CURRENT DATE CORRELATION: 1919 AD
LOCATION: NEW YORK SECTOR / SOUTH BROTHER ISLAND
INTELLIGENCE MATRIX: STABILIZED
The winter fog off the East River pressed thick against the leaded glass windows of the South Brother mansion, but inside the private library, the air was warm, smelling of polished cedar, dark tea, and aged paper.
On the surface, the human world was stumbling into an exhausted, uncertain peace. Across Manhattan, the sanitizing stations were quietly being dismantled, their utility fulfilled. In their wake, Bater Ltd's new network of shelters and educational academies had settled smoothly into the city's civic framework. Clara and her first cohort of young administrators were already managing the firm's commercial maritime filings and accounting sheets with an immaculate, terrifying efficiency born of genuine freedom.
Deep inside the library, away from terminals and automated assembly bays, the room was quiet.
David sat at a long walnut desk, his form tailored into his favored human template: sharp, composed, dark hair neatly cropped, wearing a vest and rolled-up linen sleeves. For nearly five millennia, his mind had operated like an impenetrable fortress, measuring every heartbeat, every breath, and every variable against the looming catastrophe of the Levar and the cosmic judgment of the stars. But the sterile isolation that had defined David Bater in 2123 had developed quiet, irreversible fissures.
The rhythmic, non-linear logic of the Darkhold he had woven into his Techno-Organic marrow had done more than optimize his calculations; it had eroded the rigid, defensive paranoia that once governed him. And the source of that quiet thaw was currently sitting across from him.
Selene was seated on the wide mahogany sill, a leather-bound folio of intercepted European military dispatches resting loosely across her lap. She wore an uncharacteristically simple gown of deep forest-green velvet, her long dark hair gathered loosely over one shoulder. For nearly two thousand years, she had matched his patience stride for stride. She had witnessed him dismantle bronze with his bare hands, rewire the bedrock beneath Pompeii, and dismiss kings as rounding errors on a ledger. Yet she had stayed, not as a thrall or a fanatic, but as an equal who had traded the petty vanity of ancient cults for the slow, silent architecture of an eternity with him.
"The British Admiralty has concluded their post-war accounting," Selene said softly, her thumb absently tracing the edge of an official, wax-sealed military manifest. There was none of the biting mockery she often directed at mortal institutions; in the quiet of the library, her voice held a calm, familiar intimacy. "Most of it is predictable waste. Broken regiments, misplaced munitions, and hollow decorations. But there is a file here that doesn't resolve cleanly."
David looked up from his notes. "A casualty discrepancy?"
"A pilot," she replied, her dark eyes narrowing with genuine curiosity as she turned the yellowed page. "An American attached to British intelligence, operating behind the German line in the late months of the war. He stole an experimental flight craft carrying reconnaissance data on an Ottoman chemical facility. The German pursuit shot his engine to pieces over the North Atlantic. The military wrote him off as drowned at sea, but his final wireless transmission was never filed in the public war archives. The Ministry of Information suppressed it under an absolute secrecy order."
David set his pen down.
He stood up and crossed the room with quiet, measured footsteps. In the past, his approach was always mechanical, keeping an exact, calculated perimeter of efficiency between himself and any living asset. This time, there was no clinical calculation.
He walked directly up to the window seat, stepping into her space without hesitation. He didn't ask for the ledger. Instead, he leaned in behind her to look over her shoulder, his chest coming gently to rest against the warm velvet of her back. His right hand came down naturally onto the arm of the sill right beside her hip, his fingers lightly brushing the edge of the dark green fabric as he leaned close enough that his breath stirred the loose tresses of her hair.
Selene didn't shift away.
She caught the sudden, effortless proximity, and her breath hitched for a fraction of a second. For centuries, she had treasured every deliberate nod, every softened glance, and every minor calibration variance his machine brain had conceded to her. But this wasn't an administrative adjustment; it was the unforced, unconscious movement of a man who simply wanted to be near her. A slow, quiet smile curved her lips, her eyes softening with a deep, radiant satisfaction as she leaned back just a fraction into his solid, grounding weight.
"Read the coordinates he broadcasted before the signal died," she murmured, her voice dropping into a low, private murmur as she tapped the parchment.
