Welcome to the April A to Z Blogging Challenge! Every year, bloggers from around the world commit to posting every day in April (except Sundays), working through the alphabet one letter at a time. This year, I’m visiting twenty-six fictional alternate Earths — worlds that diverged from our own at some crucial moment and became something wonderfully, unsettlingly different. Think of it like the TV show Sliders, which followed a group of travelers “sliding” between parallel dimensions, never quite knowing what version of Earth they’d land on next. Each day, we visit a new one. Today: H.

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The first thing you notice, sliding into Hero Earth, is not someone flying overhead. It’s a billboard.

It is large, professionally lit, and features a man in a sleek blue uniform standing with his arms crossed in the universal posture of someone who would very much like you to trust him. His eyes have a faint amber glow. Behind him, in clean sans-serif font, are the words: CONTINENTAL ASSURANCE GROUP — YOUR LICENSED HERO NETWORK. BECAUSE SOME RISKS YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO TAKE ALONE. Below that, in smaller text: All CAG-affiliated heroes are fully bonded, background-checked, and rated. Ask your agent about our Platinum Coverage tier.

Welcome to a world where superpowers are real, have been real for about sixty years, and have been — in the way that human civilization tends to handle anything extraordinary that also carries liability — comprehensively monetized.

The Event, and What Nobody Will Officially Confirm

The year is 1963. The Cold War is at its coldest. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have, separately and in complete secrecy, been running parallel research programs with the same basic premise: human biological enhancement. The Americans called theirs Project CARDINAL. The Soviets called theirs something that translates, roughly, as the Initiative. Neither side knew the other was doing it. Both sides, operating on the same flawed theoretical framework with the same generation of insufficiently cautious biochemists, reached a similar experimental threshold at roughly the same time.

What happened next is one of the most thoroughly classified events in the history of two nations that have since collapsed, reformed, and reclassified things several more times. The official position of every relevant government, to this day, is that the precise mechanism of what is now called the Emergence is “under ongoing review.” What is not under dispute is the outcome: beginning in late 1963, and accelerating through 1964 and 1965, a small but statistically impossible percentage of newborns began exhibiting genetic markers that had not existed in the human genome in years before. The leading current theory — “leading” in the sense that it is the least embarrassing to the governments involved — is that both programs produced an aerosol byproduct that entered the upper atmosphere, interacted in ways that no one had predicted, and came down in the rain.

It came down in a lot of rain. Globally. For approximately eight months.

Most people were unaffected. The human genome is, as it turns out, fairly resistant to casual rewriting. But in roughly five percent of children conceived during or shortly after the Emergence window, something different happened. Something that expressed itself, in the following years, as what the scientists called “anomalous biological capacity” and what the rest of the world, once the first eight-year-old lifted a school bus, called superpowers.

The governments involved responded to this development the way governments in 1965 responded to most things they had accidentally caused: by attempting to study it, classify it, deny it, and eventually, when denial became untenable, issue a series of carefully worded statements emphasizing that while certain events had occurred, no one was at fault and the relevant programs had already been discontinued.

The children with powers kept growing up.

The Heroic Age (1971–1984): Exciting, Expensive, Uninsured

The first generation of powered individuals came of age in the early 1970s, and for approximately a decade, Hero Earth experienced what its historians now call the Heroic Age with a mixture of nostalgia and mild embarrassment — the way you might look back at a period photograph and appreciate the energy while quietly acknowledging the complete absence of any structural safeguards.

The powers were varied. Strength, speed, flight, and various sensory enhancements made up the majority, with rarer abilities — energy projection, cellular regeneration, limited precognition — appearing in smaller numbers. The people who had them were, in the main, young, and like most young people who discover they have something extraordinary, they were not immediately thinking about liability.

There were genuine heroes in this period. The record is clear on this. Structures were kept standing. Disasters were mitigated. A commercial airline incident over the Pacific in 1974 that should have killed all 212 people aboard did not, because a twenty-two-year-old named Rosa Veracruz, who was not a passenger, happened to be flying nearby. The Heroic Age was not a fiction invented by insurance companies to justify what came after. People with powers did remarkable things, often at considerable personal cost, and the world was meaningfully better for it.

The world was also, increasingly, full of property damage claims with no clear responsible party.

