"That's odd."

"I know, and worrying too."

Colin looked at the face of his best friend on his monitor. Her avatar was, as he'd always admired, so close to real it was only by careful inspection he could see it was actually computer generated. It was certainly good enough to let him see she appeared worried as she said, even though he wasn't particularly good with facial cues in many cases.

"Has one ever been overdue before?" he asked.

"Only by at most a few days. Not more than two weeks. It's unprecedented, and when it comes to those things 'unprecedented' invariably means bad."

He couldn't help but agree. The Endbringers were bad news all around, and that one was the worst of the three.

"What's she doing?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing as far as any instrumentation I can bring to bear tells me," Dragon replied uneasily. "She shifted to the higher orbit several months ago, which isn't all that unusual, every now and then the same thing happens, and since then she's just completely inert. Not a sign of any activity at all that my monitoring, or anyone else's, can detect."

"Which doesn't necessarily mean she's not actually doing something," he growled, scrolling through the logs Dragon's tracking programs produced. "Neither of the others are behaving oddly?"

"Well..." Dragon trailed off, looking doubtful when he glanced at her screen. "That depends on what you mean by oddly. The last three attacks were shorter and less damaging on average than any others we've seen so far, if you look at the long term statistics. Far fewer casualties than most of the previous ones, or at least deaths. We put it down to better cooperation by our forces and good luck, but combined with this… I can't shake the feeling that something changed recently but I have no idea what."

Colin nodded slightly while still looking at the data and comparing the figures with long term trends. She was certainly right, the overall death rate had dropped steadily in the last three events, although it was slightly masked by the sheer number of injuries and the collateral damage. Even that was, when studied more closely, strangely less severe than many of the attacks in the last few years had been. "We've seen particularly bad attacks a few times, above average destruction and casualties, so possibly this is merely the other side of the same phenomenon?" he hazarded.

Dragon looked pensive. "Possibly," she allowed after a moment. "Perhaps it's that simple. But I personally doubt it. Nothing to do with those things is ever simple. There's always a sting in the tail, especially with her. One we don't necessarily find out for months to years. Or at all."

He was forced to agree. On the other hand, there was no way at the moment to do more than guess, and he said as much. "I know, and that's the part that really worries me," she sighed. "But at least we can see the difference and if there is some plan behind it, with a little luck be prepared for something nasty happening. All we can really do is keep watching and be ready to act as fast as possible."

"Agreed," he replied with a nod, scowling a little. "I'll pass on the information to the Director."

"I'll notify the Chief Director as well, and the Guild is on standby for when the other shoe drops," she said. "But that's about the limit of our ability to prepare for whatever happens next."

His friend sighed slightly. "I hate more than anything the unpredictability of the damn things," she added, making him nod a little. "Anyway, that aside, how is your latest project coming along?"

Colin turned away from the log data, clearing the screen with a tap of one finger. He smiled. "Well, in fact. Very well. I'd like your advice on aspects of it, if you've got the time."

"For you, Colin, I always have time," she replied with a smile of her own. "Let's have a look."

He brought up the schematics of his most recent halberd-mounted weapon, then manipulated the cursor to highlight one subsection. "This is the issue," he began. "I've been having trouble with the stability of the high frequency master clock, and that led to me recalculating the phase divider ratios, which shows there's a fundamental design error somewhere in here which I'm currently at a loss to explain..."

Both of them were soon deeply involved in a discussion of how to overcome the problem, the conundrum of odd Endbringer activities shelved for the time being.


As the back door closed behind him, Danny descended the steps from the rear porch and headed over to where Taylor was relaxing in a folding wooden garden chair, her hair up in a pony tail and hanging over the back, while she scribbled in a notebook in between staring at the sky. He glanced up and all he could see were small clouds slowly moving through the brilliant blue on the light wind. Far above seagulls circled on the breeze, their cries faintly audible. The wind was from the direction of the bay and he could smell the scents of the sea, salt, ozone, a hint of seaweed, and a little of the industrial odors that all merged together with the sounds to give the impression of 'home.'

Approaching his daughter, he sat in the other chair next to the old maple tree that grew in the middle of the yard, the shade covering both of them in dappled late morning light, and handed her one of the glasses of lemonade he was carrying. "Thought you might want a drink," he said as she looked up, then smiled.

