Archive of Our Own

I. The Office

INT. WALLER'S OFFICE — ARGUS BLACK SITE — NIGHT

Smith hasn't sat down. Waller hasn't asked him to. He's in street clothes, no helmet. Something is off in the way he's standing. Too still for him.

WALLER: You're late for debrief, Smith.

SMITH: Yeah. I was thinking.

WALLER: That's new.

SMITH: (small smile) See, that's the thing. That's the move. You do it with everybody. Hit the soft spot first so the conversation starts with them defending instead of looking. I clocked it about six minutes ago when you did it to your assistant on the way in. Kid with the tablet. You said "still here?" and he flinched, and that's how you open every interaction with anybody who isn't actively trying to kill you. Hit, flinch, control. It's a wrestling move. It's a heel move, honestly. I respect it.

WALLER: ...

SMITH: I'm not loaded right, Waller. Something happened on assignment. I'm not gonna try to explain it because the words I have aren't the right words yet and I'm a little scared of the ones that are. But I'm running clean for the first time since I was probably nine years old, and from in here, you look real different than you used to.

WALLER: Sit down, Christopher.

SMITH: Nah. (beat) You wanna know what you look like?

WALLER: I expect you'll tell me.

SMITH: You look like my dad.

WALLER: I am nothing like your father.

SMITH: I didn't say you were like him. I said you look like him. From the inside. My dad had a thing he was scared of so bad he built a whole life around not looking at it. He couldn't be a man who'd failed, so he built a religion where he hadn't. You can't be a woman in a world where the gods are real, so you built a job where you're the one with the leash on them.

A beat. Waller is very still.

SMITH: There's a god walking around Themyscira. There's a foster kid in Philly who says a word and an Egyptian wizard fills him up with six other gods. There's a starfish from outside our dimension that took a city, and you sent me and Bloodsport and a guy with polka dots to handle it. You. Personally. Made that call. Because if you ever stopped making that call (if you ever sat in that chair and said out loud, "I am a sixty-something woman from Chicago, and there are entities from outside our universe, and they could end us on a Tuesday, and I have no actual leverage over a single one of them") you would not be able to stand up again.

WALLER: You think I don't know what's out there.

SMITH: I think you know exactly what's out there. That's the problem. You know, and you can't carry it, so you put it in a building, and you put a number on the building, and you put a budget on the number, and you put me in the building with a gun. The gun doesn't do anything to any of them. You know that. You also know that if you ever stopped pretending the gun does something, the building falls down, and you fall down with it.

WALLER: That's a very pretty speech.

SMITH: It's not a speech. It's a diagnosis. You had Flag killed because Flag was the kind of man who might've, on a bad day, said the thing out loud. I know. I'm the one who pulled the trigger. You almost killed your own daughter for the same reason.

WALLER: Don't.

SMITH: Leota looked at it, Amanda. She looked right at it, and she didn't fall apart. She just decided you were wrong. That's what you can't forgive her for. Not the leak. Not the files. That she stood in front of the same thing you stand in front of, and she didn't need a black site to keep standing.

A long silence.

WALLER: Are you finished?

SMITH: (gently) I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to tell you I see it now. I've been one of your guns for a long time. I'm not quitting or whatever. There's still butterflies. There's still whatever came through last week. Somebody's gotta be in the building. I'm just saying I know what the building is for now. And I don't think you should be the one alone in it anymore.

He turns toward the door. Stops with his hand on it.

SMITH: Eagly says hi, by the way. He doesn't like you. I think he can tell.

He goes. Waller does not move for a long time.

II. Inventory

INT. WALLER'S OFFICE — CONTINUOUS

The door clicks shut behind Smith. Waller stares at it for a five-count. Then, without looking away:

WALLER: Get in here.

A side door opens. ECONOMOS enters, holding a tablet against his chest like a shield. He has clearly been listening.

WALLER: What happens to him.

ECONOMOS: Uh. I'd say about IQ 150, matching EQ, and most of his childhood neurological trauma got healed. (beat) Think we could get some more of that Blood of Hermes stuff?

WALLER: No.

Economos nods like he expected that. Doesn't leave.

WALLER: How long does it last.

ECONOMOS: Unknown. The Themysciran consult said the original myth-cycle Hermes drops were a single-event metabolic burn. Like, the substance gets used up doing the rewiring. So he's not on it anymore. He just is it now. Until he isn't.

WALLER: Meaning.

ECONOMOS: Meaning we don't know if it wears off in six hours or never. The consult laughed when I asked for a timeline. She actually laughed. She said "you are asking the wrong category of question," which is a thing I am getting tired of hearing from these people.

WALLER: Is he a threat.

ECONOMOS: (careful) To who.

WALLER: Don't.

ECONOMOS: Amanda. He's not gonna shoot you. He's not gonna leak. He's not gonna go to the press. He just (and I want to be clear that I am reporting, not editorializing) he just woke up. Like the rest of him came online. The trauma stuff is the part that's gonna matter operationally. The father-conditioning is gone. The reflex to obey a chain of command from a damaged place, that specific lever, we don't have it anymore. We've got a forty-something man with a clean prefrontal cortex and full access to his own memory of every order you've ever given him. Including Flag.

WALLER: ...

ECONOMOS: I'm just saying. From an asset-management perspective.

WALLER: Where is the rest of it.

ECONOMOS: The Hermes blood?

WALLER: Yes.

ECONOMOS: (pause) That's why I asked if we could get more.

WALLER: John.

ECONOMOS: There isn't any. There was one vial. The Themyscirans gave us one vial as a goodwill gesture five years ago, and we sat on it for five years because nobody could agree on what to do with it, and last week some lab tech at Site B used it on Smith because Smith was bleeding out from a head wound and the tech panicked and grabbed the nearest unlabeled thing in the divine-materials locker. Which, side note, we should probably label the divine-materials locker.

WALLER: A lab tech.

ECONOMOS: Patel. Twenty-six. Stanford. He thought it was a coagulant. In his defense it does coagulate. It also apparently does (gestures at the door Smith left through) that.

WALLER: Where is Patel now.

ECONOMOS: Amanda.

WALLER: Where is Patel.

ECONOMOS: He's at his desk. He's twenty-six. He saved Smith's life. (beat) You're not gonna do the thing.

WALLER: I'm not doing the thing.

ECONOMOS: Good.

WALLER: I'm thinking about doing the thing.

ECONOMOS: I'd like to formally register that thinking about the thing is, statistically, ninety percent of how we end up doing the thing.

Waller finally looks at him. Economos holds the look. It's the bravest thing he has ever done.

WALLER: Get Patel a transfer. Somewhere boring. Somewhere with weather.

ECONOMOS: Done.

WALLER: And John.

ECONOMOS: Yeah.

WALLER: The Themyscirans gave us one vial as a goodwill gesture.

ECONOMOS: Yes.

WALLER: They knew what it does.

ECONOMOS: I have been trying not to think about that, yes.

WALLER: They handed a piece of a god to a federal black site and said "here, do whatever." And then waited five years.

ECONOMOS: (very quietly) Yeah.

WALLER: They're not allies, John.

ECONOMOS: No ma'am.

WALLER: They're anthropologists.

Economos doesn't answer. He doesn't have to. Waller looks back at the closed door.

WALLER: Get out.

He goes. Waller sits alone with the information that a god-tier civilization has been running an experiment on her, through her, for five years, and that the experiment's first result just walked out of her office and told her she looked like his father.

She picks up her phone. Puts it down. Picks it up again.

WALLER: (into phone) Get me Diana Prince.

FADE OUT.

III. The Diner

INT. ROADSIDE DINER — NIGHT

Fluorescent buzz. One trucker at the counter, asleep over coffee. A waitress reading a paperback. Rain on the window.

SMITH is in the back booth. Costume on, helmet on the seat beside him like a sleeping cat. He's reading a tablet, thumb-flicking pages faster than the screen can render them. There's a stack of three more tablets next to the helmet. The top one says PROPERTY OF ARGUS — RESTRICTED on a peeling sticker he hasn't bothered to remove.

The bell over the door rings. CLARK KENT comes in. Glasses. Wet trench coat. He shakes the rain off, nods at the waitress, starts toward a stool at the counter.

Smith looks up. Doesn't startle. Just looks. For a long second.

SMITH: Now I see why nobody sees you. But I do now.

Clark stops. Half a beat where you can see him decide which of about four available reactions to use. He picks the one where he turns, mildly, and looks confused in a way that is so practiced it has its own zip code.

CLARK: I'm sorry?

SMITH: Don't. (gentle) You're good at it. You're really good at it. The slump's perfect. The thing with the glasses where you push them up with the second knuckle instead of the index, that's a tell I would never have caught a week ago and I'm catching it now and I want you to know I'm not gonna do anything with it. Sit down. Or don't. Your call. I'm not press and I'm not Waller.

Clark looks at him for a moment. Then, very deliberately, comes over and sits across from him. Hangs the wet coat. Folds his hands on the table. Doesn't drop the Clark, exactly. Just stops actively performing it.

CLARK: You're Christopher Smith.

SMITH: Yeah.

CLARK: I read about Corto Maltese.

SMITH: Bet you did. (beat) Bet you read about it the regular way and then read about it the other way.

CLARK: (small smile) Something like that.

The waitress drifts over. Clark orders coffee and a slice of whatever's freshest. Smith doesn't order anything. She goes.

SMITH: I'm gonna say some stuff and you're gonna let me, because I think you came in here on purpose and I think we both know it.

CLARK: Okay.

SMITH: A week ago a lab tech at an ARGUS site hit me with about four cc's of what the Themysciran liaison calls Blood of Hermes. He thought it was a coagulant. I was bleeding from the head. He picked the wrong bottle off the wrong shelf and saved my life and also did (taps his temple) this. Whatever this is. I'm reading at about a tablet a minute. I have not slept and I do not want to. I cried for an hour and a half yesterday about a dog I had when I was eleven that I had not thought about in thirty years. I told Amanda Waller to her face that she's my father in a pantsuit. I'm not bragging. I'm telling you the size of the room I'm in now so you know I'm not making small talk.

CLARK: I'm listening.

SMITH: You came in wet.

CLARK: It's raining.

SMITH: You came in wet because you walked the last block. You didn't walk the last block because the rain's nice. You walked it because if I'm what they told you I am right now, you wanted me to see you walk in like a guy. Not land like a guy. Walk. So I'd have the chance to do the polite thing and not notice. That's the whole bit, isn't it. You give people the chance to not notice. Most of them take it because most of them want to. The glasses aren't a disguise. The glasses are an offer.

Clark is quiet for a beat. Then:

CLARK: Yeah.

SMITH: Yeah.

CLARK: Most people want the world to be the size they were told it was.

SMITH: I been one of those people my whole life. I had a helmet that did it for me. Put the helmet on, world's the right size. Take it off, world's the right size, just with worse hair. The helmet wasn't the disguise either. The helmet was the offer. Same as your glasses. To me. From me. So I didn't have to look.

CLARK: And now you're looking.

SMITH: Now I'm looking.

The waitress drops the coffee and the pie. Clark thanks her by name (she's wearing a tag). She smiles in a small involuntary way and walks off feeling, for reasons she won't examine, slightly better than she did ten seconds ago. Smith watches this happen with the attention of a man watching a magic trick performed by someone who doesn't know it's a trick.

SMITH: You do that on purpose?

CLARK: (mild) Do what.

SMITH: That. With Sheryl. The name thing. The eye contact angle. Whatever you just did to her serotonin.

CLARK: I said thank you.

SMITH: Clark.

Clark looks at him. Holds it. A small admission moves across his face and then settles.

CLARK: I try to leave people a little better than I found them. It's not a trick. It's a discipline. I learned it from my mom.

SMITH: Which one.

CLARK: (after a beat, the smallest smile) Both, actually.

Smith laughs. Real laugh. First one in days.

SMITH: Okay. Okay. (sobering) Can I ask you something and you give me the real answer.

CLARK: You can ask.

SMITH: Why didn't you fix it. Any of it. You could land in Pyongyang tomorrow. You could pull every warhead out of every silo in an afternoon. You could put Waller's whole site on the moon. You don't. Why don't you.

Clark takes a long sip of coffee. Sets it down. Lines the handle up with the edge of the saucer.

CLARK: Because the day I do that is the day a man in this diner stops being a citizen and starts being livestock. (beat) My dad (Jonathan, the one in Kansas) told me when I was about fifteen that the most dangerous thing I could ever do was be useful in a way nobody could refuse. He didn't have the vocabulary for it the way I do now. But he had the thing. He said: son, if you ever make yourself the answer, you'll have made everybody else the question.

SMITH: Huh.

CLARK: I pull warheads, I've ended deterrence. I've also ended the idea that humans get to decide what humans do. I become the weather. People don't argue with weather, Chris. They just live under it. And then they stop being people in any of the ways that matter.

SMITH: So you let the warheads sit.

