I watched through a cold impartial camera lens as a trio of men attacked a woman half the age of the youngest of her attackers. She was cornered in a dark alley dressed in party clothes too revealing to be considered modest and so sparkly as to be considered fashionable. Clutching her equally sparkly handbag, her face mushed up in fear, she said something to her would be attackers. I had no audio to work with as it were, however I watched as the middle thug threw his head back in what I assumed was laughter. As the middle one talked the other two moved slowly to the far sides of the alley flanking the poor girl who looked to be just out of her teens. The poor thing was so scared that even through an outdated, low resolution security camera I could see her hands shaking as she pulled a small innocuous can from her handbag and held it out in front of her. The lowlife on the left was within arms reach when the woman pulled her mace, and unfortunately he was quicker than her. He grabbed the wrist of the arm holding the pepper spray and twisted violently. I didn't need audio to see her shouting out in pain. I clenched my teeth as the mace went flying to the ground. As soon as the mace was out of the woman's hands the other two moved on her. Within moments the three disgusting examples of moral excrement were tearing the thin material of her dress from the woman's body. She kicked, writhed, scratched, bit, and generally put up a good fight but to no avail. Her efforts merely slowed the inevitable. I breathed hatred and rage when two of the hoodie clad rapists managed to secure her hands and feet to stymie the onslaught of her refusal. The third stood over her saying something that was undoubtedly something to the effect of "stop resisting."
I felt all my tension, worry, and fear for the woman leave me as first responders finally arrived with weapons drawn. I had pinged the nearest police department under the guise of a text message sent through the phone system nearly ten minutes ago when the supers first alerted me to a probable attack in progress. Most modern police forces could respond to a text message as easily as they might respond to a 911 call, and the police in D.C were no different. I breathed a sigh of relief when the things, that barely deserved to be called men, were cuffed and escorted out of frame of the security camera I was watching though. EMS arrived soon after and took the victim out of frame as well. I tasked one of my clusters to monitor the police department's internal network for the creation of a case file regarding the attack. When the case file was created I would slip the video from the camera in as evidence complete with a doctored chain of custody. My work finished I mopped up all evidence of my presence on the bank's network and unplugged from it.
I opened my eyes and looked up at the black, starless night sky. God, that alley was less than a mile from the bench I was sitting on in what served as D.C's warehouse district. Yet in the middle of the country's damn capital, things like rape still occurred with frightening regularity.
"You alright?" Chris asked. I looked at the ginger empath seated next to me and shook my head.
"I don't know man" I replied. There was no point trying to explain what I was feeling to Chris, he probably understood my emotions better than I did.
"You smell… depressed I think," he said wrinkling his freckled nose. I let out a scoff of laughter without thinking.
"What, pray tell, does depression smell like?" I asked absentmindedly as I began to set my mind to a task that was vastly more important than saving random innocents from unspeakable if pedestrian violence.
"Smells a bit like ash unless mixed with other emotions"
I plugged into several different police networks and tasked a cluster to focus on monitoring comms traffic between cruisers and public-safety answering points. If the cluster saw words from a pre-determined list being used, or words the software judged to be code words it would alert me. It would also alert me with a higher priority if it observed encrypted traffic to which it had no key.
"Like if someone is pissed and depressed they smell kinda like spicy ash, like if you mixed ash and cinnamon" Chis continued.
I plugged into NTAC's internal network and tasked another cluster with similar comms monitoring duties albeit with much stricter parameters for alerts. Any alert coming from that cluster was given the highest priority.
"Or if someone is like jealous and depressed they'll smell kinda like burnt money" Chris continued. He went to say more but I had to interrupt him.
"Burnt money? Really?" I asked my brow raised and my voice reflecting the incredulity I felt. He shrugged in response.
"Kinda but I've explained before that the way emotions smell to me is completely unique. Like the burnt money description is just the thing that smells the most like depression colored with jealousy but the actual smell isn't quite the same" He said struggling to find the right words to aptly describe his particular brand of empathic telepathy. I grunted noncommittally and set myself back to the task at hand.
With the comms traffic of the relevant enforcement agencies tapped I just needed to locate all the members of the meeting to make sure I knew who was coming, from where, and how long it would take them to get to the warehouse. To these ends I plugged into the local mobile cell service group. The network allowed me to track certain phones in real time over a geographic map. I identified all ten of the individuals I had invited to my little meeting and tracked them through the gps devices installed on their cell phones. Only eight showed up on the map which meant that either two phones were off or had their GPS devices turned off. Most of the phones were moving in the general direction of the warehouse. I tracked their movements for a few minutes while Chris explained some more equivalences between emotions and smells. After five minutes I fed the movements of all eight phones into a cluster along with traffic information and public transit schedules from Google. The cluster did some quick math and reported that the earliest of the arrivals would be at the wherehouse in thirty minutes at the earliest. The latest of the arrivals would be there in an hour at the earliest.
After unplugging from everything except my primary node I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose where the telltale beginnings of a migraine started to throb. I had to stay connected to the primary because it was connected to the comms clusters that I needed to monitor until the end of the meeting, just to make sure that everyone brave enough to attend would be safe. Staying plugged in for any significant period of time would only feed the migraine. Given a few hours the pain would feel like thousands of spikes being pounded into my head to the rhythm of my heartbeat. I had passed out from the pain of overexerting my ability once. It was not an experience that I was eager to relive.
"I've got ibuprofen if you need it." Chris said. He did not need to ask if I was in pain, he could smell my reaction to the migraine as easily as I might access his phone records.
I shook my head "it won't help" I said. NSAIDs did nothing when it came to the head splitting pain of my migraines. As a point of fact nothing helped fight off the pain, or at least nothing I had tried so far including drugs that were less than legal. "Come on, we should get going" I said. I stood expecting Chris to follow, which he did as always.