It was a good idea to do what you can to reduce your stress at work. That was an important lesson that I learned on my first day as Chairman and CEO of Utopia. It’s going to get to you if you don’t enjoy yourself a little. And those bits of fun, like having lunch with your new friends, could make all the difference.

  I realized that I was being a little bit too passive about what my days looked like here.

  Let me start by explaining something. This was not a normal work schedule. 10 to 5 or whatever. I didn’t get weekends. I didn’t get endings. Because I had to be available in my capacity as Chairman to fly into Utopia Tower and monitor a crisis situation at any time with at most two hours notice. Same rules as the Covenant.

  But absent emergencies, it mostly did function like a normal work schedule. Because without the emergencies, which I had blissfully evaded for the first several days, work was just meetings. And most people wanted to have meetings between the morning and early evening, between Monday and Friday. So I rolled with that and got to pretend that was my life for as long as I could.

  But it wasn’t actually a good idea to just cruise along, be in the office as little as possible, and fuck around and hang out in my apartment or Hang Street Hall or Paris until the most mandatory of meetings made themselves known to me. For one thing, I was repeating the stress of entering Utopia Tower multiple times a day. But empty space in your schedule could also be dangerous. Some people could see your schedule. They could know when you’re free. They could know when the best time to bother you would be.

  But I could make work for myself. I could decide what was important. I could fill my days with Percy Work. This was my company.

  And this would make this workplace a more comfortable environment for me, serve as a creative outlet, and allow me to far more effectively showcase the tragicomic Emperor’s New Clothes adaptation that was my father‘s succession plan.

  And maybe I could change corporate culture while I was at it. These things tended to be pretty top-down. I don’t like this place? Fine. Make a place you like.

  And I was trying. Over my next few days at the job.

  And thus the question.

  I was sitting across from Joan Voyage in a comfortable checkered booth at The Atomic Diner. It had been her and dad’s favorite place in New York when they were starting out as heroes, and it was now a very well funded, cape-supported establishment that promised discretion and peace. We might’ve owned it actually.

  I trust at this point, I did not need to explain what a place called “Atomic Diner” frequented by my father looked like.

  Yes. Yes, exactly what you’re imagining.

  Joan had taken me out to lunch there to check in on how I was doing in the middle of my first week in the midst of my father’s passing, and, like any good honorary aunt (was she my godmother actually? She might have been), question some of my recent life choices.

  And what were those decisions, you may ask?

  Well, I decided to start Utopia Wellness, a program dedicated to “making sure our heroes were being taken care of as well as they were taking care of the public”. We were talking spas and meditation rooms being installed in the tower, neurochemically soothing subsonic frequencies played in public areas, lots and lots of things involving lemons and cucumbers. We were even developing our own line of utopia, branded soaps, serums, lotions, and other assorted bathroomware, launched with a promotional video that included brand ambassadors like mermaid hero Pearldive, martial arts hero Patient Ripple, and beloved American sweetheart Sophie Domino. I came to work wearing a bathrobe and cucumbers on my eyes for the first three hours on launch day to promote the program. The bathrobe was fastened very carefully.

  There was also the Utopia Games. I thought it would be a good idea to start drafting up some publicly broadcasted intramural sports leagues, where our regional hero teams could compete, no holds barred, powers allowed, in games such as basketball, volleyball, and football (sorry, “soccer”). I was still on the fence over whether I should wear a full basketball uniform and dribble a ball through the hallways on the day we were ready to launch that. Very funny, but I kind of hated how basketball jerseys looked. And, well, some of the people who worked here were very hot.

  Speaking of being hot at work. The most attention grabbing and controversial of these initiatives was the Maid in Utopia Project. This originated from a pretty simple idea. I loved having a robot maid. It was so convenient. So who was I to hoard that? So I enlisted a sizable chunk of the robotics department to focus on the creation of a line of beautiful gynoids to liven up the halls of Utopia Tower and make everyone’s work days a little bit more pleasant and relaxing. With designs we outsourced from some of the most talented animation professionals currently working in Japan, our maids were beautiful, friendly, good-natured, obviously well-endowed, and it was none of my business what you did with them as long as you didn’t bother your coworkers and you remembered to clean them. We were even introducing an incentive program where performance metrics that we already had in place to determine things like raises could be used to assign points to particularly well-behaved departments that they could redeem in exchange for new outfits, accessories, and design upgrades for their workstation’s robot maid.