CLARK: I let the warheads sit. I pull the kid out of the lake. I catch the bus. I file the story. I go home and eat dinner with my wife. Every day I make the smallest possible version of the choice, because the big version of the choice eats the world I'm trying to live in.

SMITH: That's a hell of a discipline.

CLARK: It's the only one I've got. (beat) You're gonna need one too, by the way. That's actually why I came in.

Smith goes still.

SMITH: Yeah?

CLARK: Whatever's in you right now, it might wear off and it might not. If it doesn't, you're gonna be the smartest, clearest-seeing man in every room you walk into for the rest of your life, and the rooms are mostly gonna be full of people who do not want to be seen that clearly. Waller doesn't. The Pentagon doesn't. Your old crew doesn't. Most of your neighbors don't. And you're not gonna have my off-switch. I can put the glasses on and Sheryl gets to keep her Tuesday. You don't have glasses. You've got a face that, from now on, is gonna tell people things about themselves they didn't ask to know. That's a kind of power. It's not the kind anybody throws a parade for.

SMITH: What do I do with it.

CLARK: (very simply) You leave people a little better than you found them. You start small. You start with Sheryl. You don't fix Waller. You can't fix Waller. You can maybe, on a good day, decline to be one more person who lies to her about what she is, and that's the most anyone's done for her in thirty years, and it might be enough or it might not, but it's yours to offer and nobody else's.

Long beat. The rain. The fluorescent buzz.

SMITH: My dad would've hated you.

CLARK: I know.

SMITH: Like, on sight. The minute you walked in. He'd have had a whole thing.

CLARK: I get that a lot.

SMITH: (quiet) I'm glad I met you after.

Clark reaches across the table. Doesn't grab Smith's hand or do anything sentimental. Just sets his palm flat on the formica, near Smith's, the way you might put a hand down near a dog you don't want to spook.

CLARK: Welcome to the part where you can see, Chris. It's lonelier than the brochure says. But the company's better.

He finishes his pie. Pays in cash. Overtips. Puts the wet coat back on. Nods at Sheryl by name again on the way out. The bell rings. He's gone.

Smith sits there for a long time. He doesn't pick the tablet back up. After a while he reaches over and, very carefully, turns the helmet on the seat so it's facing the window instead of him.

FADE OUT.

IV. The Lab

INT. ARGUS R&D FLOOR — SUB-BASEMENT 3 — DAY

Glass-walled lab. White everything. A holographic display rotates a molecule Smith can read now and wishes he couldn't. MICHAEL HOLT (Mr. Terrific) is standing at a workstation, sleeves rolled, T-spheres orbiting his shoulders in a lazy figure-eight. He does not turn around when the door opens.

HOLT: You're forty seconds early. I had money on you being two minutes late.

SMITH: Who'd you have the money with.

HOLT: Myself. I won.

SMITH: That's not how betting works.

HOLT: It's how it works when you're the only person in the room worth betting against. (finally turns) Christopher Smith. Peacemaker. Sit down.

Smith doesn't sit. He looks at the room. T-spheres. The molecule. A second display with what looks like his own MRI on it, time-lapsed. He clocks the MRI.

SMITH: That me.

HOLT: That's you. That's you on day one, that's you on day three, that's you this morning. The white matter remodeling is, and I want to be precise here, vulgar. Your corpus callosum looks like somebody renovated a kitchen.

SMITH: Vulgar.

HOLT: Aesthetically. The Themyscirans do good work but they do it like a drunk carpenter. Load-bearing, structurally sound, ugly seams. If I'd been the one administering it I'd have titrated. They poured.

SMITH: A lab tech poured. By accident.

HOLT: A lab tech was the instrument. The Themyscirans poured. Don't be naive, it doesn't suit the new wiring.

Smith sits down. Slowly.

SMITH: Waller said you were the third smartest man on the planet.

HOLT: Waller is being polite to two other men whose feelings she has political reasons to consider. I'm the smartest man on the planet. Bruce is a detective with a budget. Luthor is a sociopath with a grudge and good PR. I'm the one who actually does the work.

SMITH: Huh.

HOLT: Huh what.

SMITH: Nothing. (beat) I guess you can be smart and an asshole.

A T-sphere drifts between them, scans Smith, drifts back. Holt doesn't smile, exactly. Something happens at the corner of his mouth that's adjacent to smiling.

HOLT: Oh, I'm gonna like you.

SMITH: That's not what I was going for.

HOLT: I know. That's why. (leans on the workstation) Let me save us both forty minutes, Chris. You came in here expecting one of two guys. Guy A is the Black scientist who is gracious and warm and explains things to you patiently because he's grateful you took the meeting. Guy B is the Black scientist who is bitter and chip-shouldered and explains things to you angrily because he resents that you took the meeting. Both of those guys are characters white screenwriters write for me. Neither of them is in this room. The guy in this room is the guy who finished his PhD at nineteen, lost his wife and unborn son in a way that should have ended him and didn't, decided after that that there was no God watching, and concluded from that that being decent is a choice you make on purpose every morning with no cosmic backstop. I make that choice. I made it this morning. I am still going to be an asshole to you for the next ninety minutes because being decent and being agreeable are different disciplines, and I owe you the first one and not the second. Are we clear.

SMITH: (after a beat) Yeah.

HOLT: Good.

SMITH: Your wife.

HOLT: Don't.

SMITH: I wasn't gonna. I was gonna say I'm sorry. The new wiring doesn't make me less of a guy who says I'm sorry when somebody tells me a thing like that.

Holt looks at him. Recalibrates, just a hair.

HOLT: ...Thank you. (brisk) Moving on. We need to talk about what you are now and what you aren't.

SMITH: Okay.

HOLT: You aren't me. The thing in your head is myth-tier biochemistry doing a renovation on neurology that was, forgive me, a fixer-upper. You're operating at what your peak would have been if your father had been a different man and you'd been raised by people who read to you. That's a high ceiling. It's not my ceiling. My ceiling is its own thing and we're not going to compare, because comparison is the trap they want you in. Are you tracking.

SMITH: I'm tracking.

HOLT: You aren't Clark either. I'm told you had a diner conversation with him. He gave you the speech about leaving people a little better than you found them.

SMITH: How do you know that.

HOLT: Because he gives everyone that speech. It's a good speech. It's his speech. It's a speech for a man who could end the world before lunch and chooses not to. You're not that man. You're a man who, two weeks ago, could be talked into shooting a friend by a woman in a pantsuit. The Clark discipline is not your discipline. Don't try to wear his coat. It'll fit you wrong and you'll resent him for it inside a year.

SMITH: What's my discipline, then.

HOLT: I don't know yet. Neither do you. That's the project. (taps the MRI) What I can tell you is what you've got to work with. You've got pattern recognition that is now, conservatively, six sigma. You've got an emotional bandwidth you have literally never had access to before, which means every feeling you have for the next six months is going to feel like the most important feeling anybody has ever had, and most of them won't be, and you have to learn to let them pass through you without acting on them. You've got a memory that is reorganizing itself in real time, which means things you thought were settled about your childhood are going to keep getting un-settled, and you need a therapist, and I have three names, and you will pick one before you leave this room.

SMITH: Okay.

HOLT: And you've got a target painted on you the size of Nebraska. The Themyscirans handed Waller a vial of a god's blood as a goodwill gesture and waited to see what she'd do with it. What she did with it was you. You are now a data point in an experiment being run by a civilization that predates writing. Lex knows. Bruce knows by now, or will by Friday. The Chinese know. Every intelligence service with a metahuman desk is opening a file on you this week. You are interesting in a way you have never been interesting before, and interesting is the most dangerous thing a person can be.

SMITH: (quiet) Yeah, I figured.

HOLT: Good. The new wiring's working.

Beat.

SMITH: Can I ask you something.

HOLT: You're going to.

SMITH: Why are you helping me. You don't like me. You don't owe me. Waller didn't order you, because nobody orders you, that part's obvious. So why.

Holt is quiet for a moment. The T-spheres slow their orbit.

HOLT: Because the day my wife died I made a list of things I was going to do with the time I had left, and one of the things on the list was: when somebody who didn't get the start I got gets dropped into the deep end, I'm going to be in the water. Not on the side cheering. In the water. You didn't ask for the blood. You didn't ask for the renovation. You're in the deep end. I'm in the water. That's it. It's not about you.

SMITH: That's a hell of an answer.

HOLT: It's the real one. You wanted the real one. (brisk again) Pick a therapist. Dr. Reyes is the best clinician but she'll make you cry in the first session and you'll hate her for six weeks. Dr. Okafor is gentler but slower. Dr. Bergman is the one I'd pick for you because he was a Marine before he was a psychiatrist and he won't be impressed by you, which is what you need.

SMITH: Bergman.

HOLT: Good choice. (taps a T-sphere; a card prints from somewhere) He's expecting your call. I scheduled you for Thursday.

SMITH: You scheduled me before I picked.

HOLT: I scheduled you with all three. I'll cancel the other two. (beat) You have a question on your face.

SMITH: You really think you're smarter than Bruce Wayne.

HOLT: I know I am. Bruce is smarter than me about exactly one thing, which is what's wrong with people. That's not a small thing. It might even be the thing. But it's one thing. Don't tell him I said the part before the comma. Do tell him I said the part after.

SMITH: (getting up) You're really committed to the asshole bit.

HOLT: It's not a bit. It's a load-bearing wall. (without looking up) Thursday, Smith. Don't be late. Bergman charges for the hour whether you're in the chair or not, and I'm the one paying.

Smith stops at the door.

SMITH: You're paying.

HOLT: I'm paying.

SMITH: Huh.

HOLT: Get out of my lab.

Smith goes. The T-spheres resume their figure-eight. Holt stands very still for about ten seconds, looking at the door. Then he turns back to the molecule, and his hands, when he reaches for the interface, are not quite as steady as they were.

FADE OUT.

V. The Ladder

INT. BERGMAN'S OFFICE — THURSDAY — 4:47 PM

Small. Books. A window with actual daylight, which is jarring after the ARGUS fluorescents. Two chairs, no couch. A clock on a side table angled so the patient can see it, which is a choice. BERGMAN is mid-sixties, gray crew cut, cardigan over a collared shirt, no tie. He's been sitting in the chair for the full hour Smith has been talking. He has not taken a note.

Smith is forward in his chair. Elbows on knees. He's been going for fifty-one minutes.

SMITH: — and the thing is, the thing is, his father (my grandfather, I never met him, he died before I was born) was a guy who came back from Korea in '54 with a piece of his jaw missing and a Bronze Star and a drinking problem the VA called "nervous exhaustion" because in 1954 that's what they called it when a twenty-two-year-old came home and couldn't sleep without a bottle. And his father, my great-grandfather, was a Klansman in Indiana in the twenties, which I did not know until Tuesday, when I pulled the genealogy. Indiana Klan, the big one, the four-million-members one, the one that ran the statehouse. So my dad's dad came up in a house where the moral center of the universe was a man in a hood, and then got shipped to Korea at eighteen, and came back broken, and raised my dad in the broken house, and my dad raised me in the house his dad built on the foundation his dad built, and I shot a friend in the head on Amanda Waller's orders because by the time it got to me the house had been standing for four generations and I thought it was the ground. I thought it was the ground, Doc. I thought the floor of the house was the surface of the earth. And now I'm looking at it and it's a house, somebody built it, and the men who built it had reasons, bad reasons, reasons that made sense to them at the time, reasons that came out of their houses, and I want to be angry at my dad and I am, I am angry at him, but every time I get the anger up to a full boil I see the kid he was, eight years old, watching his father drink himself stupid and hit his mother, and I can't hold the anger because the kid didn't do anything, the kid was just there, and then the kid grew up and did it to me, and I'm angry at the kid's father now, the grandfather I never met, and I'm halfway up the ladder and I can already see I'm gonna run out of ladder before I run out of men to be angry at, because every one of them had a father, and every one of those fathers had a father, and somewhere back there is a guy in a field in Saxony in 1612 who started something, or didn't start it, just passed it, and —

BERGMAN: Chris.

SMITH: — and the Klan thing, I keep coming back to the Klan thing, because the Indiana Klan in the twenties wasn't even about Black people, mostly, it was about Catholics and immigrants and the wet-versus-dry fight, it was a Protestant nativist mutual-aid society with a costume problem, which is somehow worse, because it means my great-grandfather wasn't even joining the thing I'd been taught to hate, he was joining a Rotary Club that happened to also be that, and the banality of it, Doc, the absolute Tuesday-night-bowling-league banality of how my dad became my dad —

BERGMAN: Chris.

SMITH: — yeah —

BERGMAN: Slow down.

Beat.

SMITH: I can't.

BERGMAN: I know.

Beat.

SMITH: No, I mean I literally can't. The wiring's running. I can't put it in low gear. I tried. I sat in my truck for forty minutes before I came in here and tried to just look at a tree, and I counted the leaves, and then I counted the leaves on the next tree, and then I started estimating the ratio of leaves to branches as a proxy for the tree's age, and then I was building a model of the local microclimate from the leaf-fall pattern, and the whole time underneath it the dad thing is running, it's a process I can't kill, it's like a service that auto-restarts. I can't slow down. I'm asking. How do I slow down.

