Samsara

by thejarl7166

no

1. Tenjin

Tenjin

"Hey Charles," Brock said, in a false-friendly tone. "Tell us about the computers at that fancy school of yours."

It was getting easier to tune him out and keep working— this wasn't anything new. He overheard me talking to the computer teacher after class shortly after transferring in. Mrs. Knott wanted to know where I was in the curriculum, which turned into a conversation about how they taught CS at my previous school.

"Charles. Hey, Charles." Brock continued. "Charles, I need help here. Are you too much of an elitist asshole to help me out?"

"Careful Brock," I said. "Your vocabulary's showing."

He smiled, and I face-palmed. Should have kept ignoring him.

The guy on the other side of Brock made a comment, but I was able to focus on the work again. I almost had it. A battered phone sat to the side of my workstation. A few years old, but still better than any device on the market. I'd found it in one of the pawn shops over near Sawtelle, buried in a shopping cart that overflowed with old phones and pagers. Nothing indicated that it came from a PRT Agent or a cape, but I knew. An… impression of the design and manufacture that hit me, as soon as I saw it.

"Nah, Charles ain't like that," Brock said. He was careful to speak loud enough to be heard by everyone but the teacher. "Charles wouldn't hurt anyone. He's a good asian. Does math and computers and shit. Probably watches cartoons. You know."

Just another aspect of my new life to get used to. I removed the back of the phone and attached a custom wire harness. Just a modified USB cable, but whatever got the job done. The first step had been getting the phone to take a charge. Easy. Less than a day, even with improvised tools. Getting around the security… that required more time. And a new operating system. From scratch.

My latest attempt finished… compiling, for lack of a better term. I transferred it from Winslow's old computer over to the phone, the wiring harness allowing me to access the storage directly. Initiated the boot sequence.

"Isn't that right," Brock was back to his false-friendly tone. "Charles. Buddy. Pal."

A mechanical dragon flickered on the phone's screen before giving way to scrolling system messages. Which halted, hard-frozen again. But that was the work. Every failed attempt, every error, taught me something.

The plastic chair Winslow used in their computer lab creaked as I leaned back. I kept one hand on the phone, playing back the latest boot attempt in my mind. My eyes traced a brown stain that ran across the ceiling tiles, to where it intercepted an ossified wad of purple gum directly above me. Lovely.

It was the work of moments to modify my hacked together OS again. Longer to compile, but it was still a minimal bit of code. Transfer back to the phone.

"Hey Charles," Brock leaned close, glancing at the terminal window on my computer. "You think your mom was fucking your dad for his money? You know, because at least his bank account was a decent size?"

He laughed, and I relaxed my jaw before my teeth started to hurt. I wanted— so badly — to do something. To hit him, to stand up and shout. To pull my arm back and slam my elbow into his face. But that's what he wanted. I'd be the one to get in trouble, lose what little time I had with a functioning computer.

"You think your mom regretted fucking her cousin for the fun of it?" I replied, equally soft. "You know, when she had you?"

His smug smile faded and he stood, clenching his fists. I forced myself to stay seated. The same thing worked in reverse— any blows would be welcome. He'd get kicked from Intro Comp, and I'd have some peace. After a moment I smiled up at him. Mouthed the words.

"Mr. Larson!" Ms. Knott appeared. "You've completed the assignment?"

Brock's fists made a popping noise, but he didn't hit me. "No."

"Then I suggest you get back to work," Ms. Knott said. "If you wish to remain in this class."

Ms. Knott walked away after making sure Brock got back to work. I switched to a different terminal window and put together a quick script. Winslow's computers, even the administrative machines, were all on the same network. I executed the script, and Brock's computer blue-screened. He slammed his hands on the desk, swearing.

I smiled, and then got back to work.

The phone booted up again. Dragon logo gave way to system logs, which scrolled by faster than most people could read. It froze earlier than last time. But that too, was OK. More information.

By the end of the week, I had it cracked. Nothing fancy, just a command prompt and input handler— input without a keyboard was deceptively hard. But now I had an OS running on bullshit-grade hardware. A computer of my own, one I could use whenever I wanted.

"Holeeeee shiiiiiiit," Greg said, leaning over my shoulder.

I sighed.

Ms. Knott had moved Brock's seat, after he continued to have problems with his computer. Crashes at first, and then inappropriate web-sites opening countless windows. My new neighbor, Greg, was actually pretty cool. Or at least, friendly in a way I liked.

Greg also understood some of what I was doing with the phone. Nothing… incriminating. He probably thought I was just good at programming. A misconception I encouraged.

"Hey…" I pulled up another terminal window and nodded towards Brock. "Watch this."

While Greg laughed at Brock's latest troubles, I carefully reattached the case to the phone and packed up my cobbled-together wiring harness. Now that I could work back at the group home, or wherever I wanted really, things would speed up. Bootstrapping a meaningful tech base without money was hard. I'd almost given up, which would have meant joining the Wards. It was the safe option, but there was way too much oversight, and I didn't really trust the PRT. Not after what happened to Dad.

"You are out of warnings." Mrs. Knott was staring down at Brock.

"It wasn't me!" Brock leapt to his feet, glaring at the teacher, fists clenched.

Mrs. Knott backed up a step. "Get out of my classroom."

"Happy to, you butch bitch." Brock stuffed his notebook into his backpack.

Mrs Knott stared at him, face cold. Greg was shaking with laughter, which was kind of unfortunate— it wasn't that funny. His laughter also pulled Brock's attention, and he paused near us on his way out of class.

Brock narrowed his eyes at Greg, but addressed me instead. "I know it was you."

"No idea what you're talking about Brock." I smiled. "Buddy. Pal."

He smiled back. "Better watch yourself, chink."

"I'm half Japanese, moron." I couldn't help but correct. At least Greg had stopped laughing.

Greg stayed quiet until we walked to the cafeteria for lunch. While I was still worried about Brock's maybe-threat, Greg started complaining about Winslow's food. And then he was back to normal topics. Like how the Protectorate was really a force for evil.

"… reprogrammed Sphere because he was trying to make the world better, why would she leave the PRT and Protectorate alone?" Greg asked, triumphantly. "Q.E.D. PRT and Protectorate are not making the world better. Therefore—"

"Sounds legit." I cut him off before he could really get started.

A girl gaped at us before picking her tray up and leaving to find another table. Oh well, it wasn't like I could be ]more of a social pariah.

"Greg," I said, nodding towards the girl that had left. "Maybe tone it down?"

"What? Pretend everything's alright?" He shrugged. "Anyways, she's always annoyed. I tried talking to her before—"

"Sure Greg."

The rest of the day, I worked on the phone. My power worked in bursts, accumulated effort and iteration would reach a tipping point and then suck my mind down to a deeper level of understanding. Of Knowing. The hardware of the phone, and how to access it, becoming obvious in a way I couldn't even conceive of just a few hours before.

The final bell rang, and I joined the press of people eager to escape Winslow for the day. Normally, I'd go to the Library and use a computer if one was open. Study CS and EE texts if none were. But now I had a computer of my own, so just started walking back to the group home the city had put me in.

I was halfway there when Brock slammed into me.

"What the…" I climbed back to my feet.

Brock wasn't alone, and his friends were even bigger than he was.

"Hurry it up." One of them said.

"Aye." Brock grinned and settled into a boxing stance.

It wasn't pretty. His friends just pushed me back whenever I tried to make a run for it, and when I managed to land a punch of my own, Brock hit me back harder. It didn't take long until I was curled up on the ground. Arms trying to protect my head.

"You're just so fucking clever, eh?" Brock punched again. "Still think you're better than me? Slant eyed little bitch."

"Dude," Someone else said. "Take his shit and let's go."

And they did.

I uncurled sometime after they left. Rolled onto my back and stared at the sky, taking stock. A few loose teeth, but nothing broken. All my stuff was gone, of course. Backpack. Books. Wallet, with my complete and total life savings of three dollars. Bus pass.

Phone.

I wondered if there was anything to learn from this. But unlike with technology, nothing came to me. I sighed, climbed to my feet, and started walking to the group home.

My caseworker was waiting at the entrance when I limped down the steps. A skinny man with curly brown hair and the unfortunate name of Cassidy Brown. PRT lawyers had come after my Dad, seized everything we had that could be seized. Everyone, myself included, were surprised when my mom took everything else and disappeared. The PRT had seemed somewhat confused as to what to do with me when no further relatives showed up.

Massachusetts Department of Children and Families had no such confusion. They worked through a checklist and away I went. Plucked out of a wonderful school with a tuition I no longer afford and whisked away to the nearest municipality. Assigned to a group home, and allocated a case worker.

Said case worker, Cassidy, frowned at me.

Hh made the appropriate noises of concern and pulled out a chair before talking with the people that ran the home. The chair hurt, but it was better than standing. I sat there and tried to think what to do next. Losing the phone was more painful than the beating.

A catchy theme-song, overloud, boomed out of the TV. The younger boys staying at the home were gathered around the old flat-screen. Watching some Protectorate propaganda cartoon. Good times.

Cassidy returned and sat down opposite from me, Pulled out a file from his briefcase. "Do you want to go to the hospital or something?"

"Could I even pay for that?" I asked.

His head stayed in the same position as he looked up at me with his eyes. "We've talked about this Charles. The state covers medical. Basic medical."

"I'm fine," I said.

"Good. Perhaps you can tell me why you were fighting?" He continued to read the file as he talked.

I leaned back in the chair and winced as it pressed into my upper back. "Does it matter? Do I need to worry about incriminating myself?"

"I'm not your enemy Charles. I get that you don't want to be here. But try to understand that there are thousands of people that would be thankful for what you have."

I made a show of glancing at my bare feet, socks stained from the long walk back to the home. "What is it that I have?"

"A safe place to sleep, a system that cares about you. Your health, if you can stop getting into fights— "

"It was hardly a fight," I said. "Three of them jumped me."

"Your knuckles." He gestured towards my hands. "And can you honestly say you did nothing to provoke them?"

I put my hands in my lap. "So I'm what, supposed to roll over and let them wail on me and take my stuff?"

He sighed and gave me a disappointed look. One of the workers of the facility called out that dinner was ready, and then turned off the TV when none of the younger kids moved. Samson, a boy one year behind me, moseyed out of the sleeping area and sat down at the table. All the other older boys were probably out on the town. The group home was pretty lax.

Cassidy looked back down at his case file. "These spots of conflict, this inability to cooperate with your classmates. The lack of respect you show your teachers— it doesn't look good."

"My grades are flawless." I countered.

"You had a privileged education until recently" He said, one eyebrow raised. "I'd be shocked if your grades weren't flawless."

He liked to talk about privilege. "As you say. Sir."

He stared at me again, waiting for me to say more. The tactic only worked for couple of times, but he still trotted it out.

"Right." He checked the file again. "See if you can't get get along with your peers a little better, hmm?"

I nodded.

Everyone else was sitting down to eat. Instant rice, beans, and something that came out of a can today. All neatly fitted into separate compartments on those molded trays. It was, at least, somewhat nutritious.

"What is it that you want, Charles?" Cassidy asked.

"A home would be—" I started to say.

"Yes, of course." He cut me off. "But more… long term. Do you want to be a fireman? A construction worker? Do you wish to go to college?"

I wanted to change the world. Make something real, sell it to people. Get rich while making things better for everyone else at the same time. To win, and then to help others win. Show them all that it didn't need to be a zero-sum game.

"Yes sir. College is my goal," I said.

"Very good, ambitious!" Cassidy smiled. "Well, as discussed, your grades are good. You need to consider extra-curriculars though. Perhaps volunteering? Or have you considered running for student council?"

I conveyed what I thought about running for student council with a look. "Does Winslow even have a student council?"

He coughed. "Yes, well, you get the idea."

"Actually, do you know of any internships, or even part time jobs—" I started to ask.

The beep of his watch interrupted me. He looked down at it, as if in surprise, and started to pack up. "Looks like our time is up! I'll leave you with some pamphlets—" He stood, and snapped his old briefcase shut. "And I'll see you in two weeks!"

After he was gone I extracted myself from the chair and limped over to the kitchen for leftovers. One of the caretakers tsked when I told him about my shoes, and my bus pass, but he scrounged up some footwear for me to choose from. Too tight or too loose. I chose too loose.

I wasn't likely to find another piece of tech comparable to the phone Brock took. Or have the money to buy one if I did. And having tasted progress, how much everything seemed to move forward, I itched to start working again. I had lost the hardware, but I still had all the knowledge it gave me.

One of the caretakers looked up in concern as I headed back up the stairs and out into the night, but he didn't stop me. Some of what Cassidy said was true, I really should be more thankful. The group home wasn't luxurious, but it was warm and safe, and they fed us.

Just… living wasn't a bad option. There was no need to hurry. So long as Brockton Bay didn't fall into the ocean, I could just work within the system. Get some volunteer hours in, maintain my GPA. Suck up to the teachers. Take my chances with a scholarship. Try to ignore my power until I had the freedom and the capital to do something with it.

I plodded through the night, back towards Winslow. Careful not to meet anyone's eyes.

One of the gangs would take me. But I wanted to make things better, not keep the current system going. And it was hard to know if a gang would let me do what I wanted, or just lock me down in a warehouse to make weapons. Or string me out on drugs like Squealer. Yeah, the gangs were out.

And then there was the Wards. The best option on paper. Safe. Just had to do what they tell me to. But that'd be building the system up. Greg was crazy, going on about the PRT and Protectorate being some big conspiracy, but he was right about them being ineffective. Or at least, ineffective at anything other than stopping people that challenged the status quo.

I trudged past Winslow and continued further into the bad side of town. Well, one of them. North and east, the too loose shoes wearing blisters into my feet, for an hour or so. Tags of red and green grew more common the further I went, like spots of mold. A group of guys in windbreakers and track pants approached me, and I looked at them, uncaring.

They laughed, and I started walking again.

Losing the bus pass sucked.

The pawn shop where I found the phone was in what would have been called 'Little Tokyo', in a city like New York. In Brockton Bay, it was the edge of where the police would respond to calls and where you were, oddly enough, better off calling the ABB.

For all that, there was still a sort of community to the area.

I pushed the door open and a perversely happy chime rang out. Floorboards creaked under my feet as I passed over-full shelves. Random junk filled the shop without any thought towards organization, from floor to ceiling. Towards the back, a case of scuffed security glass held the more valuable items. Jewelry, watches. A few newer smart-phones and cameras. Everything but the phones sheathed in a fine layer of dust.

And in the corner, plastic shopping carts filled with old electronics. CRTs, VCRs, broken computers, and dead phones. The plastic and silicon wreckage of two decades or more.

"The fuck happened to you?" The guy sitting at the register asked, feet up on the display case and a tattered paperback book in his hands.

I shrugged. "High school?"

He laughed. "Quitting that shit was the best day of my life. Anyways, no one's brought anything by. So fuck off, please."

"Uh, not that." The pawn shop didn't have any obvious tags, and it wasn't like the sign was in green and red or anything. And the guy behind the counter wasn't wearing colors. "This place isn't… ABB is it?"

He gave me an unimpressed look. "We pay, like anyone else. I wouldn't say we are them though."

"OK." I pointed at some of the newer model phones in the case. "I can get those working again. Increase their resale value."

He raised an eyebrow. "I can get those working again too. Any jackass as can follow directions can get them 'working again'." He took his feet down from the top of the case and leaned towards me. "Look, you got money? You got something to sell? No? Then get out."

"Well, maybe you're too busy," I pressed. "I'm not even asking for money, just a few of your older phones and other parts. From the bins."

"Right." He glanced over to the shopping carts. "Look kid, maybe you should get out of here."

"They're not even worth anything to you." I tried again.

"That's not the point I'm trying to make." He said, sitting back down. "Now— "

"Please," I said. "I'll… dust? Stock shelves? Sweep, fix phones. Please."

"No." He said. "Now get out of here before I kick your ass."

I stared at him, but he just rolled his eyes and went back to his book. I walked over to the shopping carts and pawed through the older electronics. Stuff wasn't worth… anything really, but was still covered by at least three security cameras.

I ignored the cameras, and feet-on-the-counter dude's sigh. Plastic, faded and brittle with age, clattered as I fished through the bins. Eventually I found a newer model, likely tossed in with the discards because it was bricked or broken.

I put the phone down on the glass counter. "I can get this working."

"Are you really this dumb?" He asked, quietly.

"Please, lend me some tools, a computer with an internet connection, and a USB cable." I met his eyes. "And I'll get this phone working."

A door opened from behind the counter, and a middle-aged man shaped like a weeble-wobble came out in a cloud of smoke. The dude behind the counter sighed and rubbed his face. Gave me a look.

"Let him try," The man said, with a toad's smile.

"You really want to get involved in this shit?" The young dude asked, but he wasn't talking to me.

"It's my shop." The older man snapped, before turning to me, his smile back. "Let's see what you can do."

"Thank you," I said.

The overweight man disappeared up some steps. The original guy sighed loudly and dog-marked his book before standing up. He looked down at me and his shoulders slumped.

"Well, let's get you set up," He paused at the doorway to the back of the shop. "And don't say I didn't warn you."

Spoiler: Edits

Last edited: Dec 5, 2022

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ReasonableDoubt

Apr 7, 2021

#6

I went straight to the pawn shop after school, the front door triggering a happy jingle as I entered. Hiro looked up from his book, snorted, and went back to reading without saying so much as hello. Weeks later, and he was still annoyed that Tanaka let me work here. And the better job I did prepping all the phones and computers and whatnot, the more annoyed Hiro got.

I said hello and continued past the counter to the back-room. Twice as large as the shop floor and just as cramped. Mismatched shelves sagged under the weight of aged junk, piles of cardboard boxes slowly falling apart, and every centimeter of space filled with something.

I sidled through stacks of junk and made it to an old desk I'd excavated in the first week, pushed up against the back wall. A stack of phones in various states of disrepair were stacked neatly to one side, tools on the other, and a clean surface in between. I'd fixed up an old projector that, with help from an off white sheet nailed to the wall, formed a sort of monitor I could use.

Hours passed. Hiro shook me out of it at one point and handed me a bahn-mi wrapped in wax paper. There was a surprising amount of awesome food near the pawn-shop. Which probably explained at least some of Tanaka's girth.

The work continued. Try, fail. Iterate. Learn. The materials I had access to were out of date by normal standards, and couldn't even be compared against the phone Brock and he's friends stole. But even slow hardware could accomplish a lot, if orchestrated properly. One of the first things I did was cobble together a new phone for myself, and re-created my operating system to be able to run on it. It was, if anything, worse than any of the standard phones on the market. But it would get better.

"The fuck you still doing here?" Hiro asked, snapping me out of it. He set a rectangular slab of metal on the ground, a rack-mountable server. Wet, early morning air flowed in from the open loading door. "Fuck it. If you're here, you can help unload."

The loading door opened to an alley, just wide enough for Hiro's truck. More servers sat in the back of the truck, heavy enough to bottom out the suspension. Covered with a fucking tarp. Just looking at them all made me suddenly aware of how tired I was.

"Where did all this come from?" I struggled with one of the servers, the thing far heavier than it looked.

"Jesus Christ, don't ask shit like that." Hiro eased another server to the concrete floor. "Just stack em. Four high I guess?"

I put my server on top of his, pinching one of my fingers as I set it down. "How humid does this place get over summer?"

"Not my problem." Hiro shrugged. "Shouldn't be here that long anyways."

Tanaka appeared out of nowhere when we were close to done. A small cigarette dangled from his toad-like lips as he watched me. The cigarette still hung there as he spoke. "If you take one apart, I will know."

"What?" I settled the server down and stood up, massaging the small of my back. "I wouldn't just… take something."

He grunted and waddled off, leaving us to work. The sky was growing brighter when we finished, and Hiro muttered a 'goodnight' before driving off in the truck. I looked at my little work area and tried to figure out a way to sleep there. In the chair, head on the desk, study-hall style might work. I might also roll onto bits of electronics or sharp tools.

I was about to tough out the walk back to the group home when Tanaka re-appeared, a cloth bundle under one arm.

He stood there without speaking, staring at the ugly looking cluster I was building out of old phones. Then he went and walked along the ends of the aisles, too fat to fit between them. Counted each server. Every single one of them had an order of magnitude more computing power than the abomination on my work-bench.

"It's been like twenty minutes," I said. "I haven't touched the servers since we unloaded."

"Good." He carelessly shoved my half-built cluster to the side of the desk and gingerly settled the cloth bundle in its former place. "What do you make of this?"

He opened the bundle. A tube of metal sat nestled in heavy folds of oily cloth, charred and warped by some immense heat. Without thinking I reached out with one finger. The acrid reek of Tanaka's cigarette smoke, the cold bite of the early morning, all awareness of the store-room vanished as insight flooded my mind.

A laser, impossibly compact for how powerful it was. Lenses of crystallized carbon in an array, a block of material that created light, not dissimilar to an LED. And a power-source that made my brain hurt.

"Can you fix it?" Tanaka shattered the bliss of insight.

I could, but this was something else. Fixing stuff, cobbling together cellphones, and writing code wasn't really anything flashy. This thing, this laser, was reality warping bullshit. My software, what I was becoming capable of, wasn't on the same level. And everything I'd done so far was mundane, or at least should appear to be. Tanaka and Hiro might have suspicions, but if they thought I was a Tinker, they probably thought I was a boring one.

"You owe me." Tanaka leaned over and rapped his knuckles on the workspace. "The tools I got for you, the parts you take. These things are not free."

I pulled my fingers away from the black metal of the device. It was… painful, letting go. The fatigue of working through the night hit me the same time the rush of my power faded.

"I've also fixed phones for resale." I protested. "Helped out. Surely— "

"Worthless." Tanaka took a drag on his cigarette and smiled his frog's smile.

It was bullshit. The spare parts weren't worth anything, and even the extra tools couldn't have cost much. I hadn't bothered with the details when I started, too happy to get my foot in the door. Sure that I could win them over with hard work and a good attitude.

"Maybe I just walk away," I said.

"Now now, none of that." The cigarette bobbed as his lips moved. "You want to fix this. Don't you?"

Hiro said the shop wasn't ABB, and I believed him. But it wasn't like they bought the truckload of servers we just unloaded at an auction. I didn't understand how they made money, just that it sure as hell wasn't the few trinkets Hiro sold over the counter. But at the same time the work had been… nice. Personal space at the group home didn't exist, and having something to myself— even a small workbench and tools— had been a relief.

Whether or not Tanaka was involved with the gangs, there was risk. But there was also opportunity. The laser, the glimpse of how the materials inside it worked, and how I might be able to build my own. No, the lenses inside were crystal, and were grown. I could…

"You are not subtle," Tanaka said, standing closer. Looming over me. He wasn't fit, but he was large. At least, larger than me. "I know you are a tinker. A weak one, sure. But people pay for such information."

In a way, the threat made it easier. "I'll need materials."

"Of course." The end of the cigarette swung upwards has he smiled.

I frowned at the cramped store room, pretending to be lost in thought. "Not enough space…"

"I have a building nearby," Tanaka was ready with the answer.

He'd given me a chance, back when I walked into the shop, and I'd given him the benefit of the doubt. But there was no pretending any more. I'd fix the laser, and give it back to him. And learn everything I could from it along the way.

Spoiler: Edits

Last edited: Dec 5, 2022

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Apr 10, 2021

#18

Spoiler: Note

Hiro reached over and turned down the truck's stereo. As the music faded, the obnoxious roar-popping of engines grew louder. Closer.

"I hate this city." Hiro glanced over at me and scowled when he saw the phone in my lap. "Put that shit away."

My latest attempt at a phone-computer didn't fit in my pockets so I shoved it into my backpack. When I sat up, the roaring noise had shifted into the rhythms of myriad engines.

