Karen Austin worked fast.

Those recordings which existed of Simon’s ill fated attempt to take Peggy Martin into custody were destroyed, or hidden.  Her testimony’s to her superiors were fabrications.  She strove with all of the Joint Task Force’s extralegal authority to rewrite the incident into an acceptable history.

The truth:  Prevailer massacred the JTF’s field unit.

Karen’s truth:  The JTF provoked a confused and terrified Ultra into lashing out, a tragic and lamentable accident.

It is difficult to believe that Karen was entirely successful.  Someone, on some level, must have smelled something rotten.  And yet her attempt appeared to succeed.  The intelligence community agreed to allow her ‘alternate approach’ to be attempted, to neutralize Peggy by bringing her into the fold.  To turn the perpetrator of the Newark Incident.

Perhaps it was a pro/con calculation?  Call out Karen’s bullshit, and all you have is the continuation of a battle that you can’t win.  Buy into it, and she is promising you that not only will Peggy stop making trouble… but she’ll be inside, pissing out.  With a hammer like Prevailer everything would be a nail, to twist an old expression.

Alternatively, perhaps Karen’s friends and allies inside of the JTF were to blame?  The woman who would become Remover didn’t lack her later knack for finding useful pawns in her mortal days.  A whisper in the right ear, the promise of Ultra powers…perhaps it was simple corruption.

In any case, the facts of the matter are that the United States government, or a portion thereof, swallowed its pride, covered up the Newark Incident, and joined hands with Peggy Martin.  An almost literal contract with the devil.  It was to have ruinous consequences.

Still, the initial fruit of this union was sweet.

Dr. Chen went to work for the government, and the Ultra Corps began to take shape.  Volunteers.  Patriotic women who had life threatening illnesses were carefully contracted.  Grieving widows who felt that they had nothing more to live for were shown a more useful form of suicide.  A few people were probably kidnapped off the street.

Ultimately, the United States put together a squadron of Ultras, and began to use them to deal with the proto-Pantheon problems that had been cropping up.

Southeast Asia was, by this point, a sort of undeclared other world.  Videos filled the internet, of Ultras calling down fire and lightning, growing to huge stature.  Violence filled the streets of China and India, as Copyer’s Chens wrought Ultras without restraint in mankind’s population center.

Officially, nothing novel was occurring.  These were social disturbances.  Or spasms of rioting.  Or civil wars.  What they definitely were not was a sign that the world’s nature had fundamentally changed.  The Superpower of the day was not willing to see that.

And so the Ultra Corps began to fight the tide.  Trained and equipped by the world’s mightiest nation, supported by Dr. Chen (in his employment at Medsenk, which would eventually become The Company) and Prevailer, they kept the Ultras from the world’s eyes for decades.

Well, from its eyes, officially.  The knowledge couldn’t actually be stopped by kicking in doors and blasting people.  With every incident, witnesses spread.  Debunkers couldn’t quite explain away all of the disturbances as computer forgery.  Eventually, everyone knew  that something was different, though no one could say exactly what.

In 2106 the first Mover transposed 46 miles of the American northwest with a similar quantity of the Australian outback, and the dam burst.