BERGMAN: You don't.

SMITH: ...

BERGMAN: You don't slow down. That's not the move. I said slow down because I wanted you to notice you couldn't, and now you've noticed, and now we can talk about the actual thing.

SMITH: Holt said you were a Marine.

BERGMAN: Holt talks too much. Yes. Two tours. Long time ago. Why.

SMITH: Because that was a Marine move. The "slow down" thing. Make the recruit try the impossible thing so he stops arguing with you about whether it's impossible.

BERGMAN: (small smile) It works on Marines. It works on you. Tells me something about you. (leans back) Here's the actual thing, Chris. You are doing in six days what most men in this chair take twenty years to do, and a lot of them never do it at all. You're climbing the ladder of fathers. That's the work. That's the whole work, for a man like you. Most guys can't even find the first rung. You found it Tuesday and you're already in Saxony in 1612. That's not a problem. That's the new wiring doing what it does. But.

SMITH: But.

BERGMAN: But the climbing isn't the healing. The climbing is the reconnaissance. You're mapping the house. The healing is something else, and you can't do it at six sigma, and that's why I told you to slow down even knowing you couldn't. I wanted you to feel the wall.

SMITH: What wall.

BERGMAN: The wall between understanding a thing and being done with it. You're going to hit it over and over for the rest of your life now. You can understand your father in a week. You cannot be done with your father in a week. Understanding is cognitive. Doneness is somatic. It lives in the body. The body runs on body time. The body does not care that your corpus callosum got renovated. The body is going to take, my professional estimate, somewhere between four and nine years to catch up to what your head did this month. And you are going to spend those years furious that the rest of you can't keep up with the smartest part of you, and that fury is the next thing we are going to work on, because if we don't, you are going to hurt somebody. Probably yourself. Possibly someone else. The new wiring does not exempt you from the part where grief takes as long as it takes.

Long silence. Smith looks at the clock. Looks back.

SMITH: Nine years.

BERGMAN: Four to nine. Could be longer. The Klan great-grandfather is going to take a while on his own. That's a whole separate piece of work and we're not touching it today.

SMITH: I shot Flag.

BERGMAN: I know.

SMITH: That's a separate piece of work too.

BERGMAN: Yes it is. We're not touching that today either. (beat) Chris. Look at me.

Smith looks.

BERGMAN: You came in here with a question you didn't ask. You asked how to slow down. The question underneath was: am I going to be okay. I'm going to answer the question underneath. The answer is: probably. Not certainly. Probably. You have three things going for you that most men in your situation don't. You have the wiring, which is a tool. You have Holt, who is an asshole but who is in the water with you, which he told you and which he meant. And you have the fact that you came here today on time, sober, in a clean shirt, and talked for fifty-one minutes about your father instead of about Amanda Waller, which tells me you already know where the actual work is. Most guys spend the first six months blaming the boss. You skipped it. That's the wiring being useful. Use it for that. Don't use it to try to finish in a week what takes a decade. Are you with me.

SMITH: Yeah.

BERGMAN: Say it back.

SMITH: Understanding is not doneness. The body runs on body time. Four to nine years. Don't try to finish.

BERGMAN: Good. One more thing.

SMITH: Yeah.

BERGMAN: The men in the ladder. Your dad, his dad, the Klansman, the guy in Saxony. You're going to want to forgive them. Eventually. Not today. You're going to want to, because forgiving them feels like the spiritually advanced move and you are now, among other things, a man who can recognize spiritually advanced moves and reach for them. Don't. Not yet. Forgiveness from up here is cheap. Forgiveness from up here is another way of not feeling the thing. Stay angry at them as long as the anger has information in it. When the anger stops telling you anything new, then we'll talk about what comes after anger. Not before. You hear me.

SMITH: I hear you.

BERGMAN: Good. (glances at the clock) We've got four minutes. Tell me about the dog.

SMITH: What dog.

BERGMAN: The dog you cried about for an hour and a half. Holt's note said you cried about a dog. We're going to end on the dog, because the dog is the easiest thing you've said all week and you need to leave this room having said one easy thing.

Smith opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.

SMITH: His name was Bandit.

BERGMAN: Okay.

SMITH: He was a mutt. Mostly beagle. My dad got him for me when I was nine because the school called about a thing, and my dad's version of dealing with the thing was a dog instead of a conversation, which at the time I thought was him being a good dad and now I understand was him outsourcing the conversation to an animal. But Bandit didn't know that. Bandit just thought he was my dog. And he was. He was my dog. He slept on my feet. He —

Smith's voice goes. He stops. Bergman waits. Does not fill the silence.

SMITH: (quiet) He was a good dog, Doc.

BERGMAN: I bet he was.

The clock ticks. Neither of them moves.

BERGMAN: Same time next Thursday.

SMITH: Yeah.

BERGMAN: Drive home slow.

SMITH: I can't.

BERGMAN: (small smile) Drive home anyway.

Smith stands. At the door he stops, doesn't turn.

SMITH: Thanks, Doc.

BERGMAN: Go on, Marine.

SMITH: I wasn't a Marine.

BERGMAN: I know. Go on anyway.

Smith goes. Bergman sits for a long moment. Then, finally, picks up a pen and writes one line in a notebook. We don't see what it says.

FADE OUT.

VI. Tea

INT. ARGUS SECURE CONFERENCE ROOM — DAY

Faraday-caged. Soundproofed. The kind of room where the chairs cost more than the table and the table cost more than a car. WALLER is on one side. DIANA PRINCE is on the other, in civilian clothes (cream blouse, dark slacks), no jewelry, hands folded on the table like a woman at a parent-teacher conference. There is tea in front of her that she has not touched. There is coffee in front of Waller that has gone cold because she has not stopped talking long enough to drink it.

Waller is not yelling. This is the most important fact in the room. She has decided, as a matter of operational discipline, that she is not going to yell at the Amazon. She is keeping her voice at what she would describe as "firm." Diana would describe it as "the voice a kindergarten teacher uses on the last day before winter break."

WALLER: — and what I am trying to communicate, Ambassador, is that the gesture, while appreciated in spirit, has produced operational consequences that your government, if you will permit me to use the word government in the loosest possible diplomatic sense, did not consult us about, did not warn us about, and has not, to this date, offered to assist us in managing. We have an asset who has undergone a transformation we did not authorize, cannot reverse, and cannot replicate, in a geopolitical environment in which —

DIANA: (politely) May I?

WALLER: I'm not finished.

DIANA: Oh. (folds her hands again) My apologies. Please.

WALLER: — in which six foreign intelligence services have, in the last seventy-two hours, opened files on Mr. Smith, two of which have already attempted approach, one of which was the Russians, and the Russians, Ambassador, are not careful people. So when I ask you, and I am asking you, what your sisters thought was going to happen when they handed a vial of literal divine substance to a federal black site —

DIANA: We thought you would do exactly what you did.

WALLER: ...

DIANA: Was that the question?

WALLER: (very level) That was not the question.

DIANA: Forgive me. I was answering the question I thought you were asking. Please ask the one you meant.

A small muscle moves in Waller's jaw. Diana watches it with the open, undisguised interest of a woman watching a hummingbird at a feeder. She is not smiling. She is doing something more dangerous, which is having a wonderful time and not bothering to hide it.

WALLER: Did Themyscira intend the outcome.

DIANA: Yes.

WALLER: All of it.

DIANA: The intelligence, the emotional capacity, and the neurological healing, yes. The specific recipient was a matter of chance. We expected you would administer it to one of three or four candidates we had identified as plausible. Mr. Smith was not on our list. The lab technician was a pleasing improvisation. Mr. Patel, yes? Stanford? My mother sent him a fruit basket.

WALLER: Your mother sent —

DIANA: A very nice one. Pears, mostly. She is fond of pears.

Waller closes her eyes for one full second. When she opens them, her voice is even quieter.

WALLER: Ambassador. You have, by your own admission, run a human experiment on a citizen of the United States, through a federal agency, with materials of unknown long-term effect, and your sovereign's response to being caught at it is pears.

DIANA: (brightly) Yes.

WALLER: ...

DIANA: I am sorry. I am trying very hard to take this meeting seriously. I want you to know that I am trying. You are doing something with your face right now that is, I think, the most disciplined thing I have seen a mortal do in nine decades in your country, and I do not want to insult the discipline by laughing. But, Director, I have to tell you, with great affection, that you are the funniest thing I have seen yet in Man's World, and I have seen a great deal of it.

WALLER: I am not trying to be funny.

DIANA: I know. That is what is funny.

Beat.

WALLER: Explain.

DIANA: You are sitting across from a woman who watched the Library of Alexandria burn. I do not say this to impress you. I say it because it is relevant. I have been in this country since 1918. I have met every director of every agency that has ever held my file, and every one of them has sat where you are sitting, and every one of them has tried to do exactly what you are doing right now, which is to speak to me as though I am a foreign head of state who has violated a treaty. And every one of them has discovered, halfway through the conversation, that there is no treaty, because there has never been a treaty, because my mother will not sign one, because to sign one would be to concede that your republic and her island are peer entities, and they are not. And then every one of them has had to decide, in real time, whether to acknowledge this out loud or to keep performing the meeting. You are, at the moment, performing the meeting. I am letting you. It is the polite thing to do. But I want you to know that I see you doing it, and I think it is charming.

WALLER: (flat) Charming.

DIANA: Director, in 1953 your predecessor (a Mr. Dulles, you have seen his portrait, I am sure) sat in a room very much like this one and explained to me, also without yelling, that the United States would be very grateful if Themyscira would refrain from further "unauthorized exfiltrations" of Nazi scientists from South America. I had taken four. They were men who had done specific things to specific women, and my sisters had specific opinions about it. Mr. Dulles' position was that these men were now American assets and that my removal of them constituted an act of, I believe the phrase was, "extraordinary diplomatic concern." He used the same voice you are using. He did not yell either. He was very proud of not yelling. I told him then what I will tell you now, which is that my sisters do not recognize the jurisdiction in which his concern was extraordinary, and that the men in question were no longer available for further conversation, and that I hoped he and I could be friends. He did not take it well. You are taking it better. I am trying to acknowledge that.

WALLER: ...

DIANA: I have upset you.

WALLER: No.

DIANA: I have. I apologize. I will try a different approach. (leans forward, gentler) Amanda. May I call you Amanda.

WALLER: No.

DIANA: Director. We did not run an experiment on Mr. Smith to harm him, or to embarrass you, or to gather intelligence on your operations, all of which my mother already has, by the way, through channels I will not discuss. We did it because for ninety years I have watched your country produce men like Christopher Smith and then break them and then send them to die in places they cannot find on a map for reasons that will not survive the decade, and fifteen years ago I told my mother that I wanted to try something, and she said no, and ten years ago I asked again, and she said no, and five years ago I asked again, and she said: one vial, Diana, one, and you must give it to the Americans and let them choose, because if you choose the recipient yourself it is colonialism and if they choose it is an experiment of their own, and the gods care very much about the difference even when mortals do not. So I gave it to your predecessor's successor, who gave it to a logistics officer, who put it in a locker, where it sat for five years until a frightened young man at four in the morning grabbed the nearest bottle to save the life of a man bleeding out on his table. The gods chose Mr. Smith. Not me. Not my mother. Not you. The gods. I am telling you this because I think you are a woman who would like to know who actually made a decision in a room, and the answer in this case is: nobody you can put on a list.

WALLER: I don't believe in gods.

DIANA: I know. That is also charming.

WALLER: (through her teeth) Stop saying charming.

DIANA: I will try.

Beat. Waller pulls the coffee toward her. Doesn't drink it. Pushes it away again.

WALLER: What does Themyscira want.

DIANA: From you? Nothing. From Mr. Smith? Also nothing. We are not recruiting him. We are not requesting access. We will not contact him unless he contacts us, which he will, in about fourteen months, when he has a question he cannot ask anyone else, and I will answer it, and that will be the entire extent of our relationship with him unless he chooses otherwise.

WALLER: Fourteen months.

DIANA: Approximately. Possibly thirteen. He is moving faster than the projection.

WALLER: You have a projection.

DIANA: Director, of course we have a projection. We gave him the blood of a god. We are not amateurs. (beat) I will tell you the projection if you ask me to. I will not volunteer it, because I do not wish to influence the outcome. But if you ask, I will tell you.

Long pause. Waller does not ask. Diana waits, patient as a mountain, and then nods, as though Waller has passed something.

DIANA: Good. That was the right answer. I was hoping you would not ask. The director before you asked. It went badly for him. Not because of us. Because he could not unknow it.

WALLER: Who was the director before me.

DIANA: (small smile) Director, you know who the director before you was.

WALLER: I know who the official director before me was.

DIANA: Yes. You are very quick. I see now why my mother likes you.