Motorcycles blasted by either side of Hiro's truck. Mostly crotch-rockets, with heavier cruisers and dirtbikes mixed in. There was even one of those ridiculous yakuza-style choppers, handles high and seat-back higher.

"This… happens?" I asked. Brockton Bay was bad, but this was more brazen than anything I'd ever seen. "Really?"

Hiro snorted and started to slow the truck, matching the speed of the bikes in front of us. Some of them stayed behind us, one of them swerving wildly back and forth in the road.

"Not supposed to," He said, loud enough to be heard over the howling engines outside. "These fuckers are just dumb. Or hopped up on something. Probably both."

"Can you just… ram them or something?" The brush-guard on his truck was like something out of a Mad Max movie.

"I could." We rolled to a stop a ways from the bikes in front of us. "Kinda extreme. And shit would just get worse, likely."

The headlights washed out color but it was easy to see they were all sporting green and red. On their clothes, the bikes themselves, or even helmets. Those that bothered wearing one.

The guy on the ridiculous chopper had a tube for carrying a baseball bat attached to the bike. He could, and did, draw it like a sword with one hand while still seated. I hated myself for thinking it was neat.

Hiro put a gun on the seat between us, then sighed. "Don't do that cringing shit."

"What?" I asked. The guy with the chopper was walking towards us, twirling the bat. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Do that thing kids do," Hiro said. The truck was still in gear and he had his foot pressed to the clutch. "where you're out of fucks to give. Be furniture. Try not to react."

The guy walking towards us was squinting. He swung the bat, trying to take one of the headlights out, but instead it just clanged off the brush-guard and twisted out of his hands.

The rest of the riders laughed and cat-called, loud enough to be heard over idling engines, and then the guy who swung the bat laughed too. He walked closer and tapped on Hiro's window. First with his knuckle, then with the barrel of a gun.

Hiro rolled it down, somehow calm.

"Heyyyy," The guy had a flat, long face. "What's in the back?"

"Bunch of junk," Hiro replied, honestly.

"Yeah?" The guy's face lost all expression. "What if I take a look?"

Hiro just shrugged. "Fucked if I care."

Flat-face seemed thrown by that and climbed up into the bed of the truck. He tried to yank the tarp back but of course we'd tied it down. He smiled again and pulled a butterfly knife. He didn't twirl it around, simply opened it with a weird sort of fluidity and cut into the winch-straps.

"Stop staring," Hiro said quietly.

I tried to pretend like I'd been carjacked, or whatever the fuck this was, before. We were hauling pressure cylinders, mostly acetylene but a bunch of other gasses too, scrap I could work with, and a bunch of random shit Tanaka wanted stored. Such as a cast-iron bath tub complete with claw feet and flaking porcelain enamel.

The toad-like man's 'space to work' came with a catch. He did have building nearby. Three stories of rain-stained concrete with a basement. Every floor stuffed with even more crap than the pawn shop held. The basement had flooded a few years back and turned into a nightmare nest of fungus and vermin. I got to use it as a 'lab'.

The truck rocked slightly as the flat-faced thug hopped down from the bed. He came to my window this time, and stepped up on the running board. He was still holding the knife, and tapped the blade against the window, staring down at me the entire time. I gripped the plastic knob of the crank to keep my hand from trembling, and tried to keep my face blank as I rolled the window down.

The guy smiled at me, one hand on the mirror, other still holding the knife. I just sat there, like he was a feral monkey. Some animal you didn't show teeth to unless you wanted your face torn off. His gaze shifted to the gun on the seat.

"Gimme the gun," He said.

"Nah," Hiro returned, before I could say anything.

The thug leaned into the cab a bit, knife closer to my face.

"Look man," Hiro's voice was still flat, and that helped me. "We're paid up."

"Not with me you aren't," The guy said, breath foul with something.

"Hey, you know Shin, yeah?" Hiro asked. "Give him a call."

He stared at Hiro before jumping back abruptly. Twirled the knife closed and made a call, speaking in a choppy language mostly lost in the noise of idling engines. One of the bikers in front of us leaned over his front wheel, his engine revved with a loud whining noise before he let the clutch out. The back tire squealed for a moment, then the tire caught traction and the bike catapulted itself forward with enough force to flip the rider off. He hit the ground the same time the bike crashed to the pavement. More laughter.

Flat-face put his phone away and pulled his gun. The weird lighting, the bright glare of the headlights in front of the truck and the dark shadows to the side, pierced by more blinding spots of brightness by the bikes, made it hard to see. Hid the rifling of the barrel. But I knew it was there. How poor maintenance had fouled the barrel. Potential ways to correct the fouling, and repair or improve rifling that had given away to rust.

And then the gun was pointing upwards, and the thug's flat face split into a sick smile. He laughed, like it was all some joke. Behind me, Hiro let out a slow breath, and I heard the click of his gun as he safed it.

And then there was an arrow sticking out of the thug's chest at a weird angle.

He looked down at the arrow, incomprehension written across his flat face. He rasied the hand without the gun and tried to brush the arrow away. As soon as his hand hit the arrow, he screamed and dropped to the ground.

The motorcycles around us started going silent. Each engine shifting to a horrible grinding noises before dying. Another arrow appeared half inside an exposed engine, and another bike went quiet.

A smoke-like blur condensed into the shape of a slender figure in black, like a camera snapping into focus. Shadow Stalker spun in the air. Old hockey-mask, cheap and mean in the glare of the headlights. Her armored elbow slammed into the side of a biker's face.

"Oh fuck no," Hiro said. He slammed the gearshift into reverse and gunned the engine as he engaged the clutch.

Shadow Stalker touched ground and melted back into a shadow that flitted away from the headlight's beams. Hiro's truck jerked and bounced as the rear hit one of the motorcycles behind us and then rolled over it. Gun shots cracked out, and I ducked below the level of the dashboard.

"Get your phone out." Hiro eased the truck to a stop just beyond the last intersection. We turned down another street and accelerated away. "If you see her, call the PRT."

"Would she come after us?" I started paying more attention to the rooftops.

"Who knows, chick is nuts." Hiro shook his head. "Fucked up a bunch of people last summer. Best case? She was running down those bikes and doesn't care about us. Dipshits certainly made enough noise."

"But… we didn't do anything," I said, still checking for a caped silhouette.

"Yeah, you be sure to tell her that while she's knocking your teeth out and giving you a concussion." Hiro chuckled, darkly.

We cruised towards the Boardwalk, and then Downtown. Hiro turned the knob on the stereo back up and and his horrible country music filled the cab. Somehow, it wasn't grating any more.

The more 'civilized' parts of Brockton Bay contrasted sharply with where we had just been. Nice cars, street-lamps that worked. People walking carelessly on the sidewalks, laughing or holding hands. It was fucking surreal.

"What do you say," Hiro said after a while. "Get some work done?"

"You think it's safe?" I asked.

He snorted. "Never gonna be safe. Stalker's probably fucked off though."

I still felt wired. Tense. For the first time… ever, my bunk at the group home sounded pretty good.

"What about the motorcycle gang?" I asked.

"That was just a bunch of punks." Hiro snorted. "Dumb kids doing dumb shit."

Three builds would fail if I didn't get to the lab. The goal was to get everything as hands-off as possible, but that was a long ways off. And even when I babysat the process closely, it failed more often than not. And when it did, I needed to be there to learn from it.

"OK." I could handle this. "Let's go"

We took a different route back to the old dormitory, and what I was starting to think of as my lab in the basement. So far, I'd spent as much time getting the basement hospitable as on the tech. Working with Hiro to haul furniture so rotted it needed to be scooped up with a shovel, clearing warrens of rats, colonies of insects, and cleaning up a thick sludge of excrement and oily runoff. I shuddered to think what it would have looked like in summer.

The dormitory had a lobby on the ground floor, retrofitted with a metal garage door. Faded yellow tape marked out an area on the floor large enough for two vehicles, and beyond it was a jumbled mess of hoarded junk. Boxes half-rotted with age, random pieces of construction materials, car batteries. A cement bird bath.

We unloaded the ridiculous bath tub first. Everything else went down awkward cement stairs. The basement was beginning to look like a lab. Feces and mold stink superseded by the acrid smell of burning metal. The entire space was lit by super-luminescent carbon structures, a 'happy accident' derived from one of my countless attempts to create a laser medium. And along the far walls, a hodgepodge of chambers designed to control and accelerate the growth of carbon-based structures.

We took a break some time later. Hiro shared riceballs and a thermos of green tea. The doors of his truck were open and the embedded speakers blasted twangy music that made the cluttered space feel almost welcoming.

It was… nice. Sure, Tanaka would turn on me the moment he thought it'd benefit him, I was deep within the fiefdom of a psychopathic rage dragon, and I'd had a gun in my face just a few hours prior.

But I was making progress.

Hiro gestured with the thermos, and poured me another cup of warm tea. "Why you doing this?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"This shit." Hiro waved his hand around. "Why are you even in these parts of town? You ever see a gun, before tonight?"

Black-armored and masked troopers, storming into our house. "Yeah."

He raised an eyebrow and proceeded to pour himself another cup of tea.

Hiro didn't seem to like Tanaka, but the man did pay him. And he'd mentioned that getting any kind of regular work in Brockton Bay was a crap-shoot. Especially as an Asian with a record.

"Don't have to tell me nothing." Hiro shrugged. "Just shooting the shit."

"PRT arrested my dad, took everything," I said, impulsively.

"Yeah?" He asked. "What for?"

"Equities." I laughed. "I was internet-famous for about a week. Everyone at my old school was scandalized. Everyone at Winslow found it hilarious."

Hiro nodded, and didn't say anything more. I continued, he could always search on my name anyways.

"The funny thing is, yeah, we had it good. But dad never screwed anyone over or hurt anyone as far as I know. People like Accord play the market like a fiddle and murders people, but they leave him alone. The Elite runs a conglomerate, open as day, revenue in the billions. And there are countless other examples."

I was biased, I got that. Dad broke the law, and it was a simple win for the PRT. Raid a Thinker's home, get a big public case showing how they're protecting people from manipulation. All without a shot fired or a life risked. Everything made sense.

"So…" Hiro prompted.

"Yeah, I know. Every day, people get burned alive or locked into torture-bubbles or any number of horrible things." I smiled. "I lost my trust-fund. Boohoo."

"Nah," Hiro said. "Doesn't make what you went through not suck. But…"

"What?" I asked.

The music gave way to a morning talk show. One of those inane programs were people called in and asked questions or sold things. We'd worked through the night. Again.

"Well," Hiro started, "PRT usually wants people like your dad working for them."

"Yeah, you'd think," I said. "He was found dead in his cell. Hung himself, they said."

"Ah."

I laughed, shortly. "Yeah. Ah. Whoops. Mom peaced out at about the same time we got the news, taking everything the PRT didn't. Into the system I went. Zoning rules slotted me over to Brockton Bay instead of Boston, and here I am."

Hiro packed up the food while I checked everything in the basement. Made sure the active chambers wouldn't over-pressurize or do something even more catastrophic while I was gone. We buttoned up the building and were away, rolling through Brockton Bay at the only time it really got quiet. Early morning light slanting in from the east and gulls squawking.

Hiro offered me a ride, and I asked that he drop me off at school. I considered telling him the rest, what I was trying to do. It'd be good to have someone to talk with, to point out flaws that I missed. But the glass of the passenger side window was cool against my face, and then Hiro was shaking me awake just outside Winslow.

Spoiler: Edits

Last edited: Dec 5, 2022

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Apr 10, 2021

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ReasonableDoubt

Apr 13, 2021

#23

My palms were sweating and it was getting harder to hold my end of the metal tank. Hiro was a few steps down, holding the other end, and the rest of the narrow stairs stretched down into the lab proper. It was the fifth piece we'd moved that morning, and the heaviest. We should have moved it first.

"Watch out!" I cried, as the tank slipped from my hands.

The clang of metal on cement made my ears ring. Hiro lost his balance with the sudden shift of weight, and barely avoided getting crushed.

The bulbous tank, rusted and dented, gained momentum as it banged and bounced down the remaining stairs. It hit the landing and barreled through the already open doors to my lab. We chased after.

Growth chambers I'd spent the last months building, some under significant pressure, covered over half the space. Acrylic tubes and pressure hoses hung from the rafters, and an ugly mess of cabling connected everything back to a server cluster in the corner. I'd started growing my own processors, but they were still slower than even conventional tech. And harder to make use of.

The careening tank skirted the growth chambers and wobbled towards the other half of the basement. An open, orderly area filled with welding and machining equipment. One end clipped the ST microscope I'd just finished cobbling together. I used it twice, the different perspective on how the materials I made looked on a nanoscale immensely helpful.

Precisely calibrated components, perfected over months of iterative builds, flew through the air to smash against a cement support pillar.

The loss of the microscope put the still rolling metal tank back on a stable course. Down the middle of the lab, straight towards the far wall. It crashed into water-stained cinder blocks, bounced into the air, and rolled back towards the growth chambers. Most of its inertia spent.

"Oh fuck," Hiro said, and we ran to stop it.

We were too slow. The tank clanged, softly, into an active second-gen growth chamber. Not softly enough. The chamber, an inelegant thing that started life as a gas cylinder, wobbled before settling back in place. Hiro relaxed, and let out a sigh of relief. I moved faster, reaching him just as the chamber emitted a rapid ticking noise, deceptively quiet.

"Down!" I yanked Hiro down to the ground. "Hold your breath."

I filled my lungs before the growth-chamber failed. Catastrophically. A loud hiss, then a ringing ping as something metal ricocheted off the cement floor. Pressurized gas exploded out of the chamber. It rocketed upward into a spin, back down into the cement floor with a clanging crack, and then launched like a missile into a support column it skittered along until it hit the ceiling.

Hiro and I scrambled on our hands and knees as the pressure chamber rocketed along the rafters like a half-ton balloon with a hole in it. Nutrient and gas feeds ruptured and hissed, and then the lights failed as well. I was already holding my breath.

Hiro wasn't.

He collapsed, and I dragged him the rest of the way towards the stairs. Pulled the door closed behind us as heavy clouds of argon and carbon monoxide filled the lab. I dragged Hiro up the steps and laid him on the floor, making sure he was breathing.

"Oh fuck," Hiro groaned as he came back. "Shit."

"Yeah." Something in the basement made a booming pop. "Fuck."

We left the building. I grabbed my bag; Hiro looked longingly at his truck, but the clanging and hissing noises were a good argument to hurry. We left the the garage door up and fled into one of those beautiful days. Deep blue sky, a soft breeze cool against the sweat, and sweet, clean, air. We sat a ways from the building. Upwind.

Months of work lost. Some of it was likely salvageable, but I wouldn't know until I could go back and look. I tried to focus on the knowledge gained. Even if everything was lost I could build it all again, better than ever. It still sucked. I felt queasy, either from bad air or just the impact of such a colossal fuckup.

"At least the weather's nice," I said, weakly.

"What was that?" Hiro asked, breathing heavy. "Fuck. Do I have super-cancer or Tinker-fueled lung disease? Shit."

"Everything was physiologically inert," I said. "You just didn't get enough oxygen and passed out."

My phone rang, and I pulled it out of my pocket. The latest version was functionally primitive, but represented a huge advance. I built it from the ground up. Battery, simple processor of tiny mechanical components, display, and a better antenna than even the PRT phone. Waterproof, amazing battery life, lightweight. It was just a simple phone, no apps or even messaging.

I recognized the number, and ignored it. The phone continued to ring.

"So," Hiro continued, voice flat, "if you passed out, or if that thing had bounced bad and knocked you out, we'd be dead."

The growth chamber was moving with enough force to chip concrete. It would have done more than knock me unconscious. It was one of those stupid things I should have thought about, so painfully obvious. Yeah, it didn't fail until something hit it, but accidents happened.

"Charles." Hiro repeated.

"Yes." I looked at the gravel of the parking lot, small blades of grass pushing up in patches.

My phone was still ringing, I hadn't implemented anything like a block or ignore function. It was a proof of concept more than anything else. I accepted the call and immediately hung up. Next model would have a block function, or a silent mode.

Hiro blew out a breath of air and climbed, slowly, to his feet. "I'll call Tanaka."

I hesitated. "Do you have to?"

"How bad is it?" Hiro asked. "He comes by, 'to check on things'. Sometimes."

I sucked air through my teeth and grimaced: even focused on getting Hiro out I'd seen the tank wreck… a lot. It'd be hours, or longer, before the air would be clear enough that we could even start working again. "Bad."

"Then, yeah." He shook his head. "Kinda have to."

Hiro walked away and made his call, speaking in clipped tones. I tore my eyes away from the old dormitory and fished my previous, cobbled together, phone out of the bag. It was still the most useful thing I'd built. A computer I could use to keep working when not in my lab.

Hiro finished his call and glanced at me but didn't walk back over.

I went back to the phone. One of the things I used it for was to observe, and record, any cellular ID's in range. By the group home, or in the better parts of town, it was a fun chaotic list but mostly useful. Out by the lab, if I saw a group of cellphones lingering nearby in the middle of the night, I stayed in the building.

There was also a cellular ID that frequently showed up, close to the lab, at the beginning of summer. Nothing happened though, and there'd been no sign of entry. Hiro said I was paranoid, that It was probably just some bum that stole a cellphone. Regardless, it hadn't shown up in a while.

My phone rung again, and this time I answered. "Hello."

"Did you forget that we were meeting today?" Cassidy asked, snidely. "I've been waiting for twenty minutes now."

I rolled my eyes. The only reason I'd given him the number was so he could file his reports without wasting time with an in person meeting. He seemed happy enough with the solution, and so was I. And then my case was flagged for some sort of review.

"No," I said, not really up to messing with him.

"This isn't a joke," He said, "If your case doesn't pass—

He ranted on about the process, stressed how bad it would be to me if 'we' didn't pass, while I watched seagulls fly overhead. He covered the sort of questions 'they' might ask, how I was supposed to respond. Mostly about how supportive and understanding my case worker had been. How the dip in grades and attendance at the end of last semester was temporary. That I'd do better, once school started again.

The whole thing felt like he was gaming a performance evaluation.

Gravel crunched as a black sedan rolled into the parking lot. "Cassidy, sure, whatever you have to do. Bye."

I tucked the phone away and jogged over ot where Hiro was waving the car down. Away from the dormitory. Tanaka pulled himself out of the driver-side seat in a blue cloud of tobacco smoke. He started walking towards the building before Hiro stopped him. The fat man had on comically large sunglasses, mirrored to the point I could see my reflection in both lenses.

"What the hell happened?" He stepped towards me.

"There was an accident," I said. "Pressure tank ruptured and —"

"An accident?" Tanaka cut in. "An accident? Do you realize how much I've spent on this clusterfuck of yours?"

"You'll make it back," I said. "We're fixing a Tinker-tech weapon, it takes a bit more than welding equipment and a few servers. I need to build an entire tech base from scratch."

"Charles." Hiro shook his head gently before looking back to Tanaka. "It was my fault."

"You don't need to cover for this—" Tanaka started to say.

"My hands slipped, a tank rolled down the stairs out of control and set… something off. Kind of foggy, really."

The meat on Tanaka's face shifted from self-righteous anger to more of a glower, and he turned to examine the old dormitory. Even with the big metal garage door open all the way, the inside past Hiro's truck was obscured in gloom. Not that Tanaka would have gleaned any insights from looking at the ground floor.

"Can you still do it?" Tanaka asked.

"The lab's mostly ok," Hiro said, and I managed to keep my expression flat. "Just gas forcing us out."

"Have you made any progress?" Tanaka's fleshly lips were permanently turned down. "Any at all?"

I hesitated, and fished my latest phone, the 'dumb' one, out of my pocket. "I can make phones."

I let the man grab the phone out of my hands. He turned it over, flipped it open. Dialed a number from memory, and his frown intensified when Hiro's phone rang. He looked back up to me.

"Is this why you haven't finished the laser?" He glared at me, eyes hidden behind mirrored glass.

I shifted, aware of my reflection. "It's more of a side-project."

"Stop fucking around." Tanaka put my phone into his pocket. "When will the laser be done?"

"When it's done," I said.

It wasn't the full truth. The power supply was still beyond me, but it wasn't broken. At least, it was working before my lab exploded. The lenses and emitter of the weapon were fried, but I could probably recreate them, if I focused on it. I was already doing harder things.

"You said that last month," Tanaka said.

"I'll probably say it next month too." I shrugged.

"And if that's not good enough?" Tanaka sneered.

I shrugged again. And honestly, it was… ok. At some point over the summer, Tanaka stopped being some scary giant. He was big, he had money, shady connections, and an oily sort of greed. But he was also just an old man, overweight and alone. And if he took everything back, well, as I was just reminding myself, the knowledge was still there. I could always start over. Faster.

He took a step closer to the building, and hesitated.

"Two breaths…" Hiro said, "And I was out."

"We'd have a harder time moving you." I commented.

Tanaka sneered. "Six months."

"It doesn't work like—"

"Two months." Tanaka said, rounding on me. "And then you pay me back. And not with toy phones."

He tossed the sedan keys to Hiro and returned to his car, easing his bulk into the back this time. Hiro looked once more to his truck.

"Look… thanks." Hiro paused before following Tanaka. "For saving me."

The next morning, one of the caretakers at the group home shook me awake. Far too early, the bunks around us were still occupied, the phlegmy snores of the small boy two bunks down filling the air.

The communal area was mostly empty, the television turned to the news instead of insipid cartoons. Armsmaster on a stage, PRT and Protectorate logos behind him. Even if my power didn't work over TV, I could still appreciate the beauty of his armor. Next to him, a girl in black— her size and the color of her costume contrasted with the local Protectorate leader. A professional mask instead of the banged up hockey mask I saw her wearing so many months ago.

Cassidy shoved a bundle of clothes into my arms, tags still on.

"Oh," I said, still half asleep. "Thanks?"

He rolled his eyes. "Change. No, shower, then change."

Cassidy drove us Downtown for the interview. Again I marveled at how different everything looked. Polished glass, quaint storefronts getting ready for the day. A cafe with terrace seating and white-cloth tables, like mom used to drag us out to. It looked like a different world now, certainly not the same city I lived in.

I played Cassidy's game during the review. The man was an ass, but a good case worker would be harder to work with. I told them I looked forward to school starting again in the fall, and promised to be a model student. Thanked them for their time and consideration.

And then it was back to work.

Hiro's truck was gone when I returned to the lab, and he stopped coming by. No more bahn mi lunches, or someone to help haul equipment around. No more friend.

It stung worse than the lab exploding.

Tanaka wouldn't provide anything else without seeing any results, and I was forced to innovate. I built harvesters to sequester nitrogen, CO2 and argon. The carcasses of my initial growth chambers were enough to bootstrap up to a better production process, which yielded faster results.

I made protective gear. A welder's helmet as a base, and after my first improved chamber was up and running, I integrated filtration and a rebreather of sorts. It wasn't power armor or even, technically, Tinker-tech. And after everything else I had done, putting together a bit of protection was trivial.

The work felt slower, alone, but I accomplished more. I created better materials instead of trying to jump right towards fixing the laser. Carbon was versatile, and every day it became easier to work with. I created yet more growth chambers, with higher tolerances, greater variability, and these yielded better materials which in turn allowed better chambers. Over and over again.

The welding helmet's limited field of view was frustrating, so I grew a new helmet. My projector was another casualty of the 'accident' as I came to think of it, and when I grew tired of using my old phone as a development terminal, I integrated an advanced HUD into my helmet. I gradually covered the ceiling with networks of sleek piping that ran to the harvesters on the top floor and roof.

I fixed the laser in an afternoon. The original power supply seamlessly slotting into a sleek housing, grown as three separate pieces. A wicked, organic looking thing with variable length spikes functioning as heat-sinks. And inside, precisely calibrated lenses and an emitter element controlled with my own brand of rod-logic computers.