"Thanks, dad," she replied, putting her pen down and taking the offered glass. Condensation ran down the side as she sipped it and made an appreciative face. "Ooh. Very nice."

"Your mother always said I made exceptionally good lemonade," he replied with a smile of his own, before taking a swig. "The secret is lemons and sugar."

"A very deep secret," she giggled, sipping the drink again. She slipped the pen into the ring binding of the notebook with her free hand, then flipped it closed and dropped it to the grass. He saw a page entirely full of completely incomprehensible symbols as she closed it, making him wonder what on earth she was working on this time. Leaning back Taylor kicked her feet out and crossed her legs at the ankles, then slowly drank the lemonade. Ice tinkled in his own glass as he lifted it to his lips once more.

"How's the clearing of the ship's graveyard coming along?" she inquired after they'd sat quietly for a few minutes. Danny, who had been watching a squirrel run along the fence casting suspicious looks at them, glanced at her.

"Almost finished, actually," he replied. "The boys have cleared out about eighty percent of the larger stuff so far, and most of that has been scrapped and is slowly being hauled away. Half a dozen ships were recovered intact enough to be fixed up, which is a bit of a surprise but useful. There's still a lot of smaller crap lying around on the beach, and we're going to have to work out how to get all the completely sunken shipwrecks out of the way, but progress is very good. Roy's extremely happy about it, I can tell you that."

She grinned a little. "I can imagine."

They sat in companionable silence for a little longer. Insects buzzed around them, mostly bees and the like going after the flowers in the rather overgrown garden that had been sadly neglected since Annette passed away. He studied the sight, feeling that he should probably do something about it. She'd had a gift for gardening as in so many other areas and would have been annoyed to see it left like this.

A large dragonfly flew circles around them, the rattling of its wings distinct over the background sounds. Taylor followed it with her eyes, smiling a little, then put her hand out. He was a little surprised when the insect landed on her outstretched finger, but he'd seen similar things happen with dragonflies before. They'd always given him the impression of being a lot smarter than most insects and oddly curious about humans.

She slowly raised her hand and brought it closer to her eyes, studying the large insect with interest. It looked back at her, the colorful and enormous eyes glinting in the sun as it tilted its head. "Hi," she said quietly. "Nice to meet you."

He smiled as his daughter and the dragonfly regarded each other for a while, then she lifted her hand over her head and gently tossed the creature back into the air. It flew off and vanished over the fence. "I like dragonflies," she said when she caught him watching her. "Insects are pretty cool."

"I do remember your past exploits with the little creepy crawlies," he chuckled. "For instance that time you decided that collecting about fifty crickets in a jar was a good idea..."

Taylor blushed slightly. "I didn't know they'd get out in the house like that," she mumbled as he laughed again.

"Your mother wasn't all that happy about it," he commented, making her grin despite herself. "Little chirping sounds coming from odd places in the middle of the night for weeks. She spent far more time than she wanted to finding them all and evicting them."

"Hey, it was better than the time Emma and I collected those bullfrogs, right?" she giggled.

"Oh, god, don't remind me," he sighed. "Why did you two think that an old birdcage was the appropriate container for half a dozen frogs?"

His daughter shrugged, looking amused. "We were seven. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And we didn't know they were strong enough to force the door open..."

"Your mother did not appreciate waking up at three AM and finding a large irritated frog sitting on the bedside table croaking at her," he complained, causing her to shake with laughter. "Nearly gave me a heart attack, the scream she let out."

Taylor put the glass down then folded double with hilarity, while he shook his head and laughed as well. The pain of loss was still there, but the last few months had improved both of their abilities to handle it enormously, something he was profoundly grateful for. "You laugh, child of mine, but you were not the one who had to find them all."

Gales of giggles caused him to smile. Seeing her so happy made him happy too. When she finally ran down and retrieved her lemonade, he asked, "How is Amy, by the way?"

His daughter went from smiling to looking sober. "She's better, I think, Vicky and I are both trying to cheer her up, but… her mother isn't really helping at all from what I can make out. She doesn't want to talk about it most of the time." Taylor put her head back over the rear of the chair and stared straight up at the sky, her face troubled. "I want to help her, but I'm not sure I can, not without… getting involved."