David's green eyes scanned the typed dispatch:
`TRANSMISSION LOG: PILOT STEVEN TREVOR (CAPTAIN, USAS / CHARTERED RFC)`
`STATUS: MISSING IN ACTION / PRESUMED DEAD AT SEA`
`LAST TRANSMISSION: "Engine destroyed... altitude falling through three hundred feet... there's a localized fog bank rising dead center of the channel... instruments spinning wildly... it isn't open water, there's land inside the mist, high cliffs, temples, "`
David went completely still.
The ambient warmth in his posture remained, but his internal processing array instantly surged into overdrive. Across his mind's eye, the chronological map of *The Atlas* flashed. He knew every significant engagement of the Great War down to the hour: the Marne, Gallipoli, the Somme, the Argonne. He knew every experimental aircraft model deployed by the Allies and the Central Powers.
Nowhere in the historical records of his 2123 timeline was there an American intelligence officer named Steve Trevor dying off the coast of an uncharted island.
"System," David commanded in a silent, high-frequency internal query. "Cross-reference the target designation against the deep-earth seismic arrays and regional municipal records."
`SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC ENGAGED`
`CROSS-REFERENCING: HISTORICAL AND GEOGRAPHIC ANOMALIES`
`TARGET: METROPOLIS... RESULT: ZERO RECORD FOUND (SMALL SETTLEMENT ABANDONED POST-CHOLERA OUTBREAK)`
`TARGET: CENTRAL CITY / KEYSTONE BASIN... RESULT: ANOMALOUS HIGH-VELOCITY ELECTROMAGNETIC POTENTIAL FLAGGED`
`TARGET: GOTHAM REGION... RESULT: METROPOLITAN CORRIDOR ESTABLISHED / ARCHITECTURAL CONTAINMENT MATRIX DETECTED UNDER FOUR FAMILIES CONSORTIUM`
`TARGET: ATLANTIC SECTOR SEVEN... RESULT: PERMANENT SPATIAL-MIST BLIND SPOT TRACKING AT EXACT TREVOR COORDINATES`
A cold shock rolled through David's human template.
When his soul was pulled through the quantum veil into 3600 BC, he had assumed he was stranded within the comic-book pantheon of his youth, a volatile Marvel timeline of mutants, Celestials, and alien armadas. But this world was not a clean mirror of that singular framework. It was a Fused Earth. Selected, massive bastions of an entirely separate reality were breathing right beside his own borders.
And the man whose destined arrival was supposed to pull the sovereign daughter of the Amazons into the horrors of the Great War had crashed into the sea and died alone in the freezing dark.
"David?" Selene turned her head slightly, her dark eyes looking up into his with genuine, sharp concern as she felt the subtle shift in his breathing. "What is it?"
David remained where he was for a moment longer, allowing his hand on the sill to close gently over the back of her pale fingers. The contact was firm, warm, and entirely steady.
"History has an unmapped blind spot," David said, his voice quiet, carrying the raw, level cadence of his original self rather than a digitized drone. "The pilot did not drown in an empty ocean. He died on the threshold of an ancient, sovereign kingdom that was never meant to remain in isolation. Because he failed to breach the mist, their greatest warrior never picked up a sword for the surface world."
Selene's eyes widened slightly as she followed the line of his thoughts, leaning her cheek gently against his arm. "The Amazons. Themyscira."
"Yes," David nodded, his green eyes reflecting the grey light of the river outside. "Diana is still on the island. She has never seen a human war, never walked the streets of man's cities, and never fulfilled her chronological anchor. In twenty years, the human world will tear itself apart again. If the Atlantic axis remains silent and divided, our planetary network will carry a massive blind spot when the skies inevitably break."
Selene smiled, a slow, wicked curve that held both fierce ambition and absolute pride in the man standing over her. She turned her hand under his, letting her fingers lace securely through his.
"Then it seems your shopping list has expanded across the ocean, Administrator," she purred softly. "Are we going to send an army to their shores?"
"No," David replied, the ghost of a real, genuine smile touching his lips as he looked down at her. "The Amazons do not bend to armies. They listen to strength, truth, and conviction. We will take the sub-oceanic craft into the mist. It is time to pay Queen Hippolyta a visit."