Fantasy operate largely as a free agent, save for national emergencies or domestic defense. The unwritten policy that let a man like John function as the only real go-between for a team of gods and a country, really a planet, of mere mortals.
Marlowe brought John in. He made a big showing of how the Tactician was being asked to help draw up the plans for this new, officially binding partnership. John went to the meeting, holding faith that the worst Marlowe would do is make an unacceptable offer. John was still confident that, if nothing else, he could walk out of there when it was over. Could keep working from the outside to avoid the worst case scenario. Marlowe would not allow that.
Within hours after the meeting, there were suspicious silences and ruinous rumors. A full day later, the government reported that the Tactician was being held. Everyone but Marlowe's most deluded loyalists knew it was a setup. This was the only man who was fighting to keep the status quo intact. I've had weeks to understand why, and one day I realized it was eerily simple: John was the one Marlowe could physically get his hands on, and the only man smart enough to stop him legally, if it came to that.
You can't put a man on trial who flies out the window. You can't hold the Remnant, who's already read the arresting officer's move before the officer makes it. You can't execute the Assembly; richer countries than this one spent fortunes learning they couldn't so much as mark on most of this team without committing a war crime. And that's the one who even stood a chance to begin with, an extremely rare club.
But the Tactician was a man. A brilliant man with no powers, which from Marlowe's chair was the worst thing to be. John was the one piece on the board that could out-maneuver Marlowe. The President wanted the smartest of them gone, and he wanted the rest of them scared. One arrest did both.
The charge was treason. I won't repeat the specifics because the specifics were concocted, and everyone with working eyes knew it. Most of them looked away from it because the paperwork was flawless. That was the cruelty of the method. He didn't break the law to kill John. He fed John into the law. Warrant, indictment, arraignment, all of it stamped and correct, because Marlowe owned the system now. He'd rebuilt it that way over two arduous years. Built so carefully, within his newly designed procedure, that to object to it looked like objecting to the rule of law itself. The man who'd spent his life saying "we work inside the law" was eaten by the law, and I don't think Marlowe could have picked a more poetic method.
Gideon wanted to go through the wall of the jail and take him out. John talked him out of it from inside the cell, through the phone, and I have the recording because I still had access to everything then. I have never been able to erase it. John told him that the second they reached into a lawful jail to save a friend, they'd be the thing he'd died to keep them from, and that he'd rather die right than be saved into that. He said he'd done the math, and he asked his friends to trust him.
John was calm about it. They respected it. He had a plan, or thought he did. A legal one. That's the part nobody includes: they let him die because he asked them to, because saving him meant crossing the line, and at that hour they were still people who wouldn't cross it even for the best of them. Right up to the end they were good. That's what makes the rest of it impossible to file cleanly.
Marlowe made the execution public. He didn't have to. He chose to, and the choosing tells you something. I've stopped believing Marlowe did anything without a reason, even if those reasons only made sense to him.
They put it on every screen in the country and called it accountability. I watched it here, alone, because Gideon couldn't be near me, couldn't be near anyone. A man who'd given his whole life to the idea that power should answer the law was killed by a law bent to the exact shape of one man's power, in front of an audience invited to call it justice. And plenty of them did. Not all, but enough.
I'll be fair to the country that chose Marlowe but also needed the Assembly. Plenty wept and plenty were furious, and the fury was the point, because fury in the street was the fuel for the next thing Marlowe wanted, which was the war. He was already turning the country's weight toward all out chaos by then, already naming enemies across the water, already running the brinkmanship hot. John's death was one more log on it. I don't think Marlowe could tell winning from burning anymore. Not by that point.
I made myself watch all of it. Someone who claims to love the truth should have to watch what it costs. When it was done I sat in a dark house full of soft furniture, and the argument I'd been winning for years, "they're strong enough to rule yet they choose not to, and the choosing is everything..." That had just been answered by the other side, and the answer was John's body, and I didn't know what I was going to say to Gideon when he came home.
He didn't come home for two days. I would learn later that he talked with the others first. Including someone new.
I wasn't in it. I'm never in the rooms. That's the flaw in these journals and I'd rather say it out loud than pretend around it. I know what I don't know, and what I don't know could fill a thousand books.
I do know there was a room. They still called it the Watchtower, now an old joke gone cold like mine. The five of them had found a sixth, the man would would've been their seventh only days prior. He was an angry young hero who hated everything Marlowe stood for, but also was suspicious of restraint in itself. Where John kept them calm, this person, barely out of college, was out for blood. He would not last the entirety of this saga, but he played a pivotal part in his own small way.
The deliberations took days. Gideon would come home and tell me about them eventually. They were in for the long haul. They did not go out in public. They did not handle emergencies. Sergeant Fantasy became Mister Fantasy, after resigning all government posts and pensions. What felt like a week with no public Assembly sightings went by.
On the fateful day, they talked it over for some number of hours. When they came out, they had decided to kill the President of the United States and take his place. They needed to end this, for the good of the country and the world. Everything I can tell you about the inside of it came to me afterward, from people with reasons to shape how it sounded.
