Signal to Noise

11

"I need a photo."

Colin frowned as he looked at the video feed from Claire's (third person, free floating, infinite resolution) camera. He spent a few moments studying the girl as she hovered above the city, eyes not really focused on anything telling him she was probably deep in her neural interface and not even paying attention to the camera feed from his lab. If she was, she would have likely commented on him just wearing a domino mask instead of his full helmet. He couldn't be in the suit all the time after all.

Contrary to popular belief, Colin actually spent an inordinate amount of time studying human psychology, cold reading, leadership, and any number of fields relating to human relations—that is, dealing with other people. He wasn't a robot. Stoic? Certainly. Subdued in his interactions? Absolutely. He liked to keep to what was professional at all times in his interactions as Armsmaster and some of that may have bled over into his personal life. But he was a person, and he understood people—perhaps better than most. Contrary to Assault's not-so-quiet thoughts otherwise, especially as concerns Dragon's improbably obvious crush, as seemed to be the man's biggest case for Colin being a machine. The fact was, he had a girlfriend already and he didn't want to make their work life awkward.

Claire wasn't all that hard to read. She didn't really try to hide who and what she was under several layers of obfuscation. It was that self-confidence that set her apart, even from many of the adults Colin knew—let alone the Wards her age. When he spoke to her, he sometimes forgot her age—unlike when he worked with Kid Win and it was very, painfully apparent. Claire was driven, focused, and very direct.

Looking at her now, Colin could see clear signs that something was bothering her at a personal level. She was agitated, distracted, her tone was clipped and hard when she spoke. If she had slept any time in the last thirty-six hours, it hadn't been much.

He wanted to ask what was bothering her, but at the same time, the job came first. And while his job may have entailed attempting to help the Wards and provide them an ear to listen when they were troubled, Claire wasn't a Ward and he doubted she ever would be. She just wasn't a good fit for the program. Too independent. Too much bad blood. Too… bright, to tolerate being dimmed by the rigmarole that came with working with the government in an official capacity. Honestly, he kind of envied her freedom…

So instead of asking what he wanted to ask, he asked the obvious question. "Of what?"

"Gearbox. In her civilian identity." Colin raised an eyebrow at that. "I know it's a big ask, but I built a scanner. Ground penetrating stuff. Wide area, high strength, high fidelity. I've got a V.I.. If I feed the image into her, she can scan the whole city and do facial recognition. If she's here, we'll find her. Then, we go kick in doors."

A virtual intelligence? That wasn't actually all that surprising, really—especially if her Tinker specialization was, as she had claimed upon their first meeting, 'Hero: yes.' One that could take in information from a scanner that could process the entire city and find a single face among a crowd of hundreds of thousands? The hardware running it would have to be beefy. Which told him a lot about just what sort of resources she had available if she could spare those sorts of processing cycles and expect to get results in a timely manner.

He pulled up a picture of Sheryl Bailey out of costume. The original was a picture of himself and Sheryl in their civilian identities, but he had cropped everything but Sheryl, scrubbed the file of any identifying information, and given it to Dragon and the rest of the local PRT—along with the police, having filed a missing person's report for Sheryl without breaching her identity as Gearbox. He sent the file and watched as Claire blinked and her eyes focused. Her eyebrows went up before turning to Colin and wagging. "Good taste."

Colin sent her a raised eyebrow in return and Claire nodded, eyes going unfocused again. Based on some observed interactions with Panacea in public, given that neither of them actually had civilian identities, he had speculated that she was bisexual, if not homosexual. Her reaction nudged his estimate closer towards the latter than the former. He had no personal interest or care either way, but knowing what her (or anyone's) potential triggers were or who they were likely to react more favorably or negatively towards was a good policy to have. Heterosexual men tended to react more to seeing women in danger than homosexual men or heterosexual women, for instance. Likewise, people were more likely to open up to someone they could potentially have sexual interest in. It was just human nature.

