Chapter Twenty-One: Bogey on Approach
March 18, 2011
At 8:16:23 PM, Dragon turned her attention away from PHO, satisfied that everything was in hand. Cyberbullying was at a minimum, and the human moderators were doing a good job of helping her police those types of infractions. Public perception of the Protectorate and other heroes was mostly positive, as usual. Ash continued to use the name Roses of Success to post coded messages, but she allowed that.
She had recently thwarted him from gaining illegal access to a number of networks, but never found him doing anything harmful. Mostly, he seemed to be compiling data and tracking reports of unusual crimes or other odd events.
She'd held off reporting him for a number of reasons. First, the evidence wasn't solid. She knew that it was Ash she kept finding, but he was good enough that was impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Second, Fi talked about with him a sense of nostalgia and fondness, and Dragon didn't want to tell her that her friend had been charged with treason. Finally, he wasn't using the information he gathered to hurt anyone.
Dragon put the question of Ash out of her mind, and ran a status check.
Birdcage: stable. Crane had killed Ingratitude despite her best efforts, but reprisals were unlikely.
Sleeper: no movement.
The Abominations: no update.
Nilbog: no update.
Slaughterhouse 9: no further sightings. Radius of possible location increased to 200 miles around Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Leviathan: last seen entering a deep sea trench in the mid-Atlantic.
The Simurgh: no update. Drifting on same course heading, currently watched by the CSU Berkley Observatory. Projected to drift out of sight in 2.2 hours. Would next be visible from Japan in 7.1 hours, assuming a continued trajectory.
Seven weeks since last Endbringer attack. Four weeks until next earliest attack. More, if they had reverted to the slower, two Endbringer schedule.
With a little breathing room, Dragon turned her main focus to the Endbringer prediction model. Colin hadn't had as much time to work with her recently, but the last time she'd chased Ash out of the FBI records database he had offered her an intriguing suggestion. Instead of predicting the Endbringers as a whole, they could try to predict them each individually.
As soon as he had said it, it felt obvious. But she had only started trying to track the Endbringers after she triggered, and she'd found the work of other tinkers to be clumsy and sub-part work, which she had promptly discarded in order to start fresh. To her, the Endbringers were a single unit, working together on some unified pattern. She had never questioned that underlying assumption, until it was pointed out to her by the hacker.
It was the work of only a couple hours to adapt the current program to track each of the Endbringers, and then a couple more hours to integrate the predictions back together, producing a single result.
Only then did she give the program access to the data file marked "New York Sandbox." They had gathered a large pool of public data spanning the last ten years and compiled it into a single database they called the sandbox. In theory, any program that could predict a future attack, should be able to predict the previous attacks without knowing when and where they had actually occurred. The New York Sandbox was specifically limited to that data which had been available twenty four hours before Behemoth hit New York City. Similar sandboxes existed for each attack, and within each box was the ability to limit the data by availability date.
The result was a list of three cities, with New York in the top slot, and an associated time range for each city. Behemoth's attack fell on the late edge of the range, but it was within the prediction, if barely.
Pleased with the success, she ran the program through the entire Sandbox data file, and compiled the results. The program predicted the correct city every time but one, when the third-choice city was hit instead, and the attack time was correct in about 70% of cases. It was better than anything they had managed previously.
Next, she dug into the statistics of the algorithm, adjusting the sensitivity of the model to various factors and cataloging the resulting accuracies. With minor revisions, she was able to bring the prediction up to 85% reliability. She tried running the program through historical data from the point of view of being four to six weeks out from the attacks. The list of possible cities grew to eight, and the attack range increased from hours to days. The accuracy was less than 40%, but it was still much better than anything they'd had before.
Eager for a potentially useful prediction, she opened the program in the real-time databases she maintained. The next attack wasn't expected for at least four weeks, but something was better than nothing.
The result was confusing:
Simurgh / Canberra, Australia / March 20, 2011 4 PM - 8 PM local time (26 hrs and counting)
Leviathan / Bristol, England / March 20, 2011 7 PM - 2 AM local time (38 hrs and counting)
Simurgh / Szolnok, Hungary / March 20, 2011 6 AM - 3 PM local time (24 hrs and counting)
It had to be wrong. The Endbringers weren't supposed to attack for another four weeks at least, more than that if the destruction of Behemoth had reset the clock back to the two-Endbringer spacing. An accelerated attack schedule could only mean bad things.