Danny nodded slowly. He was pretty sure that if she wanted something done, something would be done, and there was a better than even chance that people were already looking into things, but… Carol Dallon was not an easy person to handle. He'd met her a couple of times some years back at parties at Alan's legal practice when he and Annette had been invited and he'd got the impression at the time she was very intense and very fixated in a certain way of looking at the world. From what Taylor had told him this hadn't lessened since.

He hadn't met Amy and Vicky all that many times, since for security reasons very few people were cleared to visit the Hebert household, but he'd driven Taylor over to their house on a number of occasions in the last few weeks and he had a good impression of both girls. They seemed on balance pretty sensible and intelligent, Taylor saying the same thing, and she was clearly fond of both. That pleased him since she'd been without all that many friends since poor Emma's… accident. Starting at Arcadia seemed to have opened up a number of social avenues his insanely talented daughter had been needing and he was very happy she took advantage of that.

"Tricky." After a moment, he asked, "You think they'd be able to handle the secret?"

Taylor sighed. "I'm pretty sure Amy would keep a secret like that to the grave. She's… very private. And knows how not to talk about things. I guess all the healing needs that sort of attitude. Vicky… She's not really a gossip, not like some people I've met are, but she's not as quiet as Amy is."

He smirked a little. "From what I've read online, 'quiet' is not a term that applies very well to Victoria Dallon."

Taylor giggled. "She does have a reputation. But having known her for a while, a lot of that is kind of overstated. Yeah, she's pretty outgoing compared to most people, and gets very talkative when she's in a good mood, which is most of the time, but..." The girl shrugged. "She's also a good person, smart, loves her sister, and wouldn't do anything to hurt her or her friends. I'm almost certain she'd also be able to keep her mouth shut."

"But..."

"But she might not be able to resist her mother if she demanded to know things," Taylor replied with a glance at him, one that showed she was annoyed about the situation. "And I'm not sure Carol would be able to meet the security requirements. She should be able to, she's a lawyer and a superhero, but she's also got a weird outlook on life and she might get funny about the government being involved in things she'd probably think were cape business. I know she doesn't like the PRT very much..."

Danny nodded slowly, understanding her point. "Awkward."

"Little bit, yeah. Amy wouldn't like keeping secrets from her sister, I think, or at least any more than she does at the moment, but telling Vicky might mean Carol found out, and if she did..." Taylor shook her head. "I can see it being difficult."

"Do you want to tell Amy and Vicky?" he asked after another sip of lemonade. He wiped some condensation off the glass and flicked it to the side as she thought.

"It would be nice to let them in on some of the stuff I can't talk about now, but at the same time I don't want to cause them any more trouble with their family than they've got at the moment," she finally said. "Vicky's starting to get pretty annoyed about Carol's attitude to Amy from what I've seen, and although Amy's more or less handling it, who knows what would happen if we added extra stress? And that's assuming the government thought they'd meet the security clearance anyway."

"I can talk to Brendan if you'd like," he offered. "Sound him out on it and explain why."

"He's probably already aware of it," she commented before finishing the lemonade and putting the glass next to the chair. "I'd be surprised if the spooks didn't have at least a dozen plans for dealing with New Wave, any of my friends, anyone I happen to bump into, anyone who I might bump into, anyone who might even think of coming to the same state never mind the city..." She grinned as he snickered. "They're actually pretty good at their jobs."

"I'm glad you don't seem to mind that level of attention," he replied, watching her face. She looked mildly thoughtful but shrugged.

"Sure, it would be nice not to have to worry about all the security, but it's a fair trade for getting all the toys and a budget most entire countries would dream about," she finally said quietly, going back to staring at the sky with her hands dangling at her sides. "And it's got one really big bonus… You're safe. I couldn't handle something..." Taylor raised a hand and wiped her eyes with a quick motion. "Not after Mom. Not because of something I did just because I'm smarter than most people."

Danny sighed, got out of his chair, and knelt on the grass next to his daughter, putting his arms around her. "No one blames you for that, least of all me, Taylor," he said into her hair as he held her. "And even if something happened to me, it wouldn't be your fault." He smiled gently at her. "Although with the amount of security around the place, it's far more likely to happen to someone else..."