It cut through an old train engine like it wasn't there. I tore the thing apart after firing it once, and went back to trying to make a phone good enough that people would want to use it, without requiring any external components.

The rest of summer passed in a haze of work, became my new normal, such that every day life felt distant and hollow. Without Hiro, or anyone else to talk to, I started trying to interact more with the other boys at the group home, some latent part of my mind worried that I was slowly going crazy, wearing my helmet for twenty plus hours a day staring at build processes and code adapted to nano-scale rod-logic computation.

I even joined in on one of the group-home field trips, a day at a beach just south of the bay proper, free of the leaking chemicals from the tankers and shipping vessels blocking the bay itself. We hunted shellfish at low tide and swam in second-hand clothes no one wanted to wear about the city but that served well as swimwear. It helped, a little.

But mostly, I worked.

It was almost a relief when Sophomore year started. The halls of Winslow felt nostalgic. A mess of people shouting and bustling. Some excited, others depressed. The rare few that seemed honestly happy. The petty acts of cruelty. The mass of humanity, messy and chaotic and senseless after the clean lines of my helmet's interface, or the organic efficiency of my growth chambers.

Greg hadn't changed over the summer. Thick glasses and a long-sleeved shirt that hung off him. He was already being bullied by a familiar asshole with buzz-cut blond hair. The larger boy held Greg up against a locker, high enough that his feet didn't touch the ground. Some sort of display of strength, while others played floor hockey with the contents of Greg's Backpack.

Brock saw me coming and took a step back, letting Greg fall. It took him a moment to recognize me. "Well shiiit. Charles. How's it going, buddy."

I stared at him without answering. He wasn't all that much bigger than me anymore— a summer of hard labor and running back and forth across the city, all the good food before I screwed up with Hiro, had combined with a growth spurt.

I hadn't really seen Brock, since he beat the shit out of me the previous semester. Had been actively avoiding him, though I hadn't really realized it at the time. Flinching away and heading the other way, whenever I saw him in the hallways.

Somehow, he didn't really faze me anymore.

The other guys were still kicking Greg's textbooks back and forth. I put my foot down on a chemistry text as it skated by, halting it. Someone laughed, and then the bell sounded and the hallway started to clear.

Brock tilted his head back in a sort of jerky-nod and smiled. "Be seeing you, Chaz."

He walked off and I shook my head. Greg was scrambling around picking up the rest of his stuff. I helped him, scooping up notebooks, textbooks, pencils. More stuff than you usually wanted to carry between classes in Winslow.

The day went as expected, checked-out teachers distributing 'rules' we'd pretend to obey, providing syllabi they'd pretend to follow. Gladly frowned when he read off my name for attendance, and stared at me before moving on. Mrs. Knott smiled warmly, once she recognized me.

The last class of the day was study hall, held in a stair-cased lecture room. The carpeting and wall-paneling hadn't been replaced since the school was built, back in the seventies. Greg was already seated. He waved at me from the top row, all the way in the back, and I started climbing the steps towards him.

An intense, athletic chick glared at me halfway there. Last year, when I first came to this shit-hole of a school, I would have ignored her. But sometimes avoiding people just made things worse.

So I stopped a few feet away and met her stare. "What?"

She ran her eyes over me quickly, assessing. It wasn't like I was wearing colors or had any tats. I didn't even have anything that could be considered a weapon on me.

"You done?" I asked.

She rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair, pulling out a phone and dismissing me. I continued on up the steps to where Greg had managed to save an extra seat. I sat down between him and a big dude who was already sleeping.

"Thanks for the seat," I said.

"Yeah," Greg was more hesitant than usual. "What happened to you?"

I looked at him. "What do you mean?"

"I mean…" Greg seemed at a loss for words. "You um, have a good summer?"

"Sort of." I laughed at myself. "Worked a lot."

The study hall monitor, a burly man that coached some sport or other, yelled for everyone to be quiet. The louder conversations died down. Not silent, but at least quieter. I took out my phone and started playing with it under the desk. Opened up the tracker and watched the list of individual cell phone signals it 'saw' throughout the day populate and sort.

It was better than my first attempt at creating a phone from scratch. Closer to an actual smart phone, even if the processor was still far slower. The tracker app started correlating cellular ID's that showed up in multiple places. There were quite a few from the apartment complex that were also present at Winslow, which was to be expected. Fewer from over on Sawtelle, by the pawn shop. And precisely one that had also stalked the area my lab was in.

The one that had popped up repeatedly at the beginning of summer, and then less frequently as fall got closer.

"What's that?" Greg whispered over my shoulder, staring at the phone.

"Dammit."

Spoiler: Edits

Last edited: Dec 7, 2022

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ReasonableDoubt

Apr 15, 2021

#34

Cold metal leeched heat from my hands as I brought the heavy garage door up, letting night air thick with moisture roll in. My HUD showed Tanaka and Hiro — or their phone signals at least — growing closer. I couldn't pinpoint locations, not yet, but with context it wasn't necessary. Headlights cutting through the rainy haze in the distance gave their position away.

Tanaka was early.

I hauled the big garage door back down once Tanaka's sedan rolled inside. Tanaka started easing his bulk out of the back seat. I hit the lights with a gesture my helmet picked up, and Tanaka flinched as lighting elements that were a simple step along the way to reproduce a laser emitter bathed everything in harsh, perfect, white light.

Hiro got out of driver side and, squinting, nodded to me. Oddly careful, and he stayed close to Tanaka. I smiled back at him before remembering the helmet hid my face. (If it was just Hiro, I'd have taken it off.) I returned his nod.

Tanaka blinked his eyes clear. "You did it?"

I brought a perfectly grown briefcase — colored a black so dark it looked like an error in reality and feather-light in my hands — to the car. Tanaka looked on eagerly as I set it on the trunk, the void of the briefcase making the black sedan appear gray. I pressed the latch and air rushed inside, filling vacuum with a slight hiss. (Theatrics, but fun and trivial to implement.)

I stepped aside. "Yes."

The weapon inside looked like a regular handgun. Blockier than a normal pistol, but the efficient heat sink spines were gone, as was the variability I'd added to the lenses. It took days of conscious effort to build-down to the original spec, instead of an improved version. It would have been easy, satisfying even, to improve it. Boost output, add utility to the range and function of the laser, increase the firing time almost indefinitely. But I worked, and worked hard, to nerf it. Letter of the agreement with Tanaka, not the spirit.

The power supply was still beyond me. Glimpses, hints of potential that one day I'd be able to do something like it. But mostly throbbing pain that ripped through my skull like a rake.

Wonder melted off Tanaka's face as he schooled his expression. "Prove it."

I shrugged, and took the pistol from the case. Tanaka stepped back, perhaps worried it'd explode or something. The old claw-footed bathtub Hiro and I had hauled in last spring jumped out at me from amongst the heaps of junk. I moved closer, conscious of the blast-through, and made sure the line of fire would hit concrete instead of anything flammable. The gun was light as a toy in my hand.

There were no red beams or zapping noises. Just a molten line that raced up the center of the cast-iron tub as I swept my arm upwards. Eerily silent but for the quiet hiss-pop of super-heating metal. And then two halves of the tub split under their own weight and hit the concrete with a crash.

Both men were staring with odd expressions. I used my helmet's interface to safe the gun, and then walked them through how to operate it. Tolerances, optimal range, how to safe and unsafe it from the pistol itself. The overheat indicator, and a warning that the gun would happily destroy itself if the indicator was ignored.

I stared at Tanaka, gun still in hand. "With this, we're even."

He glanced towards Hiro, then looked around the ground floor of the dormitory. Frowned at the lights overhead, the only real modification to this part of the building. Stared hard at me, and it struck me that he might not even be able to see my eyes through the helmet.

"Fine," He finally said.

"I keep my lab." I held the gun out to him, grip first. "Everything in it, access to it."

"That wasn't the deal," he said.

"It wasn't specified." I kept my voice even, careful to speak loud enough that he could hear me through the helmet. Another oversight, speakers on the outside would be trivial to implement. "I'm open to working with you in the future, but no more petty bullshit."

"Fine." He ground out, after a long pause.

"And I shouldn't need to say this," I continued. "But you don't mention me. To anyone."

He snatched the gun from my hand, and almost fumbled it. He glanced towards the stairs, likely wondering how much my lab would be worth. I'd need to invest in more defense. I could flood my lab with heavy argon gas at a gesture — the accident that nearly killed Hiro would make a decent defense — but that wouldn't do me much good on any other floor of the building, let alone outside.

Tanaka returned the gun to its case and pressed the lid closed. He stared with a sort of fascination as the internal vacuum re-established with a puff of expelled air and the seam along the side of the case melted away like it had never been. He ran sausage-like fingers over the case, over the invisible line where the two halves joined. He looked towards me once more before easing his way into the car.

Hiro wore a sardonic smile. "Be careful."

"Hey," I said before finished getting into the car. "There's some… security downstairs. Don't go in if I'm not around."

"About time," he said. "And I mean it. Be careful."

They drove off into the night, and I went back to work. I hesitated, but the incentives were different now and I didn't know what Tanaka would do. Or who would end up with the laser. The thought, on some level, made me sick, but I should carry a weapon.

The design was too easy.

A pistol, snubnosed and blocky. Pairs of flechettes connected by monomolecular filament for ammo, with compressed argon as propellant. A disposable bola-gun, that I didn't bother making reloadable. Thirty-two shots, and then it was an ash-gray lump of trash.

The grow finished a few hours later: it was a simple, deadly little thing with a ruggedized grip that felt like sandpaper against my palm. I didn't bother with a test firing. I knew that it worked.

And it was so easy to create.

My helmet came together more readily than even the first iteration of my phones. The phones were a constant process of failing, of learning, of iteration. Of referencing texts to figure out how to create a nanoscale difference engine, then build it up to something I could adapt my operating system to.

The deadly little monofilament bola-gun was the easiest yet. Part of it was me getting better infrastructure; my growth chambers growing achingly precise and capable. But even then, the design came to me without any work at all. And it would be trivial to build hundreds of them in the same amount of time. Carbon sucked from the air, a little bit of electricity leeched from the grid, and I could have an instant armory.

I carefully set that thought aside.

The hazy rain had given up when I left the building, leaving behind a thick mist that fought back against the early morning sun. My backpack was stuffed full of cell-phones, carefully rounded corners pressing against the canvas, but deceptively light.

Most of the past month was spent improving the phones - a camera, an actual display, programs for sending messages and a simple web browser, with reception and battery life an order of magnitude better than phones normal people could buy. All contained in a diamond-hard, waterproof case.

I'd gone back and made it thicker, just so it'd be comfortable to hold. Then, the wasted space aggravated me enough that I filled it with a better battery and even more rod-logic processing.

The phones automatically formed a mesh-network amongst themselves, but I'd also built base-stations with the same basic tech just to get things started. The stations were easy to deploy— tossed Frisbee-style to land on rooftops or in the corners of vacant lots, or manually pressed onto other out-of the way surfaces that still received enough sunlight to keep it powered.

Over the next handful of weeks, I seeded phones wherever I could, anywhere wouldn't lead back to me. Small boxes of ten phones or so, left on benches in parks. On sidewalks near intersections. In bathrooms. Stashed under the boardwalk. Floating capsules of phones dumped into the bay, with hopes that they'd wash ashore somewhere.

And so, my network grew.

It was a quiet race against the PRT. Armsmaster could easily enable squads of PRT troopers to track down my base-stations, or even the phones themselves. My hopes rested on enough people having the phones, using them, that the PRT couldn't take them all away. And once there were enough phones in use, the base-stations wouldn't be strictly necessary.

Behemoth attacked Anchorage and it was horrible. The news was censored, but you couldn't put a positive spin on a fifty-foot-tall magma monster marching through pipelines and frying people.

I hated myself for being thankful for the timing. For considering, even for a moment, that an attack which pulled Armsmaster out of the bay was what let my network reach critical mass.

But Behemoth's attack was the tipping point.

"Of course you've got one." Greg was annoyingly close, breath smelling of the pizza-thing Winslow had served for lunch. "Man, for something that's free they're hard to get."

Study hall was loud enough that he spoke at a normal volume just to be heard. The meathead coach who watched over us had stopped trying a few weeks into the semester and now he only really stepped in if someone started yelling. Or smoking. Or fighting.

Winslow was so awful.

"A bunch of people have them," I answered without looking at him.

The fit girl that had stared at me the first day of class, Sophia Hess, sat two rows down and few seats towards the center aisle. The outline of a phone in her rear-pocket clear as she leaned forward over her desk. A different phone, the phone she carried at the beginning of summer when she staked out my lab, in her hands.

"Well, yeah." Greg sighed. "And 'a bunch of people' just take them from other people."

"Ah… that sucks." I commented.

With my devices all over the city, it was trivial to determine the location of any cell-phone. My own or not. The math and the processing, the device cross-talk and timing, all were complex problems that were hard to figure out. But with the work done, precisely locating and tracking phones was simple.

My devices were a massively distributed supercomputer that grew every day. Making a record of every transmission, every location, at every moment of the day. What phones talked to each other, where they were. When. At some point, things had clicked. Everything - the software, better antenna design, signal processing, even the design of the phones - got easier.

"Here." I fished in my bag for another phone and handed it to him under the table. "Have fun."

"What." Greg's eyes went wide.

I'd suspected it the first day of class but didn't really believe it.

The fit girl, Sophia Hess, was lurking around my lab at the beginning of summer. She stopped showing up shortly before Shadow Stalker joined the Wards. Then Sophia's phones — both of them — went completely off the grid during the Behemoth attack. And by the time it was over, I had enough coverage downtown to see that she spent a lot of time at PRT HQ.

Two plus two equals four. Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker.

"How do you have two?" Greg was running his fingers over the surface of the phone, the edge.

"Calm down man." I raised an eyebrow and couldn't help but smile. "It's not that big of a deal."

He gave me a look like I was crazy, and immediately started personalizing the phone. They weren't common, not yet, but I was working hard to get it to the point where anyone who wanted one could get one. I'd heard of people buying them for more than the brand-new commercial phones on the market. By a lot more. It was surreal, hearing people gush about them. Wanting their own.

The PRT issued a statement, of course. They had seized some of my base stations. Denounced the sinister menace behind this most heinous act. Warned people that there must be ulterior motives, that their data was not safe. But it was too late.

People had free phones, free Internet. They didn't care.

"Hey," Greg said suddenly. "He's watching, right? He must be. Recording whatever we do on this."

"He?" I asked, absently.

"Fine. They." I knew he was rolling his eyes without looking. "The mysterious entity that littered Tinker-tech phones all over the bay. That person."

"Eh." I shrugged. "I'm just happy to have a free phone."

I didn't just track Sophia. That'd be creepy.

The first thing I'd done was figure out what happened to the laser. It wasn't a phone, but it used a lot of the same technology, enough so that I could even control it remotely within a certain range... which was now 'the whole city'. Thankfully, it wasn't even moving around much, just sitting stationary on the north side.

Tanaka, on the other hand, was all over the place. The pawn shop, other buildings throughout the northeast. Driving out of the city, usually to come back the same day. A surprising amount of time spent Downtown.

Cassidy, my state assigned case-worker, was sketchy as fuck. As expected, he met with a bunch of different people all over town, mostly in the poorer areas. Most of them were likely other cases, no big deal. But there was one other that he met more frequently. At the Boardwalk, at restaurants. At motels. And that person spent a lot of time at Winslow.

At first I assumed it was a teacher, or one of the other staff.

It wasn't.

"Yeah… I guess." Greg was still playing with his phone. "How many points you got?"

"Enough," I said.

People would accrue points whenever they 'shared' access to a faster network. Wifi at a coffee-shop, or at home. Cloning the ID of a normal cell-phone they (ideally) owned and letting traffic flow through that, which had the added advantage of letting them use their existing phone number. People who had enough points would unlock 'drops', their phone guiding them towards one of the caches of phones throughout the city.

Below, Sophia twisted around in her seat. Like she could tell I was looking at her.

"Huh," Greg said, blandly. "Hess seems upset."

Sophia stood and stomped up to where Greg and I were sitting. The teacher looked up from the papers on his desk, and then went back to grading without saying anything. He'd have flipped out if Greg or I left our seats.

Sophia slammed her hands on my desk hard enough that my pencil clattered. Hiro had said she was dangerous, and I'd seen her shoot someone with an arrow. A black figure snapping in and out of shadow, dismantling a motorcycle gang by herself. But she was a hero. She'd just fought Behemoth. What the fuck does it even take, to do that?

"Um," She was also very intense. "Hi, Sophia?"

Sophia leaned forward. "What are you creepy fucks staring at."

"Umm…" I tried to figure out what to say.

Greg spoke without guile. "Your pants are really tight."

"I swear to God…" The tendons in Sophia's neck stood out in stark relief.

For a moment, I thought she was going to do one of those anger control exercises. The Wards must have taught stuff like that. In, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four.

No.

She grabbed Greg's wrist off his desk and, in a smooth motion, yanked him forward and slammed his head into the desk with a loud 'thonk'. Greg groaned and sat back up, muttering that he was OK. Sophia turned to me and paused for a moment when she saw the phone, still in my hand. Then she whirled around and stalked back to her seat.

She had to know I was a Tinker. But she was a hero, and they had this whole thing about 'secret identities'. Which felt really flimsy, but she'd known where my lab was for months, and hadn't done anything.

"And you're still staring at her ass?" The dude next to me, opposite Greg, said quietly. He spent so much time sleeping I'd forgotten about him. "I mean, I understand. But damn. Chick is nuts."

"Yeah…"

Greg started playing with his phone again, and the dude next to me went back to sleep, so I opened the tracker back up. Flagged Sophia's cellphone, both of them, so my phone, or my helmet, would alarm if she was nearby. Then I panned back over and started reviewing traffic around my lab.

Nothing suspicious. I reviewed the laser. A sort of dread pooled in my stomach when I saw it move in a jerky fashion, and even fire. And then there were four duplicates, all in different locations, all firing. Again and again, far in excess of what should have been the overheat limit.

It settled down again, not moving much, but I didn't feel any better.

Oni Lee had my laser.

Spoiler: Notes, Edits

Last edited: Dec 24, 2022

244

ReasonableDoubt

Apr 15, 2021

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Threadmarks Solo 1.A - Interludes & PHO

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

Apr 20, 2021

#49

Spoiler: Note

"Hey baby." Mason smiled at Sandy. "You got one of those new TI phones yeah?"

"Is that some sort of pick-up line?" She gave him the side-eye, clearly not impressed.

Bob, who was mopping the floor, snorted with amusement. Mason had bothered the man for a month, just to borrow a blender, before he had broken down and lent it to him. Mason had returned it the next day, of course, perfectly cleaned. He even gave Bob a shout out on the video.

"And what are you laughing at?" Mason asked him.

Bob rolled his eyes and spoke directly to Sandy. "He just wants gadgets for his youtube thing."

"Oh really?" Sandy seemed interested now. "And what do I get out of it?"

"A romantic stroll on the boardwalk?" Marcus tried another smile, half hopeful.

She laughed, not the worst response. "Nice try. But no, not lending my phone to some guy. Even you, Mason"

Mason shrugged, and started wiping splattered grease off the counter before the shift lead threw another fit. He was thankful and all, for having a job. But that didn't mean he wanted to do it for the rest of his life. Or even the rest of the month.

He was fascinated by technology, and gadgets. Phones, cameras, wearables, all of it. How they worked, how they operated. Figuring out what trade-offs the manufacturers must have made, and the reasons why. He just needed a way to match his passion with something he could make a living off of.

Mason knew he was good looking, and had a nice voice. So making tech review videos seemed like a natural fit. If only he could… you know, get tech to review.

Or people to watch the videos.

"Mason, where the fuck are those fries!" The shift-lead yelled.

He was pulling the cage from the frier and the shift-lead's awful voice startled him. The cage caught, awkward, and sent droplets of four-hundred degree oil splashing up, onto the back of his hand. He hissed in pain, and almost dropped the fries back into the oil.

Mason choked back his instinctual response. "Coming up."

He didn't get a chance to run his hand under water until three hours later, and it didn't do much good by then. The busy period didn't fade, and instead of a nice lull a little bit after midnight, order after order crashed like a train into the bar-close rush.

Far, far too busy to, you know, take care of a little ol' oil burn.

But he was, he repeated to himself, lucky to have a job. Making videos was fun and satisfying and he learned something after doing each one. But two hundred views, total, wasn't going to help with rent.

His hand, pocked with red welts, was throbbing with pain when the shift lead finally let him go. He mustered a smile for Bob and Sandy, shucked his uniform into a plastic bag, and escaped. Out the back door, into glorious freedom.

He paused, smiling, letting the night air washed over him. Cool relief after the sweaty, oily hell of the kitchen.

Then he saw the bus approaching his stop.

"Aw man."

He forced himself into a run, bag flopping on his back. Desire not to wait another hour, waste another hour, until the next bus, fueled his sprint. The battered blue and white bus pulled up to the curb, air-brakes hissing with a release of pressure. Some kid got on.

"No no no no no!" He shouted as the bus pulled away.

He kept running, flailing his arms over his head. The driver didn't see, or didn't care, and Mason staggered to a halt. Red tail-lights growing smaller as the bus accelerated away. The pain in his hand throbbing in tune with his pulse.

Without thinking, he flopped down on the bench. And experienced instant, intense regret as something squished. Some asshole hadn't finished his burger. Food wrappers and cardboard littered the bench.

Perfect.

He stood. Began to gingerly brush the back of his pants. And then something underneath the bench caught his eye. A scattering of gray rectangles. Too rectangular, too ugly, to be flooring tiles or anything decorative really. All laying underneath the bench like someone had dropped a deck of cards.

He picked one up. And promptly dropped it as it came alive, glowing softly. It clattered against the sidewalk, bouncing like a piece of cheap plastic, before coming to a rest, glow-side up. The word 'Welcome' stood out against an off-white background, in a terrible, mono-spaced font.

He gingerly picked it up, careful of the sharp edges.

"Huh."

—

SUBJECT: [URGENT: ACTION REQUIRED] INFOSEC ADVISORY - UNAPPROVED NETWORK CAPABLE HARDWARE

From: Steven Rhenfeldt (Director of Information Security) srhenfeldt

To:

(bcc: medhall-ww)

Reminder: DO NOT bring personal devices or any network capable device onto Medhall property.

A number of network capable devices capable of acting as 'smart-phones' are proliferating in the Brockton Bay area.

Do not touch these devices.

Do not bring them into your homes.

Do not conduct ANY communication, professional or otherwise, on these devices.

Violation of this or any other company policy is grounds for immediate termination.

Please address any questions or concern to infosec .

Steven Ashley Rhenfeldt

Chief Information Security Officer

srhenfeldt

(617).666.1024

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: The contents of this email message and any attachments are intended solely for the addressee(s) and may contain confidential and/or privileged information and may be legally protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient of this message or their agent, or if this message has been addressed to you in error, please immediately alert the sender by reply email and then delete this message and any attachments. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, copying, or storage of this message or its attachments is strictly prohibited.

—

The second screen from the right went live automatically.

Deputy Director Renick, straight backed, United States flag prominent on the lapel of his blazer, stood at the podium. Lower level functionaries sat to his right, a visual aid to his left. Enlarged images of Tinker-tech phones and wireless hubs, bits of the paper underneath starting to show through at the bottom of the image.

"— has identified several dangerous devices in the Brockton Bay area.

"We are still examining the devices but wish to reiterate to the public that Tinker Tech is inherently dangerous, unpredictable, and often lethal. The usage of any of these devices is dangerous, and illegal.

"The PRT ENE currently offers a reward for information which leads to the safe retrieval unlicensed Tinker Tech. If you find any Tinker Tech, do not approach it, and please contact our hot-line immediately.

"I'll now take ques—

—

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Topic: Dangerous Devices! (Formerly: tinker phones?)

