Earth-212 is the alternate Earth of the MYM chronicle on which the attacks of 11 September 2001 never happened: a “white hole” opened instead, and New York came to cover the whole world. Its order rests on crime prevention, corporate power and officially sanctioned superheroes.
| Type | Setting |
| Chronicle | MYM |
| Era | Year ~2035 |
| Ruler | Doc Monroe |
| Spanish entry | Earth-212 |
Origin: the white hole
Earth-212 is a reflection of the main Earth, Earth Prime (616). On 11 September 2001, as the planes headed for the two towers, something stopped and changed reality. Where other Earths knew a black hole, Earth-212 knew a white hole, which expels instead of devouring. Everything was reduced to degree zero and became a singularity, and from it the city sprang.
Immediately, New York stopped being a place and became a form; some call it fractal, the city repeating itself until it covered everything. New York came to occupy the whole world.
New York is the world
Geographic differences (Seattle, Europe, Asia, Russia, Brazil, the desert where the iron emerged) and cultural conflicts remain, but every capital was remade in the image of one city. The architect of the two towers became the architect of the world.
The two towers still stand near the house of the nations and are now the center of the world; they are said at times to vibrate, sing and pulse. Around them lies an America turned galaxy; some speculate the prodigy might one day reach other planets.
The Monroe doctrine
President Doc Monroe governs the world, fulfilling the Monroe doctrine literally: the whole world is America. The United Nations gathers not sovereign countries but provinces of one cosmopolis. Assimilation brought surgical strikes against potential resistance leaders, always with proof that they hid terrorism or corruption, and relatively little bloodshed. Zones of resistance remain.
Crime prevention
The core of Earth-212 is prevention rather than punishment. Enemies were sought out in their caves, in Islamabad and the mountains of Afghanistan, and disarmed before they could act. A network of agencies and intelligence bodies, among them the Night Owls (Búhos Nocturnos), tracks what is about to be done and holds the monopoly of legitimate violence in a borderless world. The regime is at once positivist and libertarian. Surveillance is total, and when it errs it falls on people who have done nothing yet.
Heroes and police
The firefighters who would have died entering the towers now head the hierarchy. Many of them, with everyone who showed a special capacity (powers, training, or credit for a deed that never happened), were recruited into the forces that patrol the world.
Superheroes are thus largely police. The Liberty League keeps evil at bay with official status, and the Centurion embodies the city’s discipline as a soldier of the new Rome. Some speak quietly of “fascist Night Owls”; others work as private investigators in the gray zone between counterterrorism and crime.
Corporations and gods
Large corporations govern the cities in a meritocratic, plutocratic free market, with antitrust law and bounty-hunter disputes recalling the Pinkertons. They take the names of Greek and Roman gods: Mars Inc. (aerospace, weapons and communications), Mercury and others, gathered under the sign of the Wanderers, a planetary cult that competes with itself but converges on one ideal: regulating what is done. Agencies such as Icarus guard the sky.
Magnates such as Samuel Giles hold that the world is too materialistic and needs gods that inspire respect, and fund in the gray zone the search for ambrosia, the food of the gods that promises to make men divine. Night cults, drugs and strange conversions persist outside the official story.
The threat
Like a sword of Damocles hangs the future that did not arrive, in which the center of the cosmopolis was destroyed. Some believe that so much power expelled through the white hole will one day be paid for; others hold that everything is under control.
Beneath the surface persist the preventive ghettos for Muslims, from which the Abdullah family came and where many fathers “disappeared”; post-Harlem neighborhoods, gangs, rumors of epidemics in the sewers; and folds outside time, such as the fold in Queens, where surveillance is lost.