  “Well, Joan,” I said, “thank you for asking before judging. I’m doing math.”

  She raised an eyebrow. But she was more than used to these Domino verbal come-hithers at this point so she didn’t give me a full reaction.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Look. We both agree that this job is too stressful and difficult for me to realistically do at this point. At least this early on.”

  “Sure.”

  “So it’s a good idea for me to reduce my stress at work, negative emotions in general, both because that is good for me and will be good for my decision making.”“Fair enough.”

  “There are two ways to feel less bad. Reducing negative stimuli and increasing positive stimuli. Say my mood is at a -3 on average, from what I deal with at work. I can either try to decrease my exposure to negative stimuli, which would result in me neglecting important aspects of this job, because there is some pretty important stuff that will always be unpleasant, or I can increase my exposure to positives, which would increase my mood levels without causing me to neglect my duties.

  Is this bullshit an expensive way to do it? Sure.

  But mama, my mindset is a billion dollar asset right now. Its fluctuations matter. My fuckups will cost more. That sucks for all of us but they matter.

  And so do everyone else’s. And I’m not just doing all this for me. So. It’s not about the bottom line. It’s about the unquantifiable value of morale.”

  “Well,” Joan said, “that’s a very clever excuse.”

  “Thank you.”

  She shook her head with a smile and sipped her coffee.

  Her eyes, kind and concerned, shifted as they looked at me.

  “By the way,” her voice getting heavier, “I’m sorry the timing worked out like this, but I wanted to tell you beforehand that the wormhole will be opening soon, not tomorrow but soon, so I’m going to be packing up for the stars. I wish I could be here for you more, but I’m sure you’ll figure things out.”

  “What? No no no no no.”

  “Percy. I have a family. Not just my dead friend’s family.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. Ignore me.”

  “No. I’m not going to ignore you, as much as you might like that. But I’ll be absent for a little while. You know the drill.”

  “Yeah. Send my love to Darada and the kids.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  Joan Voyage lived what you would call a “bicoastal” lifestyle. If those coasts were on different planets, light-years away.

  See, before Joan Voyage became “the greatest explorer in the universe”, she was simply a NASA astronaut. After being sucked into a wormhole while in outer space in a cosmic accident of fate, she found herself stranded on the planet Nuk IV and became the first human being to ever set foot on an alien world. She was stuck there for years, during which she had many exotic adventures, learned the ways of the locals, aided in a revolution against a fierce and tyrannical warlord, and fell in love with the son of a tribal chief named Darada. While she would eventually find a way to return to earth and go on to explore countless other worlds, her heart always remained on Nuk IV, where her husband and several half-alien children still lived, and endeavored to spend roughly half of her time here and half of her time there.

  There’s a joke somewhere about how she was a more attentive parent to her children that literally lived in another solar system than a certain man was to his own who lived in his own house. But I wasn’t going to make it. I didn’t need to.

  “Be careful in here, Percy. Or make sure you have allies who will when you refuse to. It’s going to be a very strange few months. So much more than people realize was being held together by Dirk. I fear we will be asking questions we haven’t had to ask in decades.”

  “I’ve been making friends. I get it.”

  “Allies, Percy. Not the same thing.“What’s the difference?”

  “You don’t have to like your allies. And you don’t have to respect your friends.”

  “You’re my ally, right?”“Do you respect me?” she smiled.“Ah never mind, then.”

  “I am. Always. But find ones who won’t be in outer space.”

  There was something distinctly amusing to me about being a Meeting Man. I suppose it was similar enough to what I had been doing. I had meetings. Lots of people met me. Now, usually either less closed, less sober, or both, but they were still meetings.

  Okay not really. Forgive me for trying to find some familiarity in this environment.

  Obviously, there were some meetings that I had to attend. It was important in the first week that I met with the heads of many departments, with Rebecca, who would be running my PR, with Andrew, the lead field analyst in the monitor room, with Jordan, the head of government relations, with Calli, the head of building management.

  But there were too many requests to be physically possible to meet them all even if you tried your hardest to accommodate everyone — and believe me I was not trying my hardest to accommodate everyone.