Gideon told me the most, in pieces, over months, and never the same thing twice. Mister Fantasy told me a version years later that doesn't line up with Gideon's, and I've never resolved the gap. The Remnant told me nothing and still won't. Aquela told me one thing I believe, tho I wish I didn't. I have feeds from most of the buildings, but not that room. That room has no feed. I've decided the absence is itself a piece of testimony. You don't shut off the cameras in the one room where you did nothing wrong.
Here's what I think happened...
They didn't argue about whether. That's the part I found hardest and now find worst. Nobody refused. In every story about good people turning, there's the one who says no and walks out, so you know refusing was possible. There wasn't one. I've looked, because of all the facts I wanted to be false...this is the one I tried to wish away the most, since one man walking out would let me hate the rest of them cleanly and sleep. No one walked out. A team of fundamentally decent people looked at the same facts and each got to a unanimous decision on a coup d'etat.
Gideon's road was grief and tired arithmetic. He'd let John die to stay good. Now that John was dead, and the possibility of war was still coming, there was no one to build a version of his own restraint. No one to put forth a plan that ended in fewer graves. He'd held the line and it bought nothing. Gideon asked me once, not really asking, what the line was for if he held it and John died anyway. Marlowe was like a mad dog now. The war was coming anyway.
He asked, and I didn't have an answer. I still don't. It's the thing nobody warns you about, that some of the road down is paved with real questions that no single person can answer. At least no one left alive.
Mister Fantasy's road was the oath, and his "yes" was the heavy one, because it made everyone else's legitimate. If the soldier who'd sworn against exactly this kind of tyranny at home decided this was the case the oath was written for, then it wasn't a coup, it was a rescue, and everyone in the room got to believe that. He said it slow. I've learned that saying it slow is sometimes worse than saying nothing.
The Remnant's road was the shortest. She came from a world that died by war. She didn't think killing a tyrant was a hard problem. She said the others were sentimental, and then she said the thing that I think actually moved the room, that Gideon repeated to me exactly once: a people who won't stop their own destroyer have given up the right to be consulted about their rescue.
Aquela's accounting is the one I almost wish she hadn't told me. She said she was the one who pointed out it could be done gently. That between her mind and the Understudy's faces and the Remnant's senses, they could take the country with almost no blood. That it wouldn't look the way these things always did—not like a massacre, but something quieter, gentler, and more orderly. Street by street, mind by mind, until people simply woke up governed differently. And she told me it was the gentleness that tipped the ones still wavering. No cruelty, actually mercy. The promise that hardly anyone would have to die is what let them agree to do it. I've turned that over for years. The bloodlessness didn't make the violation smaller, but it was the thing that made the crime possible.
I'll give the last of it and mark it uncertain, because it's the piece I'm least sure of and most need to write down. Gideon has always told me he didn't do it himself. That he gave the order, or agreed to it, or didn't stop it. The verb moves when he tells it. He says the hand was the Remnant's, that his own line against killing directly held to the end. He needs that to be true, so I've never told him what I think, which is that a man who arranges a killing he's too principled to do with his own hands hasn't kept the principle, he's just laundered it. And that the difference he holds onto is the thinnest and most human thing about him. I don't know that he only gave the order. He was gone those two days, and the feeds from those two days are the ones I don't have.
After the room, there wasn't much left that you could call a decision. People picture the takeover as a run of choices and it was closer to the opposite, one choice, fueling a cascade effect that broke through every floor or barrier under it. There was nothing else to debate about once they settled on taking over. It worked like a well oiled machine.
So, they killed Marlowe. I won't describe it because I don't know the specifics, only the result, which reached me as a silence where a shot or a bomb should have been. Whatever he'd set moving toward stopped moving. The countdowns stopped. In the surviving accounts, that's the moment they call salvation, and the awful part is that it isn't wrong. A global war was two weeks out...and then it wasn't. There are people alive right now who'd be dead. I can't stand at the bottom of my own grief and pretend they should be dead to satisfy my sense of order or morality. That's the whole trap. They were right about the fire. It's only what they did with the water that damns them.
Then the world reorganized around them in weeks, because Aquela had been right, it could be done gently, and gentle turned out to mean total. Where a government resisted, the resistance didn't so much fail as wilt away. Men who'd meant to fight were made powerless to do so, finding the meaning and the fire drained from their minds without a memory of setting it down. Where a cell hid, the Understudy was already in it, had been for weeks, was the trusted second who knew where everyone slept.
Mister Fantasy's remaining connections in the military were turned into the tips of the spear for what became his standing army. The entire armed forces were his now. The lawful weapon had turned at last on the law, stood in the visible places so the quiet work wouldn't have to be seen. And over all of it was Gideon, who never had to raise a hand, whose entire job in the new order was to be the reason nobody tested the rest. The strongman, finally, for real. The woman who'd named him watching the joke finish itself on every screen she owned.
