A/N: Here at last is the first part of the long awaited Powers Trilogy. I worked my butt off during Easter vacation to bring it to you. I think it is also worth mentioning that April 24th and this story mark the one year anniversary of Greer's creation and my part in the ATS universe.
I'm looking forward to many years spent similarly.
As always denotes something Greer hears, denotes earpiece talk, {} denotes song lyrics.
Also, for those of you who can't get enough of my Greer stories, or the Tib ones for that matter, I've put together a short list of works, published and internet, which would most likely amuse you while you're waiting for the next installment.
'Idoru' by William Gibson, 'The Hacker Crackdown' by Bruce Sterling (can be found online too), texfiles.com, ed each other down. The agent was daring him to say something, daring him to step out of line. And Greer was tempted to take up the challenge.
But he bit it down, and forced his words to contain at least the semblance of polite respect.
Greer gritted his teeth.
"Agent Brown, is my presence here a problem?" the query was charged with double-meaning.
The Agent regarded the brash young man steadily.
"Not," he said, "at the moment. See that it does not become one."
Slowly Greer nodded, never breaking eye-contact with Brown.
With out further adieu the agent turned sharply on his heel and marched from the training hall, his footfalls echoing behind him, and closed the double doors.
/ White Knight will be waiting/
The power broke into his thoughts unbidden.
"Arrrrraahhhg!!" Greer growled with pent fury and frustration, and leapt into the air, delivering a powerful roundhouse kick the a nearby punching bag. He fell to the earth, landing in a spider-man-like squat, panting through gritted teeth, his hair in his face.
The Agency was constantly monitored and recorded from every possible angle, which is to say, three hundred and sixty degrees. While Jones knew this logically it had not really occurred to him at the time that he had promised himself that he would go over the Edmund records from 'every possible angle'. He sighed, twisting the camera this way and that as he inspected the footage of the twins' rampage for what was now the fifty-eighth time. He hastily adjusted the angle when he found himself looking up from the floor at the underside of running Nicholas Edmund's leather pants.
It was getting him nowhere. He had no new information whatsoever. It was just a mad jaunt, played over and over again, and then to watch the man massacre his sister that way...Jones shuddered. Neither of them said anything that was useful either, most of what they said was incoherent babbling, screaming and grunting.
Nor had the tape of his examination of Nicholas' comatose body revealed further clues, that he hadn't discovered on the day in question. It was strange to this day, however, the way the rebel had lingered in the matrix. Jones had hurried at the time, to get whatever information he could from the body before the rebels pulled the plug, but the hours had dragged on, and Nicholas breathed still. Curiously Jones had run check, only to find that Nicholas Edmund had indeed been unplugged soon after his capture. His mind though, had somehow remained trapped inside the matrix, unconscious, but there.
Nothing like that had happened, so far as he knew, before or since.
In disgust Jones shut the monitor off. It was completely futile. If there was a solution he would have found it by now. He had searched through every bit of documentation relevant to the problem. He had even searched through every line of coding that had anything to do with the twins, and with Greer. There was nothing wrong. The programs that read their brain impulses and translated them into the matrix worked perfectly! Was it possible that there was really nothing to worry about? That the Edmund twins had simply been insane?
But if that was the case why couldn't he find the source of the telephonic powers either? He should at least be able to find that. It was not something that people could do outside of the matrix. ESP, telekinesis, all those things sometimes happened because of the way the human brain interacted with the matrix. They could be analyzed, quantified, software errors that could, in most cases, be rectified. This was something different.
But if it was not a software error....
Jones' green eyes widened considerably, and his hands froze over the keyboard. Why had it not occurred to him earlier? If there was nothing wrong with the software; what about the hardware? The agent's fingerers sped over the keyboard anew. This would take a few minutes. It would be very difficult to dig up from the bowels of the mainframe the number of, let alone the information on, the pod of a twenty-years dead rebel.