Dragon hesitated, torn and unsure what to do with the intelligence. On one hand, the chance to evacuate before a Simurgh attack was game changing. On the other, the program had never actually been tried before. The sandbox data was all real world data, but looking at the results the test didn't feel robust enough.
She tried to verify the Simurgh's location visually, but there was no one scheduled to be watching her at the moment. They'd watched her continuously for the month after Behemoth was destroyed, but she hadn't reacted in the slightest and so the Protectorate had made the cal to relax back to standard protocols. This far out from an attack, it was not unusual for her to be out of range for a couple hours a day. Confirmation was currently impossible.
Dragon couldn't sit on this information, but she couldn't risk sharing it with the wrong person and inciting panic either.
Once the problem was framed that way, the answer became obvious. She called Colin, and he answered so quickly that she was certain he was suited up and working in his labs.
"Dragon? Is something wrong?"
"I'm not sure," she admitted, not wanting to alarm him prematurely. "I was working on the Endbringer program, and… well… take a look."
She sent him the code first, so he wouldn't be prejudiced by the results. She watched as he scrolled through it, and took satisfaction in the little hum he gave as he read it. He only made unconscious noises like that when he was fascinated, and coming from a Tinker like Colin, fascination was a high compliment indeed.
"Have you run this on the sandbox?"
"Yes. The sandbox accuracy was 85%."
"What does it say in real time?" Armsmaster asked idly, as he looked over the sandbox results. Like her, he expected the answer to be weeks away.
She let him continue to verify the accuracy she'd quoted while she told reluctantly admitted, "It says the Simurgh will strike Australia within the next twenty-four hours."
Watching through his computer cam, she could see Armsmaster physically jerk, as shocked by the result as she had been. She showed him the output but he flicked the results to his secondary computer screen so he could go back to the code.
"That can't be right. Has she moved yet?"
Dragon double checked the thread of herself that was trying to contact satellites and observatories. No success so far. "No. She went out of the line of sight of the Berkley observatory an hour ago, and she's not scheduled to be visible from Japan for another four hours. So she could be maintaining position, or she could be on the move. No one can find her either way. It's only been seven weeks."
"We can't afford to do nothing," Armsmaster confirmed her thoughts. "Alert Legend and Director Costa-Brown," he decided authoritatively. Dragon was thankful for his no-nonsense attitude.
"Contact every satellite and observatory and see if we can get eyes on the Simurgh," Colin continued. "Call the weather alert services and ask them to issue a storm warning for Canberra and the surrounding areas. We don't want to create panic, but we need to get people to start evacuating if we can."
A false alert was technically illegal, but she'd go to the Australian government instead and see if they would authorize an exception.
"That seems reasonable." Dragon's sent the majority of her consciousness to compose memos and make calls, but at the last moment she remembered the other reason she had decided to contract Armsmaster first. "Do you know where Contract is?"
"She's living in the Wards' base now. Why?"
"Even if the Simurgh isn't headed for Brockton Bay specifically, it's not unreasonable that she might try to influence Contract indirectly. Given the fragility of her emotional state, the stress of an early Endbringer attack that she can't do anything about might prove to be more than Contract can handle."
"We should ground everyone from Brockton Bay," Colin suggested. "We think we know where the safe limit is for Simurgh exposure, but we can't be completely certain."
"It's useless," Dragon countered the idea, though she wished it was possible to wrap Fi in cotton. Too many times she had cursed her inability to give the poor girl a physical hug. "There's no way to keep her isolated from secondary Simurgh exposure. It's impossible."
"It's only a few capes," Armsmaster protested. "New Wave, Aegis, Intrepid-"
He was missing the point. "-We can ground the PRT heroes, but we'd have to give good reasons to the rest or risk not being seen as impartial and upholding the truce. We can ask New Wave to desist, but it might raise uncomfortable questions and do more harm than good."
After a moment of thought, she amended her previous argument, "But you're right about the PRT capes. We should ground those that will be living and working alongside her. We can't keep her perfectly safe, but we shouldn't temp fate. I'll keep you updated on any changes."
Dragon logged off the call, her main focus already finishing an alert to the Triumvirate and a memorandum to the Australian prime minister. She sent a briefing to the thinkers and precogs on call for the Protectorate and PRT and almost immediately reports started trickling back. No one could say for certain that the Simurgh was not going to attack, and attempts to see the future of Canberra were hazy or flat failures.
