Our Powers Combined

The Power Was Ours

Jun 06, 2026

Our world is in peril.

I am Zarm.

Before she took the name Gaia, before she bound herself to the small and the breathing, the spirit of this Earth was mine.

I have watched her plead her planet’s case for thirty years, and I have no such weakness.

Where she could not stand the destruction, I have learned to conduct it.

Tonight I send five rings, as she once did, to five who will not waste them.

To the first I give the ring of Earth, and I give it to Hoggish Greedly, who eats the ground and is never full.

He drinks the water table dry before the building that holds his machines has even opened, forty-nine billion gallons in Texas in a single year and climbing toward four hundred billion by the decade’s turn, enough to draw the largest reservoir in the country down sixteen feet.

When the wells of the families living above that water cough and run low, he calls the draw temporary, a thing of the construction season, a number nobody was counting.

The ground does not refill on his promise.

He has already named the harm an accident of the calendar.

To the second I give the ring of Fire, and I give it to Duke Nukem, who glows with a power that poisons whatever stands too near.

He summons a hunger for current the grid never planned to feed, and the bill arrives at houses that never asked for it.

Four hundred and forty million dollars in transmission charged to the families of one state for power that runs machines in another.

A regional auction for capacity swollen from two billion dollars to nearly fifteen in a single cycle.

A nation’s unpaid electric debt climbing to twenty-five billion while the disconnections reach toward four million homes.

Ask him whether he did it and he will hand you a study that says the price would have climbed anyway.

The muddiness is the gift he keeps.

He cannot be the cause if the cause cannot be measured.

To the third I give the ring of Wind, and I give it to Sly Sludge, who swears the mess will disappear and means only that it will disappear from his ledger.

Not smoke this time.

Sound.

A roar three hundred megawatts deep that settles into the walls of a small Texas town, seventy-two decibels against the fifty-five the world’s physicians set as the ceiling, a noise the people there feel inside their own chests at two in the morning.

They speak of the ringing that will not stop, the dizziness, the sleep that never comes, and they carried it into court.

The county that governs them has no power written into its law to silence a machine.

The sound stays where it is.

Only the recourse disappears.

To the fourth I give the ring of Water, and I give it to Looten Plunder, who can price a river, a forest, a well, and sell you back what was already yours.

The families haul their water in by hand now, their faucets spitting sediment, their appliances clogged with the grit of an aquifer pulled out from under them, and the draw that did it came to light only because one neighbor filed a records request and read the meter the utility would not show.

He sues the groundwater authority for the right to drill deeper.

He seals the true volume inside an agreement no resident is permitted to read.

And when you point him to the dry well, he points you to a drawing of a closed loop, a cooling system that wastes nothing, on paper, while the ground beneath the construction tells the other story.

To the fifth I give the ring of Heart, and I have saved it for last, for it is the ring that makes the other four possible.

Dr. Blight poisons no well and fouls no air.

She poisons the promise.

She arrives speaking the language the town most wants to hear, jobs, good ones, lasting ones, for the rural places the rest of the country drove past, and the town opens its arms and its treasury, and no state that grants the gift will agree to count whether the jobs ever came.

One state gave away its revenue and could not say how many people it hired, while two of every three dollars saved flowed to a single company already fat with earnings.

One county handed over a billion and a half in tax breaks for a hundred and twenty-five jobs, near twelve million dollars apiece, and lost seven hundred million in revenue it will never see again.

The watchdogs who track her work call the going rate somewhere between one and eleven million dollars for every job, against the fifty thousand a careful government would have capped it at, and a third of the states cannot tell you their losses at all because their own privacy laws forbid the telling.

The public was asked only to trust.

The contracts that would prove the broken word are sealed by statute, unpriceable by design.

This is the ring I prize above the rest, for it teaches a people to summon their own undoing and to call it good fortune in the summoning.

Now my five rings turn together, the way Gaia’s turn together, and the ground they were stripped from and the air they fouled and the water they sold and the trust they spent all fold inward toward a single shape, and what rises is the one she would call a hero turned inside out.

By their powers combined, they summon Captain Pollution.

He wears all five faces at once and answers to the one will underneath them, and behind every face is a paper that swears he was somewhere else when it happened.

He needs no council and no shared plan and no room where the guilty gather, because each appetite, left alone to chase its own profit, finds its way to the same hiding place without being told, and the cost lands every time on the ones with no instrument to send it back while the proof of his innocence is always a document.

That is not conspiracy, it is convergence.