The problem was structural. When an unpowered person causes damage, there are centuries of legal framework for determining responsibility and extracting compensation. When a powered individual stops a runaway tanker truck by throwing it into a parking structure, the legal framework in 1976 had precisely nothing useful to say. Whose insurance covered the parking structure? Not the tanker company’s — their driver hadn’t caused the final impact. Not the city’s — the city hadn’t thrown anything. Not the hero’s — the hero didn’t have insurance, because hero insurance didn’t exist yet, because heroes hadn’t existed until recently.

The parking structure’s owner filed suit against the city, the tanker company, and the hero, in that order. The case dragged on for four years. The parking structure was never fully rebuilt. The hero, a 24-year-old with superstrength and a community college degree, settled for an amount that represented about forty percent of what the owner had actually lost, mostly because it was all she could pay.

This happened, in various forms, continuously, for about a decade.

By the early 1980s, the property and casualty insurance industry had noticed something: there was a massive, entirely unaddressed risk category sitting in the middle of the economy, generating claims that went nowhere and losses that got absorbed by whoever was unlucky enough to be standing nearest the incident. The industry’s response to this observation was not, to its credit, purely cynical. There was a genuine actuarial problem to solve. There was real need for a framework that would ensure that people whose property was damaged by powered activity could actually be compensated.

The framework that emerged solved that problem. It also, over the following thirty years, did considerably more than that.

How the Insurance Companies Ate the World (Gradually, Politely, Inexorably)

It began with the Powered Liability Act of 1983, which required any individual using anomalous biological capacity in a public setting to carry liability insurance. This was presented — and was, in its original form — a consumer protection measure. If you were going to throw tanker trucks around, someone needed to be on the hook for the parking structures.

The insurance industry wrote the coverage. The insurance industry also, in the drafting process, suggested that in order to accurately assess risk, carriers would need to evaluate the nature and extent of an applicant’s powers, their training, their history, and their intentions. This was reasonable. It was also the first thread of what would become a very long sweater.

The Certification of Anomalous Capacity Act of 1989 — CACA, an acronym that its lobbyists clearly did not think through — established the first formal licensing system, administered jointly by the federal government and a newly created nonprofit called the Powered Capacity Standards Institute, which was funded primarily by the seven largest insurance carriers and whose board was composed primarily of insurance executives. Licensing required a physical assessment, a background check, a written examination covering relevant law and ethics, and approval from a licensed insurer willing to underwrite your activities.

By 1995, you could not legally use your powers in public without a license. By 2001, the license renewal cycle had been shortened to two years and now included a mandatory continuing education component offered by, among other providers, subsidiaries of the major insurance carriers. By 2008, the PCSI had been absorbed into a new regulatory body called the National Hero Oversight and Licensing Division — NHOLD, pronounced “en-hold,” with what increasingly felt like intentional irony — which had a federal charter but was staffed almost entirely by industry veterans and funded primarily by licensing fees.

The governments of Hero Earth did not sell out, exactly. They did something more banal: they recognized that they did not understand the thing they were regulating, that the people who did understand it were the ones making money from it, and that it was easier and cheaper to let those people build the regulatory structure than to build it themselves. This is a story that has happened many times on many Earths. On Hero Earth it just happened to involve flight and laser vision.

What a Hero License Actually Looks Like

The current licensing structure, administered by NHOLD in cooperation with its forty-three approved carrier partners, works roughly as follows.

First, you register your anomalous capacity with your regional NHOLD office, which is required by law within thirty days of first manifestation or your eighteenth birthday, whichever comes later. This registration is technically free. However, the background check required to complete it costs $175. The required medical assessment to document your specific capacity costs between $400 and $1,200 depending on your provider, and must be performed by an NHOLD-certified physician, of whom there are not very many in rural areas.

Then you select a carrier. Your carrier will conduct their own assessment, set your premium based on your power classification — Category A (physical enhancement), Category B (energy-based), Category C (cognitive or sensory), and the much more expensive Category D (reality-affecting, probability, or temporal) — and issue you a policy. The average annual premium for a Category A hero working in a mid-sized metropolitan area is approximately $8,400. Category D, for the small number of people who qualify and can find a carrier willing to take them on at all, runs upward of $60,000.