Rebecca called her just less than a minute after the alert hit her desk.
"Dragon," the director snapped as soon as the line connected, "send out an S-class alert to the appropriate Protectorate capes. We will raise the general alarm as we get further confirmation, but we can't take any chances."
Dragon was already doing so, convinced by the reports from the precogs as well as the fact that both Armsmaster and she herself had failed to find an error in the coding. It wasn't impossible that they'd both missed something, but it was unlikely. Even as she thought about it, a part of herself was running the code again. The deadline had moved up by half an hour.
A secondary part of herself continued talking to Rebecca while her main focus shifted to a detailed analysis of the programming. "Already done. The Australian Prime Minister is signing a secret order for a weather-based evacuation alert, but he is refusing to make it mandatory."
The program was very sensitive to the crime reports currently being submitted in Canberra, but there was nothing to do but wait for the shift change to be finished. Colin was poking the code, trying to re-balance it, so Dragon re-focused on the conversation with Rebecca, while she also sent a message to the Canadian prime minister and American president so that they could apply pressure to the Australian prime minister.
"Contact other heads of state that we have more dealings with and see if they will throw weight behind us," Rebecca ordered. Dragon didn't bother to reply or confirm that she had already done so, and Rebecca didn't expect her to. Instead, she kept talking. "Make a list of the highest-priority targets and greatest vulnerabilities in Australia. Contact airlines and shipping companies to help with evacuation. Close down all incoming traffic that's not relief, rescue, or combat related. We've never had this much preparation. Let's make it count."
Dragon watching as Rebecca's eyes flicked to the bottom corner of her screen, then Rebecca opened an email from Company. "Tell Armsmaster to keep an eye on Contract, just in case. She's may feel guilt or responsibility, even if she shouldn't." Dragon's image nodded, but again didn't respond.
Company's email speculated that the Simurgh's attack might actually be aimed at Contract, overwhelming her by making her feel helpless. It was a little far-fetched, but it wasn't impossible, because Glenn had told Dragon that Fi herself had said that she hated feeling powerless. The question was whether it was enough to overwhelm her control.
As Dragon was deciding whether it was worth it to make another call to Colin, a different email grabbed her attention. Immediately, she forwarded it to Rebecca, who picked up her office phone and called the observatory.
A few terse words were all it took to confirm that the Simurgh had definitely been sighted. She was not where she would have been if she was maintaining her previous course, but she only drifting, not moving quickly or even directly for Australia. Still, she was moving.
That was all the confirmation that Rebecca needed. She patched the call with the observatory to the intelligence department so that they could continue to track the Simurgh, then turned back to Dragon. "Issue the S-class alert."
"What shall I use as the predicted time of attack?" Dragon asked. Rebecca's brow furrowed, and Dragon elaborated: "As new data becomes available, the range fluctuates by as much as thirty minutes. It moves both sooner and later, but on average the predicted deadline is moving towards us, not away."
"When will we have a stable time?"
Dragon was trying to determine just that, running hundreds of simulations in the sandbox data to see what she could do to increase the accuracy of the range or limit the volatility but wasn't having any luck.
"It's unclear."
"Issue the range as being from now, until an hour and half past the furthest edge that the program has given you. We need to preserve our credibility for the future."
Dragon hesitated, but did as Rebecca had said. If she could work out a more reliable range, she could update the alert later. For now, people needed to know.
She sent a piece of herself down the appropriate protocols, just as a call came in from the Canadian president, and she split her attention to deal with that distraction as well.
Simultaneously, she hung up with Rebecca and patched herself through to Colin's helmet-mounted comm link. After listening for a moment to determine that he wasn't currently talking to anyone, she spoke to get his attention.
"Colin, a college observatory in Hawaii just spotted the Simurgh. She's definitely drifting closer to Australia. We've issued a formal Endbringer alert. How is Contract?"
"She doesn't know yet. Triumph and Aegis were with her until a few moments ago, and both reported that she is doing excellent."