In: Boards ► Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay Discussion (Public Board)

Procto the Unfortunate Tinker (Original Poster) (Not a tinker)

Posted On Sep 19th 2010:

General Discussion Thread for the Tinker Tech phones cropping up in Brockton Bay.

Edit: 09/22/2010 PRT has given us a name and the internet has meme'd it into consensus: Dangerous Devices. Double D's. DDs. Deedees. You get the idea.

I hate the world.

(Showing page 2 of 4)

►Space Zombie

Replied On Oct 3rd 2010:

yeah, the hardwares awesome and all but kinda limited. browser is shit. phone is shit. less apps than an android. lame.

►TRJ

Replied On Oct 3rd 2010:

its free internet

►Space Zombie

Replied On Oct 3rd 2010:

on a shit browser. even PHO which is same interface for ten years barely runs.

►TRJ

Replied On Oct 3rd 2010:

It's free internet, and phone calls, and messaging. I charge it once and it lasts... i haven't had to recharge it. How do you not get how huge that is?

►Answer Key

Replied On Oct 3rd 2010:

No, it's not free.

You're stealing internet from some dupe gullible enough to feed this thing credentials.

►TRJ

Replied On Oct 3rd 2010:

eh, free internet and phone for me.

►Answer Key

Replied On Oct 3rd 2010:

You're paying for it with your information. Your electricity, although maybe you steal that too, and who knows what else.

Things are Tinkertech. The memelords have diluted the message, but tinker tech is dangerous. That thing could explode the next time you put it up to your ear. Or it could shoot nano-viruses into your ear canal and make *YOU* another node in the network.

Besides, average life of tinker tech is what, five weeks without maintenance?

Just buy a normal phone.

►TRJ

Replied On Oct 3rd 2010:

dude. some people cant 'just buy a normal phone'.

This is huge. even if ya'all can't see it.

End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4

—

Mason stood in the center of the living room and slowly turned around, making sure everything was perfect. It wasn't a professional recording studio, or a glamorous apartment overlooking the boardwalk. But it was what he had. He adjusted the light, checked his reflection one last time, and stood in front of the web-cam.

"What's up guys, MMKHD here. Got a special treat for you today." This was his chance. To make it big. He gingerly held up the gray rectangle. "Tinker tech."

He set the gray slab down on an off white sheet, draped over a box, and panned the web-cam over it from every angle. He'd go back in post-processing and select the best shots, do a voice over. The material was distinctive, or at least the texture was. The ash gray color was uninspired, but the way light played off the surface was like nothing he'd ever seen.

"The build quality is, honestly, amazing. Check this out."

This was the fun part, and something he'd only decided to try because he had so many of the things. He threw the phone across the room, and promptly winced as it cut into balsa-wood cabinetry. And stuck. Even if the phone was indestructible didn't mean the duplex they rented was. Anything but, if the creaking floorboards and occasional leaks were anything to go by.

Mason spent the next couple of hours, using tools left behind by one of his Mom's former boyfriends, trying to break, or even scratch, the odd little device. Hammer and chisel, cordless drill, pliers. Even a pick-axe… thing. Nothing but broken or warped tool bits and sore hands.

The tools were cheap shit, but he couldn't even grind down the edge of the device with a file.

"These things are bulletproof." He spoke into the camera, while still covered in a slight sheen of sweat. "I've never seen a piece of personal electronics capable of just shrugging off so much damage."

He set the cheap web-cam back up in the living room, wishing again that he had a better camera, and started walking through the phone's software. It was… bad. Atrocious UX, ugly-ass fonts everywhere, and sometimes the screen hitched or lagged. Navigation elements were simple square touch 'buttons', sometimes with text on them, sometimes not.

The touch-screen keyboard was amazing though.

He called Katie, who he'd given one of the phones to. She answered, and it was like she was in the room with him. The sound was perfect, and he had no idea how the little device did it. He made sure the camera was recording, and asked her to start playing her guitar.

"Mic pickup is surreal. If I could use these things to record audio and transfer it to— speaking of which, why can't I record audio?"

He might leave that in, people tended to like the natural takes. The annoyances of simple features that manufactures, somehow, missed.

"It's hard to tell because my audio capture isn't the greatest, but the sound is amazing. Not sure how he does it, but this little device puts out better sound—"

The sun was starting to rise and so he walked outside and positioned the camera to show the woods behind him as the backdrop. No need to see cars up on blocks, dirt lawns, or the confederate flag their jackass neighbor had put up last week.

The lighting was perfect. He held the phone in one hand and smiled into the camera.

"It's an impressive device, but not really useful. Utilitarian design, to the point of being ugly.

"Edges sharp enough to draw blood. Seriously, if you decide to use one of these? Take some electrical tape and wrap it all around like this. You'll thank me later.

"The camera is… bad. I don't know why they even bothered, with this kind of image quality. It's not like they need to tick boxes for marketing."

"All in all," The sun was continuing to rise and people would be waking up to go to work or beat their wives or sit out on their porches drinking. They really needed to move somewhere nicer. "Not a bad device, if you're living in Brockton Bay and can't afford a normal phone.

"But be careful, you're probably giving up all your data and personal information to whoever built this."

He paused as angry shouting started up somewhere in the neighborhood. Not the neighbors, thankfully. That was always… rough. The shouting died down and Mason turned his head slightly to the side and raised his eyebrows.

"So, I don't recommend paying for one of these, or really, using it as your primary phone if you can avoid it.

"Thanks for watching, let me know in the comments what sort of gadgets and devices you'd like to see next. And if you haven't already, please. Like and subscribe."

—

The second screen from the right went live.

"— again stress the risk of unlicensed tinker tech." Deputy Director Renick stood behind his podium as if it would shield him from the horde of press. "These devices appear to act as a single network. If one node has credentials to a network or other system, they all do.

"Owning or using unlicensed Tinker Tech is not only da— bad," Deputy Director Renick looked like he wanted to face palm. "But illegal. Please, we urge the public to leave these devices alone. Using them puts yourself, and your entire community, at risk.

"Thank you," Renick braced himself. "I have time for a few question—"

A sudden surge of reporters yelling out questions. Renick's smile turned into more of a grimace as he pointed at a woman in the front.

"Tina Brown, BB7. How many devices are there in the bay area?"

"No comment." Renick smiled. "You."

"Dillon Lindt, Mariner's Journal. Why isn't Armsmaster talking to us instead of you? Is the protectorate taking these devices seriously?"

"Armsmaster recently helped defend the people of Anchorage from Behemoth, and is still serving a critical role in the aftermath. I assure you, both the PRT and Protectorate are taking these devices very seriously."

Renick pointed at a balding man. "Next question."

"Any actual cases of the devices causing physical harm?"

"We're still evaluating that." Renick paused. "But remember; each of these so-called phones packs the same amount of energy as a car-battery. Given the unstable nature of tinker tech, it's not something you should be putting next to your head."

"Can you comment on why you've discontinued the bounty?" A young woman from the back shouted out.

"I'm afraid we're out of time for now." Renick smiled again. "Thank you, and good day."

— — —

* Private message to: Kid Win (Verified Cape) (Wards ENE)

* Private Message to: Miss Militia (Verified Cape) (Protectorate ENE)

* Private Message to: Armsmaster (Verified Cape) (Protectorate ENE)

1aabac6d068eef6a7bad3fdf50a05cc8: ONI LEE HAS A TINKER TECH LASER, HERES HOW TO TRACK.

1aabac6d068eef6a7bad3fdf50a05cc8: Step 1: Obtain a carbon-constructed smart-phone. Referred to as a DD.

1aabac6d068eef6a7bad3fdf50a05cc8: Step 2: With the *default* camera app, scan the following QR code:

—

Topic: A New Thread

In: Boards ► Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay Discussion (Public Board)

Procto the Unfortunate Tinker (Original Poster) (Not a tinker)

Posted On Sep 19th 2010:

General Discussion Thread for the Tinker Tech phones cropping up in Brockton Bay.

Edit: 09/22/2010 PRT's given us a name and the internet has meme'd it into consensus: Dangerous Devices. Double D's. DDs. Deedees. You get the idea.

Edit 11/11/2010: No soliciting or offering of Danger Points here. Other threads for that, keep this one on topic. DP's as a concept: OK. Give me DP for pics: Not OK.

I hate the world, more and more, every day.

(Showing page 18 of 40)

►QwertyD

Replied On Nov 13th 2010:

Yo guys, whoever is behind these phones put out an SDK.

►Chaosfaith

Replied On Nov 13th 2010:

ELI5?

►QwertyD

Replied On Nov 13th 2010:

Software Developer Kit. We can write our own apps for the DDs. Shit's still pretty rough around the edges, and developing on a phone is... honestly pretty fucking hard.

But it's a start. Check it, this guy already built a better browser: /ipfs/Qme7ss3ARVgxv6rXqVPiikMJ8u2NLgmgszg13pYrDKEoiu

►Answer Key

Replied On Nov 13th 2010:

So now people are writing programs for this dude's tech? Why don't you all just kneel down and suck his cock too?

This shit is Tinker Tech. A parahuman is literally throwing it in our faces. It's not some benevolent social uplift. It's a scheme to benefit the parahuman. They don't help people.

►Mane Magenta

Replied On Nov 13th 2010:

Eh, thanks for the browser. way better than the default. Looks like he's getting points for it too.

So... ya know. Other devs are going to make more apps and get some of those points for more tinker tech.

►Answer Key

Replied On Nov 13th 2010:

Wtf is the PRT doing? Can't believe they haven't taken this shit down yet.

►TRJ

Replied On Nov 13th 2010:

Haha, they can't man. It's hosted on the DANGERNET. This shit is lit.

End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 ... 38, 39, 40

—

"Hey everyone, MMKHD here again." He took deep breaths, trying to speak with a calm, even cadence. Though, maybe he should treat this as more of an impromptu 'live' event.

"Got a treat for you all again."

He positioned the camera, a newer model than the web-cam he'd been using. His video on the tinker tech phones had gone viral, ridiculously so, and was already making their life better.

He held out the ash-gray phone so that both he and the screen were being recorded. The phone displayed a simple count-down, and beneath the large numerals, a button that read 'cancel'.

The button greyed itself out at the five minute mark.

"Thanks to all of you, I got enough points to queue up another Drop. And this time, I'm recording it live."

He turned to take in the little clearing, wincing at the littered beer bottles and bongs. A few hours ago, he had queued up a drop. Selected the closest available site that he was familiar with, which thankfully didn't involve trekking all the way over to the docks. Or dealing with ABB.

"I'm sorry about the lighting, and poor quality of the video in general. As you can see though, they're doing something new with the drops. I'm in the area specified,"

He gestured around the depressing little clearing in the woods. A few logs next to an attempt at a firepit. Trees, skeletal in the poor lighting, stretching away into the darkness.

"Normally, I'd be getting more precise instructions guiding me to a cache of Double Dees. This time though?"

He held up the phone again. "I just got a countdown."

At thirteen seconds remaining, he heard a soft puff of air. He exaggerated the natural squint of his eyebrows and turned his head to the side. "Hold on, I think I— "

He almost fell over as a black… beach ball thing, near-invisible in the darkness, dropped out of the sky. It settled to the ground silently..

"Holeeee shiiiiiit." He approached the sphere, realising that it wasn't, technically speaking, black. "OK, the camera's not going to be able to pick this up properly but whatever this is made out of is like… sucking in all the light. Super dope. And—"

He flinched back as the sphere emitted a 'whuff' noise. Hexagonal panels popped outwards, some of them crumbling into ash before they hit the ground. At the base of where the former sphere sat was a sleek little box. Similar to the one he'd found before, but with rounded corners.

"'Drop' just got literal," He said. "I'll open this up in the studio— " by which he meant their crumbling house in the middle of redneck land. He hadn't made that much off the videos yet. "— and, judging from the case which has," He smiled as big as he could. "rounded corners. Maybe the phones do too?"

He brandished the case in front of the cameras. Imagining he was the hostesses of one of those old-school game shows. Smiled brightly.

"Like and subscribe, and find out in my next video.

"MMKHD. Out."

—

Topic: A New Thread

In: Boards ► Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay Discussion (Public Board)

Procto the Unfortunate Tinker (Original Poster) (Not a tinker)

Posted On Sep 19th 2010:

General Discussion Thread for the Tinker Tech phones cropping up in Brockton Bay.

Edit: 09/22/2010 PRT's given us a name and the internet has meme'd it into consensus: Dangerous Devices. Double D's. DDs. Deedees. You get the idea.

Edit 11/11/2010: No soliciting or offering of Danger Points here. Other threads for that, keep this one on topic. DP's as a concept: OK. Give me DP for pics: Not OK.

I still hate the world.

(Showing page 32 of 67)

►Miraclemic

Replied On Nov 17th 2010:

WANT TO BUY DANGER POINTS

You send me DP's, I send u cash.

Address: ddp:5d80d89fbc7eeca5f7517cb33a722663

►Space Zombie

Replied On Nov 17th 2010:

what the fuck. why u do this.

Also, against thread rules. mods

►Miraclemic

Replied On Nov 17th 2010:

Shit son, should be obvious. Get drops, make a profit selling phones. If i can juice that cycle by buying DPs, gonna do it.

►QwertyD

Replied On Nov 17th 2010:

If you accrue enough points you can also request custom kit. Buddy of mine that's doing pretty good making software requested a 'bigger development device'.

Three hours later, this crazy-ass stealth-bomber looking ball thing lands in his back yard with what looks like an extra thick, large, DD.

Thing folds out to a 100cm diagonal screen with integrated stand and everything. Bluetooth a keyboard up to it and yer golden.

►Xyloloup

Replied On Nov 17th 2010:

Aww man, so jelly. We started seeing DD's in Boston.

PRT came down on that shit like a ton of bricks. Like, their response to Blasto's Woad Giant strolling down main-street, spewing spores all over the place, was tepid in comparison to how fully they flipped out when people started getting free cellphones.

►Chilldrizzle

Replied On Nov 17th 2010:

Wut? lol.

PRTENE just puts DDNick on TV, letting us know how 'very disappointed' he is that people are not listening to the warnings, and putting everyone at risk. Think of your neighbors.

►Xyloloup

Replied On Nov 17th 2010:

DDNick?

►Answer Key

Replied On Nov 17th 2010:

Deputy Director Renick.

The memetards are convinced he's the unofficial spokesmen of DDTech.

►Chilldrizzle

Replied On Nov 17th 2010:

Lol.

Miraclemic i got some DP for u. DM me.

End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 ... 65, 66, 67

—

* Private message to: TB77291

21e119daf697467b14b076f2d5819aec: This is the individual behind the Tinker Tech devises in Brockton Bay, colloquially referred to as Danger Devices, or DDs.

21e119daf697467b14b076f2d5819aec: Carbon based nano-scale engineering. Replicable.

21e119daf697467b14b076f2d5819aec: I want to arrange an exchange of ideas, technology, or resources.

21e119daf697467b14b076f2d5819aec: To verify my identity, use the (default) camera app on any DD to view this QR code, and follow the instructions thereafter.

Please do not respond to this message. This account is a throwaway, and you will not be able to reach me here.

—

Mason was, cautiously, optimistic. He'd quit the fast food job, started buying better food for the little ones, and even got a doctor to look at his hand to make sure it wasn't infected.

After years of work with one or two hits, the last two months had netted him millions of views and generated some serious revenue. Not life changing, not yet. But enough to help out Mom a bit. And it brought attention to all the videos he put out before. Which was somehow even more rewarding than suddenly being famous.

It was one of those overnight successes that took years.

"Alright guys, we're here today looking at what appears to be either the second or third iteration of the DD's, depending on how you count it."

Mason looked straight into the device he was using to record. "And honestly, please. Whoever is making these? You need to talk to a branding or PR person."

"But we're here for gadgets, not brand management.

"You'll notice that this iteration is a bit larger. The corners are not as rounded as in the gen 2, though thankfully not back to the knife-edges of the gen 1.

"The back of the device is no longer perfectly flat, rather there's a sort of contour here that makes it much more pleasant to hold. And if you're a lefty like me?"

He smiled extra large and transferred the phone to his dominant hand. The screen flipped with it, keeping a usable orientation.

"Just flip the phone over and it works. Camera shots are a little wonky if you hold it like this, but honestly. Who takes photos in portrait mode?

"And speaking of the camera, it turns out that even the first gen camera wasn't bad. Actually, it was good. Like, insanely good. Better than anything on earth outside of maybe Dragon's satellites. Which, technically, aren't on earth."

He'd cut that in post processing. Say the same thing, but tighter, with more expression. Less lame attempts at humor.

"So why was image quality so bad? Software. The default app just didn't do a good job translating all of that extra information into something that'd display nicely, or make sense to regular human eyeballs. Anyways, whoever's behind this stuff released an SDK.

"Shit."

He took a deep breath and jumped in place a few times. Shook out his shoulders and hydrated. He was finally making progress. Off the cuff impromptu shit was fine for the live streams, but this was an official review. People would, if he did it right, reference this clip for years.

"The person who's making these devices opened up development to the community a few weeks back. And the community has delivered. Check it."

He clamped the phone in a stand placed perfectly opposite the device doing the filming. He set a small potted tree behind it the phone, and made sure everything was lined up.

The effect was startling if done properly. Otherwise it just looked weird.

"My man ShutterBagg released a camera app that translates the extra data extremely well."

He tapped the 'sb-camera' text on the phone's screen. Adjusted the zoom so that, from the point of view of the camera, the phone disappeared. A faint outline, but otherwise flawless. He stepped between the phone and the tree, breaking the illusion.

"Now, don't go getting ideas of buying up like fifty dee-dees and making an invisibility cloak out of it. This is just to show off how good both the camera, and the display are. If backed up with good software.

"You can even use the device for night-vision, infrared, and probably a bunch of other things we haven't figured out yet."

He moved to a corner of the room he had set up to be more casual. He sat down on the armchair and paused. Then he stood, fetched the potted tree, and brought it over to sit next to the chair. Leaned into the camera. Smiled.

"Downsides. The biggest one, data privacy. With no statement or any real message from the creator of these devices, we just don't know.

"Also keep in mind that these devices are 'dangerous'." He smiled, lifting one end of his mouth up a little bit more to let viewers know he was in on the joke.

"But other than that?

"Rapidly evolving app ecosystem, better battery life, better reception… well, better everything than any other phone on the market.

"And of course, the price is right. If you're lucky that is.

"If you're not lucky, they're expensive and getting more expensive by the day.

"And, illegal to own. We have reports of the PRT raiding houses in Boston to confiscate these things.

"The devices do now have a 'stealth mode' that can be enabled, which makes them act like a normal phone, but you lose Dangernet and the free connectivity. Still, a good trade-off if you're outside Brockton Bay and don't want your door busted down by stormtroopers."

He'd need to cut that, re word it. PRT had squashed influencers before for being too critical, and it wasn't worth the risk. Not when things were finally starting to look up.

"So do your own diligence and decide what risks you want to take.

"Anyways, check out ShutterBagg's app," He pointed to the side, where he'd edit in a click-able banner. "And send that man some sweet, sweet points. And while you're at it, send me some points. If I get enough, I'll put in an order for custom kit, or maybe even some beta gear.

"And of course, I'll be right here to show it to ya'all.

"Like and subscribe. MMKHD. Out."

—

MEMO

SUBJECT: CRITICAL! - PRT ENE NETWORK COMPROMISED

All email, active directory, and agent accounts have been locked and new passwords assigned.

All phones, personal and company, must be exchanged for verified clean hardware. The agency will reimburse personal phone forfeiture up to $250 if original purchase receipt is presented and device was purchased within the past two years.

Your computer has been cleared and re-certified. Any files which were stored locally, in violation of PRT IT Policy, are lost and will not be recovered. Any work which was properly saved to your network folder is safe.

Please note that uncertified personnel are not to interact with unapproved technology. Tinker tech or otherwise.

Present your badge to your local IT representative at your earliest convenience to obtain your new network credentials and company phone.

Thank you,

PRT East IT

*NOTE: Due to an increase in ticket volume we are experiencing a delay in response time. We thank you for your patience.

—

Second screen from the right, live.

Armsmaster, dominating the PRT stage in larger than life power armor and smiling warmly. He crossed the stage with muted thumps before standing at parade rest in front of the podium.

"In the interest of everyone's time, I'll be brief.

"The devices proliferating in the Bay Area are the work of a single Tinker. We have assigned them the temporary designation of 'Cobble.'"

"We urge the Tinker responsible to submit to PRT or Protectorate forces. To consider how much more they could accomplish working with the law, instead of against it.

"To the people of Brockton Bay: usage of unlicensed Tinker Tech is illegal, and for good reasons. Tinker Tech can be unstable, and these laws are for the safety of everyone."

"Questions." Armsmaster looked over the crowd of assembled reporters. "Miss Brown."

The woman in question looked taken aback that the man recognized her but recovered quickly.

"Thank you. These devices have been in circulation for weeks now, surely you've examined them. Can you comment on how dangerous they are?"

"I've personally examined hundreds, with samples taken from each of the three primary generations currently present in the Bay Area.

"The devices I examined were not physically dangerous. That is not to say that they are benign."

A display on the wall behind armsmaster came active, showing a map of Brockton Bay. The map began to time-lapse forward.

"Even before being activated, each unit is an active node in a network that has grown to cover the greater Brockton Bay Area."

On the display a handful of dots, clustered around the center of the city and the docks area, pulsed outwards. Other clusters appeared and then spread, only to multiply again.

At the end of the animation, representing two months time, the entire city and immediately neighboring suburbs were bathed in yellow overlay, with varying degrees of penetration of the dots.

"As you can see, the devices spread like bacteria if left unchecked."

Armsmaster scanned the crowd again. "Mister Tanida."

"Thank you." A greying asian man with square glasses. "Neighboring PRT jurisdictions have acted aggressively against the so-called Dangerous Devices. Why hasn't PRT ENE?"

Armsmaster nodded. "Partly because the devices first appeared here, and we were slow in recognizing the danger. Other, more pressing matters had priority. By the time we realized the nature of the threat it was too late.

"PRT East, our parent organization, has developed a soft quarantine around Brockton Bay to keep these devices contained.

"Additionally, all PRT branches are now equipped with, and using, scanners that can reliably track down Cobble's tech.

"PRT ENE serves the people of Brockton Bay. At this time, the people of Brockton Bay have chosen to embrace this technology. Implementing the measures used in Boston, for instance, would be both impractical and unpopular.

"The rest of the nation is watching to see how this plays out for us."

"We have time for one more question." Reporters waved hands in air and shouted. "Miss Ramirez."

"Yes. Many people are actually thankful for these devices, some of them unable to afford a computer or high speed internet access on their own. Let alone a top tier mobile device— "

"Miss Ramirez," Armsmaster interjected. "Do you have a question?"

The woman frowned before continuing. "What's the point? Why is this Cobble doing all this?"

"I hesitate to assign motives to a Tinker I have not met or interacted with. But I will say this.

"Based on the amount of cross-talk between devices, we believe any information known by one device is known by all of them.

"Passwords, personal habits, geographical locations, audio, video. Every website you go to, every password you enter, every message you send.

"We must assume these devices are always listening, always recording, and always sharing to the network at large.

"And of course, if they wish it, Cobble themselves."

—

Topic: Stormtiger Killed

In: Boards ► Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay Discussion (Public Board)

White Fairy (Original Poster) (Veteran Member)

Posted On Dec 19th 2010:

Oni Lee murders Stormtiger

Not sure of the details yet, but from what i heard, Oni Lee was firebombing small businesses up on Westridge. Hookwolf drove him off, and Stormtiger gave chase.

Oni Lee then pulled out some kind of laser and... it's not pretty.

I don't think it's a coincidence either that all these fancy phones start showing up, starting in ABB territory, and just a little while later Oni Lee gets a shiny new gun.