That it hadn't worked for Dragon during Claire's… incarceration in violation of protocol, because it wasn't actually ruled as unlawful and was settled out of court, was an aberration. One he now knew the reason behind, if Dragon truly was an A.I. as Claire seemed to be convinced she was. It wouldn't be a stretch to assume that Claire had, at the time, believe that Dragon was sent to handle her by playing 'good cop.' Someone sympathetic, but who couldn't actually do anything about her predicament except report things upwards—where it would be soundly ignored. If Claire knew then, she could have assumed that Dragon was actively working with them to try to get her to capitulate, thus would return any attempts at interaction with disdain at best, hostility at worst.

"Alright. I'm going to run some scans. I'll get back to you when I have something." Claire paused, before quietly adding, "Or if scans come back negative. Azazel out."

Colin turned back to his work, but was interrupted again only moments later. "Hey, Colin. How, uh, how are you holding up?"

"I'm… fine, Tess."

The mousy brunette (she pretended to be?) frowned (emulated a frown?), biting her lips in (simulated?) worry.

That was the problem with A.I.. The constant doubt over whether their reactions were real or not. If they weren't reading whoever they were talking to and planning things a hundred steps in advance. Colin wanted to give Tess, his friend regardless of what she was, the benefit of the doubt… but there was doubt.

"How's the search going?"

Colin shook his head. "Nothing so far. Azazel just called. She's developed a ground penetrating scanner and she's going to scan the city and use facial recognition to try to find Gearbox."

Tess raised an eyebrow at that, looking surprised. "Really? The processing power alone… and then actually having a program smart enough to differentiate human faces in any kind of realistic timeframe…"

"She has a V.I.."

"Oh?" Tess's eyes widened, her mouth opening slightly. "Really?" Colin nodded. "Amazing." She considered him for a moment before nodding. "I'm going to call her and volunteer my help. I've got some servers just idling right now, so it'd be a shame to let them go to waste, you know?"

"Mm."

"I'll talk to you later, Colin."

He nodded again and she disconnected. For being a somewhat frightening artificial intelligence, she pretended to be a human rather well. Her intentions couldn't be clearer if she had sent them to him in text format.

Colin wished Claire luck. She was going to need it. Dragon could get… very enthusiastic sometimes.

It would be better to say she could be a bit much.

Dispersing the disk drones, I let Enola manage their flight around the city and scanning patterns. A timer popped up in my field of view, counting down to time of completion for the scan—a little over two hours. "Good enough," I sighed.

Kicking over, I went limp, letting myself just float—the effect wasn't unlike being in water, really. It was amazingly relaxing, just staring up into the overcast sky like this, floating over the city where nothing but helicopters and the handful of flying capes in this shithole of a city could even reach me, let alone bother me. Even the birds—an automated process pinged and a narco-laser shot out, zapping yet another unwanted avian approaching my position—especially the birds couldn't reach me here, with clear lines of sight on every approach for my targeting computer. I could just let my mind wander. Maybe drift off and take a nap until the scan finished…

Fucking Taylor. Fucking Amy. Fucking Lisa. Fuck—

My phone interface rang, signaling a video call. Fucking Dragon.

But best (Worm) A.I waifu hadn't done anything to piss me off and I had been a shit to her when both of us were in a bad position, so I owed it to her to try to make up for that. So, I picked up the call and tried to hide the sigh in my voice as I asked, "What's up, Dragon?"

"I just spoke with Armsmaster. He told me you were scanning the city for Gearbox. Do you… would you like some help? I have some extra servers I could offload some of the data or processing to, if you'd like."

I shook my head. "No point. The scan and processing would be done by the time the data made it over there, let alone by the time you had a chance to look through it all."

"Wow, that's pretty amazing," she said, and I could hear the leading tone in her voice.

Snorting quietly, I dug into my neural interface and wrote up a short summary of the specs for my ever growing light-based quantum computer, before sending it over. A few moments later, a believable time for a human to have speed-read it, Dragon whistled. "Wow! This is just, amazing. How are you keeping this sustained?"

"A carrier wave that creates an energy pattern that forces it to loop."

"Wait, wait," Dragon frowned. "This… this isn't actually running in hardware, is it?"

"Nope," I grinned. "Hardware would only slow it down. It's running on an energy construct. Most of my tech is. I can attach it to hardware, but there are definite losses in performance."