WALLER: Your mother does not —

DIANA: She does. She watches your hearings. She says you have the bearing of a woman who would have done well at Themyscira if you had been born five thousand years earlier and approximately four feet taller. She means it as a compliment. Please accept it as one.

Waller stares at her. Diana looks back, serene, hands folded, the untouched tea cooling between them. There is a long silence in which Waller, against her will, almost laughs. She does not. But almost. Diana sees it. Diana's eyes get very slightly brighter, and she has, just barely, the grace not to comment.

WALLER: (finally) Get out of my building, Ambassador.

DIANA: (rising, smoothly) Of course. Thank you for the tea.

WALLER: You didn't drink the tea.

DIANA: No. I am sorry. The tea was a kindness and I did not honor it. Next time I will drink the tea. (at the door, turning) Director.

WALLER: What.

DIANA: Mr. Smith is going to be all right. I want you to know that. Not because of anything you did or did not do. Because of what he is choosing, now, every morning. Dr. Bergman is the correct choice. Holt is the correct ally. You should consider, in your own time, whether you would like to be a third thing in his life that is correct. You do not have to decide today. You do not have to decide this year. But the door is not closed, and I think it would surprise you, if you walked through it, how much of him would be glad to see you.

WALLER: Get out, Ambassador.

DIANA: Yes, Director. Good afternoon.

She goes. The door closes with the soft hydraulic sigh of a billion-dollar room. Waller sits perfectly still for ten seconds. Then she picks up the cold coffee and drinks the whole thing in one long pull, like a woman taking medicine.

She sets the cup down. Looks at the closed door.

WALLER: (very quietly, to no one) Pears.

FADE OUT.

VII. Bayonne (Before)

INT. T-CAR (HOLT'S WORKSHOP VEHICLE) — NIGHT — MOVING

Matte black. Looks like a Tesla and isn't. The dashboard is one piece of smoked glass with information that arranges itself around what you're looking at. Holt is driving. Smith is in the passenger seat in tactical blacks (no helmet, no white-and-red, he's incognito and he knows it). A T-sphere rides in the cupholder like a sleeping cat.

SMITH: You said action. I thought you meant a gym.

HOLT: I said you needed action. You said you needed a gym. I corrected you. (eyes on the road) You've been talking to Bergman for six weeks and reading at six sigma and crying about a dog. Your body has not done anything in six weeks except sit in chairs. Your body is part of the project. Your body needs a night.

SMITH: A night doing what.

HOLT: Work. I have a thing. I was going to do it alone. I'm taking you instead.

SMITH: What's the thing.

HOLT: Human trafficking ring operating out of a warehouse in Bayonne. Movement of women through the port, falsified manifests, three layers of LLC between the operators and any name you could indict. FBI has had a file open for two years. The file is going to stay open for two more, because two of the layers run through a campaign donor and one runs through a sitting judge's brother-in-law. I am not the FBI. Tonight there will be eleven men in that warehouse, twenty-three women in shipping containers in the lot behind it, and by morning the eleven men will be in a condition that makes them available to the FBI in a way they currently are not, and the women will be in the custody of an NGO I fund through four shells, and the file in Washington will close itself because the political problem will have resolved on its own.

SMITH: ...okay.

HOLT: You have a question.

SMITH: I have several.

HOLT: Pick one.

SMITH: How do you know all that.

HOLT: Wrong question. Pick another.

SMITH: How sure are you.

HOLT: Better. I am at the level of sure where I am willing to act and not at the level of sure where I would be willing to convict. Those are different thresholds. Conviction requires evidence that survives the rules of evidence, which were written by men with an interest in the outcome. Action requires evidence that survives me, and I am harder to fool than a jury. I have surveillance on the warehouse going back fourteen weeks. I have audio from three of the eleven men describing, in their own voices, the specific women in the specific containers. I have financials. I have the manifests. I have a woman named Ileana who got out three months ago and who told me, in a room in Trenton, what the inside of the second container smells like. I am sure.

SMITH: Why me.

HOLT: Three reasons. One, you need it. Two, I want to see you work. Three, the new wiring needs a calibration event. You have been climbing the ladder of fathers in your head for six weeks and you have not yet had to make a decision with the new wiring in real time with consequences. Tonight you will. I want to be there when you do, because the version of you that comes out of tonight is the version I am going to be working with for the next several years, and I would like to meet him in a controlled setting rather than read about him on a Tuesday.

SMITH: Controlled.

HOLT: Relatively. I have eight T-spheres in the trunk. I have overwatch. I have a medevac on twelve-minute standby. I have, in the glove compartment, a thing I will not describe to you that I will use if the night goes truly sideways, and you will not see me use it because you will be unconscious, and you will wake up in a hospital in Newark thinking we had a quiet evening at a steakhouse. Controlled.

SMITH: (after a beat) What are the rules.

HOLT: Good. That's the question I was waiting for. (glances at him for the first time) One rule. Don't kill anyone, unless you know they deserve it.

Long beat.

SMITH: That's not Clark's rule.

HOLT: No.

SMITH: That's not Bruce's rule either.

HOLT: That's right. It's not.

SMITH: Whose rule is it.

HOLT: Mine. (eyes back on the road) Clark's rule is don't. Clark's rule works for Clark because Clark has the bandwidth to never need to. Clark can disarm a room in 0.4 seconds without breaking a finger. The rule and the capability match. The rule is honest for him. Bruce's rule is don't, ever, even when you should, and Bruce's rule is dishonest, and Bruce knows it, and Bruce keeps it anyway because Bruce believes that the day he breaks it is the day he becomes the thing he is afraid of, and Bruce may be right about Bruce. The rule is psychologically necessary for him. It is not ethically defensible. Those are different things. Most people conflate them. I don't.

SMITH: And your rule.

HOLT: My rule assumes the operator is competent to assess desert in real time and is willing to be wrong and live with it. It is a harder rule than Clark's, because Clark's rule never asks you to decide anything. It is a more honest rule than Bruce's, because Bruce's rule asks you to pretend you haven't decided when you have. My rule says: you are the one in the room. You are the one with the information. You are the one who is going to live with what you did. Decide. Decide with everything you've got, and be ready to be wrong, and don't decide so fast that the deciding is just a feeling you're calling a decision.

SMITH: What if I'm wrong tonight.

HOLT: Then you're wrong, and a man who maybe didn't deserve it is dead, and you carry it for the rest of your life, and you become either better or worse for the carrying, and which of those happens is a thing about you that we will both find out at the same time. (beat) I am not telling you to kill anyone tonight, Chris. I am telling you that the rule permits it under conditions you will recognize, and I am telling you in advance because I want you operating with the actual rule and not a version of it you guessed at in the moment.

SMITH: Have you killed people.

HOLT: Yes.

SMITH: How many.

HOLT: Wrong question.

SMITH: How do you sleep.

HOLT: Better. (beat) I sleep because I made each one of them an answer to a question I had asked myself with everything I had, and because in each case the alternative was worse in a way I could specify and would defend out loud to a person whose judgment I respect. Bergman knows about all of them. Bergman is one of three people who do. Diana is another. You are now the third, which is information I am giving you on purpose, because I want you to understand the size of what I am extending to you tonight.

Smith is quiet for a long moment.

SMITH: The men in the warehouse.

HOLT: Yes.

SMITH: Do they deserve it.

HOLT: I have an opinion. I am not going to tell you what it is. You are going to walk through that warehouse in about eighteen minutes, and you are going to meet them, and you are going to know things about them in the first six seconds that the file did not tell you, because the wiring does that now. And you are going to decide. Each one. Not as a group. Each one. Because that's the rule.

SMITH: Each one.

HOLT: Each one. The man who books the containers is not the man who guards them is not the man who (beat) visits them. They are eleven separate men who made eleven separate sets of choices. The rule does not let you average them. The rule makes you look at each face.

SMITH: That's a hard rule.

HOLT: Yes.

SMITH: Clark's rule is easier.

HOLT: Clark's rule is easier for Clark. Clark's rule, applied to your situation, would have you arrest these men, and the men would walk inside ninety days, because the system that would receive them is the system that has kept the file open for two years, and the women would be re-trafficked inside six months through a different LLC out of a different port. Clark's rule is honest for Clark and is a luxury good when worn by anybody who is not Clark. I am not going to insult you tonight by handing you a luxury good and calling it a principle.

The car slows. Holt pulls into an industrial side street. Kills the lights. The dash dims itself.

HOLT: Two blocks. We walk from here. (turns to him, fully, for the first time) One more thing, and then we go.

SMITH: Yeah.

HOLT: You are going to want to perform tonight. For me. For Bergman, who is not here. For Clark, who is not here. For your father, who is dead and is not here and is going to be in the warehouse with you anyway. You are going to want to do this the way one of them would do it, to show one of them, or to spite one of them. Don't. Do it the way you would do it if none of them existed. The rule is mine but the night is yours. If you walk out of that warehouse having done a thing one of them would have approved of, you have failed, even if every operational metric says you succeeded. Are you with me.

SMITH: (quiet) Yeah.

HOLT: Say it back.

SMITH: The rule is yours. The night is mine. Don't perform. Look at each face. Be willing to be wrong.

HOLT: Good.

Holt opens his door. Stops. Doesn't get out yet.

HOLT: Chris.

SMITH: Yeah.

HOLT: Eagly stays in the car.

SMITH: Eagly's not in the car. Eagly's at home.

HOLT: Eagly's in the trunk.

SMITH: ...how.

HOLT: He let himself in while we were loading. I noticed. I made a judgment call. He stays in the car. He has water and a chicken thigh. He is fine. We are not bringing a bird into a tactical environment. Are we clear.

SMITH: (a real, quiet laugh, the first one in the scene) We're clear.

HOLT: Good. Let's go to work.

They get out. The doors close with the soft thunk of a vehicle that costs more than a house. The T-sphere lifts out of the cupholder and follows them. From the trunk, very faintly, an aggrieved bird noise.

FADE TO:

EXT. BAYONNE WAREHOUSE — NIGHT

Chain link. Sodium lights. A container yard behind a corrugated wall. Two men smoking by a side door. Smith and Holt at the corner of the building, in shadow. Smith's breathing has slowed. His eyes are doing a thing they did not do six weeks ago. He is reading the scene like a page.

He looks at the two men at the door. Looks for a long moment. Long enough that Holt notices.

HOLT: (murmur) Talk to me.

SMITH: (murmur) The one on the left is twenty-two. He's been here three weeks. He thinks the containers have electronics in them. He's wrong but he hasn't checked, because checking would make him a person who checked. The one on the right has been here four years. He's checked. He brings his own gloves.

HOLT: ...

SMITH: The one on the left I'm gonna put to sleep.

HOLT: And the one on the right.

Smith doesn't answer for a beat.

SMITH: I'll tell you after I see his face.

Holt nods. Once. The T-sphere goes dark. They move.

CUT TO BLACK.

VIII. Bayonne (After)

INT. T-CAR — NIGHT — PARKED ON A SERVICE ROAD ABOVE THE PORT

Lights off. Engine off. The dash glows the minimum needed to read faces. Through the windshield, four kilometers away, the warehouse is a small bright thing with red and blue flashes starting to gather around it. The NGO vans have already come and gone. The FBI is arriving now, as scheduled, to a scene that has been prepared for them.

Smith is in the passenger seat. Tactical blacks open at the throat. Sweat cooling. A small cut on the eyebrow he hasn't noticed yet. His hands are on his thighs, palms up, fingers slightly curled, the way hands rest when their owner has stopped telling them what to do.

Holt is in the driver's seat. Both hands on the wheel even though they're parked. A T-sphere is doing slow laps of the car's exterior, sweeping for tails. Eagly is asleep in the back seat on top of a folded tactical vest, breathing the small rhythmic breath of a bird who has had a chicken thigh and considers the evening a success.

Neither man has spoken since they got in the car. It has been about six minutes.

HOLT: You fight better.

SMITH: Yeah. (beat) It was like the best flow in the dojo, ever.

HOLT: Mm.

SMITH: Like. Every sparring session I ever had where it clicked for thirty seconds and then I lost it. That. But the whole time. The whole forty minutes. I never lost it.

HOLT: Mm.

SMITH: I could see what they were going to do before they did it. Not, like, prescient. Just. Their shoulders told me. The guy with the shotgun, his front foot rotated a quarter inch before he swung the barrel, and I had a second and a half to be somewhere else and I used about a third of it. I had time to choose where else. I had time to choose the spot that put him between me and the guy behind him so the guy behind him couldn't shoot without hitting his friend. I had time to notice I was choosing. That was the part. The noticing.

HOLT: That's the new wiring.

SMITH: I figured.

HOLT: The wiring isn't making you faster. Your fast-twitch is what it always was. The wiring is giving you time inside the time. You always had a second and a half. You used to spend it on one decision and panic. Now you spend it on six decisions and breathe.

SMITH: Yeah.

Beat.

SMITH: I didn't kill anybody.