Once insured, you receive your license, which permits you to use your abilities in specific approved contexts. The licensed hero works within a Coverage Zone designated by their carrier, responds to incidents within their approved Activity Types (not all carriers cover water rescues; most require additional riders for any activity involving aircraft), and files an incident report within 48 hours of any power use resulting in property contact. Three late filings in a calendar year is grounds for license suspension. Two suspensions and your carrier can drop you, at which point you are unlicensed and cannot legally use your powers, which is to say you are a person who can bench press a building and is not allowed to.

There is an appeals process. It takes fourteen months on average.

The Ninety-Five Percent

Here is the part that gets lost in most discussions of Hero Earth, which tend to focus on the people with powers because they are more visually interesting: ninety-five percent of the population has no anomalous capacity whatsoever.

They are ordinary people. They go to work. They pay taxes, including the 0.8% Heroic Infrastructure Surcharge that was added to federal income tax in 1997 to fund NHOLD operations and which has, despite repeated promises, never been removed. They watch licensed heroes on the news and follow the coverage rating systems that the major carriers publish quarterly, which rank active heroes by response time, incident resolution rate, and customer satisfaction scores derived from surveys sent to people whose emergencies were handled.

They navigate a world where roughly one in twenty people they meet might be capable of lifting a car, and where that capability is managed, to the extent it is managed, by a system that they fund but do not meaningfully control. They cannot use powers they don’t have, which means the licensing system is not their problem — except that it shapes their cities, their emergency services, their insurance premiums on everything else, and the heroes available to them, which depends heavily on whether their neighborhood is in a coverage zone that any carrier has determined is financially worth serving.

The rural and low-income coverage gap is, among policy researchers on Hero Earth, one of the most documented and least addressed problems in the system. Licensed heroes concentrate where the property values are high enough to make the premiums worth paying and the incident volume predictable enough to keep their ratings up. If you live somewhere that doesn’t meet those criteria, you are, officially, in a “coverage-pending” zone. There has been a coverage-pending zone in the agricultural flatlands of central Kansas since 2003. NHOLD describes it as “an ongoing area of carrier development focus.”

The people in central Kansas describe it differently.

What they mostly describe, though, is tiredness. Not anger, exactly — or not only anger. Just a deep, settled, slightly comedic exhaustion with the entire apparatus. With the news coverage that treats hero license suspensions as scandal and hero rating drops as tragedy while the practical question of who shows up when something goes wrong in an unincorporated township remains technically unresolved. With the NHOLD quarterly reports. With the carrier advertisements that show amber-eyed men in blue uniforms and promise protection as though protection were a product with a simple price point. With being the ninety-five percent — the part of the story that everyone acknowledges is the larger part, and that somehow remains, perpetually, the background.

What the Sliders Know

You will step off of Hero Earth having seen some remarkable things. You will have watched a licensed Category A hero file a digital incident report on her phone approximately thirty seconds after pulling a child from a submerged vehicle, because the window for automatic claim initiation closes at thirty-five seconds. You will have seen the NHOLD kiosk in the airport — between the currency exchange and the pretzel stand — where travelers with anomalous capacity can register for a forty-eight-hour visitor’s provisional, for a fee. You will have, if you stayed long enough, met someone with real, genuine, extraordinary power who sat across from you and explained, without much drama, that their license lapsed during a period when they couldn’t make the premium and they’ve been “dormant” for the last two years because it isn’t worth the legal exposure.

You will leave thinking about the ninety-five percent. About the ordinary majority of a world that has had sixty years to get used to the extraordinary, and has arrived at the conclusion that the extraordinary is, largely, someone else’s problem — managed by a system they didn’t design, funded by a surcharge they can’t opt out of, and delivering results that vary considerably depending on your zip code.

It is not the reaction you expected to have to a world with superheroes. But then, you have never lived in one. The people of Hero Earth have, and the consensus view — held quietly, expressed mostly in the specific flat tone of people who have tried caring about something and found it exhausting — is that having superheroes and having a world that works are not, as it turns out, the same thing.

The billboard watches you go. CONTINENTAL ASSURANCE GROUP. The man with the amber eyes is still smiling.

He has excellent ratings.

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Join me tomorrow for I — and another world waiting just beyond the edge of what we know.