Dragon was silent for several moments before asking, "Armsmaster said you had a V.I.."

"I do. Enola's managing all my stuff. She can emulate people, but she's still just a fancy script. Not true A.I., even if she can learn. The Protectorate frown on that. Not that I give a fuck what they frown on anymore."

"Why not just make an A.I., if you don't care what the Protectorate think?"

I shrugged. "Because I didn't want to create life, only to enslave it, or worse—doom it to live on Earth Beta. If I made a cute little A.I. daughteru, I couldn't imagine forcing her to live through this shithole, especially not when her pa—mama could die any time some asshat with more power than brains get a bit uppity. I'd want to travel places with her, show her new things, you know… have fun."

"Haha," Dragon chuckled quietly. "But… it would just be a machine, right? She couldn't really feel. She wouldn't really be alive. She'd just be ones and zeroes. She wouldn't have a soul."

"Not sure about that last part," I nodded. "Maybe a requirement to acquire a soul is being in meat-space. Maybe not. I've got no way to objectively measure and quantify a 'soul.' Hell, maybe we live in one of those horrible deterministic universes where souls don't exist. Kinda fucking doubt it though. As for the rest… well, when you get right down to it, humans are just meat computers passing electro-chemical signals. If you're religious and believe we were created by a higher power, that we were made in some god's divine image, that's fine—it doesn't contradict the fact that our divine spark, consciousness, our soul, is running on a wetware platform made of seventy percent water and some meat. So, what if I emulated wetware in software? If I perfectly emulated a human brain, an entire human body, wrote an A.I., and told it to run in virtual meat-space?"

Cracking one golden, glowing eye open I studied Dragon's face in my video feed. She looked unsure. Worried. "Let's talk about something else."

"Okay," she agreed. "How are you, Claire? I mean, after… everything."

I hummed quietly. "Feels good to be vindicated. I'm free to wear my," my throat caught and I shook my head, swallowing. "My own face." My tone turned annoyed as I admitted, "Kinda bummed that it's either wait until summer for the contractors to rebuild my place or buy a new one. I liked that house. Spiteful bitch didn't have to burn it down."

"What about the building in the docks?"

"That's not a home, Dragon. It's a hideout. A base. A place to meet for work and sleep if I needed to crash after a long day and was feeling too lazy to go home. Or to hide from the authorities."

Dragon hesitated, before quietly asking, "Past tense? And, if you'll excuse me, you look… like crap. Have you been sleeping?"

I frowned, realizing I'd let that slip. With a quiet sigh, I nodded. "Had an argument with Amy. Kinda turned into a big blowup. I left to give her some space and time to think about things. Haven't really slept worth a shit since. Too much on my mind."

"Do you… want to talk about it, Claire?"

"Not really," I muttered.

"Okay. I'll—"

"But."

Dragon paused. She had been willing to back off, but she had also offered to listen. She wasn't connected to the situation. She wasn't even human, really. She had no frame of reference… but she was also a pure digital consciousness, so maybe…

Taking a breath, I engaged my thrusters and climbed up above the cloud layer. ECM, baffling, and other anti-eavesdropping tech spooled up and locked me in a little bubble of privacy. "What I'm going to say doesn't go beyond us." And Saint, but he would probably be dead soon, or in jail. Either/or.

"Of course."

"When I triggered, it came with more than just a nifty power. It came with an entire lifetime's worth of memories and experiences." That was a lie, but she didn't need to know that. No one did, nor would they believe the whole truth. The next best thing was the small lie. Holding up my hands, I hefted the left. "On the one hand, sixteen years of experiences as Claire." I lifted the right. "On the other, thirty-odd as someone from an entirely different Earth." I brought them together to illustrate the point. "If you were being nice, you could call it a personality merger. If you were being honest, I subsumed Claire. It's not like there's two of us in here fighting for control. I haven't Mastered her. I ate her. Became her. I am Claire, but I'm more me. She's… a drop in the bucket. A big drop, but not enough to come out as the dominant personality. Especially when she wasn't really that dominant or assertive to begin with."

Dragon studied me for a few moments before asking, "So, who are you?"