Cobble's ABB. Ya'all better ditch those phones if you know what's good for you.

(Showing page 11 of 33)

►TRJ

Replied On Dec 19th 2010:

look, all i'm saying is that oni lee has been using guns and bombs for years. Only thing a laser gives him is something Stormtiger can't wind-wall.

►Answer Key

Replied On Dec 19th 2010:

Do you hear yourself?

From the sounds of it Oni Lee duplicated himself a bunch of times, while firing a tinker-tech laser, and reduced a person to chunks of charred meat in less than a second.

An admittedly horrible person, but that could just as easily be Assault, or Vista.

I'm not gonna cry any tears for nazi-tiger but i'm not sleeping any easier knowing murder-ninja has a better gun.

Replied On Dec 20th 2010:

Fuck Lee.

Stormtiger is a villain and part of the empire, but he was defending small businesses. I garntee you tiger coulda taken out lee before and didn't take the shot.

Empire's shown a lot of restraint. They gotta lota capes, and strong ones too. Who here doesn't think that Hook could roll in and shred every one of the merchant's roster?

Oni Lee will get what's coming to him. Fucking coward.

Replied On Dec 20th 2010:

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Hookwolf has 'shredded' plenty of non-capes. Purity's been raining down hell on brown people every Tuesday for the past six months. I'm sure Stormtiger has, hah, sorry *had*, red on his claws.

Bout time.

End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 ... 31, 32, 33

—

Topic: [DELETED] Empire, Merchant, Other Cape Identities Leaked / Exposed! !?

In: Boards ► Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay Discussion (Public Board)

White Fairy (Original Poster) (Veteran Member)

Posted On Dec 20th 2010:

Gonna get banned for this, but fuck it. information is already out there.

Whoever did this shit is evil, we're talking pure agent of chaos evil. Not just pulling this shit, but doing on a monday morning. For shame.

[LINK][BACKUP]

And on the 'dangernet' : /ipfs/Zme7ss3ARVgxv6rXqVPiikMJ8u2NLgmgszg13pYrDKE0iX

Now, no one really cares who Skidmark or Squealer are, they barely bother with masks as it is.

But Max Anders, CEO of Medhall, is Kaiser? Kayden is Purity? What the actual fuck?

(Showing page 1 of 1)

Replied On Dec 20th 2010:

I'm probably getting permabanned just posting to this thread, but hear me out.

I don't think we can just assume this is cobble. It's... pretty ham-fisted, compared to what cobble has done over the past three months? This is just... yikes.

And not including the ABB? An attempt to stir the pot, probably. Like Lee or Lung care if their identities are leaked, i guarantee neither of them are functioning in normal society at all.

►TRJ

Replied On Dec 20th 2010:

I don't think we have to assume anything, other than that the Bay is going to be even more of a shit show for a while than usual.

►Answer Key

Replied On Dec 20th 2010:

Privacy invasive devices spread like some sort of digital plague, and then private information is revealed.

I am so shocked.

End of Page. 1

Topic: A New Thread

In: Boards ► Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay Discussion (Public Board)

Gangwatch (Original Poster) (Not a tinker) (Might be a thinker.) (Not a thinker.)

Posted On Dec 20th 2010:

Hot on the heels of the post that shall not be named, word on the street says Kaiser (Yep, referring to him as Kaiser) put a bounty on Cobble's head.

Half a mil.

EDIT: Lung matched Kaiser's bounty. Live only though, and not sure what that means.

EDIT: Well, everything's over, but sounds like Skidmark woke up, felt left out, and put a bounty on Cobble too. One dime. Dead or Alive.

(Showing page 1 of 403)

►Antigone

Replied On Dec 20th 2010:

RIP

End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 401, 402, 403

Spoiler: End Note

Last edited: Jun 16, 2023

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ReasonableDoubt

Apr 20, 2021

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

Apr 25, 2021

#84

Early morning frost crunched under my feet while I waited in line, and I huddled deeper into my parka against the cold. Headlights swept across Mr. Tran's little food cart, and every one of us, each time a car turned off the street and into Winslow's parking lot. I wondered if the other public schools in the bay started so early. The private one I went to, before, certainly hadn't.

"One Sagion, one ebi-chilli," I said, when it was my turn.

Mr Tran, a small man with a pinched face, grabbed two sandwiches tightly rolled in wax paper. "Point? Cash?"

"Uh, Points? How many?" I asked.

He looked at me like I was stupid. "One."

My phones were helping people, which was awesome. Rewarding, in a way I hadn't really experienced before. I'd scattered hundreds of them in low income neighborhoods and places where homeless sheltered. Left them in the stairwells of housing projects, underneath bus benches, and in the dirt of sad, poorly maintained little parks.

Most people sold them. It was frustrating at first, but it made sense. Free internet and phone calls weren't going to pay rent or buy food. At least, not immediately. And if selling something that I could make, essentially for free, helped people, then that was also a win. My tech still got out there, and people's lives got better.

But this was the first time I saw someone take points for real-world goods. I pulled the phone from my pockets and transferred a point to Mr. Tran. He handed me two sandwiches, and a small stack of bills in return.

"Please," I tried to hand him back the bills. "Keep the money."

"No!" He barked, and shooed me away to deal with the next person.

It felt weird, just getting money like that. But I stuffed it in my bag, along with the sandwiches, and walked over to Winslow. Stood in another line, this time to go through the metal detectors.

Fall semester had passed in a blur. I kept my attendance up, not quite ready to give up the little bit of normal life I'd been able to find, or maybe just too scared. But every other free moment was spent working. Distributing phones, making them better. Improving the production process.

My growth chambers, finicky things that required a special touch, gave way to deterministic production. Fabrication units that, given a specific pattern, produced the same build, the same way, every single time.

More phones in circulation meant more compute capacity, and I started to run simulations. I no longer needed to design something, painstakingly monitor the build process to see where it failed, and then start over. Or at least, not as often. My simluations, like everything, were a work in progress. But each time my simulations were inaccurate, with each failure, I learned. Improved.

I created better fabrication units. Condensed to volley-ball sized pods that, with access to sun and air, would first build themselves. Growing, like seeds, into a self-contained units capable of constructing anything my process worked with. Phones, of course, but also more pods. Rudimentary drones, like the bastard child of a gliders and a stomp rocket, capable of delivering my tech anywhere in the bay.

Production of phones, and the delivery, became an automated process and freed up more of my time to make the devices themselves better.

Tanaka was happy too. Or at least he recognised that I was worth more alive and free than in the hands of some villain. He took as many cell phones as I gave him and sold them all. And each bundle he moved made him less likely to turn on me. Or at least, that was what I hoped.

The first period bell rang with an annoying, old school clanging that made my ears hurt. Mr. Quinlan's classroom was more empty than usual, it being a Monday and the last day of the semester. The washed-out math teacher still went through the motions though. Heroic, in a way. Going through geometry proofs at the same plodding pace for the three or so people that were paying attention.

My phone buzzed, and I lowered it below my desk when I saw who the message was from.

::secure message::

TB: Risk-benefit analysis has changed. The deal's off.

-TB: What?

TB: [LINK][LINK][LINK][ddfs:/ipfs/Zre…iu]

Frowning, and making sure my phone was muted—Toybox had rick-rolled me before—I tapped on the links. The first two were PHO threads that had already been deleted. The third changed everything.

"Fuck. Me." I whispered.

The guy next to me snorted, and looked up from his own phone. "Yeah. Shit's off the rails now."

Quinlan continued going through proofs, but the sleepy atmosphere of the class had changed. People who had seen the news whispered to each other, woke their friends up to let them know. Everyone who had a phone, mine or otherwise, was on it.

::secure message::

-TB: Does membership come with extraction?

TB: It would, but that offer has passed. Good luck.

-TB: Seriously?

TB: Please do not respond to this message. This account is a throwaway, and you will not be able to reach us here.

Cheap plastic pressed into my back as I leaned back in the seat and stared at the ceiling. Half a million dollars. At least Lung wanted me alive.

I should have left town. Or gone full crazy-tinker and barricaded myself in a warehouse somewhere. Though, apparently that's what String Theory did, and it hadn't worked out for her.

Hiro had fucked right off as soon as Oni Lee killed Stormtiger, that's what I should have done. Asked to go with him. At the very least, I could have taken a few cycles to build something defensive beyond the little bolo-pistol strapped to my leg.

Someone sitting by the windows shouted.

Mr. Quinlan's class was on the second floor and a row of windows, heavy glass honeycombed with security wire, looked out over the northside. Sad little houses close to the school, tenements further out, and between the gaps of crumbling residential towers, the looming profiles of shipping warehouses and loading cranes.

A pulsing star hung above it all, a harsh white brighter than the still rising sun.

"Oh fuck," Someone said.

A blinding lance of light suddenly connected Purity to the ground, and disappeared just as abruptly. An after-image lingered, swimming in my vision as I blinked my eyes. A building crumpled in upon itself, a plume of dust rising in the air. Like white smoke in the backwash of Purity's light.

She fired again. And again.

Purity harassed ABB territory all summer long, starting just after the spring semester had ended. I'd been terrified at first, had stopped working over-night in my lab for a few weeks after she started. People said she'd been holding back, and it had almost become routine. Bright light out on tuesday night? Stay inside.

No one had said how much she was holding back. Everything I made, everything I was capable of, suddenly felt… small.

"Fuck this, I'm out." The guy next to me packed up his stuff.

Most of the class had the same idea, walking right past Mr Quinlan. Who was, somehow, still going through geometry proofs on the board. The halls were already crowded, and I weaved my way towards the exit while trying to act casual. A fight broke out near the stairs, and I turned to take the long way around. I wondered what was happening at Arcadia or Clarendon, if people just kept studying, or orderly proceeded to the shelters.

"Hey!" A familiar voice called out.

I turned around, not wanting him at my back. "Brock."

He had two friends with him, who were looking at me skeptically. Around us, people started watching us. Three white guys, one with a deliberately precise buzz-cut, and me. People got the fuck away, or pushed to get a better view. No one would help.

Brock smiled. "Going somewhere?"

"Isn't everyone?" I edged to the side as his friends moved to surround me.

A comically large asian dude pushed his way through the ring of spectators. "Heyyy."

We all stared, confused, as he walked up and stood next to me. Basketball shorts and a sleeveless jersey, despite it being the middle of winter. And a shit-eating grin, like three guys surrounding another was fun.

"You guys aren't bugging my boy here," The grin vanished. "are you?"

Brock and his friends shared looks. Brock was bigger than me, but not by much, and we were both sophomores. His friends weren't any bigger. This guy towered over all of us.

"Nah," Brock said.

"The fuck? We can ta—" The one that had started to flank me protested, but fell silent when Brock glared at him.

"See you around," Brock said. "Charles."

The people who'd been ready to watch a fight groaned but faded into the press of students. The hallway was growing louder, people shouting about Purity, or something happening downtown.

I turned to leave. "Thanks for the help."

"Hold up," The big guy's hand fell on my shoulder. "Whitey called you, what. Charles?"

I shrugged, the shoulder under his hand hardly moving. "Just something he says to fuck with me."

"Right," He kept his hand on my shoulder and walked with me towards the doors. "Shit's wild right now, how 'bout I give you a ride?"

"Nah, I'm good," I said. He didn't listen.

"Oi! Shin!" He shouted to someone in the hall. "Get Tyler."

We made it through the press of people at the exit, and he tightened his grip on my shoulder. "Don't be going anywhere."

The parking lot was full of people gawking at the spectacle to the north. Flashes of light, and the crunch-crack of Purity's 'hardlight' punching through concrete and steel. Loud enough that we could hear it, miles away.

And then, a roaring.

Purity rose higher in the sky as a flaming mass launched itself above the skyline. Another blinding lance of light slammed into Lung, driving him back to the earth. Purity kept firing.

"Shiiiiiiiit," The big guy said.

I swung my arm up and back, trying to dislodge his grip. It sort of worked. He clenched his hand but only grabbed my parka. I shrugged out of the coat and bolted, leaving it, and my bag, behind. And my fucking sandwiches.

"Get him!" Someone shouted.

I ran. Cars honked and tires squealed as I bolted across the street without slowing down. Old man Tran was packing up his cart, and stared wide-eyed as I dashed by. I risked a look over my shoulder to see the big guy, and four others, close behind.

Every time I risked another look over my shoulder, the crowd chasing me got bigger. I ducked through yards and down alley ways, trying to cut line of sight. And whenever I thought I was free, someone would spot me. More yells, and it'd start again.

Pleghm built up in my throat and mouth as I sucked down cold air, pushing myself to keep running. Lung's roars and the crackling blasts of Purity were joined by thunder. News helicopters hung in the sky, filming the spectacle. Sirens, from emergency services and the PRT, were a constant, wailing backdrop.

I sprinted towards an old lot, filled with aging shipping containers. Rows of metal boxes stacked five units high, some knocked over to create a three dimensional maze. I'd hid caches of phones there, before getting the gliders working. It would have been the perfect place to hide, or to lose the crowd of people chasing me.

A ridiculous Honda Civic screeched to a halt between me and the safety of the shipping containers. I recognised the spoiler, a ridiculous thing that'd likely tear off if the car got any real speed, from Winslow's parking lot. An asian guy with a short-billed cap and bad teeth sat behind the wheel, and someone else was already climbing out of the passenger side.

We all flinched as another crack-boom of thunder sounded out, close enough to feel in my chest. I recovered first, bolting to the right. Between two warehouses, and another sharp turn. More shouts, as I continued to run.

If I had three fucking minutes to check my phone, I would have been fine. Able to avoid them, or to choose a better course. Instead, lungs burning, I slowed to a stop where the pavement ended. A rusted metal fence separating me from an expanse of icy water, pale blue on the cold winter day. The Protectorate headquarters rising out of the bay in the distance, as if mocking me.

I crouched, pulled out the bolo-pistol, and turned around. Took great, heaving gasps of air while tried to get my breath under control.

They came around the final corner, seven of them in total. Another boom of thunder drowned out the gentle gurgle of waves and the wailing of distant sirens. Lung's roar a constant backdrop. There hadn't been any flashes of light from Purity in a while.

"Holy shit." One of my pursers said, staring at the blocky, ash-grey pistol in my hand. "It is him. Cobble's a fucking kid."

Keeping the pistol pointed in their direction with one hand, I pulled out my phone with the other. A few swipes, and every DD nearby was locked and flooding the EM spectrum noise. They couldn't communicate out, which would give me time to hide somewhere more secure. If I could get away from them.

"Move to the sides." I tried to sound confident, so of course, my voice cracked.

The big guy that had started all this pushed forward. He was covered in sweat, we all were. But he was the only one in fucking basketball shorts and a jersey. If the chill breeze coming off the bay was uncomfortable for me, it must have been painful for him.

His wide grin from before was gone. "Come on man, we're not gonna hurt you."

Lung's constant roar, more distant now, changed to a piercing shriek. Another boom of thunder cut it off abruptly.

"Move to the side." The gun was almost weightless in my hand.

A few of them shifted to the side, nervously, but the big guy took another step forward. "That's a small gun."

"Please," I said, voice serious. "I don't want to use this. Don't take another step."

He wasn't going to stop. The gun had thirty two shots, but they'd probably freak out and run if I fired once. I needed to be ready, if any of them pulled out guns of their own. Or if they rushed me.

"I won't work for Lung." I said.

The big guy took another step.

I fired.

A thuft of compressed gas. Flechettes, connected by a strand of rolled graphene. All but invisible in the mid-day sun. I'd aimed at the guys legs, and Basketball shorts didn't provide much protection.

The wire wasn't strong enough, the flechettes not heavy enough, to cut through the guys legs. The razorwire wrapped around his legs and sliced into flesh. A trickle of blood at first, and then an oozing mess as he lost his balance and fell.

He screamed, thrashed on the black pavement. Every movement digging the wire deeper into the meat of his thighs, more blood. I swallowed bile and rose the gun, too-light, towards the crowd.

They backed up. One turned to run, and then they all did.

I sighed and moved to help the poor guy bleeding out on the pavement. Not sure that I could. A tourniquet maybe?

A black shadow dropped out of the sky, looking wrong in the cheery morning sun.

She stood there, black cape and frowning mask of a woman's face. My power triggered off the mask, not enough to know what it did, only that it was tinker tech. For a moment, I thought she was going to help me. Or at least save the poor dude bleeding out on the ground between us.

Instead, she raised her crossbow.

I sighed, and safed the bolo-pistol. Dropped it at my feet. She didn't lower the crossbow, so I raised my hands above my head.

Then she shot me.

"Seriously?" I crumpled to the ground and blacked out.

233

ReasonableDoubt

Apr 25, 2021

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

Apr 30, 2021

#124

I woke on a stiff bed, the mattress crinkling as I shifted. A square cell, slightly wider than I was tall, walls of metal. An orb loomed above me, half-embedded in the ceiling. My power gave an impression, arcing electricity, the intention of pain.

I'd never actually seen a PRT holding cell, they hadn't allowed visitors when they took Dad. Just troopers, dragging him away in the early morning, him yelling how sorry he was to me, to Mom. And then nothing. Did they put him in a cell like this?

The isolation dragged on. Three times a day, the slot in the wall would announce the arrival of my meal with a clunk. No one came to talk or question me, the screen embedded in one wall remained dead, and I felt myself slowly going crazy. Like worms writhing, just beneath my skull. It was the longest I'd ever gone without doing something. Figuring out a problem, or how to build something new. Working.

I spent more time asleep than awake, my pace from the past months catching up to me, but the tedium was suffocating. I did calisthenics. Pushups and squats, got crazier and started doing handstands against the wall. Exercised until exhaustion, so that stopping felt like a reward.

A cake arrived with dinner, a week or so into my captivity. A square of angel-food covered in green and red frosting. I thought they were fucking with me, until I realized it was Christmas. I did more pushups.

When the guards finally came for me, looming in full armor and masks, it was almost a relief. They restrained me with bulky, heavy cuffs that encased my hands in metal. Marched me through the door, and down wide hallways, absent of people. There were muted voices behind the doors we passed but my guards were the only people I saw. And even then it was hard to think of them as people, with all the armor.

They brought me to a bland interrogation room, metal table and two chairs bolted to the floor. Harsh fluorescent lighting that buzzed in a way that grated on my nerves. We stood there, awkwardly, until a man in khaki's stormed into the room, huddled over his phone.

Deputy Director Renick was more rumpled in real life than on TV. Bags under his eyes, the collar of his shirt undone, hair a little wispy. The little flag pin on his lapel was tilted, irritatingly.

He was the first person I'd actually seen since Shadow Stalker knocked me out. Somehow, finally meeting someone who wasn't in full armor made it seem like he and I were the only real people in the world.

He exhaled heavily and looked up from his phone. "How are you still delivering devices?"

"You put me in a metal box for a week." I looked at him like he was crazy. "Get fucked."

"Look." He slid the phone into his blazer. "You kicked off a shit-storm— nevermind. Here's the deal. You tell our techies, or if necessary Armsmaster, how to shut it all down. The network, production, anything else you're hiding. And in return, we'll give you a Wards package."

"Pass."

"Kid, think about it. Two years of service, where you get resources and training— not to mention security. You think anyone would put a bounty on the head of a Ward? We even pay you."

"All for the low, low price of betraying… what is it now? Fifty thousand people?"

"A bunch of people picked up free shit and are using it to steal internet and create an infosec nightmare. There's nothing to betray.

"You think they wouldn't jump on to the next thing if it was nicer, and just as free?"

Renick's phone buzzed, and he turned to the side and started texting again. I took a deep breath, remembered too late that the best thing to do was almost always not to talk. Did I already incriminate myself? Was that even a thing? Legal matters… were a lot more complicated than tech.

Renick almost put his phone on the table before rethinking it, and sliding it into his pocket instead. "Do you have any idea what will happen to you if we take this to trial?"

I shrugged. "I die mysteriously?"

"What? You can't hones— we don't do that. We'd never do that." He looked at me like I was the crazy one. "Hell, we go out of our god-damned way to avoid killing capes. Even when they're blowing up the city, even when good officers die for it. We're not going to kill one we've already captured."

"Yeah, sure. Tell that to my dad."

"Oh cry me a river." He shook his head. "Kenjiro Sakai killed himself when his billion dollar, thinker-fueled, ponzi scheme came crumbling down. He could have had a cushy job in Watchdog but I guess a wife, kid, and six figures wasn't enough to go on living."

My jaw hurt from clenching my teeth, and I focused on breathing through my nose as much as possible. After a moment, Renick sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

"Look. That was out of line. I'm sorry." He said. "But if you're not gonna play ball, I've got a whole lot of other fires to be putting out."

His phone buzzed, and he pulled it out of his blazer to look at the screen. He glanced at me once more before putting it to his ear. He was already talking before he left the room, pointing to the guards, then to me, and yanking his head to the side as he walked out the door. Gone to put out another fire, or something. Asshole.

More time in my metal box, more isolation. Another little cake on New Years, chocolate with firework frosting. They wouldn't even give me a notebook and the urge to create ran like fire through my head. I imagined outlines of my standard HUD ghosting across my vision, like the most twisted sort of fever dream. A freakish sort of urgency that drove me to do something, anything, when all there was to accomplish was body weight exercises and pacing around a too small cell.

When the guards next came into my cell, it was even more of a relief than the first time. I couldn't even work up resentment over the ridiculous treatment— the same special cuffs, like steel oven mitts, the same over-wide corridors, disturbingly empty— I was so happy to be out of the cell. Even if it was just to go to the exact same integration room.

This time, there was already someone there. Waiting.

A slender, middle-aged man in a neatly pressed a PRT uniform, minus the armor and accouterments. He stood when we entered the room and was completely focused on me, and the two troopers.

"Thank you," He smiled at the guards. "Take a break, and relax Zed-C if you want. I don't think Charles here wants to hurt anyone."

The guards filed out, and the man gestured to the seat. I eased into the chair and rested my hands on the table, steel cuffs hitting cheap metal with a hollow clunk. The man opposite me grimaced, stood back up, and pulled a set of keys from his belt.

"Sorry about that, ridiculous really." He undid the cuffs and slid them off my hands. He offered his palm, soft and pristine, to shake. "Thomas Calvert. It's a pleasure to meet you, Charles."

I rubbed my wrists instead of shaking his hand. "So you're the good cop?"

He chuckled, as if at himself, and sat back down. "Nothing so well planned I'm afraid."

He pulled a small laptop out of his bag, nothing special, and positioned it on the table so we could both see the screen. He opened up BB7's site, and hesitated a moment before turning to me.

"I understand you've been kept in isolation, and haven't even been offered a lawyer, along with a host of other errors.

"I'd like to apologize for that. The local PRT was simply overwhelmed and undermanned, and failed to handle your case properly."

He pressed play on one of the videos. A news commenter, showing a hell-scape of metal and wrecked cars downtown. Aerial footage of north Brockton Bay, most of it a charred mess, some of it still on fire. Another shot of Downtown, City Hall a backdrop to people marching, red and black bandannas covering their faces. Chanting. Waving actual nazi flags, or at least double Eight's, stylized to resemble swastikas.

Calvert paused clip with curious timing, leaving one of the flags prominently displayed. "This is what we let them air."

He pressed play on another video file, stored locally. Grainy black and white body-cam footage began to play. A flaming monster, bright enough, or hot enough, to wash out the camera's sensor. Barreling through a PRT transport, back-handing armored officers like a grown man beating small children. The brightness flared as the monster neared, and the footage ended. More files. Giants, clad and armed in metal, clashing with Battery and Assault. Iron palisades, points wicked and gleaming, grew around them. Metal resembling a wolf, clashing off Armsmaster's halberd in a shower of sparks. On and on.

Calvert paused the video again, Armsmaster spinning his weapon overhead, face stoic, as Hookwolf charged.