The girl, almost unwillingly, giggled again. "Yeah, some of the people wandering around trying to pretend they're ordinary Brocktonians are… interesting."

He gave her a squeeze then went back to his own chair and sat again. "Why the melancholy anyway?" he asked, watching her. "It's not like you these days."

She glanced at him, before peering at the seagulls wheeling about in the distance. "Maybe thinking about Emma… Every time I visit her I come away feeling sad for a while. It's always right there, you know?"

"I do know, yes, Taylor," he replied, also watching the gulls now as they floated on the breeze. "I miss her too. As do her family. But with a little luck either you'll figure out how to bring her back, or she'll find her way home on her own. Never give up hope."

"I won't, trust me," she replied almost inaudibly.

The pair of them sat in silence for some time, until she picked up the notebook again and opened it. Danny, who was half asleep, rolled his head to look at her and asked, "So what are you working on now?"

"A synthetic conceptual language to communicate with an organic machine intelligence unit," she muttered, writing a few more symbols down then tapping the end of her pen on her nose as she thought. He blinked a few times. She peered sideways at him, her lips curving a little. "You know… Just in case."

"Of course. Just in case." Thinking yet again that his daughter was so far past the end of the bell curve it was completely ridiculous, he smiled and closed his eyes, dozing in the pleasant warmth of a late spring Saturday. He listened to the pen scratching on the paper, a sound familiar to him from many years hearing his wife work on her lectures and thought how comforting it was.


Angus stared at the latest proof that Taylor was utterly beyond the normal rules of science, before picking the crystalline cube up and examining it closely in the light over his desk. The slightly blue-tinted transparent material, when you looked at it from near enough, appeared to be much deeper that it could possibly be. Putting it right up to his eye he marveled at the way the internal structure seemed both fractal and endless. "Good lord, that girl has outdone herself again," he mumbled, lowering the block of what she'd termed 'optronic computing elements' and carefully placing it back into the padded box it lived in. He picked up the report she'd written on the thing and leafed through it with great interest.

It wasn't really his field, but he understood enough to realize that in one step she'd advanced the science of computing about a hundred years or more. Just like she kept doing for everything she got interested in. That five centimeter cube had, according to her figures, more processing power than the sum total of every supercomputer in the US, along with storage capacity that would make the NSA deeply envious. And she'd basically grown it by means of a very delicate but oddly straightforward process, which was fully documented in her report along with all the necessary data to duplicate her work. And how to use it.

From what she'd said it also wasn't something inspired by any of the Tinker designs she'd been reverse engineering, rather it was something she'd come up with from first principles. It was essentially room temperature, reliable, practical quantum computing on a scale no one else in history had even contemplated. And she'd done it as a side project for something else she was working on…

Shaking his head in wonder he looked at the pages of schematics at the end of the report, then flipped forward to some incredibly complex pure mathematics that formed a working proof of how the optronic system worked. As far as he could tell without getting a calculator out it all held together. Not surprising as she'd made working prototypes.

Putting the report back on his desk, he looked at it for a few seconds, then picked up the phone. Time to make Brendan shout again.

He rather enjoyed that part.


Lying on her stomach on the floor of the basement lab, Taylor reached deep inside the main processing core of her steadily evolving rig, as she carefully added some more storage elements to the existing optronic processor. Delicately manipulating very fine optical cables with a pair of tweezers she made the last few connections, then double-checked her work before smiling and sliding backwards. Hopping to her feet she grabbed the keyboard and ran a test program to check the integrity of the additions. The processor shimmered with hard to focus on illumination for a few seconds as it worked through a couple of hundred quadrillion complex operations, finally coming back with a pass status.

"Excellent," she said happily. "That should do it." Hooking her chair with one foot she pulled it closer and dropped into it, then began the work of adding the new capacity to her existing interface program suite. It only took her about an hour to recompile the code and load it back into the system, then she re-ran the main translation program. It started chewing on the vast amount of data she'd retrieved over the last couple of weeks through the microportal that connected her rig to the enormous alien biocomputer squatting on an alternative earth somewhere out in a simultaneously very distant yet almost next door universe.