"Was. Can't really say I am any more," I shrugged. "My name was John. Now, well, I suppose I'm Claire."

"So you were a man."

"Yep."

The A.I. hummed. "What's that like, going from one to the other?"

"Weird," I deadpanned. "Do not like. I'm still getting used to the body, to seeing this face in the mirror. Claire didn't really have mood swings and was a fairly emotionally subdued girl, which I'm thankful for. Other than a few ups and downs here and there, it hasn't been the rollercoaster ride I was dreading. Claire didn't have sexual preferences, before me. I like women exclusively. But generally, the kind of women I'm attracted to don't like other women—which is fair, everyone has their preferences."

Dragon softly asked, "Is that what you and Amy fought about?"

"Yeah. Lisa ran her mouth. I get it, her power makes her feel like she's a smartypants and hot shit, but fuck sake, get some fucking self-restraint. Here, you tell me what you think."

Pulling up the video, I played it.

"So, we can just… dump this into the pocket dimension and it'll be safe?"

"All tests show yes, master," Enola confirmed.

"Awesome. Let's do it, then," I agreed. Pressing my hand against Enola's heart, I opened a portal and pushed it inside. "So?"

"Everything appears to be running as normal—"

"Breakfast~!"

"Coming!" I called back. That takes care of my biggest vulnerability, and the biggest possible liability to Brockton Bay. No baby star waiting to go up if containment fails.

I hurried to the sink and washed my hands, before joining the others. We sat around the kitchen table, eating donuts and drinking coffee or cocoa. Even Taylor had earned herself a donut, now that she was showing some gains.

"So, I figured that whole 'no periods' thing out. I pushed the update to your watches. Also, it acts as free birth control—no eggs being released means no chance of pregnancy. So, you're welcome. It's still on you if you get the clap though."

"Ew," Taylor pulled a face.

Amy shrugged. "Seen worse."

"Sweet~!" Lisa chirped, getting up and pulling me into a hug against her modest chest. They were decent tits. Not much to show in her tee-shirt this morning, but in that purple cat suit? I would give my left nut, if I still had one, to push her down and rip that thing open with my teeth—

"Waaaait," Lisa murmured, pulling away and looking at me critically.

"What? Donut on my face?"

"Oh my shit, really?!"

I sighed. "Lisa. Either spit it the fuck out or—"

"You're a man!"

I blinked. Taylor blinked. Amy… laughed. "Nope! Not even close. I checked pretty thoroughly a few times."

"Yeah, I think your power is on the fritz, Lisa," Taylor rolled her eyes. "Trust me. She sleepwalks. Naked."

"I do not," I denied automatically. "Anymore."

"Mm no," Lisa shook her head. "Nope, she's a man. One hundred percent. Probably some power bullshit, but even if she's got all the bits and pieces on the outside, on the inside she's a dirty old man."

Amy sent me an amused look. "Yeah, I know. She told me."

Lisa looked between the two of us and something on my face must have given me away. "Oh. Oh. She did tell you. She meant it literally and you took it metaphorically."

"What? Bull—" Amy paused as she saw I wasn't laughing. I was sending Lisa a very annoyed look, however. "Claire?"

I shrugged. "She's not wrong. She's missing some context, but she isn't wrong. Short version, I remember being a guy on another Earth before 'waking up' here as Claire. But I also remember being Claire. They sort of merged, but I'm more one than the other. The 'me' with more experience came out on top. It's not like I tried to hide it. It just didn't seem important, and I'm kind of still working through the whole thing myself."

"But you're," Amy winced.

"I'm a dirty old man trapped in a girl's body? Yes. Well, depends on what you define as 'old.' Thirties isn't that old."

Taylor looked between the three of us before asking, "Wait, so you're a trans—"

"No." I cut her off swiftly and decisively enough that she flinched. "I was a man one day and woke up as a girl the next. I lived an entire life as a man, and then an entire other life as a girl from birth until whatever happened. Neither John nor Claire had gender identity disorder or dysphoria, body dysphoria, or any other mental illness. We didn't believe we were 'born in the wrong body.' Neither of us desperately wanted to be the opposite sex, other than the usual curiosity of 'I'd totally swap for a day if given the chance.' If there was an 'us' to separate, or a way to go back to my own male body, I would in a heartbeat."

