Tom Maximoff, Analyst 013, the other of the two Head Analysts.

warnings: AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. technobabble. rampant bad 616 references. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s***).

pairing: none/gen.

timeline: Network Operations 3652 (AD 6188).

disclaimer: characters belong to marvel. au and au versions belong to me.

notes: 1) Tom is probably a couple thousand years old. he and Pietro are utterly indispensable to Network Operations, much like the Programmers, so they receive consistent life-extension. 2) Traveler!Wade kicked the Hunter's butt back in Singularity (Blood & Tears). 3) somebody's "bread and butter" is his basic workload. it's his living, his livelihood. 4) Auditor!Hope met Eight-ball in Call for Pickup (The Collector).

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

Bullet-Time Baby

Tom Maximoff is good at what he does. He's the best (no matter what his uncle claims). He was the one who caught the Civil War event—came on shift and had it staring him in the face like a moldy orange in a fruit bowl.

Most of the Core doesn't even bother to speculate about what's going on in the timestream above the grey band (admittedly, doing anything about it would be illegal for most people, anyway).

Tom lives at the point-oh. Half of his day is spent there, floating at the top of the multiverse, watching dots of light dance across a millimeter-thick film before their past plays out below in strands and strings. By contrast, Pietro prefers it down there in the middle of greb, hanging over the shoulders of their field agents, watching every twist and twirl of every active assignment. Tom thinks it's a waste of time and energy to assume that the agents can't do their jobs without constant monitoring.

As far as he knows, he's the only Analyst in the whole Network who would be just as happy with the raw datastream.

Every shift starts with a quick scan of greb while his control seat ascends the Core Monitoring Chamber. On his way, he flags persistent anomalies for their respective Senior Analysts to deal with. In the dark and serene reaches of the point-oh, Tom's every breath is devoted to watching more than a thousand pixels of light split, flicker, and merge. It's like watching a cosmic switchboard. The medics have imposed a strict six hour limit to the shifts of the Head Analysts, but Tom has always felt like he could do it all day; to him, it's the most relaxing job he's ever had.

Here, looking down on the timestream from above, he can almost predict the movements of the bundles. That's the Core—steady as a rock. That's BB—a firm dot following three neighboring bundles so closely that it's almost impossible to tell that it's actually the one leading. That's MP—bursting into fireworks and converging again, splintering into up to fifty secondary bundles on a given day before agreeing again and then splitting again. That's WM—it makes ugly bubbles up here that resolve into neat loops down below.

It's only here, above greb, that a certain kind of anomaly can be spotted.

For an instant, a flicker, a millisecond, the point-oh goes black. In the wake of this flicker, the simulation twists and shivers—only above greb.

This is his life. This is existence at the speed of thought.

He's a bullet-time baby.

Tom has another advantage over his uncle: he never second-guesses himself. Ever.

He throws the stability alarm and pulls up a channel to the Sysadmin.

When he speaks, he speaks at a reflexive speed; the Sysadmin has never had trouble understanding, even if 'normal' people hear it as fast-forward gibberish. Tom suspects that the Sysadmin is a computer program, like Anthony and the quacks keep saying (or maybe he has a high-speed speech parsing software). "One minute down of point-oh—awaiting conf unup."

The fragment replays at high speed, and the shiver becomes a blatant flash of one picture to a completely different one. The simulation flashes red.

In the wake of the fiasco with the Hunter and having to replace several Keepers, the list of people who could be sent to deal with an unup is very short.

The Auditor was a man who balanced easygoing discretion with a unique capacity for violence. After the initial exploration, all the charting and determining what was and wasn't structurally important, unups were the Auditor's bread and butter. This would've been a job for him, no questions asked—if he were still alive.

No matter what kind of training she's had, the new auditor doesn't have the experience or the firepower to deal with an unup on her own. No one but the original Auditor would be crazy enough to try, because it could be some naïve little sorcerer just beginning to dabble with real magic, but it could be a timestream rogue trying to engineer his own paradise.

Tom spends three whole seconds deciding the best course of action. Not a long time for most people. Wastefully indecisive for him.

His hand flies through the form commands. Bureaucracy is a pain, but the paperwork is how the Sysadmin keeps track of things, and it's how the Netcon is held accountable to the public. A form to assign the trace to Node 250, a form to assign resolution of the unup situation to Node 218, a special form to recommend cooperative resolution…

The arm of his control chair beeps an incoming transmission warning; he accepts it with a flick of the wrist.

~"Hope Summers AR553-Omega,"~ says the redhead on the chair's projector.

"Tom Maximoff NC085," he replies. "Auditor, your immediate action is required on an unup."

She looks sheepish. ~"I…I don't know what that is."~

He blinks. "Unup," he says again. "Unauthorized upstream tuning. Either somebody's playing around with reality-altering powers, or somebody's going forward and bringing shit back. It skews pretty much all of our projections to bring things back from above the point-oh. It's why we don't go above the point-oh. Could send the whole thing crashing down around our ears."

~"Oh."~

"Oh," he echoes sarcastically. "We usually send the Auditor to take care of unups, because he was generally assumed to be just about the most dangerous and capable agent in the entire Network, but since you haven't been solo long, I want you to get help on this. You remember Node 250 Eight-ball?"

~"Yeah."~

"You'll need him to do the trace. Used to have to send the Cartographer or risk data corruption on the Savant, but that's why we made Eight-ball. After that, I recommend sliding to Node 017 Apollo to get the assistance of his new Keeper. The DBA should be able to pass you all the info you'll need on those. Good luck, and try not to let the timestream implode."

~"Um. Thanks?"~

He closes the channel as the simulation returns to normal.

Again, the relaxing dance of light pixels, the shape of the present predicting the future.

"God, I love my work."

.End.