"I'm showing this so you can understand what's been going. Not as an excuse, for how you've been treated, but for a bit of perspective. A bit of hope that, maybe, you can give us the benefit of the doubt. And trust me when I say that your treatment was not out of malice.

"We cultivate an image of security, of competence. But we're just a group of individuals, like any other organization.

"We're trying to protect people. And sometimes it feels like we're the thin line standing between that," He pressed play again, and Hookwolf blurred. Armsmaster's parry separating the metal head from the mass of blades and not doing a thing to stop the wolf, who barreled over the hero. Armsmaster rolled to his feet, and kept fighting. "And the rest of society."

He opened another video. This time of a bland man, approaching middle age, with a blunt, wide nose. He sat in a cell similar to mine, head freshly shaved. Opaque metal goggles tightly wrapped around his skull. He was entirely still but for regular deep, steady, breaths.

"Oni Lee." Calvert commented. "Captured, thanks to you. That was good planning, good thinking, and it saved a lot of lives. We need more of that.

He leaned back in his chair, letting the silence stretch. He didn't look away, or fidget. He seemed completely comfortable, as if he'd be happy to sit there for hours.

"So," I finally asked. "What do you want from me?"

He smiled. "Well, for starters, how can we make your captivity more comfortable?"

"What?"

"I can't get you internet, or any external contact, for obvious reasons. Not yet at least. But what I can do, if you promise me you won't try to escape or hurt anyone, is move you to a nicer cell."

I let the silence stretch again, and he was just as zen about it as the first time. He was obviously perfectly happy to sit there in silence.

"I never wanted to hurt anyone," I finally said.

"Of course not. You've only tried to help people, and done a good job of it." He was either a good actor, or believed what he was saying. "So do I have your word?"

I nodded, I wasn't agreeing to anything new— I honestly didn't want to hurt anyone. And it's not like I could realistically escape. Even with my tech, I wasn't really that kind of a tinker.

"Sorry, bit of a formality. I need to hear you say the words."

"I won't try to escape, or hurt anyone," I recited.

"Excellent." He leaned forward and held out his hand. This time I took it, his hand engulfing mine. "Let's see if we can't come to an arrangement that works for all of us."

Everything changed, after that. And not gradually.

It was like the sun suddenly came out from behind heavy clouds. The guards were more open, they didn't bother with full face-covering helmets and bulky body armor anymore. The hallways they walked me through was alive and bustling with activity. Agents or office workers glancing at me curiously, on occasion, before going about their day.

Like the weeks of isolation were some sort of surreal nightmare, one that I'd escaped by taking Thomas Calvert's hand.

Instead of returning to my six by six metal box, the guards took me to a different level and checked me in to what could have been mistaken for a hotel room. If the hotel was built deep underground, and encased all their electronics in an exotic polymer that set my power alight with possibilities.

I received any book I requested. Trash fiction, just to amuse myself with, but also texts on everything from electrical engineering to crystallography and particle physics. It was fascinating, in a way. Reading findings cited as laws of nature that I had already disproved, or finding theoretical practices that I had implemented in real life.

The PRT let me contact a number of law firms, even provided brochures on all of them. I was skeptical of course— Calvert seemed to be the one driving all the change and he was too friendly. But unless the PRT went through the trouble of falsifying hundreds of pages worth of information, court records, testimonies, even back-issues of law journals, the information was legit.

There was one clear 'best choice', a firm operating out of Cambridge, every partner a Harvard Alumni. A long and storied history defending minorities and then parahumans. Profitable, and sharing in those profits, operating refuge relief funds and donating to the Parahuman Asylum. Competent, ethical, and good. And they wanted to take my case. Pro bono.

I talked to them, and they were positive about my case. The junior partner they sent to meet with me was polite and enthusiastic, broke down all the potential charges, and then assured me they could get them all dropped. Get a good Wards deal, with no strings attached.

Again, the safe, easy option. Do what they told me to do, quietly bide my time.

I also decided to talk to the most expensive firm, just to test the waters. Calvert had treated me well, and maybe he wasn't stacking the deck. But it wouldn't hurt to try the other lawyer's first.

"Quinn Calle," The wicked scar running across the left of his face twisted as he introduced himself with a smile. "You're lucky I was in town."

"Thank you for meeting with me," I said. "Have you reviewed my case?"

"I have," He said. "And find it hard to believe that you can afford our rates."

"Would you be willing to take… points?"

He smiled wider, showing perfect teeth. "A clever solution, getting my incentives aligned with yours. But no, I'm not interested in points. Or your tech."

"I see. Then, why are you here?"

He shrugged. "Curiosity, mainly. Wanted to see what made you tick. I've worked with a number of parahumans, violent, insane, timid. The troubled and the paranoid. Can't really say I've worked with someone that could have, or would have, done what you did."

"Thanks?"

"Not sure it was a compliment," He said. "There's some fascinating articles that have surfaced about what it would mean to bring your tech forward legally. Imagine, Texas Instruments suing a Tinker for patent infringement. What a glorious mess that would be."

Despite myself, I was curious. "How so?"

"Legal nerdery, nevermind." He waved it away. "But, if you'll humor me, can you tell me why?"

"Why… what? I didn't release everyone's secret identities— I only found it out had happened after there was a bounty on my head."

"Ok, fine. But why phones? You seem capable of keeping your head down— why not just sell guns?"

"I didn't, don't, have just one reason…"

"That's usually the case." He shrugged again. "Our world isn't black and white, and most people don't have just one reason to do a thing."

"Do we need to do the dollar thing?"

He laughed. "No. We can just agree that, while in this room and discussing legal matters, that you are my client. Anything you say is safe with me."

I paused for a moment, looking around the little meeting room. It had the same dimensions as the one Renick, and then Calvert had met me in. Instead of metal furniture, bolted to the floor, there were wobbly wooden chairs and a scuffed table that looked older than the building itself. I didn't really know where to begin.

"Phones, really are just the beginning. Or would have been."

We talked for a while, and I explained a bit of how my technology worked. How hard it was, in the beginning, to focus on something I could make a lot of. Manufacture, essentially. That the smart phones really just represented the visible part of what I was working towards.

A production base, flexible enough and robust enough to be run remotely. Fabrication chambers that could create the 'seeds' for more fabrication chambers, small enough to discreetly distribute wherever there was an abandoned plot of land with enough sunlight.

"Sorry, I get excited about the tech. Tend to ramble."

One side of his mouth quirked up. "I don't mind, but you still haven't really answered why phones. All of your production stuff, even the distributed processing part, could have been done without going through the effort of spreading phones throughout the city. Surely it realized it made you a target."

"I guess, I'd be ashamed of myself if I didn't try to help in some way. I wasn't about to go around fighting crime— even if I could have made weapons and armor for myself or whatever. I mean I could have, but what would that actually change?

"Free phones, with internet? That people would want to use, that would, maybe, make this shitty city a little bit better? Sure, it was hard. But I thought it would help. And it seems like it was."

"What would have been easy?" He asked.

"Weapons." I shrugged. It'd always been there, at the back of my mind.

"Information is a weapon." He countered. "Especially control of it."

I shrugged uncomfortably. At some point over the past months, things had clicked, gotten dramatically easier. The fabrication techniques, the networking. The software controlling it all on the back-end. Not the surface level stuff people interacted with, but routing and control. The code that made tens of thousands of devices a cohesive network. Information, be it was access to the internet itself, private network credentials, or people's location in space and time, rippling through the nodes like tesselation automata. Beautiful, in a way.

"Maybe. But phones at least, and what I planned to do in the future, also helped," I continued. "In a way that helped me at the same time. Dad used to talk about different types of games people played, zero sum and positive sum. So much of all this is," I waved my hand around the tired little meeting room. "NEPEA5 and all the other bullshit legislation, is zero-sum thinking. Fear, that parahumans will take money or opportunities away from someone more deserving. That it's unfair, someone getting granted powers and then being able to live a good life with them, I guess.

"I wanted to change that. Change the system, just a bit, make an impact. Do something that makes life better for everyone."

"Except the PRT," Calle said, with a sardonic smile.

I snorted. "I guess."

He pursed his lips for a moment, and then shrugged. "Alright."

"Alright?" I asked.

"Let's see what we can do." His smile had a wicked tilt to it.

It was a lot of back and forth. Most of what Calle, and his firm, actually did was beyond me. They'd talk to the PRT, to Calvert or another functionary, laughingly acknowledge the possibility of a trial, all the while talking about what sort of settlement we would come to.

"I'm not shutting down the network." I said.

"Hey, I'm good, but I'm not Jesus. You need to learn to compromise." Calle leaned forward slightly. "This will work— we set up a shell company, ensure you're able to 'consult' with it as a part of your Wards contract. The rights to the tech, the proceeds, the liability all sits with the LLC, and… your eyes are glazing.

"Look, you can still help people and keep some freedom. The LLC will give you a layer of isolation from orders, something that should continue to work until they actually write new laws to prevent what we're doing here.

"But to do that, we need to throw the PRT a bone."

"It's not just about me, it's about all the people that worked to build out the network. That continue to build it out. People are using points as currency now, I can't just screw everyone over like that."

"Well, you can, but it isn't in your best long term interest."

"Sure," I said.

Calle hmm'd, and thought for a bit. "What if you make them do it?"

"The PRT? How is that better?"

"Hear me out." He leaned forward. "You already have allies within the PRT and Protectorate. Calvert for one, and he has a lot of pull, locally and in other districts. The Director of Image for the entire protectorate is interested— "

"How is marketing going to help me."

Calle raised an eyebrow. "In the 1920's the Tobacco industry took a public that was convinced cigarette's were a 'dirty, corrupting habit not fit for a lady' and made them believe lighting up was a symbol of women's rights and a convenient way to lose weight.

"You told me information is a weapon— marketing is just another way of wielding it."

"OK, I get that it can be powerful but I'm not sure I want to take lessons from the Tobacco industry."

"Merely an example." His cufflinks glinted in the light as he waved his hand. "If the public sees you as a moody teen that can't work with anyone, or even just some flashy kid-cape that flies around on a hoverboard or whatever— nothing you do will matter. The PRT will hold all the power.

"But! If you play this right, then by the time your Wards obligation expires, you'll have a rock-solid reputation as a hero. The public will adore you.

"And the PRT will bend over backwards to help you."

"No one's going to adore me if Armsmaster bricks every device."

"That's good-bad, binary thinking." He leaned back and adjusted his suit jacket. "Someone who's cultivated public perception to the degree Armsmaster has isn't going to want to piss a bunch of people off without a damned good reason.

"You just have to be careful not to give him a reason."

I frowned, and Calle actually rolled his eyes.

"Look, you said you wanted a win-win, and that starts now. How can we make this deal work so that everyone wins? What can you can concede? What can we change?"

"Well, if we find a way to pay for a real internet uplink, ISP grade, I can yank out the network invasiveness."

"Doable through the shell company," Calle nodded. "If you're confident you have processes that non-tinkers can use?"

"The tech isn't the problem."

"Let us worry about the legal side," Calle said, writing on a large yellow pad of paper. "I think we can make this work."

It wasn't easy, and it wasn't quick. Negotiations, back and forth. Approvals and compromises. Calvert finagled it so I was let of my little motel-room cell more frequently. Still escorted, but able to take advantage of the PRT's facilities. An olympic sized swemming pool. Obstacle course and gym. There was even a sauna, and a not-bad cafeteria.

They wouldn't let me near a computer, or any network-capable device. One of my guards had what looked like a panic attack when he realised the treadmill I tried to use was one of the smart-kinds. But they brought me books, and I filled piles of journals with ideas for new builds, or even code.

Some part of me still wanted to demonize it as a clever scheme. A sinister attempt to humanise the faceless storm-troopers of the PRT. That the thirty minutes I spent on an exercise bike, next to some intern reading a sociology text while on a treadmill, would dull my suspicion, blunt my anger. That I would stop seeing them as an evil, shadowy cabal.

But it was hard to think of a scheme that made me see the people, instead of the organisation, as something evil or sinister. And, ultimately, the PRT had far bigger problems than me. Calvert's explanation at the beginning made more sense.

I just didn't matter that much.

The protests continued, flashing into riots seemingly at random. Empire 88 morphed into a sort of militarised government in rebellion, calling themselves a sovereign state, and for some reason it was allowed to happen. The national guard didn't come rolling in. The other PRT branches didn't send in their capes to flatten them. Kaiser built his little walls and the rest of Brockton Bay just sort of wrote-off an entire swathe of land.

Lung went on a tear through Merchant territory. Trash, as it turns out, burns, and the PRT was pretty sure Mush was no more.

And through it all, my phones still functioned.

Calvert lobbied hard to get me ten minutes with a phone. One of the third-gen devices they'd straight up bought instead of confiscating. He reasoned that if I were going to go scorched-earth, I would already have built in contingencies. And that, at some point, we needed to start building trust.

Calle and I crafted a message, and I broadcasted it to every phone on the network. Letting everyone know that I was working with the PRT to arrive at a fair solution. That, while new points would not be granted, and the drops would be suspended, there would be more coming.

Promised, that I would continue to provide free internet.

The clock began to tick, my new shell company going into debt paying for ISP grade circuits.

Between the gesture of trust, Calle's badgering, Calvert's lobbying, and whatever strings the PR guy pulled, it all came together. We had a plan to go forward. An offer I could live with for the next two-plus years.

They brought me to a conference room at the top of the PRT building to sign on as a Ward.

Floor to ceiling windows of ballistic glass looked out over Downtown Brockton Bay. Armsmaster stood there in his power armor, and I locked up for a moment when I saw him. My power of course— glimpses of how the armor had been made and what it was capable of— but also just awe of the man himself. Childhood dreams I thought dead, rising to the surface.

Calvert held out a hand, smiling, and I shook it.

Armsmaster's gauntlet folded away in a fascinating display of precision, and he offered his hand as well.

"I look forward to working with you," He said.

"Um, thank you. Me too." I managed to reply.

Calle pressed a heavy fountain pen into my palm, and I sat down in front of one of the three stacks of paper. What had started life as a standard Wards contract had evolved into a legal treatise, over a hundred pages full of specific language. Terms of probation, consequences and incentives, and the loopholes that Calle's team had created. I worked through it all, carefully flipping to each place I needed to sign or initial, each helpfully marked by colored post-its.

When I finished, Calvert slid the copy he'd been working on across the table, and I started again. More signatures, more initials, and the same with the copy Armsmaster had started with.

It was easier than I would have thought, to sign away two years of my life. A handful of minutes. Myself, Calvert for the PRT, Armsmaster for the Protectorate. Signed and Notarized, in triplicate. Calle clapped me on the shoulder.

Calvert stood, a genuine smile on his face. Armsmaster beside him, looking on approvingly.

"Welcome to the Wards."

Spoiler: End Note

Last edited: Dec 11, 2022

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ReasonableDoubt

Apr 30, 2021

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

May 5, 2021

#174

"It's all gone?" I squinted against the glare of the sun as we looked out over the city.

The wind gusted across the roof of the PRT building. The chill was refreshing, better at waking me up than yet another cup of government-institution coffee. It also drowned out the sounds of a crowd protesting in the streets below. Helped me to focus on something other everything that was going wrong with the city.

Innocent people being assaulted or abducted, even after the PRT announced they'd captured me. Purity's rampage and the running battle with Lung had killed hundreds and displaced thousands. Tent cities had sprung up in the parks around Captains Hill, pissing off the people who lived there Refugee camps, barely a defense against the cold winter, and no solace to people who'd been burned out of their homes. Or forced out by racists.

People were talking about an emergency recall of the Mayor. They'd already changed PRT Directors.

And more immediate to me, the shell company Calle had set up was already burning money. Providing free internet to half a city wasn't cheap. It was more necessary than ever, with what people were going through, but I still needed to figure out a way to pay for it.

So much to do. Too much.

"Yes." Armsmaster's armor gleamed, morning sun glinting off cobalt blue as he shifted to track an aberration in the sky. "Stalker shared your lab's location, before engaging you, and there were complications when trying to capture your gear."

"What happened?" I resisted the urge to huddle against another gust of wind, and reminded myself to ask for a coat before going to the roof again.

PRT HQ wasn't the largest structure downtown, Medhall loomed higher just west of us, and some of the high-rise condos towards the bay were even taller. But standing on the landing pad that took up most of the roof still put us above most of the buildings downtown. Four troopers were on the roof with us, due to a heightened state of alert.

Apparently they had alert levels. I'd learn all about it, if I ever got the time to go through Ward orientation. I had thought that, maybe, after signing the contract they'd ease me into it. Meet the rest of the wards, do some training. Go through paperwork and procedures, that sort of thing. Learn first aid and radio discipline.

It didn't work like that, at least not for me. I signed, and got to work. They told me that proper accomodations would be taken care of late. Asked if I minded, terribly much, staying in the same little motel-room cell until they did. Freshly upgraded with internet access, computer equipment, and one of my phones. Promised that a lab would be made available to me, soon.

I said it was fine, and developed a habit of obsessively checking the door, making sure it wasn't locked. That, if I wanted to, I could step out and walk around, even if there was nowhere to go. The Empire protesters that surrounded the building would likely tear me apart. Some dude in a wife-beater presenting one of my toes to Kaiser, asking for a portion of the five hundred thousand dollar bounty.

I needed more caffeine. Or less.

Armsmaster appeared unaffected, of course, by the bitter wind and any lack of sleep. I'd worked through the night to nerf my network, bringing it down to a level that the government could tolerate. Developed a way to share the code, the schematics, and what boiled down to root credentials, all in one night. Control and oversight, to be handed to Armsmaster.

I was tempted, so tempted, to build in a back door. To gate the second root account through my approval. But there had to be some sort of trust, and I wasn't handing it to the PRT. I was handing it to Armsmaster, one of the original heros. And if giving him control gave the PRT enough confidence that I could get the shell corporation off the ground? It'd be worth it. So instead of back-channels or hidden overrides, I went the other direction.

"ABB were already there," Armsmaster continued to follow the drone as it approached. Calle had shared the gist of what they had on me during negotiations, but not the particulars. "Three breached your lab without breathing equipment and died of asphyxiation shortly afterwards. The others must have hesitated after that. They were waiting outside the building, and fled as soon as we arrived.

"Your equipment crumbled to ash when we attempted to move it, and then Agents left to secure the site withdrew when we failed to capture Lung. We destroyed the entire site, rather than risk it falling into ABB hands."

The black speck became distinguishable as a flying-wing shape, and we tilted our heads back to continue tracking it. The non-reflective surface that worked so well at night freakish and obvious by day.

The drone released its payload and began to break-down. A trail of gray ash scattering on the wind. It felt wrong, calling in drops while the sun was up. The PRT, or any organization with satellites, could easily track the drones back to their launch sites.

The payload-vehicle's fall slowed as it ballooned into a sphere. A gust of wind pushed the sphere off course until compressed gas jettisoned. Course-correcting against the cross wind.

"Interesting," Armsmaster commented, as the sphere touched down and began to collapse.

"It's kind of a hack." The wind gusted and ripped away half-decomposed fragments of sphere. "What about the guy I shot? Before So—"

"Shadow Stalker. Please be careful with identities." Armsmaster stepped a little closer, looking over my shoulder. He continued, a little softer. "The boy, Daisuke Katajima, bled out."

"I was going to try to help him." The sphere fully dissolved, and I focused on the tangled mess left behind. "Maybe a tourniquet on his legs, and then call an ambulance. Or something. And then Stalker shot me."

I'd lost track of what helmet revision I was on, but it was a far cry from the original welder's mask. What had been spines in earlier versions had grown into semi-flexible extensions, housing more functionality. Optics, buried in the mass, glinted in the morning sun.

"Stalker could have handled the situation better, and has been reprimanded," Armsmaster said.

"Oh." I ran my hands over the spines, sorting them in one direction so the helmet would be easier to pick up.

"I'm not the greatest at this." He waved off one of the troopers that was stepping closer. "You'll have regular sessions with a therapist. This would be a good topic to cover."

I finished disentangling everything. It was hardly recognizable as a helmet anymore, I'd played around with it a lot, adding whatever optimizations or functionality felt natural, or even interesting. The front face was speckled with sensors and optics, with more scattered across the rest of the helmet. Spines of varying size and length housed rod-logic, facilitated cooling, stored energy, gas exchange. And a host of other functions.

"Sure." I pulled off my domino mask, and lifted the helmet.

A deep breath, and then I pushed my head into the helmet with slow, steady pressure. It pressed against the base of my neck and shoulders, internal pressure and atmosphere stabilized comfortably, and the display came to life in glorious fidelity. The world around me snapped into clarity, and then the HUD began to populate with various readouts.

Sound came in greater clarity as well. The faint sussuruss of the protesters below now distinguishable as hundreds of voices chanting. 'No Trial, No Cage'. Over and over again.

"You should be more careful with your own identity too," Armsmaster said. "The Empire, and others, may be monitoring the building."

I pointed at the next drone instead of answering, not really caring about a secret identity. That ship had sailed. "There's the next one, the third one will launch shortly."

"Are you able to land the glider, instead of having it self-destruct?" Armsmaster looked where I pointed. "I'd like to take a closer look at one, if you don't mind."

I shrugged. "Sure."

It would have taken too long with just a phone. The drones flew themselves, and the software, while not overly complex, was still a lot of code. The helmet let me work faster though, and was a pleasure work with again. After being constrained to a phone for so long, and unable to do much of anything while stuck in a PRT cell, I'd forgotten how awesome the helmet was. Immersive. Not real AR, not yet. But better than plain, naked, reality.

The second drone released its drop as I worked. A second sphere hit the center of the PRT's landing pad and crumbled open to reveal a coconut sized fab-seed. Gray, and covered with thin tendrils that writhed in the sunlight. I interrupted my work to prevent it from going into a grow-cycle.

"The next one will be here shortly." I gestured to the fab-seed sitting on the pad. "That's good to go, if you want to start checking it out."

"I'll need the equipment in my main lab," Armsmaster made a gesture, and the case at his feet opened. "Place it in here, please."

The tendrils tickled the flesh of my palms as I picked up the seed. The PRT were paying more attention than they had at first, and openly stared as I tossed the fab-seed into the Armsmaster's container. The seed was designed to be dropped out of the sky, if necessary. There was no need to be careful with it.

I pulled up a video feed from the final drone, watching it angle into a steep dive. Below, protesters clad in black and red clogged the streets. So dumb. Purity killed dozens during her tantrum, and had been tried in absentia. Or whatever the proper legal term was. The Internet and Dnet both had videos of her flattening apartment buildings. Some occupied.

It was a quick trial, but that didn't stop Max — I refused to think of him as Kaiser — from whipping up a bunch of trash into a mob.

The final drone dipped below the level of the PRT building's roof, bleeding off extra speed before rising sharply enough to stall. A puff of expelled gasses knocked the nose back over into a short glide to the landing pad, where it came to a clattering stop. The EM absorbing surface of the drone eerie in the morning sun.

The wind gusted, and I rushed to keep the drone pinned before it blew off the roof. "What now?"

"It's… larger than I thought it'd be." Armsmaster said. "I'd like a control surface, and whatever sensors you're using."

"Sure. Sensors, processors, and comms are all the same as the phones, but I'll get you some. Hold it there, please."

I ashed the rest of the drone, leaving behind a second fab-seed and the bit of wing Armsmaster held. I dropped the fab-seed in the container without asking. One for my new lab in the PRT building, one for the shell company. If we got approval.

Normally, they said it'd need multiple rounds of review. Independent PRT boards and tinkers. And it'd still be doubtful. But with the city in the state it was, and Director Calvert pulling strings, we might manage.

It was fishy as all hell, but at least the fishy-ness was working in my favor for once.

"Not to rush, but how long will it take you to approve the fabrication units and the phones?"

"Director Calvert wants both done as soon as possible," Armsmaster said, turning the bit of wing in his hand over. "I've gone over the specs, and the code. You did good work, but the ECM is still an issue though."