"But you lied. You tried to hide it—"

Turning back to Amy, I shook my head. "No. As I said, I'm still processing this shit and figuring out what it means for myself. I was planning to tell you eventually—"

Amy stood up suddenly, knocking her chair back from the table and rushing away, towards the back of the building. I sighed quietly, then stood up and followed. "Amy, I'm sorry."

"Go away!"

"Amelia. Come on, hear me out—"

"Fuck off! Claire, or John, or who—whatever the fuck you are!"

With a quiet grunt, I turned away from the door to my own bedroom where Amy had locked herself in. "Alright. Call me when you're ready to talk." I wanted to say worse, to tell her that she was acting childish and she should just talk to me like a normal fucking person, but… there was no way that would get through her head now. It would only antagonize her. So I left.

Besides, with everything I owed her, Amy had a free pass for a lot of leeway. Especially when it came to things that screwed with her worldview.

"You should have told us," Taylor began as I entered the kitchen. "I mean, I kind of get why you didn't. I know what it's like to not be ready to talk about stuff. But I still feel kind of… not okay with the whole thing."

I wanted to call her a fucking hypocrite. To tell her that she would never have told her father that she was a cape, until it came out in a way she couldn't cover up—perhaps one of the worst possible ways. But again, I bit back on the impulse. Instead, I said, "I'm leaving for a while to give Amy some space. Continue operations as normal. The machines are all set up to produce pylons. The former dockworkers don't really need oversight there beyond making sure they're safe while they're putting them out. Once you've got the area secure, you and Lisa get together and work out what to do about the ferry. If something comes up, call me."

"…So you're just running away."

I twitched. A full body twitch. Lisa leaned away as it felt like every muscle in my body clenched for a moment. Taking a breath, I forced myself to relax and answer in a calm tone. "No, Taylor. I'm walking away until the two of you are ready to talk. If I stick around, it's just going to stay fresh."

I left the kitchen. A moment later, little feet pitter pattered down the stairs after me. "Hey, so, uh… sorry?"

"God damnit, Lisa," I turned around and growled at the blonde, moving up into her personal space and putting my finger in her face. She flinched, but didn't back away. "It's a fucking compulsion with you, isn't it?"

Quietly, the girl admitted, "Yeah, a bit."

"I was beginning to wonder what I was going to do, now that I didn't have the law breathing down my neck. But here's Sarah to the rescue, making sure to keep my plate topped up with shit! Thanks for that. Really."

Lisa winced. "I wasn't trying to. Really. It surprised me. My power just sort of pointed it out. That the way you look at women is, well, predatory. Like you're sizing up every last one of us. I don't mind it. As much as I joke, I don't really do sex or relationships since I got my powers. Although, I do definitely owe you sexual favors for the whole 'no periods' thing."

"Are you going to enjoy it?"

"Not really," she admitted. "Too much information. Too distracting. Or worse. It just ruins the experience. Like, I can tell you'd probably be a great lay from the way you and Amy—" seeing my face, she winced again, "Right. I'm sure you'd get me off, but it wouldn't really be great. And there would be no emotional attachment, so…"

I palmed my face. "Right. Gotcha." Sighing, I sent her a glare. "You suck. Find a way to fix this."

"Not sure I can."

"Try. Until then, keep shit running for me, would you? You know what I want. I'm going to… focus my efforts on finding Gearbox."

And with that, I left.

Dragon made a face as she sighed. "Well… it could have gone worse?"

"Thanks, Dragon."

The A.I. opened her mouth, made a show of looking unsure for a moment, before nodding to herself. "Tess."

"Hm?" I asked, pretending I didn't already know.

"You never really got a chance to have a private, secret identity. Even without the eyes, I think that, because of the Winslow situation, you would have likely been taken in by the PRT anyway had you stayed—given Shadow Stalker's animus. I don't think you'll abuse the information, so… my name is Theresa. Just Tess is fine though."

"Tess," I agreed.