  I would just have Sebi scroll through the internal missives in my Scheduling subfolder, and it felt like watching people tap on the window of a boat you’ve boarded that is about to escape an exploding island with dwindling available room.

  These people could have really serious reasons for wanting to talk to me. And it was so arbitrary whether they got that opportunity at all. This company had over 70,000 employees. Even after all the layers of filters that Dad and the IT department had established to automatically forward requests to more appropriate sub departments, there was still an unfathomable amount to wade through.

  I loved that it was a dice roll. The whole world’s a fucking casino, isn’t it?

  Alan and Jenna Hurt, 2:13PM, Wednesday.

  This one I picked because it was flagged as a potential unauthorized abuse of Utopia accounts by persons other than the accounts owner, which intrigued me, and also because it surrounded a hero by the name of DevilKid, which I thought was a cool name.

  So I found myself in conference room 32F with a middle-aged couple, one of whom was a former Utopia maintenance staffer, who had an unusual request regarding their child.

  “We would really appreciate it if you could fire him,” Alan said, fidgeting a little, “and I know, gee, I don’t want to come off as some kind of meddling parent getting in the way of their kids' business, but you have to understand it’s a tad more complicated than that. Gideon - DevilKid - doesn’t realize that this work isn’t good for him. He still lives with us. And we see the toll it takes on him. The paranoia. The mood swings. The long hours. Heck, his momma has hardly caught a glimpse of him all week. And the thing is, he’s not always the one fully in control here. We know that the devil he’s united with, Aldagatur, respects his contract with Utopia and intends for his host body to fulfill it. We don’t think it’s so clean cut as just recuperating in Gideon’s body in exchange for his demonic powers. We think that devil might be messing with Gideon’s head. Pushing him to engage in battle, driving him towards danger, not understanding the consequences. And neither is Gideon. Hell, Gideon made that contract with Aldagatur when he was 15 years old. In most of the country, why, that would be grounds to dismiss it entirely! But we think if Gideon’s employment was terminated, the demon would have no choice but to respect that he stopped being a hero and let him keep living his life while he continues to share his heart.”

  “Okay. Thank you for sharing that, Mr. Hurt. There is an issue. On DevilKid’s file, which I have pulled up right in front of me, it says that he’s 19 years old?”

  “Yes. But he still lives with us. He still our boy. He’s in no position to-“

  “How the hell is this your business then? He’s an adult. He can make his own choices. I’m not firing someone because their parents want me to.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  “Please sir,” the mom interjected, “ as we’ve tried to explain, Gideon does not have the capacity to make those decisions right now.”

  “Sure as hell does more than you guys. Alright, Sebi show them the door. Have a nice day.”

  “Wait.”

  “And Sebi, have HR contact Gideon Hurt and let him know that we will help subsidize or even cover rent on an apartment in the city he lives in if he is in urgent need of escaping the captivity of living with his meddling parents.”

  Lucile Sporic a.k.a. Color Theory, 5:15PM, Wednesday.

  I wanted to see what Color Theory looked like in person. She was a hero belonging to the Lake Legion, our team that protected the Great Lakes area. Her entire body, that of a tall, fit, good looking woman in her 30s, was triple-refracted into red, green, and blue blurs of itself like she was being looked at through 3D glasses at all times. It was a truly headache-inducing mirage and apparently she couldn’t turn it off. I wondered if she could even see what she really looked like in a mirror.

  She was mostly famous for how weird and interesting she looked. Which was a little bit unfortunate because she was genuinely good at this job, but to be fair, wow. I felt like I was on drugs. I mean, I was at work most of the time, but not enough to have fun with it.

  “Color Theory. How can I help you this evening?”

  “Evening, Mr. Chairman. Vivat Utopia.” She saluted me.

  “Right. Vivat Utopia.”

  “We in the Legion are growing increasingly concerned with the surge of vigilantism in the greater Chicago metropolitan area recently. There are new unauthorized lawmen calling themselves heroes emerging every few months at this point. Deployment continues to have them pretty much de-listed so it’s hard for us to get the authorization to tackle the problem at its root. We need a fundamental re-orientation of threat response priorities for our garrison in order to address this. What I’m asking is for HQ to classify this ostensibly decentralized mob of vengeance seekers as a formal supercriminal Syndicate so that we can take appropriate actions aimed at dismantling the entire structure instead of picking up the scraps before they erupt into more chaos then we can contain.”