It took about two years to hold the whole Earth. The young upstart who voted for a coup...didn't have the stomach for world domination, and was quietly excused from the proceedings. No one has seen or heard from him since. I know how that all reads. I was here and it still reads like something almost made up to scare you.
I think the speed is the lesson. The only thing that ever kept the boot off our necks was the strong choosing not to press down, and the day five of them decided pressing was a kindness, there was nothing left, no law and no border. No higher power or principle that stepped in. In many ways their rise mirrored Marlowe's, just without the anti-hero vendetta or the geopolitical chaos.
I have to write the truth, because I've been unsparing throughout. I have to admit that it works, even as I hate writing it, and the hating is about the last resistance I've got.
Nobody's hungry. I don't mean it the way their predecessors in totalitarian hellholes would mean it. I mean I've looked, with what's left of a reporter's suspicion, and I can't find the hunger the official story would be hiding if there were one. The wars are over, even the ones that had absolutely nothing to do with Marlowe or the presidents who came before him. Over, not paused. Over, the way a fire is over once you've taken the air away from it.
The old sicknesses are going the way the wars went. No, they haven't magically cured cancer, but they did jumpstart research to curb it. They've fully quarantined HIV and AIDS, they've ensured anyone afflicted has a good quality of life, and they're working to eliminate conditions most people hadn't even heard of. There are cities that were rubble a decade ago and are cleaner and better run today. Better than the people who lived in them could ever have managed. The poorest people are housed and fed. The darkest, most dangerous corners of the globe are now lit and quiet.
Quiet is the word for it. You can say anything you like at your own table and nothing will happen, that much is true. The surveillance still has limits, just like it did even before they took hold. But it's true merely because saying things at tables changes nothing. Everyone's learned to adapt anyway, to leave the major complaints things left unsaid, and all without a lesson you could point to.
There are no elections. They were suspended, and the suspension became permanent without most people noticing. Certainly without many caring. They had a "transition" date once, and the date isn't mentioned now. I watched "one year" turn into "when conditions allow" turn into just the shape of things, and I couldn't tell you the day it changed, because it never changed on a day.
No, that's not quite right. Transition is mentioned, but in vague reference to the younger generation of Assembly members, their proteges. No one remembers the upstart who helped light the fire. But they know these kids. These are the only ones they know. No new heroes are sanctioned except by Assembly say so. Villains are quietly pacified or disposed of. Some through conditioning, others by more severe and unforgiving means.
The cost isn't where the old stories put it. In the history books and parables, the tyranny always rots, the crops fail, the people rise, the paradise curdles and proves that wickedness can't build anything good. That would be a comfort. It isn't what happened. This works, and it can't be handed back. Somewhere a man was right that they had no right to do it, and he's dead. Being right didn't save him, and his rightness sits in the world now doing exactly nothing, the way the Tactician's whole legacy sits in the world now, morally correct and practically useless.
I can't always tell whether a room is truly empty. The Understudy can be anyone or anything. He's surreptitiously replaced, I'm fairly sure, people I've mourned. This confinement, which is Gideon's gift to me, is the last freedom he could find a way to paper over. His reign might be the most watched thing on Earth, wearing a face I'd trusted. I'm writing this in a room I believe is empty. I've believed that before and been mistaken.
I don't know why I keep these up. Habit, if habit's the word, which I don't think it is.
I'll put down the thing I've been circling since the first page, plus the one mystery I've never solved, and then I'll stop for now.
If they gave me the night I met him back, I'd do it again. All of it, knowing all of it. I've examined that about myself the way you'd examine a lump, and it hasn't gone anywhere. I don't offer it as an excuse and I don't fully understand it. I only know that if anyone ever wants to understand how a free country let this be done to it, they'd do better to look at me than at the men who did it. The rot wasn't only in them. It's in how easily a fed, quiet, gentle world can be enough to abandon our freedoms and our virtues. Can be traded for, like we might sign an employment contract or loan agreement that we know isn't fair.
If the person you love, the face you believe in, the man or woman who saved your life more times than you remember, asked you to trust them, would you really say no? The one thing that they asked us to do was trust. It wasn't much of a choice, but we still made it. Just like some odd majority of us once chose a malignant madman to lead the country by popular vote. I think about the feeling. How little it feels like a trade while you're making it, how good the person across the table can be while you make it.
I wonder what John's plan was, and why it never even came up. He was called the Tactician for a reason—he had countermeasures for his countermeasures. I sometimes suspect that maybe Marlowe somehow sabotaged our salvation on his way out, forced the Assembly's hand in a way where even John's precautions couldn't prevent. Or maybe someone on the team did. Remnant knew him better than most. Gideon was his best friend, to the extent John could be said to have friends. Did they know what his next move would've been...and simply refuse to make it?
I keep writing these on the chance it ends someday and somebody comes looking for what actually happened and finds only the clean version. That's most of why. I'd be lying if I said it was all of it. Some of it is just that this is the last thing I own that they can't quite grant and can't quite deny. They know what it would have to take, and taking, truly taking, is the one thing they built this whole soft world to never have to do.