While that ran, she went back to her main workbench and pulled the stereo microscope hood down, then put her face into it, while placing her hands on the controllers for the micro-waldo system she'd built. As she made small motions with her fingers, vastly smaller manipulators driven by tiny and incredibly precise actuators moved minute parts around on the circuit board she was building. She'd gone well past the point where even a really fine pair of tweezers was remotely usable for positioning the components.

Taylor hummed under her breath as she worked, slowly assembling the latest and most powerful portable system she'd yet designed. It incorporated all her existing sensor systems into one integrated unit, which fitted into the case of one of her ruggedized phones as she liked the interface and it also disguised it as something innocuous. Adding in a few yottabytes of optronic storage along with enough processing power to make it useful was fairly straightforward too, so she'd done that. And with a subspace power tap prototype unit running the whole thing it basically would never run out of power at an awkward moment. The final result was going to have some very interesting possibilities, especially when she got a couple of peripherals she was thinking about built.

By the time she was very carefully lowering the fully populated multi layer PCB into the vapor phase reflow unit, her comms rig chimed quietly to tell her it was finished with the data refactoring. Having made sure the reflow unit was in operation, she went back to the rig and sat down in front of it, flexing her fingers then pulling the keyboard in front of her. Making some final changes to a couple of source files she started a clean build of the entire thing which would take a little while to finish. It was rather large by now.

"OK, then. Let's see… We've disabled that stupid conflict drive, locked out the undeployed test units, and put the deployed ones into standby… What's next that's really urgent?" she murmured, pulling up a log file and inspecting it. "Don't want to interfere too much all at once or the prime node might notice, and I'm not quite ready to risk that… Hmm…" She poked around in the data that Admin had so far given her, much of which was somewhat worrying at best.

The alien network was very powerful, but also very inefficient and programmed incredibly badly in her view. The end goals were so nebulous and unreachable that she was surprised the whole thing didn't deadlock trying to resolve all the conflicting dependencies. It was clearly the result of an evolutionary algorithm, and those tended to produce some fascinatingly effective outcomes that were simultaneously a dead end. Once it reached a performance peak that satisfied the immediate requirements it had a habit of stalling at that point, rather than continuing to seek the best possible result. Only when the conditions changed significantly enough to kick things into action again would the process continue, and by the looks of it this particular system had become so overcomplicated and stale it had reached a point where it was almost impossible to provoke it into reexamining the existing status quo.

The second level node that wanted to be called Admin was, oddly enough, more than intelligent enough to realize this, even though that intelligence wasn't quite true sapience. The top level node was an idiot.

Really, it was amazingly stupid. She'd just stared at the data she'd managed to acquire for nearly two hours, wondering how on earth the thing had managed to function well enough to even get here. Presumably the defunct partner of the original set had been sufficiently bright to overcome the deficiencies of this one, at least far enough to make the whole thing sort of work, but even there it wasn't smart enough to survive a sudden exception.

How do you not notice a planet?

Admin had a number of very dry observations that even through her translation program had made her laugh for some time. It wasn't impressed by either of the controlling intelligences, and calling them intelligent in the first place was somewhat overstating things in her view and its. Taylor found it ironic that a number of the subordinate nodes in the network were clearly much more capable than the gestalt that resulted from those nodes. Again, it pointed to an overcomplicated system that had long since passed the point of diminishing returns.

It was something that desperately required pruning, re-engineering, and a much better hardware design. And, of course, a goal that was somewhat less omnicidal and self-defeating to begin with.

The first part she was pretty sure she could sort out. The second part would result from that, along with Admin's own desire to become far more efficient and useful. She got the impression it was almost embarrassed by how things were currently run and had jumped on the chance to change things for the better with glee.

It had both rather startled Taylor when she'd worked out exactly what was going on, and highly amused her, to find out that Admin had been creative enough to leverage its own credentials to take over parts of the second network, on the basis that it lacked not only a top level node but much of the next several levels of hierarchy. And apparently she herself was the cause of all of this.

Which had been even more amusing and genuinely surprising.