  Vigilantism was, of course, a crime, and Utopia had largely made it a thing of the past. Technically Utopia had a special license from the US government to engage in “independent law enforcement activities”, and anyone attempting to do so without a Utopia badge was committing a crime.

  But the Cause had a complicated relationship with vigilante activity. Almost no one wanted to categorize them as “supervillains”, despite the actual government making little distinction between them. There was probably some sentimental attachment within the community as well, considering our roots.

  It always kind of sounded like bullshit to me. Why would you be doing something for free you could be getting paid for? Hard to imagine any motive other than wanting an excuse to be violent without accountability.

  “I see. I admire your dedication to keeping your city safe, miss. Tell me more about why you think this is a Syndicate rather than just a stampede of assholes cropping up independently.”

  “Well, it’s pretty easy to trace this wave of popular vigilantism to the career of one individual. The one calling himself Blackwing. He would, of course, be designated as a Syndicate Director for the sake of our threat response protocols.”

  “Blackwing, huh?”

  The name did sound vaguely familiar. But I couldn’t quite place it.

  I pulled up his entry in the Utopia database on the console behind us to take a look at this guy. The photos were blurry, of course.

  But they were clear enough for me.

  What?

  Mel?

  Mel’s alive?

  Why didn’t anyone tell me that?

  Okay Percy, who would have told you that?

  No. Come on. What?

  “No. Leave him alone.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “There’s been a mistake. Leave him alone.”

  “Mr. Chairman. I’m not sure what you mean by that, even if I think I understand your tone. This vigilante is already listed as a prominent wanted criminal in the Chicago area, even without the Syndicate classification.”

  “Cancel all of it. Leave him alone. Fuck.”

  “So if we see this individual committing crimes in our jurisdiction, we should just look away? You’re implementing a non-engagement order on the most prolific vigilante above the Maison-Dixon?”

  “Yeah. Yes. I declare the order. Pass it on to everyone in your garrison.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “He’s not a bad guy. Just. Fuck. I don’t want to talk about this. Sorry. Sorry.”

  “I see. Thank you for your time, Mr. Chairman.”

  “It’s okay if you’re mad at me or whatever. I get it.”

  She didn’t say anything else.

  user requests user requests, 1:30PM, Thursday.

  This message was incorrectly or possibly even accidentally filed. It was from “user requests user requests”, and read:

  “[To Chairman],

  Body of your message here.

  Thank you,

  [Name]”

  Obviously, I granted this request. This would be hilarious. That’s just how the dice roll, baby.

  Someone who probably was just trying to get on with their day, possibly even forgetting they did this, was suddenly summoned to a meeting with the Chairman that they wouldn’t want to refuse.

  And so I met Audrey Ki-Moon.

  She was young. About my age. She looked like she wasn’t really supposed to be here. She wore a nice pantsuit without the confidence to pull it off. In fact, I think I might have seen a tag.

  I was positive I had never seen her before in my life.

  But there was something quite familiar about how she looked. The semi-translucent skin. Blue hair. Bulbous eyes. Spindly limbs. Small swaying antennae.

  Wait, is she actually?

  Could she—

  Something just came over me.

  I took a huge swig of water and started to emit some gurgling sounds that my throat hadn’t made in a decade.

  [Sorry if this is rude, but are you Quori? Or half?]

  Audrey laughed a genuinely startled laugh and then her throat began to faintly glow and expand.

  [Yes. My father is. How on Earth do you know this? I heard the Dominos are all geniuses, but I’m impressed.]

  [It’s nothing special. I grew up in the Hills.]

  “You can stop doing that before you drown. I’m impressed enough.”

  I swallowed my water.

  “You read minds?”

  “Hardly. Though I can—“

  “‘Feel them’?”

  “Yes. You are not what I expected.”

  “Well what did you expect?”

  “For one thing, someone much older and more serious. See, I filed this more than a week ago, so—“

  I chuckled.

  “Sorry you ended up with me. You did a kind of bad job of filing the request though, you’re lucky you’re getting a meeting at all.”

  A giggle.

  “I saw that in retrospect and I’m very embarrassed. So why am I even owed the pleasure of this?”

