-Real World-
Caesar Clown mattered more than anyone had initially calculated. This was becoming a recurring theme.
The man who had spent most of his career as a secondhand embarrassment to genuine science — funded by people who wanted results he delivered as promises, defrauding institutions with enough sophistication to keep the money coming and not enough to face a final accounting — had appeared on the Sky Screen in Year 1940 as a several-hundred-meter bronze statue at the center of a university he had founded, with a stone tablet crediting him with contributions that had shaped an empire. The gap between the Caesar Clown that most people knew and the Caesar Clown that the future had decided to memorialize was large enough to produce a kind of cognitive discomfort in anyone who sat with it.
Back on his assigned experimental island, Caesar Clown was experiencing this discomfort from the inside.
The Marine had provided him with living arrangements that were comfortable in the particular way that suggested they were also surveillance. Two or three female sailors were assigned to his immediate vicinity — pleasant, attentive, and clearly there to observe him as much as to protect him. He didn't mind, ally. Female company of the variety that could discuss experimental methodology was more interesting to him than most other categories of company, and the current arrangement had produced at least one colleague worth talking to.
"The Giant God Soldier." He was speaking with the kind of honesty that sometimes surfaces after a sufficient number of drinks, because that honesty has been trying to come out anyway and alcohol simply removes the friction. "I have no idea what I'm supposed to build. My future self apparently figured it out. I look at what's on the Sky Screen and I look at what I can currently do and I genuinely cannot see the path from here to there."
His female colleague received this with the equanimity of someone who had been working beside him long enough to know that his complaints were a form of processing rather than a form of giving up. What the Sky Screen showed was real. Caesar Clown had not, in her assessment, failed to deliver on any significant claim that had been verified by the Sky Screen. The gap between present capability and future achievement was a problem of time, not of fundamental capacity.
She said as much, and added that his more immediate problem was likely to be staying alive long enough to cover the distance.
She was not wrong.
The footage from the future — Borsalino's timeline in Year 1940, Gwen Stacy reading the stone tablet, the camera dwelling on the titles The Road to Serfdom and The Theory of Class — had landed with the Five Elders the way a stone lands in still water. The ripples had been immediate.
The Five Elders had, until recently, understood the Marine's rebellion primarily as a physical one — an organization that had developed the combat power to refuse the World Government's institutional authority. What the stone tablet described was different. A scientist who had written works on class structure and the nature of servitude, works that a future empire had preserved and elevated. The intellectual dismantling of a system was not a development they had considered, in part because no one had previously presented it as a viable attack vector.
They could not read the books. The books did not yet exist. The titles alone were sufficient to identify the general direction of the argument, and the general direction of the argument was directly toward the foundations of everything the Celestial Dragons had built their position on.
They sent a formal request to Fleet Admiral Sengoku for Caesar Clown's transfer into World Government custody.
Sengoku declined.
This was not the Sengoku of the previous era — the man who had smoothed over institutional conflicts with the patience of someone who understood that he was operating within a power structure that could override him. The Marine currently held five Admirals. The Five Elders could not produce an equivalent. The practical balance had shifted enough that "no" was now a position the Marine could maintain without requiring extraordinary justification.
His counter: if the Five Elders wanted Caesar Clown, they could offer Vegapunk in exchange. A unilateral transfer of a Marine research asset was not something that happened anymore.
The Five Elders attempted the familiar lever of funding — restricting Marine expenditure to create pressure. This had worked before. It did not work now, because the Marine had, in the interim, developed its own revenue streams. The garrison costs billed to member states had been revised upward. The additional margin had been redirected to military expenditure rather than flowing through the World Government's accounts. The financial pressure that the Five Elders expected to apply had no surface to push against.
Caesar Clown, learning through the Sky Screen that he would live to one hundred years old, and that the end of those hundred years would involve a statue rather than an unmarked grave, found his motivation to continue cooperating with the Marine substantially reinforced. The Fleet Admiral of the Broadcast era apparently understood what scientists needed in a way that made the institutional relationship worth maintaining.
He went back to his notes feeling, for the first time in a long time, like the timeline was on his side.
The Revolutionary Army had a different relationship with the Sky Screen's revelations.
Kamabakka Kingdom had become the movement's new operational base — a functional choice, given that the island's ruler was currently imprisoned and the space was available, and that the Revolutionary Army needed somewhere to reestablish communications infrastructure after the previous headquarters had become a problem. Liaison offices had been set up. The information network was functioning.
The morale was not.
Dragon sat with the stone tablet's text in his mind and did not particularly like what he found when he examined it carefully.
The Revolutionary Army had a clear enemy — the World Government, the Celestial Dragons, the system that produced the structures of violence and extraction that crushed the people the movement existed to protect. It had always been clear on the enemy. What it was less clear on was the program — the principled, articulable answer to what comes next that would make the revolution into something other than the destruction of the old arrangement without a coherent replacement.
Dragon was powerful. He had the personal force to hold the organization's center together and the charisma to draw people toward the cause. He did not have, and had never pretended to have, the ideological framework that would give the Revolutionary Army a language for what it was actually building toward. Most of the cadres followed him personally, not a set of articulated principles.
The Road to Serfdom. The Theory of Class. He had been looking at those titles for a while.
"Whether Caesar Clown actually wrote those works from his own thinking, or assembled them from somewhere else — if the ideas are real, I want to read them." He was speaking to Sabo, not exactly asking a question. "A great thinker could point us toward something we don't currently have words for. That's what the revolutionary army is missing more than anything else."
Sabo had been thinking since the topic came up and had not resolved it. His own political formation was largely Dragon's, absorbed through proximity rather than developed independently — he knew this about himself, and he was in the phase of knowing it without yet knowing what to do about the gap. He was not yet the figure he would need to become to carry the movement forward on his own. He was getting there.
"If I could see Luffy again," he said, which was a different direction entirely, "that idiot would probably give me something to think about. He usually does."
The memory of the three of them was the kind of thing he kept in a part of his mind that he visited carefully. No class distinction. No ideology. Just three children and the happiness of that.
Dragon filed the Caesar Clown idea for later.
Both of the Revolutionary Army's top two were, independently, considering an introduction.
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