After a moment, she sighed. "I can't pretend to have a lot of experience with relationships. I'm uh, kind of a shut-in, you know?"

"Hikki-NEET dragon girl."

"Hey!" Tess giggled. "Hikki, yes. Absolutely. NEET? That's completely untrue. I'll have you know I'm gainfully employed."

"Really? That's great. You can be my sugar mama then and pay for all my Tinkering when I start messing with hardware."

Tess's face emulated such a look of stupefaction that it was, quite frankly, adorable. "Buh?"

"Mhmm! Absolutely. It'll be great. I'll Tinker up a full-dive virtual environment and you'll never have to leave your house any time you want to have a booty call. No muss, no fuss. Just neat, clean digital pen-1-5 in vag-0-0 fun timez."

Tess blushed, before her eyes narrowed in a mock glare. "I think you're missing the equipment for that, Claire."

"Hm? Oh, no. The penis is for you."

"Wut."

I laughed and took a screen grab of her face. "I'm posting this to PHO. Gonna send it in to tin_mother to get it set as my profile pic."

"…I'm not verifying that for you."

"Fuckin' knew it!"

Tess hesitated a moment before asking, "But uh, do you think it would be possible to make some kind of virtual environment…?"

I shrugged. "Sure. Alien space whale backed fiat bullshit pretty much guarantees it. Want to work on it together later? We could test it out together~."

Sending me a smile, she nodded. "Sure. That sounds fun. And it'll take your mind off of… well."

"Kinda defeating the point of taking my mind off all this if you point out that it'll take my mind off of it."

"Sorry."

I waved her off. Opening up a new screen with my neural interface, I sent Tess an invite to a shared workspace. She raised an eyebrow, but accepted. "Alright, now I was thinking we could start with…"

Time flew by in a haze of shared Tinkering as the two of us worked together to build something amazing, laying the foundations for a full-dive virtual reality system that would work just as well for humans as it would for theoretical 'digital entities.' Tess had no trouble keeping up at all, though I could see areas where her thinking was surprisingly non-linear for being an A.I..

The project started under the assumption that it would be running a quantum computer on an energy construct framework instead of physical hardware, so it would have all the processing power it would ever need to run. As we worked, we ran ideas by each other. I already had a ridiculous fidelity scanner, so it should be more than possible to just scan in whatever we wanted right down to the molecular level and reconstruct it. From there, scans of the human body and how it interacted with various stimuli would get us the basic senses.

Kinda wish I could tap Amy for this. Having a bio-Tinker check over our work would be nice, I mused, before shaking the thought off.

Before I knew it, however, an alert beeped and I looked away from our work to see that Enola had completed the scan of the city and come up with results. A map popped up, along with a view (rendered from the scanners) of the inside of what looked to be an old Brockton Bay cistern—part of the sewer system that looked to have been shut off, drained, and bricked up from most of the system. Inside were people—lots of people. Forty-one prisoners in cages they had to stoop to sit in, in addition to fourteen people wandering around with guns. Finally, two forms highlighted—one in red, the other in blue. Blue was clearly Gearbox—naked, but for a hospital gown, strapped to a table and being pumped full of what Enola identified as enough sedatives to keep a horse down. Red was an unknown. Likely Chinese, but not wearing any identifying markings. He stood over Gearbox with his hand on her head, while her eyes rolled rapidly.

"Oh fuck," I breathed as I realized what was happening. I was witnessing a Master at work.

"Claire?" Tess asked, but my mind was already working over the possibilities.

Clearly an ABB operation. Human trafficking. But they've got a Master down there. Do Lung and Ryuu know? I don't see how they couldn't. Who's this chuckle-fuck work for? I mean, there are lots of possibilities there, but… could be C.U.I.? Lung, canonically, hated the C.U.I. because they tried to mind-fuck him, if I recall correctly. So… what if they succeeded this time, and those two are actually just puppets themselves? Could be, but I'd think we would have seen more people disappearing.

I sent a mental command to Enola to scour missing persons reports in Brockton Bay since Lung and Ryuu had shown up. But that was back burner stuff. I didn't have time to speculate on that when Gearbox was being Mastered right this second.

I pulled up a scan of the area and went over my options…