HOLT: I noticed.

SMITH: I thought I was going to. With the one in the office. The one with the laptop.

HOLT: Number seven.

SMITH: Yeah. Him. I had him on the floor and I had the thing in my hand and I had the angle and I had the reason. I had several reasons. And I sat there for what felt like a minute and was probably four seconds, and I didn't.

HOLT: Why not.

SMITH: (slowly, working it out) Because the reason I had was the reason a different man would have given. Not me. The reason was a Chris-from-six-weeks-ago reason, dressed up in better vocabulary. It was the helmet reason. The reason that lets you not look at the face. And I was looking at the face, and the face was a man who had done specific things to specific women, and the face also belonged to a guy who was forty-four and scared and pissing himself, and both of those were true, and the forty-four and scared and pissing himself was not a reason to spare him, that's not what I'm saying, but the fact that I could see both at once meant I wasn't in the place where the rule was meant to be applied from.

HOLT: Say more.

SMITH: The rule is, don't kill anyone unless you know they deserve it. I had concluded he deserved it. I hadn't known it. Those are different. Concluded is fast. Known is something else. I didn't have the known yet. So I didn't.

HOLT: (small) Huh.

SMITH: What.

HOLT: Nothing. Keep going.

SMITH: That's it. That's all of it. I broke his hands so he can't fly the boat anymore and I left him for the FBI. He'll do twenty if the prosecutor's any good. He won't be any good, so he'll do nine. Nine is not what I would have given him. Nine is what the system will give him. The system is what it is. I'm not the system. I'm not supposed to be the system. That's another thing I figured out while I was sitting on his chest.

HOLT: (quiet) That's a very good thing to figure out while sitting on a man's chest.

SMITH: Yeah.

Long beat. The sphere outside finishes a lap. Holt taps the wheel once and it docks into the dash with a small magnetic click.

HOLT: Number three.

SMITH: Yeah.

HOLT: Tell me about number three.

SMITH: (a small breath) The young one. By the side door. Twenty-two. Three weeks on the job.

HOLT: You put him down with a choke. Clean. Eight seconds. You laid him on his side so he wouldn't aspirate. You took his phone and his wallet and you put them in his jacket pocket and you zipped the pocket.

SMITH: Yeah.

HOLT: Why the pocket.

SMITH: Because when he wakes up in a federal holding cell at six in the morning the only thing in the world that's going to feel like his is going to be his wallet, and I didn't want some cop to have taken it. He's going to do four years and lose his twenties. That's enough. I'm not adding and somebody stole my wallet to it.

HOLT: ...

SMITH: What.

HOLT: Nothing. Keep going.

SMITH: That's it.

HOLT: No it's not.

SMITH: (after a beat) He reminded me of me. At twenty-two. The version of me that would have taken that job because somebody told me it was electronics and I wouldn't have checked, because checking would have made me a person who checked. He's not me. He made his own choices. He's going to do his own time. But he's the closest thing to me that was in that building, and I noticed it, and I didn't let the noticing make me soft, but I also didn't let the noticing make me hard. I just. Zipped the pocket.

HOLT: (quiet) Chris.

SMITH: Yeah.

HOLT: That's the discipline.

SMITH: What is.

HOLT: The pocket. The thing you did with the pocket. Not the choke. The choke was technique. The pocket was the discipline. Clark's discipline is leave them a little better than you found them. You found a twenty-two-year-old kid running security for a slaver and you left him handcuffed in a federal van with his wallet in his zipped pocket. That is, against all available odds, a little better than you found him. You found the Clark move on your own, on the job, in the middle of a fight, without quoting him at yourself. That is what I brought you out here to see. That is the calibration event. You passed.

SMITH: I don't feel like I passed anything.

HOLT: Good. That also tracks.

Beat.

SMITH: Mike.

HOLT: Yeah.

SMITH: Can I tell you something I'm not telling Bergman until Thursday.

HOLT: Yes.

SMITH: I liked it.

HOLT: I know.

SMITH: Not the hurting them. The flow. The forty minutes of flow. I have not felt that good in my entire life. Not once. Not with a woman, not with a drink, not with a gun, not with my dad approving of me on the two days a decade he did. Not once. And I am sitting here in your space car next to your bird and I am scared of how much I want to do it again.

HOLT: (after a long beat) Yeah. That's the part.

SMITH: That's what part.

HOLT: That's the part where I tell you something I don't tell most people. (looks at him) I feel it too. Every time. The flow is real. The flow is the drug. The flow is what every operator I have ever known has chased for the rest of their lives after their first taste of it, and most of them chase it badly, and most of them die or get somebody else killed because the chasing eats the judgment. The flow is not bad. The flow is the body's reward for being fully present and fully competent in a high-consequence environment, which is a thing the body was built for and gets to do approximately never in modern life. Of course it's the best you've ever felt. It is the thing your nervous system was for. The problem is not that you liked it. The problem is what you do with the liking.

SMITH: What do you do with it.

HOLT: I structure my life so that I get to feel it about six times a year, in service of a thing I would defend out loud to a person whose judgment I respect, and the rest of the year I lift weights and build T-spheres and have one whiskey on Friday and I do not, ever, take a job because I want the flow. I take the job because the job needs taking, and the flow shows up because the job is the kind of job the flow shows up for. The flow is a passenger. It is not allowed to drive. If you let it drive, inside three years you will be a man looking for warehouses that maybe aren't quite warehouses, taking jobs that maybe aren't quite jobs, and you will tell yourself a story about it the whole way down, and the story will be a good one because the wiring writes good stories, and you will not notice you are falling until you have already landed.

SMITH: How do you keep it from driving.

HOLT: (simply) Bergman. The whiskey on Friday. The fact that my wife is dead and I have decided to live in a way she would have recognized. The T-spheres, which are a discipline of building rather than breaking. And the part where I do not, ever, work alone on a night like tonight if I can help it. Tonight I did not work alone. I worked with you. You did not work alone. You worked with me. That is the structure. The structure is not optional. The structure is the only thing standing between a man with our wiring and the version of him that ends up on a watch list.

SMITH: (quiet) Okay.

HOLT: Tell Bergman on Thursday.

SMITH: I will.

HOLT: Tell him I told you to.

SMITH: Okay.

HOLT: He'll be pleased. He'll pretend he isn't. He is.

Long beat. The flashing lights at the warehouse have multiplied. Smith finally notices the cut on his eyebrow. He touches it. Looks at the small smear of red on his finger. Looks at it for a long time.

SMITH: I'm gonna need a different name. Eventually. Aren't I.

HOLT: Yeah.

SMITH: Peacemaker doesn't fit anymore.

HOLT: No.

SMITH: It was my dad's name first. Did you know that.

HOLT: Yes.

SMITH: Of course you did. (beat) I'm not picking one tonight.

HOLT: I should hope not. You'd pick a bad one. You're high.

SMITH: (a real laugh) Yeah.

Eagly stirs in the back seat. Makes a small interrogative bird sound. Smith reaches back without looking and the bird steps onto his forearm and walks up to his shoulder and settles. Smith does not react to this. It is the most ordinary thing that has happened to him all night.

Holt starts the car. The dash brightens, gently.

HOLT: I'll drop you at home. You're going to sleep for fourteen hours. When you wake up you're going to feel terrible. The terrible is the comedown. The terrible is information. Sit with it. Don't drink. Don't drive. Don't make a decision about anything bigger than what to have for breakfast. Thursday you tell Bergman everything, including the part about the flow, including the part where you liked it. Are we clear.

SMITH: We're clear.

HOLT: Good. (pulls onto the road) You did good work tonight, Chris.

SMITH: (after a beat, looking at the bird on his shoulder, not at Holt) Yeah. I did.

The T-car slips down the service road and away from the lights of the port. In the back, Eagly closes his eyes. In the front, neither man speaks again until Smith's apartment, and when Holt pulls up to the curb he doesn't say goodnight, just nods once, and Smith nods once back, and that's the whole of it.

FADE OUT.

IX. Karachi

INT. WALLER'S OFFICE — ARGUS BLACK SITE — MORNING

Smith is in civilian clothes. Henley, jeans, boots. No tactical anything. He has not been summoned, exactly. He has been asked to come in, which in Waller's vocabulary is summoned, and he has come, which in his vocabulary is courtesy. He is sitting in the chair across from her desk with his hands loose on the armrests. He looks, for the first time in any room he has ever been in this building, comfortable.

Waller is standing. She prefers standing for this kind of conversation. The file in her hand is thin, by design. The thin ones are the ones she expects to be accepted.

WALLER: Karachi. Forty-eight hours. You'd fly out tonight. The team is Bloodsport, Ratcatcher, and a new asset I'm not going to name until you're on the plane. The target is a man who, four months ago, sold a partial schematic of a Wayne Enterprises satellite uplink to a buyer we have not yet identified, and who is, as of Tuesday, in a hotel suite in Karachi with what we believe to be the second half of the schematic on a hard drive in a safe in the wall behind the minibar. You will be in and out in under six hours of ground time. The other forty-two hours are travel and cover. Standard package. We're done by Friday.

She sets the file on the desk in front of him. He does not pick it up. He does not look at it. He looks at her.

SMITH: No.

WALLER: ...

SMITH: I quit.

Waller goes very still. Not surprised-still. The other kind. The kind that precedes a recalculation.

WALLER: You can't quit.

SMITH: Yeah I can.

WALLER: Christopher. Sit down.

SMITH: I'm already sitting.

WALLER: You signed paperwork.

SMITH: I did.

WALLER: The paperwork is, and I want you to hear this clearly, the paperwork is not a normal employment agreement. The paperwork is a Task Force X agreement. The paperwork has been read into the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session twice. The paperwork has clauses your therapist does not have clearance to know exist. The paperwork is the reason you are not currently serving a life sentence in Belle Reve for the murder of Annie Sturphausen, the murder of Auggie Smith, and the murder of Rick Flag, three counts, federal jurisdiction, and the paperwork is also the reason a man named Christopher Smith exists at all rather than the reason an inmate number exists at Belle Reve. You do not get to quit the paperwork. The paperwork quits you.

SMITH: Yeah. I figured you'd say that. (beat) My friends Holt, Prince, Wayne, and Kent say I can. You want to take it up with them?

Long silence.

Waller does not move. Her face does the thing it does when she is doing math behind her eyes very fast. The math is not about whether he is bluffing. The math is about what each of those four names costs her if it is true.

WALLER: ...all four.

SMITH: All four.

WALLER: When.

SMITH: Holt last night. Diana three weeks ago, in a coffee shop in Georgetown that she picked because the windows face east and she said the light was good for the conversation. Bruce ten days ago, on a video call he initiated, which by the way you should know your secure channels are not as secure from him as you think they are, that's not a threat, that's a courtesy, you should patch the thing in the Denver relay. Clark this morning. I had breakfast with him. He paid. He overtipped. Sheryl was working.

WALLER: Who is Sheryl.

SMITH: A waitress at a diner outside Metropolis. Not relevant. The four of them know I'm in this office right now. The four of them know what I'm saying to you. The four of them have, independently, agreed that the paperwork I signed in a cell at Belle Reve while bleeding from a wound your medic refused to treat until I'd put my name on it is not, in the considered legal opinion of Bruce Wayne's general counsel, an enforceable instrument. The four of them have also agreed, also independently, that the question of its enforceability is not actually the question. The question is whether you would like to find out, in open federal court, with discovery, what the paperwork says.

WALLER: (very quietly) You would not survive that process, Christopher. You would be the lead witness. Discovery would include Corto Maltese. Discovery would include the implant. Discovery would include what you did to Flag.

SMITH: I know.

WALLER: You would do twenty years.

SMITH: I know.

WALLER: Then what exactly is the leverage here.

SMITH: The leverage is that I would do the twenty years. (beat) The leverage is that I am sitting in this chair telling you, calmly, that I am prepared to do the twenty years, and that the four people I just named are prepared to ensure that the twenty years happen in a facility where I am safe, and that the trial that produces the twenty years happens with their lawyers in the room, and that every single thing that comes out in discovery becomes a matter of public record. The leverage is not that I won't go to prison. The leverage is that I will, and that you will go with me. Not to prison. Somewhere else. Somewhere there isn't a name for yet, because the kind of woman you become after a discovery process like that doesn't have a name. You become a cautionary tale that other directors get briefed on. You become the reason there's a new subsection in the next reauthorization. You become, Amanda, a footnote. And I have watched you for four years and the one thing I know about you with the kind of certainty that survives the rules of evidence is that you would rather die than be a footnote.

Waller does not respond. She walks to the window. Looks out at the parking lot for a long moment.

WALLER: Bruce.

SMITH: Yes.

WALLER: Bruce does not take meetings with assets.

SMITH: I'm not an asset.

WALLER: Bruce does not take meetings with people like you.

SMITH: He took this one.

WALLER: Why.

SMITH: (after a beat) You'll have to ask him.

WALLER: I'm asking you.

