Julia From Brockton Bay The Poltroyans
DISCLAIMER: Worm and its characters are the creation of John "Wildbow" McCrae. The Galactic Milieu was the creation of the late Julian May. I own neither, and neither expect nor deserve any sort of financial remuneration for this work of fiction. I wrote this story for my own amusement.
Individuals wishing to learn more about the Worm web serial may search for it on the Internet. Julian May's Intervention and Galactic Milieu series are available on Kindle, although hard copies can be found here and there.
ADVISORY: This chapter rated T for foul language and situations. If either offends you, please don't read it.
Julia from Brockton Bay*Julia from Brockton Bay*Julia from Brockton Bay
Dad picked me up after school. It still hurt. Kasey was a Head.
"So how was school?" he asked.
"Fine," I said shortly. We were stopped at a traffic light, so Dad could look at my expression and frowned. He didn't believe me.
"Did you get in touch with your friend Kasey?" he said "How is she doing?"
"I learned that she's in a Special Ed program," I said. "I think she hurt her head or something."
"That's awful," said Dad. "You were such good friends. She might be in Special Ed, but I think you ought to stay friends considering all the stuff you've been through this year."
Gee, thanks for the sermon, I thought. A lot of my shit was caused by you and Mom deciding to go through the Portal instead of remaining in Brockton Bay. I ignored the fact that I wouldn't have known what happened to either Madison or Kasey if their folks had gone through the Portal and my folks had remained back in Home State.
I went to my room after I got home. I sat on my bed and put my head in my hands. This shit keeps happening and happening and happening. What the Eff was going to happen next.
I tried to do homework after that but my heart wasn't in it. Kasey was a Head, Madison was in trouble in Portland and God alone knows what happened to my other friends. I cried myself to sleep.
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The pain lessened a little overnight. Still, I woke up feeling depressed the next morning. Kasey's telling me that she'd become an Operant had hit me hard. Did she already have Master powers, or did that come later, after the Slimies finished brainwashing her? Either way, Kasey was a collaborator, either willing collaborator like a supervillain, or unwilling like one of Heartbreaker's harem.
I was still feeling rotten when Dad drove me to school the next morning. Seeing the Milieu flag on the flag pole made me feel worse. I walked into home room silently cursing the Endbringers back on Earth Bet, the Proctorship, and what they'd done to my friendships.
I got a nasty surprise in my Current Affairs class. Mr. Reddy was standing at the front of the classroom wearing a smile. "Today we have two special guests," he said. The classroom door opened and not one but two guys entered the classroom. Both of them were short and bald-headed, but with red eyes and purple skins. Poltroyans, both of them.
I looked at them and thought What the Eff are those guys doing here?
"Good morning," said the first Poltroyan. "I'm Renesso. I work for the Department of Education and Interspecies Relations for the Simbiari Proctorship."
"I'm Ssenyama," said the other Poltroyan gesturing at the first Poltroyan. "I work with Rennie here."
Some of my classmates gave a brief laugh.
"We're here to touch on some of the aspects of Milieu Law when it comes to Criminal and Civil court cases and how it relates to both current and pre-Intervention law."
"Before we get started, as most of you know, the Great Intervention has forced major changes to the legal system, particularly to those countries whose legal systems were patterned after those of Great Britain. The current legal system being implemented does incorporate Milieu ideas and principles, but is patterned after the Napoleonic legal codes used in much of Europe, Africa, and Latin America…"
Blah, blah, blah, I thought, and rolled my eyes. I tried to shut him out and put my mind to daydreaming or something so I'd be less tempted to slug him.
The first Poltroyan was still lecturing when I looked up again. "Some of you are aware that most pre-Intervention criminal codes, at least those used in representative republics, were written with legal protections against self-incrimination on the part of legal defendants. This was done to protect the rights of the defendants against malfeasance by police, prosecutors, and other organs of the various states that existed before 1990. Some of these codes did offer extensive legal protections to individual defendants, others provided little more than lip-service to regimes bent on harassing or silencing political opponents…" I gave him credit for not droning like some grown-ups but I thought what he was saying was a crock of shit.
My bad mood grew worse when the classroom door opened and Ms. Carstairs walked in. She smiled at Mr. Reddy and the Poltroyans with approval, then took an empty seat near the front of the classroom.
"The difficulty with laws against self-incrimination is that on the one hand, these laws at best provide inadequate legal protections against zealous or malevolent prosecutors and on the other allow criminal defendants skilled at either directing others to perform criminal actions or concealing their own motives or criminal actions to conceal their own guilt. After all, who better than the accused would know his or her actual guilt or innocence?"
I wasn't sure that I liked where this was going.