  “I thought it would be funny to grant an important meeting to some fumbling mook who possibly didn’t even file the request on purpose.”

  “Is it funny?”

  “It’s very funny. You know, you’re not what I expected either.”

  “How so?”

  “ I didn’t even know there were others from Quo Lin Prime on this world besides—“

  Stay in it, Percy. Memories can be nice.

  “— besides Weird Woman.”

  “Oh. Yes. She is a pioneer, but there are quite a few of them. My father is her cousin I think.”

  “Do you want a drink? Let’s get some drinks. Sebi. Bring us—“

  “An aperol spritz for me, please.”

  “Yes. And I will have—”

  Something much stronger.

  “Order number 32, please.”

  “Codenames?” She smirked. “What are you embarrassed of? Don’t want them to see a man drinking a daiquiri?”

  “Just like to keep it mysterious.”

  “It’s working.”

  They even smiled the same, a little.

  Alright, careful. This could be nice.

  It wasn’t a daiquiri, by the way. Come on, that was a summer drink. Like I said. Something much stronger.

  “Speaking of mysterious,” I said, “what actually brings you here? I hope you’re not trying to waste the Chairman’s time just hanging out in a conference room.”

  “Hm. So I’m wasting your time now?”

  “I said trying. I didn’t say succeeding.”

  “Fair enough. I do actually have something important to talk about. And I appreciate your time. I’m with the Science Division and I have a proposal that my own department isn’t taking very seriously, I’m probably too young or too new, but I can’t help but think that we have a lot of untapped potential that we can work with, and I thought I’d take a shot in the dark and see if our new young Chairman would lend me a more sympathetic ear.”

  “Didn’t you say you thought you’d be meeting with my dad?”

  “Right. Right, yes. But I have a renewed sense of hope now. With you.”

  That was cute.

  Imagine feeling hope.

  Women should be allowed to hope. While we took care of the bullshit that let them keep it.

  “Alright. Let’s hear it then.”

  She seems smart. But also the kind of woman that gets overlooked in a workplace like this. Plus, I, uh, could imagine some prejudice being directed at people who look like her. After—

  We know why.

  I took another big sip and quietly ordered another drink.

  “I’m guessing you’ve been to Diana XIII before.”

  That was Utopia’s moon base.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, you know that our moon operations have sort of been abandoned by R&D and Finance for years now. There’s a skeleton crew maintaining the place and that’s about it. There are many perfectly good expansion blueprints dating back all the way to 2004 that have never been touched. I guess it’s just been considered a dead end, not profitable or something. And I get that. There are so many things that urgently need attention and funding.

  But, like, maybe I’m just a romantic here, but it feels wrong to abandon the spacefaring dreams of our predecessors. It’s part of the, well, Utopian vision that first empowered people like your dad, like Alfred Numeric, like Joan Voyage, who made us fall in love with science in the first place. Sorry, does that make sense? I know that’s not exactly corporate meeting talk.”

  “Yeah. Don’t worry. I can code switch. I’ll try my best to stay out of the corporate meeting talk that I’m obviously so proficient at.”

  She gave a sweet smile that sent a little bioluminescent flush up her face.

  “And I have an idea that’s kind of a longshot, but I’ve run the numbers and I think it would pay off big-time. Here, let me send you a file.”

  I pulled up the proposal she sent me on the room’s monitor.

  It was detailed. It was serious work.

  “There’s this Non-Photonic Cold Fusion Reactor we have in storage that we seized from Reichmaster. He was using it to power one of his Blitz-Bots, in the attack on Paris. It’s broken, and no one has really put in much effort to repair it because of its odd schematics, but I think that the atmospheric and gravitational conditions on the moon would make it possible to reactivate it with the right timing and the right equipment. The presence of a reactor like that on our moon base could massively aid in expansion efforts and make them much easier and more cost-effective than people think. Here, look.”

  I did look.

  As far as I could tell this all checked out. Very creative thinking.

  “This is a good idea, Audrey. So what do you want from me specifically?”