SMITH: I know. I'm declining to answer. There's a thing he told me he doesn't want repeated and I'm not going to repeat it. You can read into that whatever you want. I'd suggest reading into it that he had a reason and that the reason is durable.

WALLER: Diana.

SMITH: Yeah.

WALLER: Diana told you she'd protect you.

SMITH: Diana told me Themyscira considers me, and I'm quoting, a matter of ongoing interest, and that the goodwill gesture of five years ago is, and I'm quoting again, not yet concluded. She did not say she would protect me. She said her mother would be displeased if I came to harm, and that the displeasure of her mother is a thing that has, historically, expressed itself in ways that the United States government has, historically, found inconvenient. She was very polite about it. She drank the tea this time. She wanted me to tell you she drank the tea.

WALLER: (without turning) Of course she did.

SMITH: Clark.

WALLER: I don't need Clark explained to me.

SMITH: Okay.

Long beat.

WALLER: Holt.

SMITH: Yeah.

WALLER: Holt is on contract to me.

SMITH: Holt was on contract to you. Holt's contract terminated at 11:47 last night, on the standard ninety-day-notice clause, which he was apparently waiting to invoke until I made my decision. He asked me to tell you that the T-spheres in the divine-materials locker are his personal property and he'll send a courier on Tuesday. He also asked me to tell you that if you retaliate against Patel, the lab tech, in any form, including a transfer to a worse posting, he will know within ninety minutes and he will be unhappy, and the unhappiness will express itself as a quarterly report to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he has, apparently, been drafting in his head for six years and would enjoy finally writing down.

Waller turns from the window. Her face is composed. She has done the math. The math has resolved.

WALLER: What do you want, Christopher.

SMITH: I want my file closed. Not sealed. Closed. Active surveillance off. The implant out (Holt will do it, not your people). The Karachi op goes without me. Whatever you tell yourself about why I'm not going. I don't care what story you put in the file. Just close it.

WALLER: And then.

SMITH: And then I go home. I go to therapy on Thursdays. I work a job Holt is helping me set up that I am not going to describe to you. I take care of my bird. I see my friends. I do not work for you. I do not work for the agency that replaces you when you are eventually replaced. I do not work for any successor instrument. If a thing comes up in the world that is the kind of thing I am uniquely positioned to address, the four people I named will tell me about it and I will decide whether to be involved, and you will not be in that conversation, because you are not my friend, Amanda. You are the woman who put a bomb in my neck. That is what you are to me. I am not angry about it anymore. Bergman and I worked through the anger in February. But I am clear about it, and the clarity is permanent.

WALLER: (quietly) You used to be afraid of me.

SMITH: Yeah.

WALLER: You're not anymore.

SMITH: No.

WALLER: When did that stop.

SMITH: (thinks about it, honestly) The night with the warehouse in Bayonne. I went home and slept fourteen hours and woke up and the fear was gone. Not the respect. The respect's still there, which is why I came in person instead of sending a letter. But the fear is gone. I think it left while I was asleep. I don't know where it went.

Waller looks at him for a long moment.

WALLER: Get out of my office, Christopher.

SMITH: Yes ma'am.

He stands. Doesn't offer his hand. She doesn't offer hers. He walks to the door. Stops with his hand on the handle. Doesn't turn around.

SMITH: Amanda.

WALLER: What.

SMITH: Diana wasn't kidding about your mother.

WALLER: My mother is dead, Christopher.

SMITH: Diana's mother. Hippolyta. She said you'd have done well at Themyscira if you'd been born five thousand years earlier. She meant it as a compliment. Diana wanted me to make sure you'd heard it from a second source so you'd know it wasn't flattery. (beat) For what it's worth, I think she's right. And I think the reason you and I never worked is that I was a man you couldn't put on Themyscira, and you didn't know what else to do with me, so you did this instead. (beat) That's the last thing I'll say to you, I think. Goodbye, Director.

He goes. The door closes.

Waller stands in the middle of her office for a long time. She does not sit. She does not move. After about four minutes she walks back to the desk, picks up the Karachi file, and drops it in the burn bin. Then she picks up the phone.

WALLER: (into the phone) Get me Bloodsport. (beat) No. Karachi's off. We're going to do it the boring way. Get me the legal attaché at the embassy. (beat) Yes. The boring way. (beat) Because today is apparently a boring-way kind of day, Phil, do not make me repeat it.

She hangs up. Sits down. Opens a drawer. Takes out, of all things, a pear. Looks at it for a long moment. Sets it on the desk. Does not eat it.

FADE OUT.

X. The Plot

INT. WAYNE TOWER — PRIVATE STUDY — NIGHT

Not the cave. The other one. The 84th-floor study most people don't know exists, accessed by an elevator that requires three biometrics and a key Alfred used to carry. Bookshelves, real ones, with books Bruce has actually read. A fireplace that works. Two leather chairs, neither of them facing each other directly, because Bruce does not like to be looked at and Holt does not like to look at people he isn't currently dissecting. A decanter on a side table. Two glasses, one poured, one not. The unpoured one is in front of Holt, who does not drink.

BRUCE WAYNE is in the chair on the left. Reading glasses, which he doesn't need but wears because they slow his reading speed to a pace that gives the rest of his brain time to think. He is looking at a tablet. The tablet shows a multivariate plot Holt sent him forty minutes ago.

HOLT is in the chair on the right. He brought the plot. He is waiting.

BRUCE: (without looking up) This is provocative.

HOLT: It's data.

BRUCE: Data is provocative when the axes are chosen provocatively.

HOLT: The axes are the axes.

BRUCE: (finally looks up) You're going to make me ask.

HOLT: I am.

BRUCE: Walk me through it.

HOLT: (leans back) Three axes. Cognitive capacity, which I'm calling IQ for shorthand, you and I both know it's a poor proxy but it correlates well enough above two sigma to be useful. Emotional capacity, which I'm calling EQ, same caveat, I'm using a composite of the Mayer-Salovey ability measure and a behavioral coding I did myself off six months of footage. And somatic intelligence, which doesn't have a clean acronym in the literature so I'm calling SQ, and which is what I mean when I say the body's capacity to know things the head hasn't gotten to yet. Proprioception, threat-perception, micro-expression reading at the kinesthetic level, the whole package. The thing operators have and academics don't. The thing dancers and surgeons and snipers share. The thing your butler had in a way the rest of us will spend our lives studying.

BRUCE: (small) Alfred would have appreciated being called a sniper.

HOLT: Alfred was a sniper, Bruce.

BRUCE: I know.

HOLT: Anyway. Three axes. I plotted the League. All of you. I plotted me. I plotted the active Bat-adjacent roster. I plotted the Titans. I plotted six metahumans I'm tracking who aren't on any team yet. And I plotted Smith.

BRUCE: And the sum.

HOLT: The sum is the thing.

BRUCE: Whose is the highest.

HOLT: (after a beat) His.

Bruce sets the tablet down. Takes the glasses off. Folds them. Sets them on top of the tablet. Does not pick up his drink.

BRUCE: Walk me through the components.

HOLT: Cognitive. He is not the highest. I am the highest. He is third. Behind me and behind you. Comfortably above Diana, which she would find amusing and is the reason I have not shown her this plot.

BRUCE: You're third.

HOLT: I said I was first.

BRUCE: You said he is third, which implies an ordering above him.

HOLT: You're second. I'm first. He's third. Diana is fourth. Clark is fifth, which surprises people who haven't talked to Clark for an hour about anything other than what Clark wants to talk about. Arthur is, and I want to be careful here because Arthur is an unusual case, Arthur is operating with a cognitive architecture that is not commensurable with the axis I'm measuring, so I've left him off. Barry is sixth on raw but Barry's processing is time-distorted in a way that doesn't compose cleanly with the other two axes, so I've adjusted him out as well. Victor is its own conversation. We can have it later.

BRUCE: Continue.

HOLT: Emotional. He is first.

BRUCE: ...

HOLT: Not by a little. By a lot. The wiring did something to him that I have spent six months trying to model and have not been able to model, because the model would require a control case and the control case would require somebody else to take the blood and there is no more blood. But the practical observation is that he has access to his own emotional state, other people's emotional states, and the gradient between them, in a way that none of the rest of you do. Including Clark, who has the best EQ on the active League roster by a wide margin. Smith reads Clark. Clark told me that. Clark said, and I am going to quote him exactly because I wrote it down, that boy sees me in a way I have not been seen since my father died, and I do not know what to do with it, and I do not want to do anything with it, I just want you to know. Clark wanted me to know.

BRUCE: Why did Clark want you to know.

HOLT: Because Clark trusts me to do the math and not be sentimental about it. Which is what I am doing.

BRUCE: And the third axis.

HOLT: Somatic. He is second.

BRUCE: Who's first.

HOLT: Diana.

BRUCE: Of course.

HOLT: Diana is first by a margin that is not closeable by a mortal, which is a category of statement I do not usually make but which is operationally accurate. She has been in her body for ninety-some years of conscious training and approximately three thousand years of latent divine architecture, and the body knows things she cannot articulate and does not need to. Smith is second. Above you. Above Clark, which is interesting because Clark's body is technically Kryptonian and should outperform on any reasonable axis, and the reason it doesn't is that Clark spent thirty years training himself to not know what his body knows, because what his body knows is that it could go through any wall in any room he is ever in, and he had to suppress that knowledge to be a person. Clark's somatic intelligence is high but it's gated. Smith's is not gated. Smith's body has been a tool of trauma for forty years and now it is a tool of attention, and the transition from one to the other is something I am going to be writing about for the rest of my career, in a journal that has not been invented yet, for an audience that does not currently exist.

BRUCE: And the sum.

HOLT: Third plus first plus second.

BRUCE: Third plus first plus second is not obviously the highest sum available.

HOLT: It is when the rest of the field is bottom-heavy on one axis. You are second, first, third, which is a higher raw sum, except your emotional axis I scored against your capacity, not your expression, and if I scored against expression you would be eighth and the sum would not be close. Diana is fourth, second, first. Clark is fifth, third, third-gated. Nobody else is in the conversation. Smith is third, first, second, and none of his axes are gated. The composite ranking is not about peak. It is about access. He has the most access to the most of himself of any human being on the active roster of any team I track. He may have the most access to the most of himself of any human being currently alive. I am not prepared to make the second claim publicly. I am prepared to make it to you.

Long silence. The fire moves. Bruce finally picks up his drink. Takes one sip. Sets it down.

BRUCE: What does Bergman think.

HOLT: Bergman does not know about the plot. Bergman does not need to know about the plot. Bergman is doing the work that makes the plot possible. If I show Bergman the plot, Bergman will start treating Smith like a special case, and the entire premise of Bergman's value is that he doesn't.

BRUCE: Does Smith know.

HOLT: No.

BRUCE: Will you tell him.

HOLT: No.

BRUCE: Why not.

HOLT: Because the moment I tell him, the composite drops. The composite is what it is because he is not optimizing for it. He is optimizing for being a person. The composite is a side effect of the optimization. If I tell him the side effect, he will start optimizing for the side effect, and the side effect will degrade. This is the central problem of measurement in any domain where the measured entity has a model of the measurement. I am not going to introduce the model. I am going to let him keep being a person.

BRUCE: Who else has seen this plot.

HOLT: You. Diana, but only the rankings, not the underlying data. Clark, who looked at it for thirty seconds and asked me to put it in a drawer. Bergman, no. Waller, no. The relevant intelligence services, no, and I have taken specific measures to ensure it stays that way. You are the only person I have walked through the methodology with.

BRUCE: Why me.

HOLT: Because you're the one who's going to ask the next question.

BRUCE: Which is.

HOLT: (simply) What do we do with him.

Bruce is quiet for a long time.

BRUCE: Nothing.

HOLT: That is one of the available answers. I want to be clear that I agree with it. I want to be even clearer that I think it is going to be the hardest available answer to actually hold to, because the field is going to apply pressure. There is a war coming. You know there is a war coming. I do not know the shape of it yet, neither do you, but the composition of recent intelligence and the behavior of certain off-world actors and the thing that happened in Gotham Harbor in March all point in the same direction, and when that war arrives, the temptation to deploy the highest-composite-access human being on the active roster is going to be considerable, and it is going to come from people whose judgment I respect, including you, and possibly including me, and we are having this conversation now because I want both of us on record, in this room, before the pressure shows up, as having agreed: we do not deploy him. We do not recruit him. We do not invite him to the table. If he walks to the table on his own, we make room. We do not pull out the chair.

BRUCE: Agreed.

HOLT: Say it.

BRUCE: We do not pull out the chair.

HOLT: Good. (beat) There is a second question.

BRUCE: Which is.

HOLT: The blood is gone. The Themyscirans have indicated, through Diana, that no further vials will be forthcoming. The technology is, for practical purposes, non-replicable. Smith is, for practical purposes, unique. If we lose him (to age, to accident, to the war that is coming, to a sniper with a grudge and a good day) the composite he represents goes with him. There is no successor. There is no understudy. The thing he is, is the only one of itself, and the only one of itself it will ever be.