"The Magistratum's legal system legal system reduces if not eliminates such abuses. Before the Intervention, those polities that allowed self-incrimination usually obtained such admissions of guilt by torture or coercion., actions that expressly forbidden by Milieu law. By contrast, using redactors allows police and prosecutors to allow innocents to clear their names as possible suspects by corroborating their testimony during questioning or later on during court proceedings…"
WTF! I thought. These assholes are JUSTIFYING using mind-probes as legal tools? I remembered the Bay and news stories I'd read about other places, where cops and prosecutors ran all over some dumb fuck's ass and they couldn't do much as say "Boo" in response. I decided that I hated them even more.
The first Poltroyan, or Renesso, as he liked to be called, blathered on for several more minutes. Then he and his buddy Ssenyama asked if anyone had any questions. A couple of the local kids asked a couple of mealy-mouthed softball questions while the few of us from Earth Bet kept out mouths shut. Whatever I usually thought of my fellow refugees from Eath Bet, it looked like we had the brains to see through the Milieu bullshit.
The questions quickly petered out and there was silence in the classroom. I decided that this was my moment. I raised my hand.
"Yes, Miss Marcotti," said Mr. Reddy, playing short-stop for the aliens.
"Yeah, I've got a question," I said. "This stuff about the Milieu using mind-reading as a tool for catching crooks is all very nice, at least if you've got honest cops, but what about mind-reading and mind-manipulating crooks using their powers to assault normal people?" I saw the alien's expression of surprise that someone wasn't willing to play the sucker and grinned. I was going to keep going.
"The Magistratum has laws that expressly prohibits operants from using their powers to coerce or manipulate non-operants into performing illegal acts or other actions against their will," he replied.
Yeah, right, I thought, and pigs roost in the trees.
"Nice talk, but how do you catch them?" I replied. "I'm from Earth Bet, and we have problems with guys like Heartbreaker who have like Master powers and use them to make their targets commit crimes or become sex slaves."
That got a reaction both from the teachers and the Poltroyans. Mr. Reddy looked alarmed and Ms. Carstairs gave me a dirty look.
"The Milieu pursues and punishes such people," Renesso replied.
"Yeah, and how do you catch them?" I said. "The ones back on Earth Bet can move from place to place and never get caught. Heartbreaker's been active for years and the PRT's yet to catch him. Nobody knows what he really looks like and he probably looks like any other schmo on the street."
Mr. Reddy and Ms. Carstairs were now giving me very dirty looks. I decided that if I wanted to get my licks in, I'd better do it now before they shut me down..
"Ms. Marcotti, I think you ought to let someone else have a chance to .." Ms. Carstairs began.
I decided that I wasn't backing down.
"You guys probably couldn't catch him either because you wouldn't have a friggin' clue and because you wouldn't know the first thing about stopping him if you did find him! I said.
"Ms. Marcotti, sit down," said Ms. Carstairs.
"No!" I yelled. "I don't see why we have to act like good little sheeple and expect the Proctorship to to know its butt from its elbow."
Ms. Marcotti, enough!" said Ms. Carstairs. "Your behavior is disgraceful. Detention. Now."
She stood up as if she was going to manhandle me personally. One-on-one, I probably could have taken her down, but the odds sucked. Mr. Reddy was in the room. So were the two Poltroyans, not to mention any Canucks who'd come rushing to Ms. Carstairs' aid. I stood up and sullenly let her lead me out of the classroom.
I followed Ms. Carstairs back towards her office. She opened a side door, which turned out to be some sort of conference room with a desk, a couple of chairs, and zero decorations. She looked at me with disapproval, then said "Be seated. I will attempt to contact your parents."
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I sat in the small room and seethed. G_d d_n freaking mind-controlling Heads and the Effing humans that collaborate with them! They should be put in jail or better yet, put against a wall and Effing shot!
There was a digital clock mounted on the wall. I thought briefly about knocking it down. I could pull up a chair and then see about knocking it to the floor. I then decided to see if I could pull it off. I pushed the conference room chair over to the wall, then stood on it. I then raised my arm as high as it could go to see if I could knock it off its hook or nail and make it fall. I couldn't; the clock was mounted too high on the wall and I was too goddamn short. I pushed my chair back to the table, then sat back down. I turned my chair away from the clock and seethed.
There wasn't that much to do except twiddle my thumbs. I looked at my wristwatch and checked the time. Current Affairs was over; if I hadn't cut loose on the purple-skinned assholes, I'd probably be doing study hall right now. I hated being here; this was a drag.
Shortly after the period would have ended, the conference room door opened, and Ms. Carstairs walked in, followed by the two Poltroyans.
"What the Eff do you want?" I asked, glaring at the Poltroyans.
"Miss Marcotti, language," said Ms. Carstairs. "You're in enough trouble as it is."