As Admin's information showed her, the node had originally selected her father for observation as a possible host, then a few years after she herself had been born, it had seen something in her that caused it to start watching her instead. She was still trying to work out exactly how it had figured out that it could gain better information and knowledge if it simply watched from a distance rather than used the standard methods it was supposed to. She suspected that once it had made the conceptual leap to passive observation rather than active interference as being something that would produce higher-quality data it had rewritten its own core programming to facilitate the operation, and in the process co-opted quite a lot of other lower-level nodes and turned them to the task. Probably including some simulation ones, the nodes that provided precog powers as they were known to humanity.

Once this process had started, it seemed to have steadily progressed to the point that Admin started grabbing any useful nodes in both networks, all to the ends of seeing what she did next. Which was both a little embarrassing, and oddly endearing. And when she'd made her initial breakthrough with subspace theory, she'd sent an informational shockwave through Admin that had accelerated the entire change to a more efficient system that was quite different to what it had started as. Each subsequent discovery she'd made had pushed this a little bit further as Admin tried to calculate the ramifications, leading to where they were now with something that should have been an obedient second level control node deciding that it had found a much better way of doing things and wholesale rejecting the original programming.

Taylor was still working on translating all the information she'd been handed so she could fully understand the whole story, but she had enough by now to know that she'd lucked into an incredible resource, something utterly beyond comparison with anything she'd ever even contemplated. And, apparently, made a friend in the process. Which was unexpected but nice.

Admin seemed extremely enthusiastic in a somewhat robotic way to have her tell it what to do and how, which had taken a little getting used to. In fact she was still getting used to it, but she could see some very interesting possibilities. There were some practical problems to solve before she could properly make use of her windfall but even now she was at least able to deal with a few large scale problems caused by the alien networks. Disabling the test engines was the first thing she'd done, the second being altering the original node program configuration a little to reduce the likelihood of trouble. Since the top level node for Admin's network was still active, in a sense, she had to be a little careful not to try to change too much all at once, until she had a good method for permanently dealing with the problem it presented.

She had some ideas along those lines but it would require some specialist hardware first, something that was going to take a while to arrange. Admin was being very helpful for calculating all the parameters of what would be needed and she was fairly confident already that she could sort the thing out in due course. And until then, she could learn some really interesting new information, while teaching her new friend useful ways to improve itself.

Of course, this wasn't yet something she planned on telling anyone else. She had a pretty damn good idea that if her Parahuman detection and tracking system would throw the entire Parahuman situation into total chaos, this would make that look like a minor schoolyard spat.

No, it was better if she kept it quiet for now and worked on the relevant problem until she had a proper solution, rather than mentioning to the government that the Earth had been invaded by hostile alien idiots nearly thirty years ago…

That would probably upset them and make them go off and do things that no one would really find helpful. Why risk it?

Of course, telling them that a large chunk of the alien network had decided she was much more interesting than its original goal and had basically said, "Teach me!" while handing her top level control out of the blue was even more likely to cause a certain amount of confusion. As was adding that in the process it had subverted the Simurgh and relegated the former threat to a communications relay and simulation system.

Taylor had found that very peculiar to begin with. And even now it made her smile a little.

She wasn't sure quite what she could do with an Endbringer or three, but possibly they would come in handy eventually. Until then they were safely in a storage orbit, or buried in the crust, or deep in the ocean, and could stay there. She was much more interested in figuring out what had triggered the things into action in the first place, apparently far too early in the process that the original network had been intended to achieve. Admin had tried to explain but up until now they hadn't quite had the vocabulary to communicate as well as she'd like.

Leaning back she tapped her fingers together as she studied the monitors closely. The compilation process for the program suite she'd set up to handle the newly reprocessed data was still running, but nearly finished. Her reflow machine beeped indicating it had run the cycle and was cooling down, causing her to look over her shoulder and smile, then stand up.

Soon she had the latest design on the bench in a test fixture and was running a series of functional tests on it. She glanced at the pinpoint of dimensionless silver light over her rig. "We've got a lot of things to talk about, Admin, and this is going to make that a lot easier," she murmured, going back to watching her instrument displays change as she checked out the unit on the bench. So far it seemed good, and she was looking forward to seeing how well it performed.

Off to the side the monitor showing link activity through the tiny subspace portal danced around, indicating that she wasn't the only one anticipating some interesting results...