BRUCE: ...

HOLT: I am not asking you to do anything about that. I am telling you it is true so that you have it in your head when the war arrives and somebody in a room with both of us in it proposes that he be the tip of a spear. The cost of losing him is not the cost of losing an asset. The cost of losing him is the cost of losing a category, and the category does not refill.

BRUCE: (quietly) Does he know this.

HOLT: No.

BRUCE: Will he know it.

HOLT: Eventually. He's at third on cognitive and he's accelerating. He'll work it out inside three years. Possibly two. When he does, he will come to one of us, probably me, and he will ask, and I will tell him, and he will be angry for a while because the knowledge is a burden, and then he will integrate it, because that is what he does now, and then he will be a man who knows what he is and is choosing to be it anyway, and that is, Bruce, the version of him I am most interested in meeting. Not the current one. The one who knows.

BRUCE: When he asks, you'll tell him.

HOLT: Yes.

BRUCE: Not before.

HOLT: Not before.

BRUCE: Good. (beat) Mike.

HOLT: Yeah.

BRUCE: Where am I on the somatic axis.

HOLT: Third.

BRUCE: Who's second.

HOLT: I told you. Smith.

BRUCE: Who's gated.

Holt looks at him for a long moment. The fire moves.

HOLT: You are. (beat) You are gated, Bruce. You have been gated since you were eight years old in an alley. You are operating at extraordinary somatic competence inside a gate that was installed by a moment, and the gate is what makes you Batman, and the gate is also what means you are number three on the axis instead of number one. You asked. That is the answer. I am not your therapist. I am not going to expand on it. I am going to let you sit with it.

BRUCE: ...

HOLT: Are we done.

BRUCE: We're done.

HOLT: (rising) I'm not going to drink this.

BRUCE: I noticed when you sat down.

HOLT: Why did you pour it.

BRUCE: Because I wanted you to know I'd offer.

HOLT: (small) Huh. (at the door, turning) Bruce.

BRUCE: What.

HOLT: The gate is not a flaw. I want to be clear about that. The gate is the reason you exist. The gate is the reason a small boy in an alley became a thing that has saved more lives than most armies. The gate is load-bearing. I am not suggesting you remove it. I am suggesting that, in the next thirty years, you might consider whether the gate could be a door. Doors have hinges. Gates are nailed shut. That is the entire structural difference, and it is the only piece of advice I am going to give you tonight, and I am giving it because you asked, and because the man who has access to the most of himself of any person currently alive learned how to do it at forty-three, and you are fifty-one, and the math is not yet against you.

Bruce does not respond. Holt nods once. Goes.

Bruce sits alone in the chair for a long time. Eventually he picks up the tablet. Looks at the plot again. Touches Smith's point on the three-axis projection. The point rotates gently. Bruce looks at his own point. Looks at it for a long time.

He sets the tablet face-down on the side table. Picks up the glass Holt didn't drink. Pours it back into the decanter. Sets the empty glass beside his own.

Then he gets up and walks to the bookshelf and pulls down a book he hasn't read in twenty years and opens it and begins to read, slowly, because the glasses are still on the side table and he has decided, for tonight, to let his eyes do the work.

FADE OUT.

XI. Compass

INT. BERGMAN'S OFFICE — THURSDAY — 4:47 PM

Eighteen months later. The office hasn't changed. The clock is still angled toward the patient. Bergman is in the cardigan. Smith is in the chair across from him. He looks like Smith. He also doesn't. The difference is hard to name. He sits the way men sit when they have stopped renting their bodies.

He has been quiet for about ninety seconds. Bergman has not filled the silence. Bergman never does.

SMITH: I picked one.

BERGMAN: Picked what.

SMITH: A name.

BERGMAN: (small nod) Tell me.

SMITH: I want to walk you through how I got there first. If that's okay.

BERGMAN: It's your hour.

SMITH: Yeah. (beat) So you remember last Thursday I was talking about how every name I tried on felt like a costume. Reckoner. Tally. Witness. Even Witness, which I really wanted to work, because the witness thing has been the through-line in everything (Bayonne, the warehouse, the kid with the wallet, the pocket, all of it). But Witness was still doing the thing where I was naming myself by what I do to the world. The world is the object. I am the verb. And every name I tried was a verb name. Reckoner reckons. Tally tallies. Witness witnesses. Even the bad ones I rejected fast (Tribunal, Audit, Ledger) were all verb-on-object names. They were all about what I bring to the room.

BERGMAN: Mm.

SMITH: And I sat with that this week. The way you taught me. I sat with the discomfort of every name I can come up with is a verb name and I didn't try to solve it. I just let it be a problem. And on Tuesday I was driving home from the thing in Newark (the small one, the one I told you about, where I didn't have to hurt anybody, I just had to be there and the situation resolved itself because I was being there in a particular way) and I realized I had it backwards. The reason all my names were verb names is that I was still trying to be a peacemaker. Just a better-educated one. I was still naming myself by the active intervention. And the actual thing I do now (the thing the wiring lets me do, the thing you have helped me learn to do, the thing Holt has trained me to do, the thing Diana modeled and Clark named and Bruce gave me cover for) the actual thing is not an intervention. It's a condition.

BERGMAN: Say more.

SMITH: I am, in any room I walk into now, the person who has the most access to what is actually happening in the room. That's Holt's phrase. He used it about me eighteen months ago in a conversation I wasn't supposed to know about and that Bruce eventually told me about, because Bruce decided I should know, because Bruce is, despite his entire personality, occasionally kind in surgical and unsentimental ways. The thing I am is the person who sees the room. Not the person who fixes the room. The seeing is the thing. The fixing, when it happens, is downstream of the seeing, and most of the time the fixing isn't even me, the fixing is the room reorganizing itself around having been seen, which is a thing rooms do when somebody finally sees them properly.

BERGMAN: That's a lot of weight to put on seeing.

SMITH: I know. That's why I didn't want a verb name. A verb name overpromises. I'm not going to fix things. I'm going to see them. Sometimes the seeing is enough. Sometimes the seeing tells me to break somebody's hand. Sometimes the seeing tells me to zip a pocket. Sometimes the seeing tells me to sit in a chair across from a woman who put a bomb in my neck and not say the thing I want to say. The seeing is the constant. Everything else is application.

BERGMAN: So.

SMITH: So I needed a name that named the condition, not the intervention. And I sat with that for two more days. And I tried a lot of bad names. Aware is a bad name. Lucid is a bad name (and was taken, by someone worse than me, in the eighties). Clear is a bad name. Open is a bad name and also sounds like a hotel chain. Present sounds like a yoga teacher. Every name in the condition of seeing family is either taken, or pretentious, or already a mood ring at Whole Foods.

BERGMAN: (small smile) Yes.

SMITH: And then I realized I was making the same mistake again. I was trying to name what I am in the modern vocabulary, which is a vocabulary designed by people who do not believe in the thing I actually am. The modern vocabulary for seeing is therapeutic. The modern vocabulary is present, aware, mindful, attuned, and all of those words have been so worn down by self-help paperbacks that you can't use them in a sentence anymore without sounding like you're trying to sell somebody a candle. The vocabulary for what I am is older. The vocabulary is religious, or pre-religious. The vocabulary is from before the split between seeing and knowing, which is a split that English does badly and that older languages didn't make at all.

BERGMAN: Where did you land.

SMITH: (beat) Witness was right. I just had it in the wrong language.

BERGMAN: ...

SMITH: In Greek, the word for witness is martys. Same root as martyr, which is the thing it became when the early church decided that bearing witness was the kind of work you could die for. I am not calling myself Martyr. I would die before I called myself Martyr. Martyr is the worst available name in any language. Martyr is what my father would have wanted.

BERGMAN: Agreed.

SMITH: In Hebrew, the word is ed. Two letters. Too short. And it doesn't carry in English. Ed is a guy who fixes your sink.

BERGMAN: (small laugh) Yes.

SMITH: In Latin, testis, which has its own English problem, and spectator, which is the wrong valence (a spectator does not act, and I do, when the seeing tells me to), and arbiter, which is closer, but an arbiter judges, and I don't, the room judges itself once it knows I'm in it, I'm not the judge, I'm the condition under which judgment becomes possible.

BERGMAN: Keep going.

SMITH: In Sanskrit there's a word, sakshi, which is the technical term in Vedanta for the witness consciousness, the part of awareness that observes the contents of awareness without being any of them. The Hindus had a whole theology of this. Sakshi is not a doer. Sakshi is a seer. Sakshi is what Krishna means in the Gita when he tells Arjuna that the self is not the body and not the mind and not the deeds, the self is the one that watches. I read the whole Gita this week, by the way. The wiring let me do it in an afternoon. I have opinions about it now. We will discuss them in March.

BERGMAN: Noted.

SMITH: Sakshi is the closest single word in any language to what I actually am. It is also a word I cannot use, because I am a forty-four-year-old white man from the American Midwest, and naming myself Sakshi would be (and I want to be clear that I am using this word in its precise sense and not its slogan sense) it would be colonialism. It would be lifting a load-bearing term out of a living tradition that has people in it and using it as a brand for a guy in a costume. Diana would forgive me. The actual Hindus would not, and they would be right not to. So I cannot use it. But it pointed me where I needed to go.

BERGMAN: Which was.

SMITH: Back to English, but to the older English. The English from before therapy ate the vocabulary.

BERGMAN: Mm.

SMITH: There's an old word. Anglo-Saxon. Gewita. It means one who knows together with. A co-knower. The thing you are when you are in a room with another person and the knowing is happening between you, not in you. It's the root of the modern English word witness, but the modern word lost the together with part. Modern witness is unilateral. You witness at a thing. Old witness was bilateral. You witnessed with. The room and you were both in the knowing together. That's the thing. That's the actual thing I do. I am not the one who knows. I am the one in whose presence the room also knows, and the togetherness of the knowing is the operative fact. I am the gewita.

Long beat.

BERGMAN: You cannot call yourself Gewita, Christopher.

SMITH: (laughs, real) I know. Nobody can pronounce it. The W is doing something the W stopped doing in 1100. It's a dead word. I am not bringing it back. But it gave me the concept, and once I had the concept I could find the modern English word that does the same work without the Anglo-Saxon overhead.

BERGMAN: Which is.

Smith doesn't answer right away. He looks at his hands. Looks up.

SMITH: Compass.

Beat.

BERGMAN: ...

SMITH: Hear me out.

BERGMAN: I'm listening.

SMITH: A compass does not move things. A compass does not judge things. A compass does not intervene. A compass is a condition under which orientation becomes possible. You put a compass in a room and the room is not changed by the compass. The room is findable in a way it wasn't before. The people in the room can now know where north is, and the knowing is not something the compass did to them, the knowing is something that happened with the compass present. Compass is the gewita. Compass is the sakshi. Compass is the witness who witnesses with rather than at. And it's an English word. And nobody owns it. And it doesn't sound like a yoga teacher. And it's plain. The new wiring has not made me a fancy man, Doc. The new wiring has made me a plain man with a lot of access. The name should be plain.

BERGMAN: (slowly) Compass.

SMITH: Compass.

BERGMAN: Not The Compass.

SMITH: No. The would make it a title. It's not a title. It's what I am.

BERGMAN: It will be misread.

SMITH: I know.

BERGMAN: People will think it means moral compass. They will think you are claiming to be the one who knows right from wrong for the room.

SMITH: I know.

BERGMAN: That is the opposite of what you just described.

SMITH: I know. And I sat with that too. And here is what I decided. The misreading is not my problem. The misreading is the room's problem. The compass does not stop being a compass because some of the people in the room think it is telling them which way is good instead of which way is north. The compass keeps doing what the compass does. North is north. The people who misread it will eventually walk into a tree, and the tree will correct them. I do not have to do the correcting. That is, in fact, the entire point of the name. The name names the thing I am. It does not name the thing other people will project onto the thing I am. Letting other people's projections drive my naming would be a regression to where I started. Peacemaker was a projection name. My father's projection, the agency's projection, my own projection of what a man should be. I am done with projection names. Compass is a description name. It describes what I am. If the room misreads the description, the room misreads. I keep pointing north.

Long silence. Bergman looks at him for a long time. Bergman, for the first time in their working relationship, picks up his pen and writes something in the notebook. Then he puts the pen down. Then he picks it up again and underlines what he wrote.

BERGMAN: Christopher.

SMITH: Yeah.

BERGMAN: That is the right name.

SMITH: Yeah?

BERGMAN: That is the right name, and the reason it is the right name is that you arrived at it by a process that is itself the thing the name describes. You did not pick it. You oriented to it. You ran the whole search the way the named thing runs a room. The methodology and the result are the same thing. That is, in my professional opinion, the cleanest naming I have ever seen a patient do, and I have been doing this for thirty-one years.

SMITH: (quiet) Thanks, Doc.

BERGMAN: One question.

SMITH: Yeah.