"Really?" I asked. "I removed the easy triggers."

"Yes." Armsmaster fit the section of wing he was holding in the case with the fab-seeds before sealing the whole thing and effortlessly picking it up. "Why do you think that is?"

"FCC Regulations?" I guessed, and started following him to the elevator.

He huffed a laugh, though I wasn't trying to be funny. "No. Or rather, only partly. The jamming you triggered before Stalker apprehended you blocked PRT comms in a five block radius. And every other wireless form of communication. Every emergency responder, every wireless phone.

"Stalker was unable to call for a backup squad, or medical support for the boy you shot."

"Oh."

"I'm saying this so you can learn." Armsmaster paused and looked at me. "We all have blind spots, and you should understand the implications of what you build.

"Your phones are capable of powerful ECM. Even with the triggers removed, you could still write a bit of code and have every phone in the city act as a jammer, correct? Shut down wireless communication across the city at any time you wish?"

"Yes." It made sense. "The strength of the jamming is a side effect of the antenna efficacy. Ripping it out would be… You do have an override, or you will. Won't that be enough?"

"I'll run it by the Director." Armsmaster said. "The fabrication units are an interesting case. I've already completed my assessment, the scans of these two units are to make sure they match your schematics, and won't take long.

"The actual approval will come down to PRT politics."

The elevator arrived, a large sturdy unit, the metal floor scarred from years of use. Once again, my power threatened to drag me down a rabbit hole examining it.

"Politics?" I asked, as the doors closed behind us.

"Your fabrication units are capable of self-replication." Armsmaster said. "You included safeties, good ones, but it will still scare people. Even if they have the potential to do good. A lot of good."

"They will," I said.

He nodded. "You also mentioned you'd pass credentials to me in person."

I sighed, and reminded myself that this was necessary, at least for the short term. Armsmaster was a hero, had been a hero longer than I'd been alive. And if for some reason he wasn't worth that trust, well I could see everything he could do on the network as well. Power would be balanced by transparency. For both of us.

I forced myself to hold out a standard USB key. Armored gauntlets delicately plucked the small drive from my hand, never coming into contact with my skin. It still felt like he was ripping away a part of me. This was necessary.

"Please be careful with that," I said. "You have full control, and will be able to shut down or even destroy the network. We will both need to approve any substantial changes going forward, and there is now a full audit trail that I've done my best to make tamper-proof. For both of us."

"Thank you, I do not take this ligthly," He said. "You're doing the right thing, working with us."

"I hope so."

The elevator halted, soundless, and the doors glided open. Scuffed from years of use, but still worked flawlessly. I wondered who'd built it.

"You're meeting with Glenn next?" Armsmaster asked.

"Yes," I said. "Headed directly there."

"And you're wearing your mask?"

"My helmet?" I glanced at him. "Shouldn't I?"

"No, go ahead." He stepped out into the hallway with me. "In fact, I can take five minutes to walk there with you."

People gave us a wide berth as we walked down the hallways, nodding respectfully to Armsmaster. Staring at me, unreasonably. My helmet was, maybe, a little bit ugly. But it wasn't that bad.

Armsmaster guided me to another conference room, less glamorous than where we'd done the signing, but still a few steps above the room where I'd worked with Calle.

A half-empty box of bagels and paper coffee cups, all stamped with the logo of a cafe that must be nearby. Calle had brought the same ones to some of our meetings. One of the cups looked untouched, but had already cooled to room-temperature.

A colorful, fat, middle aged man looked up as we walked in.

"Glenn," Armsmaster said.

"Armsmaster!" The man greeted with a smile. And froze as his gaze shifted to me. He looked back to Armsmaster, expression flat. "Yes. Very droll."

"I thought you'd enjoy the aesthetic." Armsmaster said, smiling. "Good to see you, I should get going.

"Charles," Armsmaster turned to me. "You're in good hands."

And then he left, taking root credentials to everything good I'd ever built, and leaving me alone with a man who resembled a rooster. A fat rooster.

"Glenn Chambers," The man said, holding out his hand without hesitation. He had a warm, firm handshake. "Please take off the mask. Speaking face to face will make this easier."

I triggered the release with a gesture, and the seal weakened with a puff of vented gas. I half pulled, half peeled the helmet off, and blinked against light that was suddenly both brighter and less illuminating. I violently sneezed as the scent of too much cologne assaulted my nostrils.

"Nice to— " Another sneeze. "Sorry, your cologne is really strong."

"Yes, well." He gave a dry smile. "I took a red-eye and haven't had the chance to shower. Trust me, the cologne is preferable."

"I lived in a group home for boys, I'm acclimated to B.O." I struggled not to sneeze. "But anyways, nice to meet you."

"Let's get to it then, we don't have a lot of time."

"We have ten hours," I said.

"Well, unless you want to present yourself to the public as Iggy the Techno-Squid, we need to come up with a brand you can live with for the rest of your life. A good brand.

"We also need a strategy for not alienating your existing support, now that you're working for 'the man'." He stared at my helmet where it sat on the table, spines dangling over the side, the corner of his mouth twisting up in distaste. "Are you attached to that look? Does your tech always come out looking like a waxy Giger mock-up?"

"It's not that bad," I said. "And I was more focused on practicality than anything else. I can make it look different."

"Right. Well, the gray is already widely associated with you and has the benefit of being fairly neutral. We'll base your new palette on it, ensure the connection to what you've already created is carried forward, while accentuating it with brighter, more distinctive colors.

"Do you have any preferences? Colors, themes, or even names?"

"Not really," I glanced at my helmet. Maybe I could put it on and get some work done.

"Really." Glenn frowned. "I'm getting the impression you're not taking this seriously. Also, sit up straight. You're a Hero, not an IT nerd."

I corrected my posture, despite myself. Old habits from before, Mom always harped on about how to carry myself. I stared at Glenn. His garish shirt and sad little mohawk. Bulging gut.

Calle had impressed upon me how important my brand would be. How I could leverage it in the future. The rushed press conference meant I didn't have time to really learn anything about branding or image, not with everything else going on.

And when Calle had talked about the PRT's head of image, I had imagined someone with a bit more style. Or maybe less style. Less of whatever Glenn had going on, definitely.

"Are you really the Director of Public Image?" He didn't even look like he paid much attention to his own image. "For the whole Protectorate?"

His eyebrows rose, and he took on an offended tone. "Is that so hard to believe?"

"I'm sorry. I've been through a lot lately and just pulled an all-nighter." I kept my doubts to myself, no need to antagonize him. "But why would the Director of Image, for the entire Protectorate, personally fly to Brockton Bay just to meet me? Seems like overkill."

"Well," He smiled without cheer. "A number of factors.

"First, you're already famous. Not just here, videos of your tech have gone viral nationwide. The idea of tinker tech raining from the sky has captured people's imagination. And everyone's watching to see how Brockton Bay's grand experiment turns out.

"Second, the fallout from outing every Empire cape. Most people don't believe 'Cobble' actually did the deed, but it still served as a catalyst. And the idea that 'Cobble' did do it, or is responsible, remains plausible enough that those who want to blame you, can."

He kept on doing actual air quotes every time he said the word Cobble.

"And third, you already have a fan base. Large, borderline religious. Like the die-hard fans of rock groups, willing to line up for hours outside ticket sellers, or follow their group across the nation just to see them play. What you've done with the phones is becoming a social movement.

"I suspect this is why the new Director is rushing the press conference. Actually— "

He got up and fumbled with one of the conference rooms windows of thick glass, finally finding a way to open it a crack. The chanting, a barely noticeable background buzz, snapped into focus. The same words rising above the buzz. Whining about Purity's treatment.

"Think for a moment."

Sirens sounded out below, and then the thing cop cars did where they blast noise at you. The chanting didn't stop. "No trial, no cage."

Glenn looked at me with half a smile on his face. "What would happen if your supporters decide the PRT is coercing you? If they start protesting as well, and while they do so, they clash with— " He shook his hand at the window to indicate the crowd below. "that."

He clamped the window shut and returned to his chair, staring at me.

"So, as the person responsible for the Protectorate's image, nation wide, when a freshly installed PRT Director, presiding over a dumpster fire in progress masquerading as a city, tries to slip a notification past my office that there's going to be a press conference to introduce a new ward the next fucking day?

"Do I cancel everything I have scheduled in L.A.? Do I apologise to my family, letting them know I won't be home on time? Do I drop everything, and take the first available flight to the hot mess that is Brockton Bay?

"Yes." Glenn leaned back and stared at me. "Yes I do. So, do you think you can take this seriously?"

"Yes, I get it, this is important. I just don't know anything about all of this, and there's a million other things going on, just as important. Things that I do know something about."

Calle said Glenn was competent, and something of an odd ball in the Protectorate's system. He had authority, but aggravated a lot of people. Especially the more military minded administrators in the PRT. And Armsmaster, had said I was in good hands.

And for all his odd style, at least he seemed invested.

"I'm glad we both agree that this is important." Glenn said. "Maybe we can stop wasting time now."

"I guess I'll trust your judgement," I said.

"Good." Glenn was more serious than he'd been at any time since entering the conference room. "I will not betray that trust. Some things, you may not understand the reasons to, but we just don't have time to quibble over every little detail. If you can trust me, and my team, I guarantee you we'll have an identity ready by the time you walk onto stage tonight. A good one."

He glanced towards my helmet. "You can build with a different look, right?"

The next hours were fascinating and difficult. Glenn constantly complained about the lack of time, reflexively corrected my posture— even as he slumped in his own chair —and discussed aspects of the upcoming press conference I hadn't considered.

We worked out a way to, hopefully, not alienate people already supporting me. He listened to my ideas on how to reach out to them, how to prove I was the one behind the phones, behind any shadow of a doubt. Convince everyone that I still had free will, that I'd support them even while working with the government.

Some of it required new code, ways of leveraging the devices already in use. Glenn told me to get to it. And as the somewhat obese man went back to his laptop and sketch pad, I pulled my helmet on.

We worked. Me in relative silence, probably looking like the worst kind of nerd with my hands flailing at a keyboard and gesturing at screens only I could see. Glenn alternated between gregarious motion, pacing back and forth while talking ceaselessly into his phone, or shouting at his laptop. Tearing paper from his sketch pad, and hunching over it to start anew. Again and again.

"How much longer?" Glenn asked me at one point.

"The code for the press relase?" I confirmed, still working "I finished it a while ago."

"Then can you take that off again?" Glenn slid his sketch-pad across the table to me. Colors, logo, a sketch of a figure in light armor, with more detail paid to the helmet. "Need your input."

"I'd like more antenna." He'd added two back-swept antennas to the helmet, akin to the ears of a hare laid flat. The whole style called for straight lines, gray and blue, with orange for contrasting highlights. "I can move more power storage and compute into the armor, but having more distributed—"

"We don't have time for you to go full technobabble. This is an initial concept. The two 'ears', combined with a distinctive color palette, gives you instantly recognizable elements you can incorporate as your technology evolves, and forms the basis of a strong logo. Try not to festoon the thing with a bunch of tentacles."

"Still, it looks… goofy?" I leafed through the sketch pad, all the other pages were blank, though there were countless wads of paper throughout the room now. "And do we really have to put the asian guy in Anime armor?"

He sighed. "There's a reason Vista's costume incorporates a skirt. Sometimes, you want to lean in to what the public expects, embrace the stereotype so you can take it some place new.

"Even so, with more time, I'd try to find something… orthogonal to the asian tropes. Nod to them, while offsetting it with cleverness. We don't have that time. Trying too hard to be 'not asian' is riskier. And given the current state of the city, having a hero with distinctly Asian themes might help. Besides, you're armor will evolve, only the key elements need to remain consistent."

"And the name?" I pulled out my phone and researched it. "These aren't Asian themes, they're Japanese themes."

Glenn sighed again. "I'm open to suggestions, but I've been going over this with my team for hours and we need to settle on something. Are you sure this will be enough time for you to build something?"

"The build should be fine." I said, absently. "The name is kind of presumptuous."

"The best ones are." Glenn countred, mildly. "Hero. Legend. Even Eidolon, and Alexandria."

I laughed. "Don't be ridiculous. I'm nowhere near that level."

"Not yet." He smiled.

"Right." I rolled my eyes. "I build stuff. I have zero desire to go out and fight crime by punching it."

"Which is why this fits so well." Glenn said, getting animated again. "Literally the spirit of scholarship. You described what you do as a learning process. And your phones are all about spreading, and sharing, knowledge."

I gave him a flat look.

"Or at least, that's how we'll spin it." He smiled again. "Also, the Empire will hate—"

Thomas Calvert barged into the conference room, without knocking. He waved away someone in the hallway and closed the door, wrinkling his nose slightly at the state of the conference room. The remains of bagels, the empty coffee cups. Crumpled up sketches scattered across the floor.

His gaze stopped on my helmet where it sat on the edge of the table, spines trailing over the side. "He's not wearing that."

"Thomas." Glenn smiled with half his mouth. "A pleasure as always."

"Glenn. I thought you were fully booked in L.A.," Director Calvert said.

"Charles and I were just talking about that," Glenn said with false cheer. "If it's important enough for you to rush a press conference, it's important enough for me to make it a priority as well."

"I see." Calvert sighed, and massaged his temples. "Well then, welcome to Brockton Bay."

"Thank you!" Glenn glanced towards the windows as a cop started warbling his siren somewhere below. The protest had not stopped, and while the thick glass blocked out the chants, the sirens still got through. "Lovely city you have here."

"Yes, well." Calvert smiled, thinly, and picked up the sketch pad I'd been looking at. "This looks good."

"Of course." Glenn said, as if bored. "But you might want to hear some of Charles' ideas. We were working on how to avoid alienating his existing support base."

"Then you'll be happy to note that Armsmaster has finished his review." Calvert smiled at me. "We can promise them more phones."

"That's good, great really," I said, and meant it. "I also had a few other ideas. To keep, and build, trust. Prove I'm who I say I am, and that I've joined up willingly."

"Such as?" Calvert looked at me.

"First, an opt-in, so people decide what data they share, if any. Keeping everything encrypted at rest, by default, such that it's not even a question of trusting the government." I was proud of this. "We simply won't be able to access their data. It addresses the number one complaint, and proves my identity with a major feature upgrade."

"I'm not sure that's wise." Calvert said. "Or at least, we should consider it later. Too much is riding on your network as a tool we can leverage in emergencies, and this would hamper that."

"People were already creeped out when they didn't know who was behind the phones. If they think the government can do whatever they want— "

"Charles, we've had this discussion." Calvert interrupted, but not unkindly. "You're not giving control to some faceless agency, you're sharing it with one of the most respected Tinkers in the world. People will be relieved that sole control is no longer in the hands of a young adult.

"Giving them free devices will be enough."

"It might… but," I looked at Glenn, but he just gestured at me to go on. "No. It won't. It comes across as slimy. Inauthentic." Glenn's vocabulary was already leaking into mine. Damnit.

"I was independent, an unknown. Un-involved, in any of this. I didn't moderate the network or tell people what to do, just gave them tools.

"Now I'm going in front of them as a Ward. Throwing more bling at them… I don't think it will be enough."

"Charles did have a few other good ideas," Glenn added.

Calvert pulled out a seat, his back towards a wall and where he could face both of us. The contrast between the two men, Glenn corpulent and colorful, Calvert in a PRT uniform and thin enough that the contours of his skull stood out against his skin, was striking.

"Go on," Calvert gestured to me.

"Well, for one, we should do the conference live."

"I'm not sure— " Calvert began, frowning.

"I agree." Glenn cut in. "Staged was never really an option. It needs to be fresh, feel real. And you can't go with canned questions."

"Risky." Calvert said.

"You'll be on stage with him right?" Glenn countered. "You can take anything that's too spicy, the reporters will expect it."

I held up the phone I'd been using. "I'd also like to do a sort of live-stream, to every device on the network. Prove that I'm who I say I am. Open it up to crowd-sourced questions, if people care. Anyone who's watching will be able to vote up the most interesting ones."

Calvert sighed, staring at Glenn, and then looking at me. "And there's no other way?"

"Can we put it off a week?"

"No." Calvert's answer was immediate.

He looked like he was going to say something else, but he paused. Glenn and I shared a look while Calvert looked at something on his phone, and then ran his hands over his face. He stood.

"I have other matters to attend to," He said. "Glenn, thank you for your help. Charles, I'll see you in a few hours."

Once he was gone, I turned to Glenn. "Not a fan?"

"Not particularly, no." He got up and walked over to where Calvert had sat and fetched the sketch pad. He set it back down in front of me, properly oriented. "So. Are we doing this?"

I looked over the sketch one more time. Gray, with a rich blue on the larger surfaces. Orange accents. The armor was impractical, but it was just concept art. I could see myself wearing this, or something like it.

And Director Calvert, for all that he seemed to be in a foul mood, had approved my fab-seeds, and cleared the phones for additional production. I could start building again. And if I kept their attention on me long enough, it might just work.

We were going to break the law, but only a little bit. And by the time anyone actually called us out on it, it'd be too late. We'd be too critical, too popular.

At least, that was the plan.

"Yes." I told Glenn, and set the pad back down. "We're doing this."

Spoiler: End Note

Last edited: May 10, 2021

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ReasonableDoubt

May 5, 2021

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

May 10, 2021

#198

I jolted awake, heart beating hard enough to feel in my chest, a featureless white mask staring at me. Too close. I jerked backwards, confused and still tired. I'd been reviewing the notes Calvert had sent—

"Hey," The figure stepped back and held his hands up, pacifying. "Easy there."

My new helmet rattled as I shook my head. Tried to clear the fog of sleep. Instead of making me feel better, the motion moved the helmet on my head, knocking lenses out of alignment and blurring the entire display. The notes I'd been going over when I fell asleep shifted and doubled in a way that was nauseating— I reached up and adjusted the helmet. Recalibrated the lenses, until the display snapped back into better-than-life clarity.

"Sorry about that." The rest of his costume was the same white as his helmet but interrupted with clocks that shifted at varying rates. "Glenn asked me to wake you up before the execution."

"Glenn? Execution?" I asked, confused, still dumb from sleep. "What?"

He laughed, and it could have been mocking, or friendly. The echo from his mask made it hard to tell.

"The press. Glenn's already out there glad-handing, or whatever image people do."

I groaned, and carefully moved my head around. The helmet, thankfully, stayed in place. It was different enough from my previous helmets that I considered it a new build. PR Helmet, Mark 0.

Same display, which was far better than reading or trying to work on a phone. And incomparably better than viewing the world directly. But it fit poorly, went out of alignment when I moved too fast, had fogging issues, and a thousand other annoyances. All of the little optimizations that made my previous helmet comfortable to wear, a joy to work in, were absent.

And worst of all, the 'antenna arrays' sweeping back from the helmet were empty. Non-functional. Just for show.

Most of my design time was lost working out a way to color the thing. I'd never bothered with anything other than the grays and blacks that were natural to my current build process. Adding blue and orange was hard. In the end I just gave up and covered the external surface with the same displays I used on the phones. A hack, but at least the colors were vivid.

"Right." I moved Calvert's notes to the side with a gesture, and held out my hand to Clockblocker. "I'm the new guy, Charles."

"Clockblocker. Dennis when not in costume." He sketched a bow. "Welcome to the team. Gotta ask, why are you flailing your arms around?"

"My helmet picks up the gestures, I have an array of screens up—"

"Armsmaster does the same thing but manages to not look ridiculous," He said. "You're already rocking bunny ears, try not to make it any worse."

"Very funny."

I walked to the side of the waiting room and poured a cup of stale PRT coffee. At least the PR helmet made it easy to drink. I offered a cup to Clockblocker… to Dennis, and he flinched like I'd brandished a weapon. The oily black fluid was tepid and bitter in my mouth, foul taste doing more to wake me up than the caffeine.

Out of curiosity, I pulled up a video feed on my display. While waiting for the PR helmet build to finish, I'd adjusted the drones programming to circle around after delivering a payload. Conserve propellant, ride thermals where possible, and only ash itself after it failed to maintain a certain altitude. The code seemed to work, so I made it default. Having an overhead view was awesome.

"Is the protest bigger?" I asked.

The drone's looked down on a mass of protesters. Clogging the streets, and not just around PRT HQ. The sun was starting to set, and people held up phones or flashlights. Even a few lighters. Flecks of light, growing comparatively brighter as the sun set.

"I don't think so," Dennis replied. "They have to be getting bored. Or cold."

I put the feed onto a phone and handed it to Dennis. He swore softly as he took in the full scope of the protest. Countless specs of light in the dusk. The thin line of police holding the crowd back from PRT property. And beyond them, just in front of the building itself, PRT troopers in full gear.

"Why are people so dumb." Dennis sounded tired. "I should get back before Vista gives me her 'I'm very disappointed in you Dennis.' look."

"They have the two of you on… riot duty or something?"

"Nah, last thing PRT wants is parahumans engaging a bunch of normies." He shook his head. "Me and Vista are just here because we're rock solid on defense. In case the empire makes a play to break-out Purity."

"What?" None of the news I'd read covered any of this. "Purity's here? And they plan on you and Vista fighting the Empire?"

"Hey, Vista and I are bad-ass," he said. "But no. The new Directors a little more… whatever he is, but he wouldn't do that. We'd just freeze parts of the structure and whatnot, leave the fighting to others. And even that's like… super worst case paranoid planning."

"Oh. Why is Purity even here?"

He laughed. "That's actually kind of funny. Dauntless fucked her up so bad that we can't just dump her in the Bird-cage as is." He checked to make sure the door to the conference room we were waiting in was still closed. "And even Director Calvert, with his schmoozing turned all they way to eleven, couldn't convince New Wave to heal her. All the other branches— "

The conference room door opened suddenly, and Clock stood back up straight and put his hands behind his head. As if summoned, Director Calvert walked in and looked suspiciously at Dennis.

Calvert raised an eyebrow. "Don't you have somewhere you should be?"

"As the only other Ward to have a live press conference, I'm doing my sacred duty to— " Clockblocker began to say.

"Return to your station." Clockblocker got half another word out, but Calvert talked over him again. "That was not a suggestion."

Blank white faceplate met Calvert's steady gaze, and then Clockblocker snapped off a mocking salute, and whirled around to walk out of the room. Calvert's mouth compressed into a line.

And then he was all smiles. "There's been a slight delay I'm afraid."

I glanced at the corner of my HUD, the press conference should have already started. The first drops, scheduled to start at the same time as the live feed, were already in the air. All the tension and panic I'd felt before came back. The same feeling I used to get if I overslept, back when school still mattered.

To make things worse, we'd messaged every phone on network earlier in the day. Announced the press conference, and a live stream.

"Ah, sorry…" I started agonizing over whether or not I should send another broadcast message. "Do we know by how long?"

"Nothing you have to apologize for," Calvert smiled. "You have gone over the talking points."

I nodded, not wanting to admit I fell asleep. "Partly… I ran out of time."

He sighed, as if mustering patience. "Just try not to antagonize anyone. And don't apologize. Remove the word 'sorry' from your vocabulary. People don't want wishy-washy heroes who make mistakes and say 'sorry', for it."

"Yeah, but… Glenn was saying I need to be myself. Be 'authentic'."

"And that's good advice." Calvert smiled again. "And you should do so. Without apologizing. If there's something you feel you should apologize for, just wait a few weeks. The public will latch on to something else, and forget whatever you were worried about."

I nodded, hesitantly. He'd gone over it before, and while Glenn had frowned, he hadn't contradicted Calvert's point. Calvert seemed to think that apologizing for something was tantamount to taking responsibility for it. Which was not to be done when talking to a bunch of reporters. Whom he made sound like sharks that would be driven into a feeding frenzy at the first sign of weakness.

