Artificial Suns In Alternate Galaxies

Chapter 2

Okay, so Tony has to admit that Ross wasn’t completely off-base when he labeled the UGC – yes, he’s rolling with it now – as a sincere business.

The call was made to the British representative of the UN council – a commendable choice if you ask the inventor: Emanuela Clarke is simultaneously one of the most open-minded and most level-headed people he’s ever had the pleasure to meet. She didn’t seem fazed by the less than human looking people on her phone screen for a second, even though they managed to catch her in the midst of the birthday party of a seven year old girl.

She handled the entire ordeal with a level of grace and competence that cannot be taught in public relations courses – if the aliens haven’t had figured out the internet already, they would have left with a pretty tall first impression of Earth after their talk with Clarke. She listened to the clearly prepared sales pitch with attentiveness and patience, nodding along at all the right places, asking questions that made her appear interested but not overeager.

The fact that she was talking to literal aliens didn’t even seem to register throughout the whole conversation.

The three extraterrestrials seemed to be giving a well-rehearsed performance for the first few minutes: the only woman of the group asked Clarke if she was free to talk, announced that they were calling her from a foreign planet and are representing the UGC, and that they would like to talk to the representatives of Terra about our newfound neighborship.

Clarke very wisely did not laugh in their faces as Tony would likely have done, so they proceeded to talk terms about a face to face meeting, answering Clarke’s questions with the same detached professionalism and transparency she welcomed them with.

The most important thing Tony has learned – both from the call and from the incredibly informative program they provided Clarke with – is that Thanos seems to be a common enemy. The UGC claims to have the largest known army in the history of the universe – and isn’t that food for thought for another gloomy day – but apparently Thanos has been very careful to stay outside their borders in his quest of destruction, and so they haven’t had ample opportunity to “neutralize him yet”.

Tony has his doubts about whether they really have the power to just neutralize someone whom the universe casually nicknamed as the ‘Mad Titan’, but if only a tenth of their claims about their own forces are to be believed, that would still give Earth a much better chance of winning against Thanos, should they choose to ally themselves with this Communia.

And ally themselves they would, Tony decides, even if he has to spoon-feed the idea to every single UN Councilmember and state PM himself.

Tony Stark has eight doctorates – a pretty public, if often forgotten fact – but only six of those doctorates are in STEM subjects. Two of his dissertations were written in Political Science, the second one particularly condemned by his peers for pointing out why democracy is only a step on the ladder of modern civilization.

And after a twenty hour long binge of reading about how the UGC operates, Tony feels a bit giddy when he admits that this, the Communia, is the next step. Hell, it’s several steps ahead of them, if not close to the top of the ladder in terms of social advancement, although Tony reserves the belief that there is always room for improvement.

Still, if this little information database with the humiliatingly verbose user interface isn’t lying, then the UGC is the sort of utopistic society that Earth can only dream about becoming for centuries to come, if that.

Tony is a futurist. The UGC is the future, so far be it from the genius to stand in the way of fate, when the notion suits his ideals so very perfectly.