"I was unable to contact your parents but Renesso and Ssenyama wish to talk to you. At this point I'm angry enough that I'm willing to let you dig the hole you're digging for yourself even deeper."
Eff you, lady, I thought, glaring at Carstairs.
"Principal Carstairs, with respect, we're here to talk with Miss Marcotti about other matters besides school discipline," said the first Poltroyan. "After we leave, she's all yours."
I turned my attention away from the Principal and glared at the first Poltroyan. Renesso gave me a half-grin. "Since this is informal and we're not friends, girl, let's get down to business."
What business, you purple-skinned asshole, I thought. "I'm not gonna apologize for trashing you," I said.
We're not here to talk about your manners, kid," he said. "We're not here to talk about strings and sealing-wax, either. We're all here to talk about this Heartbreaker guy."
"Heartbreaker?" I said. "Why the Eff do you want to talk about Heartbreaker?"
"Because we're worried about him and we want to know more, doll," said Renesso. "You see, when the Portal opened and you guys started pouring in, we didn't have the time to sort through you little angels to see if there were any naughty operant schoolboys we didn't know about."
I wondered again why he'd gotten so interested in Heartbreaker and why he talked like a guy in some old movie.
"So what do you do about local operants?" I said.
"Almost all children here are tested at an early age to see if they're operant or not," said the Poltroyan.
I knew that I was in trouble and I could feel the ground shifting under me. I decided to change the topic. "So why don't you ask the Simbiari?" I answered.
"Because the Milieu's a bureaucracy and because sometimes the right people don't ask the right questions," said the purple guy.
"So why ask me?" I asked.
"Because you know about him and you can give us leads," the Poltroyan replied. "And even if you don't give us the straight dope, we can learn what questions to ask the next Joe or Jane who knows about him."
I scowled at him and started thinking. I had two bad choices and I had to choose one of them. On the one hand, the last thing I wanted to do was to become an effing collaborator with the effing Proctorship. I still hated them and I still wanted them gone.
On the other hand, I hated and feared guys like Heartbreaker. They were no friends of mine. They regularly used their mind powers to make women have sex with them and manipulated people to do what they want, and normal people like me were almost completely powerless to do anything to stop them.
One choice or the other and both choices sucked.
I thought about it a little more, hating the Poltroyan and hating the choices. I finally decided to roll with the Poltroyans. While I couldn't make the Slimies and their other friends pack up and leave Earth, I liked the thought of doing my dirty little bit to spoke the wheels of whatever wanna-be Heartbreakers who'd made their way to this side of the Portal.
"All right, I'll talk," I said.
So I talked. I told Renesso about Heartbreaker, a notorious Canadian Cape with Master powers who'd been active for a number years. I told him about some of the people he used his powers to manipulate, some of the crimes they committed, and that sometimes when the cops did catch them, they killed themselves before the cops could be interrogated.
Renesso asked me about other people who could corroborate my story. I rolled over like a toy poodle, giving him Kasey's and poor Maddy's names, telling him about the local version of Parahumans On Line, then suggesting that he ask around the refugee communities if he wanted other sources. By the time he was through I felt sick and ashamed.
My questioning ended a short time later when my Dad came by the school. Ms. Carstairs told him about my outburst, and I knew that I was in for more trouble when I got home.
My Dad looked at me and shook his head. "Julia," he said, "what the Hell did you do this time?"
Author's notes:
General note: Readers should be aware that Julia Marcotti can an unreliable narrator. She is often opnionated, dishonest, unobservant and occasionally ignorant. Heartbreaker is even worse than Julia described him, but readers should remember that Julia is a civilian and is neither a supervillain nor a member of the Protectorate back on Earth Bet.
Home State: Wildbow, the author of Worm, was not specific as to Brockton Bay's location, only saying that the city of Brockton Bay was north and east of Boston. After perusing maps showing the New England coastline, I decided to create a separate, fictitious US state called Home State, carved out of an elongated state of Maine.
"Head" A human slang term used on Earth Showa as a term for metapsychic operants.
As exposed in the previous chapter, Kasey Baumgardner, a non-Worm canon friend of Julia's, was discovered to be a metapsychic operant.
"Slimies" a non-Galactic Milieu canon pejorative term used by disgruntled humans to describe the amphibian Simbiari, the race proctoring humanity as humanity hopefully edges towards membership in the Coadunate Galactic Milieu.
Heartbreaker: a canon Parahuman villain from Worm. Heartbreaker not only committed the offenses I described in this chapter, but also sired children, then later tortured them to force them into "triggering" their parahuman abilities.
Poltroyans: a meta-psychic member race of the interstellar Coadunate Galactic Milieu. The Poltroyans are bi-pedal humanoids who look and act somewhat like humans, but are not genetically related to humans or other Earth primates.
Magistratum: The law enforcement arm of the Coadunate Galactic Milieu.