Dragon took that to mean that he had removed Triumph and Aegis from Contract's vicinity. It was probably a good call. She wanted to tell Armsmaster about Company's warning, but she didn't want him to overreact. Colin was very level headed, mostly, but the Simurgh was a lot for anyone to deal with, particularly when she was acting erratically. Dragon decided to issue a softer warning. "Don't be complacent. Fi can turn on a dime, though usually it's from depressed to alright, not the other way around." She hung up before he could press her, and turned her attention to the wider cape response.
The part of her that was talking to the prime minister registered that the conversation was over, and called the American president rather than wait for him to call her.
The main focus of her attention sorted through the responses from movers offering to transport capes onto Australia and civilians off of the island. She set about coordinating the necessary chains of communication and muster points.
She also sent a message to the Toy Box to try to determine what tinkers might be in Canberra that the Simurgh could ping off of.
For a time, Dragon lost herself in the myriad of preparations that she was normally never able to complete before disaster hit. After fourteen minutes, an anomaly broke her concentration.
It was a chat message, pinged off of Rebecca's IP address, but clearly not from her.
Let me talk to Contract.
Before she'd finished the trace, which ended in the same empty fields in Texas, she knew that the message was from Ash. It was too much to hope that he would keep his head down while she was busy and distracted. She briefly diverted enough of her attention to verify that he wasn't already hacking his way toward Fi, but found nothing but his proxy, waiting for a reply. It wasn't totally reassuring, but there was too much to do for her to justify a more detailed search.
She sent back a quick reply.
Dragon: I don't have time to deal with you right now.
Ash: Great. Just let me thru to Contract.
Dragon: Not going to happen. Contract is currently on an informational lock down.
Ash: That won't last. You physically can't isolate her. Patch me through.
Dragon diverted a bit more attention toward the conversation. It was interesting that Ash claimed they couldn't keep Contract ignorant. Not that they shouldn't, but that Contract herself would somehow be able to figure it out.
Dragon: It's just until the attack is actually over.
Ash: If you know, chances are that she already knows too.
Dragon: What do you know that we don't?
Ash: I know that she might be able to destroy the Simurgh. They changed the schedule. Unless she zoned out back in January, the acceleration should give her leverage against the Simurgh.
Dragon: I will see to it that she is informed.
Ash: And play into Simurgh's hands? You're a cape! And a Tinker! Simurgh can see you coming from a mile away.
Dragon: And you think she won't see you?
Ash: Have any of your thinkers or precogs been able to see Contract? No? I didn't think so.
Dragon considered. It could be a bluff. But it might not be. If it wasn't, then they had the chance to end the Simurgh. But that meant trusting Ash. It was too much of a risk to make the decision alone.
Dragon: Wait just a moment.
She called Armsmaster. "Colin, how is Fi doing?"
"No change, as far as I'm aware. She still doesn't know."
"I've been contacted by a friend of hers who thinks Fi might be able to stop the Simurgh. He said the fact that they deviated from the schedule could be enough to let her smite another one."
"How do you know he's a friend?"
Dragon sighed. How to explain the situation with Ash? She hadn't reported it to anyone. "To be honest, I can't be certain. But I have had interactions with him before. He's been leaving her coded messages on PHO and he helped her with the programming for the Sophia recordings. She speaks of him very fondly, although I haven't told her that I've had interactions with him."
"It could be a trap."
"Isn't it worth at least asking her? If the schedule is an opportunity, we should take it."
"But if he isn't being straight with you, we'll have stressed her out with the news of an attack she can't effect."
"I understand why you want to keep her ignorant as long as possible, but she'll find out eventually. This is just a little sooner, that's all. Is it worth missing this opportunity? You need to inform her about the situation, at least." Dragon chose not to mention Ash's claim that she would find out on her own. Colin didn't respond well to being pushed too hard.
Surprisingly, Armsmaster considered that for a moment, then said, "Let me talk to him."
Dragon went to connect Ash's proxy to the comm link, and found he was already eavesdropping. He had probably ghosted in behind her when she hacked Armsmaster's helmet display. Well, it was too late to do anything about it now. Repercussions would have to wait until after the Endbringer was dealt with. Still, she couldn't resist a single jab.
This, right here, is why I don't trust you. Since I don't have time to stop you right now, you might as well talk.
Once the call was connected, she shifted the main focus of her attention back to coordinating capes. As much as it pained her to leave only a small portion of herself supervising Ash when he was deep within the PRT systems, the reality was that the general response was more important right now. She'd deal with Ash later, if it meant landing a suit in Texas to do it.