BERGMAN: Who knows.

SMITH: You.

BERGMAN: Who else.

SMITH: Nobody.

BERGMAN: Why me first.

SMITH: Because you're the one who taught me that the body runs on body time and that understanding is not doneness and that I should stay angry at the men in the ladder as long as the anger had information in it. The name is the first thing on the other side of all of that work. The name is what I am after the work. You should be the one who hears it first. The order matters. You were first. Holt will be second, because Holt needs to hear it before I tell anyone else, because Holt will want to argue, and Holt arguing is part of the test, and if the name survives Holt's argument it's the name. Then Diana. Then Clark. Then Bruce. Then, eventually, Waller, who I will tell in a letter, which is the most contact she's getting from me for the rest of her career.

BERGMAN: (small) And Eagly?

SMITH: (grins) Eagly's known for a week. I told him on Sunday. He took it well.

BERGMAN: (setting the notebook aside) What did he say.

SMITH: He said kreee.

BERGMAN: And what does that mean, Compass.

Smith stops. Looks at Bergman. The room is very quiet. The clock has another four minutes on it.

The name landing on him from another person's mouth, for the first time, does something to his face. He sits with it. Doesn't perform the sitting. Just sits.

SMITH: (eventually, quiet) It means I see you.

BERGMAN: (also quiet) Yes. I expect it does. (beat, with the smallest smile) Same time next Thursday, Compass.

SMITH: Same time next Thursday, Doc.

He stands. At the door he doesn't turn around. He doesn't have to.

FADE OUT.

XII. The Olive Grove

EXT. THEMYSCIRA — THE OLIVE GROVE ABOVE THE PALACE — LATE AFTERNOON

The light is the kind of light that does not exist anywhere else on Earth. Thirty-three hundred years of selective horticulture have produced trees whose silver undersides catch the Aegean sun in a way that makes the grove look, from the right angle, like a school of fish suspended in air. The path through it is white marble worn smooth by feet that include, among many others, the feet of the woman currently walking along it.

HIPPOLYTA is in linen. No armor. No diadem. A queen at home is a different thing from a queen in council, and this is home. She is older than the trees and the trees are older than most of what the mainland calls history. She is also, somehow, not old. The category does not apply.

DIANA walks beside her. Also linen. Bare feet. She has been on the island for three days. She does this twice a year. The visit is unannounced both ways: she does not ask permission to come, and her mother does not announce her arrival to the sisters, because everyone on the island knows the moment Diana steps onto the beach and there is no need to make a ceremony of it.

They have been walking in silence for about a kilometer. Hippolyta is the one who breaks it.

HIPPOLYTA: The gods chose well, this gift.

DIANA: Yes.

HIPPOLYTA: You are not surprised I have been watching.

DIANA: Mother, you have been watching since the night Patel took the wrong bottle off the wrong shelf. You watched while pretending to be reading. You did not put the scroll down for six hours. I noticed. The sisters noticed. Menalippe asked me, three weeks later, whether you had finally found a poem worth that much of an evening, and I had to tell her no, you were watching a man in New Jersey bleed.

HIPPOLYTA: (small) Menalippe is impertinent.

DIANA: Menalippe is correct.

HIPPOLYTA: Those are not always the same thing.

DIANA: In her case, increasingly often.

They walk. A wind moves through the grove. Hippolyta puts her hand briefly on the trunk of an olive Diana remembers being planted, by her own grandmother, the year Diana learned to read.

HIPPOLYTA: Tell me what you see in him.

DIANA: You have seen him yourself.

HIPPOLYTA: I have seen what he does. I am asking what you see in him. You have been in rooms with him. I have not. I want my daughter's account, not the scrying-pool's. The pool is a witness. You are a sister.

Diana is quiet for a long beat. The wind moves again.

DIANA: I see a man who, eighteen months ago, was a building with the windows painted over. I see, now, a building with the paint off. The structure is the same. The materials are the same. Where the man was forty-four years old he is still forty-four years old. The renovation is not what people think it is. The renovation is not that he was given something. The renovation is that he was uncovered. The blood removed the paint. The man underneath was always there. He had been there since he was a boy. The paint was put on him by his father, and his father's father, and the men before them, in layers, over four generations, and the paint was so thick by the time he was nine that he no longer remembered that there was a window underneath. The blood was not a gift of new sight. The blood was a solvent. He has the sight he was born with. That is, mother, the thing I did not understand until the seventh month, and the thing that has, since I understood it, made me a different woman in the world.

HIPPOLYTA: ...

DIANA: Every mortal we have ever met in Man's World, every one, since the war that made me come there in the first place, every one of them has been a building with painted-over windows. We have known this. We have known it the way one knows the temperature of a room. We have accommodated it. We have built our diplomacy around it. We have decided, as a people, that the painting is a thing mortal men do to each other and that it is not our work to undo it, because if we undid it on one we would be obliged to undo it on all, and we are not equipped for that obligation. So we have, for thirty centuries, treated the paint as the man. And we have been wrong, mother. We have been wrong about the entire species for thirty centuries. The paint is not the man. The paint is what the man's father did to him because the paint was done to the father. Underneath every single one of them is a window. We did not know this because we had never seen one of them with the paint off. We have now seen one. The thing he is is the thing all of them could be. That is what the experiment was for, and that is what it has shown, and I do not yet know what to do with the showing, and neither do you, and that is, I think, why you have been quiet for three days while I waited for you to ask.

Hippolyta walks for a long moment without speaking. The grove ends. They come out onto the small terrace above the palace, where there is a low wall and a single bench and a view down to the sea that has not changed materially in the lifetime of the island.

She sits. She gestures. Diana sits beside her. Their shoulders touch, which on Themyscira is the gesture a mother makes to a daughter when the conversation is about to leave the official record.

HIPPOLYTA: I have been quiet because I have been wrong, Diana. I am not accustomed to it. I am giving myself the courtesy of three days before I admit it out loud, even to you. You have just admitted it for me, which is a kindness, and also an impertinence, and I will allow both because you are my daughter and because you are correct.

DIANA: Mother —

HIPPOLYTA: Let me finish.

DIANA: Yes.

HIPPOLYTA: When you came to me, fifteen years ago, and asked for the vial, I said no because I believed the gift would be wasted. I believed that the recipient, whoever he was, would receive the blood and would then use the clarity it gave him to be a more effective version of the man the paint had made him. Smarter cruelty. Better-spoken contempt. A man with the paint reinforced by the new sight, rather than dissolved by it. I have seen this happen, Diana. I have given mortals gifts before, in eras you do not remember and that are not in the histories the sisters teach, and the gifts have, more often than not, made the recipients worse. The clear-seeing villain is a worse villain than the muddled one. The articulate tyrant is a worse tyrant than the inarticulate. I had reason, from my own long experience, to believe that what your gift would produce was a more dangerous painted man.

DIANA: Yes.

HIPPOLYTA: I said yes the third time you asked because I had run out of arguments and because you are my daughter and because the gods, when I consulted them, returned an answer that was, in their usual fashion, both clear and unhelpful. Athena said: the experiment is owed. She would not elaborate. Hermes laughed, which is rarely a good sign but is occasionally an excellent one. Hestia said nothing, which from Hestia is a vote of confidence. Aphrodite was not consulted because Aphrodite was, at that time, not speaking to me, for reasons we will not discuss. The pantheon's combined verdict was: try it, do not choose the recipient, do not interfere, and report back.

DIANA: And we have reported back.

HIPPOLYTA: And we have reported back. (beat) Athena's response, last week, when I told her what the man had become, was the response I have replayed in my mind perhaps a hundred times since. She said: the experiment was not for him, Hippolyta. The experiment was for you.

Diana goes very still.

HIPPOLYTA: I have spent three days sitting with that sentence. I have decided that it is true, and that I do not entirely know what to do with it being true, and that the not-knowing is itself a thing I am now meant to learn how to inhabit, because for thirty-three hundred years I have been a queen who knew, and I am being asked, in my late period, to become a queen who sees. Which is, I think, what the gods meant. Athena does not often condescend to make her instructions explicit, but in this case I believe she did, and I believe the man we are discussing is, in addition to being a man, a mirror that has been arranged so that I have to look into it.

DIANA: (quietly) Mother.

HIPPOLYTA: I have been a painted woman, Diana, in my own way, for a very long time. The paint on me is not the paint of cruelty. The paint on me is the paint of certainty. I have known what mortals are and I have known what they are for and I have known what to do with them, and the knowing has been comfortable, and the comfort has not been questioned by anyone on this island in three thousand years because no one on this island has had standing to question it. You have had standing. You have been questioning it gently, in ways I have chosen not to fully hear, since the year you turned ninety. The man has, by being what he is, finished the question for you. I cannot any longer pretend that mortals are a category that has been correctly described by my long acquaintance with them. They are not. The category is wrong. The paint is not the man.

DIANA: ...

HIPPOLYTA: And the question that now sits in front of me, the question that has sat in front of me for three days and that I have not yet answered, is: what does Themyscira owe a species whose members are, every one of them, a window painted over, when we have known, all along, how to remove paint, and have chosen not to?

Long silence. The sea moves. A gull, very far below, makes a sound.

DIANA: I do not know the answer.

HIPPOLYTA: Neither do I.

DIANA: I am glad.

HIPPOLYTA: That I do not know?

DIANA: That you have arrived at the not-knowing. I have been there for some time. I have been lonely in it.

HIPPOLYTA: (a long beat, then, very simply) I am sorry, daughter. For the loneliness. I should have come to the not-knowing sooner. You should not have had to carry it alone.

Diana does not respond verbally. She puts her head, briefly, against her mother's shoulder. Hippolyta does not move. They sit that way for what is, by the standards of either of their lives, a very long time and by the standards of the world they are looking down on, a very short one.

Eventually:

HIPPOLYTA: The man has a name now.

DIANA: Yes.

HIPPOLYTA: Tell me.

DIANA: Compass.

Hippolyta is quiet for a beat. Then, slowly, she laughs. It is not a queen's laugh. It is the other one. The one almost no one on the island has ever heard. Diana looks at her, startled, and then begins to laugh herself, because her mother's laugh is contagious in a way her mother's authority has never been.

HIPPOLYTA: Compass.

DIANA: Compass.

HIPPOLYTA: Of course. (wiping her eye) Of course that is what he named himself. He found the plainest word in his language that does the work, and he chose it, and he will spend the rest of his life being misread by people who think it means he has opinions about morality, and he will let them, because the misreading is their problem and not his.

DIANA: That is, almost word for word, what he told his therapist.

HIPPOLYTA: Of course it is.

DIANA: You were watching that session?

HIPPOLYTA: (with great dignity) I do not watch his therapy sessions. That would be invasive. I asked Athena to summarize.

DIANA: Mother.

HIPPOLYTA: (small, unrepentant) I am sixty-one centuries old, Diana. I am permitted some idiosyncrasies.

Diana laughs again. Hippolyta does too. The sea continues to move. The light is doing the thing the light does in this place, which is to make the moment feel as though it has always been happening and will always be happening, and the two of them are merely passing through it on the way to whatever the gods are arranging next.

HIPPOLYTA: (quietly, after the laughter) Diana.

DIANA: Yes.

HIPPOLYTA: When the war comes. The one Bruce and Michael are afraid of and have not yet named. The one Athena has not been willing to discuss with me. When it comes.

DIANA: Yes.

HIPPOLYTA: Compass does not fight in it.

DIANA: I know.

HIPPOLYTA: Holt has already extracted that promise from Bruce.

DIANA: I know.

HIPPOLYTA: I am extracting it from you.

DIANA: Mother, I have not pulled out a chair for him in eighteen months. I have not visited him. I have not written to him. He has my number. He has not used it. I have allowed him to be the one who decides whether the relationship between him and this island exists, and he has, with great courtesy and great firmness, decided that it does not yet exist, and I have honored that. I will continue to honor that. He does not fight in the war. He may, at his option, see the war. The seeing is his, not ours. We do not deploy him.

HIPPOLYTA: Good. (beat) We do not deploy him because he is the demonstration. He is the proof. He is the thing we point to, in the long argument we are going to be having with ourselves for the next several centuries, about what mortals are. If we use him, we destroy the demonstration. The demonstration is more valuable than any battle.

DIANA: Yes.

HIPPOLYTA: Athena would say more valuable than any war.

DIANA: Athena would.

HIPPOLYTA: Athena is occasionally correct.

DIANA: Mother.

HIPPOLYTA: (small smile) I am working on the certainty, Diana. The paint comes off slowly, even on a queen.

Diana takes her mother's hand. They sit on the bench above the sea until the light begins to change, and then they get up, together, and walk back through the olive grove toward the palace, where the sisters will pretend not to have noticed how long they were gone.

High above them, invisible to mortal sight and visible only as a particular quality of the wind in the silver leaves, OLYMPUS notices that the conversation has concluded, and notes the outcome, and does not interfere, and is, in its own way, pleased.

FADE OUT.

END.