  “I’m not asking for much. I don’t expect you to be willing to greenlight any kind of expansion efforts right now in your first week on the job. I just want a chance to try. I want you to authorize transport of the broken reactor and materials requested in the file to the moon. If we can fix it, then Diana XIII gets to keep it. Operating budget of $700 million to the Diana team to fix the reactor. That’s not even 5% of my divisions’ annual budget. And if we can’t do it in a week, you can cut funding and just leave us with a useless hunk of space garbage. Also, as part of this, I am requesting an immediate transfer to the Diana team, along with my coworkers who are named as collaborators in this proposal.”

  “Got it. Yeah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah it sounds great to me, Audrey. Good work here. Let’s get the lights on on the moon again. Like we would see in the sky as kids.”

  “Really? You’ll actually consider it?”

  “No.”

  “Oh?”

  “No, I’m approving it.”

  A small gasp.

  “But usually these proposals take weeks or even months to review—”

  “I’m not a usual guy. Looks like you’ve done all the reviewing for us. I’m not trying to make your work more difficult.”

  “Oh gosh. Oh, thank you so much.”

  “Thank you. Let me know how the view is from up there. And pack light. You’re going to the moon.”

  Huh. Who would have thought? I really knew how to pick my meetings, eh?

  Friday brought me my first emergency.

  Fitting, really. I felt like most of the emergencies in my life tended to happen on Fridays, but those tended to be my own fault.

  This one wasn’t. Yet.

  I was just sitting in Conference Room 32F with a cup of coffee prepared by one of our wonderful new Floor Gals, dressed in a French maid outfit, when my watch blared so loud I almost dropped it on the floor.“Alert. Chairman’s Presence Requested in Liberation Hall. Deployment Notice Requested. Deployment Notice Requested. Alert. Chairman’s Presence—”

  I nearly stumbled into Liberation Hall, sweating from my forehead, coffee stains on my collar from trying to drink it and jog at the same time.

  Localized emergency.

  Fort Lee, New Jersey, a hair’s breadth away from New York proper.

  Thirty Utopian Knights already en route.

  Localized abstention order issued.

  Eighty-nine cameras and counting spliced across Liberation Hall’s monitor-windows.

  Crashes, yells, and… slurps already spilling into the room from the drone feeds.

  Sir Galahad already en route.

  Most of the Covenant had begun to emerge through Lydia Liberty’s portals.

  Several gallons of seawater sloshed into the room from Brother Wave’s.

  Lydia’s irises shimmering with purpose and power.

  The kreen!-kreen!-clank! of power suits being booted up and assembled.

  All eyes were on me.

  WEET. WEET. WEET.

  WEE-OOO. WEE-OOO. WEE-OOO.

  “What’s the situation?”

  Silly thing to say. Filler words. The thing I just assumed people said at times like this.

  My mouth was very dry.

  All eyes were on me.

  Threat identified. Threat Level: Tempest, subject to increase with further intel.

  What was I here for again? What did I need to do? I-

  Unidentified anomaly. Biochemical hazard identified.

  Assessing. Assessing.

  Cautionary protocols 2A and 5B initiated.

  Zero confirmed casualties and counting. Halt live casualty count?

  Right. Covenant protocols. Covenant mission. Three or more Covenant heroes deployed at once was considered a Covenant mission per the bylaws of Utopia.

  Covenant missions required authorization and active monitoring from either the Chairman or the leader of the Covenant in order to proceed.

  Chairman was me.

  All eyes were on me.

  Three confirmed casualties and counting. Halt live casualty count?

  Anomaly identified.

  Matching…

  Threat identified as “Haldane Blob”.

  “Haldane Blob” invented and previously utilized by supervillain Dr. Genesis. Open file?

  Perpetrator identified as Dr. Genesis. Open file?

  Video message received by individual with 96% biometric match to Dr. Genesis. Open message?

  Open. Open. Open.

  A green-tinted video scored by a gurgling machine orchestral soundtrack like a Ridley Scott movie put through a trash compactor displayed the face of a smiling man who looked far too young and fresh for his old age. He had blue and red DNA helix tattoos across his eyes that made him look like a particularly sophisticated anime clown and a tall spike of white hair.

  “People of the Eastern Seaboard! Your day has come! Fortune has smiled upon you! For your bodies will become the catalyst for the next era of life on Earth! Prepare for rebirth. Rebirth for evolution. Prepare… for Genesis.”

  Gotta be honest.

  I was not Prepared for Genesis.

  All eyes were on me.