"Good." He smiled. "And you've gone over the political situ— you haven't. At the very least, read up on the different candidates and their respective policies. It's in the—"

"I've got it up now," I brought his notes back up on my display. "Sorry about that."

He sighed. "Do your best Charles. A lot of people are counting on you."

He responded to something on his phone, and I tried to understand what was going on with the mayor. A recall had passed and, as if there weren't enough other things going on in the city, they would run an emergency election. At least there were only two real candidates. Three, if you counted the current mayor.

The feed from my drone, now joined by a host of other feeds as more drones launched, kept pulling my attention away. The crowd in front of the PRT building was getting larger. The line of police holding them back insignificant by comparison.

Or at least it seemed that way.

I made a note to check if Armsmaster had some machine-vision code I could adapt. Toybox's snarky little message, what felt like ages ago, still sort of rankled. But they had a point, It was just too much information for me to deal with on my own.

"When are we starting?" I asked.

Calvert looked up. "Another slight delay. Soon now."

I nodded. And, bracing myself, sent out another broadcast message. The first message I'd sent hadn't been anywhere near as nerve wracking. Glenn had helped me craft it, and it felt more like a service announcement than me talking to people. Combined with a product release, a small application to submit and upvote questions.

This one was different. It was me personally apologizing to tens of thousands of people, for being late. I promised to start the live-stream on my own if there were any further delays. It felt like spam, that people couldn't possibly care to get a message for me.

But there were already hundreds of questions submitted. A handful had accumulated enough upvotes to stand out, and then collected a sickening amount of additional votes. Most of them weren't the fun, softball questions the reporters were supposed to lob at me either.

I reminded myself that, in a way, this was the work. Crystallize people's interest with my work so far, the phones and the network, into a brand that was associated with me. That I had control over.

And at the same time, commit that brand to transparency. And, hopefully, bring the PRT down the same path. I couldn't avoid giving them some form control. The choice was to work with them, or do some sort of jail time, and a month without working had almost wrecked me.

But I could work with them, and make sure everyone else knew what that meant. Saw what I was doing, and if the PRT did do anything, make sure they saw that too.

"Remember," Calvert was talking again, staring at me with unnerving intensity. "Talk about your opinions, and even then keep it to concrete facts or policies. Events. You're joining the Wards, this is the best way for you to help people. Keep things simples. There's no reason to dilute the message."

He seemed mollified when I nodded. "I'm up first, we're doing a lot more than introducing a new Ward. Someone will call you soon."

He power-walked out of the room, meeting an aide in the hallway. I went over everything again. Fiddled with the windows on my display. Opened up the video feed stream from a drone that was soaring over the bay, big enough that it filled my entire view. Until I felt like I was the drone, staring down at the dark, rippling water far below.

And then someone in a suit stuck her head in and called me to the stage. Calvert's voice echoed down the hallway as I approached, weirdly distorted. It felt like the aide was walking too fast. This was happening.

"… formerly known as Cobble, now serving Brockton Bay as your newest Ward, I'm happy to present Tenjin!"

The press room looked bigger in person. An open space, mostly empty. Many of the journalists and reporters that would normally be present not braving the protesters outside. A high ceiling, with intricate lighting arrays and video cameras that were far too large. No one clapped, or seemed happy to see me. It was weirdly silent, just the soft tread of my PRT issued boots on the stage, and the clacking of cameras. Strobes of light leaking under my helmets visor as flashes went off.

"… a few words about himself." Calvert said, and I needed to talk.

"Um. Hi. One moment please."

I wanted to apologize already. And, too late, I realized I already botched that with my message to everyone earlier. Maybe that didn't count. I moved to the front of the stage and propped up a phone so it's camera captured everything. Started the stream. A part of me was far too happy that the thin little rectangle would be sending out a better feed than the gigantic cameras.

I took a deep breath. "Hi. For those of you on the livestream, Director Calvert was just explai.."

It was awkward and painful, and I wondered if Armsmaster ever felt this way when he stood up in front of a bunch of people and introduced himself as Armsmaster. Or what went through Sophia's mind when she was introduced as 'Shadow Stalker'. Tenjin felt cringey, but yeesh.

"I'm going to help people, try to make Brockton Bay a better place, as your newest Ward. Now, I'm sure people care more about the network, and new devices than me, so here's what we've got."

I went through how points would work in the future. More rewards for sharing internet, but stricter controls to prevent pirated connections. It felt dirty, notifying ISPs, bowing to the cell phone carriers. But it would allow the network to survive, and if I could start getting anything outside Brockton Bay, soon companies would want to send traffic on my network, instead of the other way around.

"I've been working with a local company, that I definitely do not own, to continue providing free internet. This will continue," At least, it would if I was able to start making money, "but more connectivity will help everyone." and make it so they couldn't just deny the entire DNet access to the internet.

"Also, drops are back."

I checked my display. More drones were in flight, a portion had already delivered their cargo. It already felt like I'd been speaking for ages, but only a few minutes had passed. And a significant portion of the city was watching me live, via the phones. Which was surreal and almost made me choke all over again. I moved the counter further to the side.

The reporters and journalists, the real media, were staring at me with a mix of reactions. A few actually had one of my devices in hand, scrolling through the submitted questions or getting another video feed. Others looked bewildered, but were figuring it out. No one seemed happy, and most probably wanted to go back to the other stuff. Parts of the city in something resembling rebellion, the appearance that the PRT wasn't doing anything.

Calvert explained how questions would work, and gestured called on a reporter to start.

A kindly woman, pencil in hand and another behind her ear. "What do you hope to accomplish as a Ward?"

I took a deep breath, this was an expected question. "To help people, and to learn. I'm not really looking to get into cape-fights on the front lines. I want to improve people's lives with what I build, and make things better for everyone."

I tried to be subtle while accessing the interface of my helmet, looking at the ranked list of questions.

"Most of the top-voted questions have, I hope, been answered, or are in the documents linked. The next one up is… pretty inappropriate, sorry.

"And the next top-voted question: 'What is your favorite video game'."

I half smiled, despite myself, and wondered if anyone had manipulated the previous question as well. This one was innocuous though, and easy enough to answer.

"Some 'influencers' probably put their thumbs on the scale for this one, but I'm game. I used to play 4x's, Civilization and the like. Since…" I stalled out.

Doing this live was hard. "Lately I've been more focused on my work."

Calvert called on another reporter.

"Are you responsible for the release of Empire and Merchant cape identities?"

"No." I shook my head. "I only found out it happened after they placed a bounty on my head. I didn't know any of their identities, prior to the leak, and if I did, I wouldn't have released them."

I had thought about trying to track down how it got there. The identities were, still, posted on the DNet. Tracing back to the device that uploaded the files wouldn't be hard. But anyone who pulled this off would have used a one-off device, and likely destroyed it afterwards. And digging up a device trail like that… I was already crossing enough lines.

I read out the next question from the crowd. "Have you spied on us? Can the government spy on us now?"

Calvert, still standing at a podium at the side of the stage, was remarkably calm. Or he appeared to be. For the first time, I spotted Glenn in the half empty room. Everything from his hair to his bright shirt screamed 'look at me', and I still managed to miss him when I walked in.

He nodded. Encouragingly.

"Yes." I spoke clearly. "To both."

One of the reporters, a stately man with gray at the temples, looked flabbergasted. That we could spy on people, or that I'd admit to it. But everyone must have already known it was possible. It was just a matter of saying it, officially. Removing the fig leaf of doubt that people used to pretend everything was fine.

"I haven't accessed anyone's personal data, But I have tracked the location of devices. And that… was more information than I thought it would be. It kind of freaked me out, to be honest.

"Mostly, I did this to make sure the area around my lab was secure. That wasn't someone stalking me.

"But I also looked into the locations of a few people I knew. And knowing where people are, and when? That's… a lot more information than you might think."

Some of the reporters were nodding, and Glenn had an intense expression his face. I thought about revealing what sort of things I'd found out. Sophia's activities weren't an option, of course, but maybe Tanaka's visits to City Hall. Or my case workers activities. But I didn't know the details, and it wouldn't really add anything to what I was trying to accomplish.

"Can the government do all that? Yes, of course they can. They've able to for years. But anyone concerned about this probably already knows this.

"Let's get to the real question.

"Can I look at your data, and can the the government?

"Yes. Yes we can."

Even with the physical space half empty, there was a buzz of excitement as journalists turned to each other, or consulted with people via phone, as quietly as they could. Again, they had to know it was possible, but it was likely no one thought I'd come out and say it. Or that I'd be allowed to.

"I haven't." I shook my head. "But I can't prove that to anyone, and my word isn't good enough, which is something I'm trying to correct.

"As to the government, or the PRT, I haven't given them the keys. Not exactly.

"What I've done is give Armsmaster the same level of control I have, plus a little extra."

More nods. And, too late, I realized I should have talked with Armsmaster about this. It was kind of a dick move, handing over control, and the responsibility that came with it. The more I thought about it, it was a relief that someone else had rights to the network. I just hoped he wasn't upset about it.

"Armsmaster of course isn't at fault for anything that goes wrong, any violations of privacy or trust. All that rests on me. And, while I'm a Ward, it'll be one of those situations where success is possible because of him, and the failings remain my own.

"I respect Armsmaster, and believe he's a good person to trust with this. He's been a hero for longer than I've been alive. And let's be real here, he's a far better choice to gate-keep the network than I am."

"That said, trust but verify, right? For both of us."

Glenn's expression ran the gamut while I talked. Occasional little frowns that made me sure I'd fucked something up. At least someone was paying attention. I was losing the crowd, and most of the reporters kept on looking back to Director Calvert.

I looked to the camera of my phone, clamped to what might have been a microphone mount at the front of the stage. All this was for them, the people on the live stream. Not the reporters, not the journalists. Anyone that really cared was likely already watching.

"I'm making everything as transparent as possible. My code is on the DNet, along with documentation, tools, and a sample app showing how to audit and verify any 'admin' type accesses or change."

My original plan was to allow people to 'opt out' of sharing any data. Keep the user space of the phones encrypted at rest, make it so I couldn't see what they used as the encryption seed.

I still planned to get there, but it'd take longer. It'd have to be after the devices were proven to be too much of a good to society to outlaw. And the future iterations, as I got away from the phone form factor and towards something more transformative, more of a game changer, should make that a given.

An audit trail, and explaining how the code worked and how the mesh-network exchanged data, hadn't any extra work. It was pretty much the same package of code and documentation that Armsmaster got.

In some sense, the phones were now more secure than standard phones. If anyone accessed the data, be it myself or Armsmaster or the PRT, everyone would know. I was concerned that Calvert would be pissed that I snuck this in here, but he seemed not to care. Or was a good actor.

The press conference got easier after that, softball questions from the reporters, inane or troll questions from the network. I began to think it might just go ok, and looked forward to sleeping. Even my little former-jail cell was starting to look appealing.

"Who's your favorite hero?" A woman in the front row, wearing overlarge glasses that complemented her face.

I blanked. This was a question that was likely to come up but I'd gone on to other things without even thinking about it. Glanced to Calvert, got nothing. Saw Glenn, calmly watching. Remembered the advice, to be authentic. Real. Make some failures, that might endear people to me.

"This isn't going to be popular," I hesitated, then shrugged and went with it. "Sphere."

Awkward silence, worse than when I admitted we could spy on people. "I mean, fuck the Simurgh, and fu—"

"Tenjin." Calvert said, tone firm.

"Right."

I took a deep breath. Glenn was face palming, that was probably bad, and most of the reporters present had a sort of horrified expression on their face, and not because of me swearing. At least they were paying attention now.

"Sorry. I hate what he has become, but what he was? I admire that. He was going give humanity something, make us more. For a brief time, he got us looking forward, and I think that was pretty cool."

I paused for a moment, thinking over how I could have answered that question better, or dodged it. Could have just said Hero, like anyone else that liked tech, or even Armsmaster, though that would have felt awkward. Still would have gone over better than saying I liked he who became Mannequin.

A reporter with an absurdly square jaw asked another question before I could read the next one from the live-stream. "Do you think the PRT is justified refusing Othala's offer of healing?"

"Uh…" I had no fucking idea how to answer that. "Yes?"

"I'll take that one," Calvert cut in. "We encourage Mrs. Rosenthal to surrender to the PRT. She will be tried for her crimes, but I'm confident we can come to an arrangement."

My eyes shied away from the number of viewers on the stream. The feeds from some of my drones showed a city in contrast. Most of the north side was dark, thermal showing more light from residual heat than illumination from electricity. Captains Hill glowed like a party, as if nothing was wrong. Overlarge lawns, with a dusting of snow, idyllic in the night.

And of course downtown. Tall buildings stabbing up towards the sky. And for blocks surrounding the PRT building, the protesters. Not all of them were in the streets, waving their lights. Some of them were sitting on the sidewalk. There were even kids present, and what looked like a snowball fight, throwing dirty snow.

"Next Question."

Another reporter jumped in before I could read one out from the crowd.

"What are your thoughts on the mayoral recall, and the candidates running?"

Calvert was calm, and simply nodded at me. I hadn't read all of the notes provided on the political situation in Brockton Bay, just enough to understand how much of it had gone to shit. People were pissed, the former PRT director had already been thrown under a bus, and the Mayor had apparently followed.

The notes had outlined their policies. "I'm… really not qualified to comment here, but as to my thoughts? I think we need change, and progress. Mayor Christensen— do I still call him mayor? Never mind — doesn't seem to have achieved much. "

Talk about policies and results, not individuals.

"Grove's policies seem to go too far in the wrong direction. Like trying to get back to a world that may have been better, for some people, but isn't attainable anymore.

"Padillo's policies seem good? Again, not really qualified, and I'm biased because what she's proposing helps what I'm trying to do. But she wants to put money and effort into making things better, restoring the north-side, improving some of the inner city schools. Fixing the buses."

Another man started to speak. "What do you— "

"I'm going to take a few questions from the stream now." I interrupted him, firmly. "Next question: Is the PRT forcing you to do this."

I took another deep breath and thought about it. Press conferences were exhausting. Live streams were exhausting. I hadn't slept, not properly, in more than a day and a half.

"I don't know how to answer this in a way that doesn't upset everyone. I'm working with a lawyer, and believe we've come to a solution that lets me continue helping people as best I can." I paused for a moment, mentally reviewing what I just said. "Shit, that's a non answer, isn't it."

Calvert looked pained, for the first time during the interview. Glenn looked like he was trying not to laugh.

"I… broke the law. I don't feel bad about trampling over regulations and patent laws and getting approvals or whatever else I was supposed to do. I thought I was doing good. Still do.

"But people also died.

"The PRT arrested me, and we came to a compromise. I'm going to try to do the best I can for people. Make sure that anyone who wants it has free, good, internet, and that information can't be censored. And devices that make life better, or even easier. Phones are just the beginning."

"Just a few more questions for Tenjin." Calvert pointed at a young woman in front of the stage. "You."

She leapt into a question like she'd been waiting for her chance.

"Right now the so-called DNet is a wild west with no content control or moderation of any sort. Criminal elements use it to coordinate, pornographic material, some of it unspeakably vile, proliferates without oversight. Pseudonymous accounts post slanderous material or conspiracy theories, and that's, to use your words, just the beginning.

"Just this week a girl killed herself as a result of cyber-bullying. Enabled by your devices.

"In the face of all this, how do you plan to ensure your network, and devices, remain a force for good?"

I should have anticipated a question like this. Variants had been submitted by the crowd, but none of them really gained traction, and I'd pushed it from my mind.

Before getting captured, I'd have responded with some version of how information wanted to be free. That we all needed to use, and develop, our judgment to discern what was true or not. Lean on freedom of speech. Say that people were assholes, with or without the internet.

I would have rejected the idea of moderation, maybe even been a little angry about it. Back before killing four people, however inadvertently. Sitting in a cell, unable to build. Left to just think. On some level, it was silly. Purity killed dozens. Lung just as many, if not more. PRT troopers threw themselves at Lung or Hookwolf, barely slowing the monster down. The world was circling the drain.

What was four lives, in the face of that? What was one girl killing herself? But I still felt awful about it.

"We don't discuss ongoing investigations," Calvert cut in while I tried to figure out how to respond. "Obviously controls are needed, and this is something Tenjin and Armsmaster will be working to solve, now that he's joined the Wards. Next Question."

I used the time Calvert bought me, looking up the previous question. Thinking. There wasn't time to fully understand everything, the articles that mentioned someone dying mostly contradicted each other. Most were hit pieces, sensationalizing the horrible content that could be found on the DNet. All agreed that cyber-bullying was also a 'growing concern', like it hadn't already existed. And that's where the similarities stopped.

Some told the story of a girl that went catatonic, dead to the world, for unknown reasons that were only tenuously tied to me. Others articles said that someone attempted, and failed, to kill herself. And others outright claimed killed herself because of the DNet.

And all of the articles were comparatively minor. Buried under the 'bigger' news of rampaging parahumans and collapsing social order. The girl, whatever happened to her, wasn't really relevant. It felt like the reporter was just using her to hit me harder with the question. The in-your-face version of click-bait. But the underlying issue was still there. Should I do something?

When I failed to read out another question from the crowd, and Calvert called on a reporter.

A black man, as fat as Calvert was thin. "Why are you holding a press conference when there's an Empire mob on your doorstep?"

Calvert responded firmly. "A protest will not stop the PRT from serving its function. Communicating to the public it protects is a vital part of that function."

In the corner of my vision, the count of live viewers continued to go up. Angry, disparaging, and outright trolling comments scrolled by on the live stream. Too fast to read, the textual equivalent of an angry mob, the tone and emotion coming across clearer than the individual words and statements.

The reporter pushed himself forward, maybe to ask a followup-question. Others clamored for attention.

Calvert spoke over them all. "You might be asking why we, the PRT, are not doing anything about the protest. Why we don't take action."

The video feed from my drone showed the protest in full swing. Specks of illumination, from flashlights, from cellphones and torches, swaying in time with a chant I couldn't hear. The drone was far overhead, one of its cameras already zoomed in. The perspective transformed the mob of protesters into a river of light, flowing slowly between buildings in a way that might have been beautiful.

Calvert's voice, amplified by the speakers, filled the physical space. "Civic demonstrations are not our remit. If we believe unlawful parahuman is involved we may— "

"Director," The man who'd asked the original question had a deep, rumbling voice, and he projected it like a weapon. "It's an Empire Mob. Unlawful parahuman activity is involved."

I zoomed the drone feed further in, while still thinking about the previous question. Along the sides of the streets, people lounged in fold-up camping chairs. Barbecued on the back of pickup trucks. Occasionally, a protester would put out their light, rotate to the sides and grab a beer, maybe a hot dog. And just as steadily, others would stand up and walk into the crowd, holding their light overhead. They probably thought they were standing up for justice, or something like that. Deluding themselves.

I zoomed back out. It was just noise.

Calvert fixed the reporter with a gaze before responding. "We will not overstep our authority. The protest outside is uncomfortable for a number of reasons. As a person of color myself, I sympathize.

"But unless we have a clear call to action, be that obvious parahuman involvement, a request from civil authorities, or the BBPD requiring support, we will not act against a civic demonstration. Thank you."

"Next Qu— "

I stepped forward on the stage before he could call another reporter. "May I?"

The room, almost as one, turned to look at me. One reporter, the one with the large red frames, actually rolled her eyes. I got the sense that 'adults were speaking', discussing more important things. But Calvert nodded.

"I need to answer the previous question. About my devices, and the network, causing harm."

Out of the corner of my eye, the list of ranked questions shifted again. The sway of lights on the virtual screen showing one of my drone's view changed, but I tuned it all out. Just noise.

"First of all, I want to apologize. My actions, and what I built, contributed to the chaos and the violence of the last few days. This won't mean anything to someone that has lost a loved one, or been torn from their home, but as stupid and naive as it sounds, I truly am sorry. I never intended for people to get hurt."

I wasn't at fault. That was whoever had released the identities, though they surely didn't care. Purity and Lung. The monsters still fighting in the streets. And if anything, my devices and the DNet were just a tool. The fallout probably would have been the same if whoever had kicked everything off just stuck to the normal internet and went directly to the news stations.

But, for whatever reason, I still felt some responsibility for what had happened. And I wanted to apologize.

But I wasn't going to stop. I was going to do more.

The people in the room with me, the reporters and journalists, listened with the air of people humoring a child. One man towards the back, older and starting to go bald, had a cynical smile on his face. Glenn was back to an intense look, and I had no idea what he was thinking. It didn't matter.

"I believe that what I'm doing does more good than harm. There will always be people that try to tear others down, and there will always be people happy to use what I build to hurt others. To use an uncensored network to cause chaos, or harm.

"I don't think that justifies denying everyone else something that might make their lives any better. People can buy a gun for less than a decent phone, to say nothing of internet. For starters, I'm going to reverse that by making phones and internet free. Or at least, ridiculously cheap."

"Maybe, with the help of Armsmaster or anyone else that's willing to work with me, we can come up with some minimal moderation policies. I don't know, I don't really think that's my place, that it's our place. But I will look into it."

Calvert was, where only I could see, making a 'get on with it' gesture.

"I know that, for those that have been hurt, this probably falls flat. But I will do better."

I shut down the window showing comments, and new questions. I wanted to see if people thought I was doing too much, or if I should do more. That those who had believed in me might now just… not. Feel betrayed that I was now just another cog in the system. Or maybe Renick was right, that people didn't care, so long as I gave them free shit.

Calvert went back and forth with the reporters on more policy questions, until there was a sense that the press conference was wrapping up. I bowed slightly in thanks, thanked everyone still on the live stream, without looking at the numbers

Glenn pushed his way against the tide of reporters leaving the room, coming to the foot of the stage, where he leveraged his bulk up stood in front of me.

"Well," He smiled. "It could have gone worse. Don't worry too much. Get some sleep, we'll go over the video in the morning. From your stream, and the official feed. I fly out in the afternoon but that will still— "

"Sorry, something's happening."

Something about the protest had changed. The flow of lights had concentrated in front of the PRT building. The police line was no longer straight, instead starting to curve outwards. Like the wall of an above-ground pool about to break.

I apologized to Glenn and walked over to where Calvert was talking to an aid.

"I think the protest is about to get violent."

"One moment." He said to the aide he was talking to, the same one that had fetched me from the conference room before the conference. "Yes, they almost certainly will."

"What… should I do? Do you need to do anything?" I asked.

"This isn't anything for you to do. Get some rest Charles."

I pulled out another phone, thankful PRT uniforms had a lot of pockets, and showed Calvert the feed. "Look."

As we watched, the crush of protesters broke through the police wall. Some of the officers were trampled, others stood aside, or seemed to ride the front of the wave of people like flotsam. Some protesters dropped their flashlights, others brandished heavier lights like improvised clubs. They surged towards the PRT building.

Puffs of white foam, stark against the press of bodies, bloomed into existence. Encasing the front of the line, and snaring the press of people behind them. The troopers themselves were hidden from my drone, either by the angle of the building or some sort of overhang. But I could still see streams of containment foam shoot out at the crowd, swelling even as the fluid arced through the air, blanketing the nearest protesters.

The protest, now a riot, receded like a wave from the PRT building, from the mass of containment foam. And they went elsewhere, breaking storefronts. Bashing through the doors to office buildings. A police car caught fire, somehow. Water rocketed out of a fire-hydrant, cold water falling on the crowd.

The press room we were in had some sound dampening, but whenever the main doors open the sounds of conflict rushed in. Like a dull roaring that was then silenced again.

"The troopers can handle it," Calvert said, calmly. "This… has a lot of potential. Can I borrow this?"

"Sure…"

I showed him how to switch between drone feeds, and zoom in. Switch sensors. I felt good, showing that I wasn't useless. Even as I worried that this was another bit of functionality that I should have kept to myself.

Calvert walked off, one of my phones in hand. Talking to his aide, even as he watched what was going on from high in the sky. And I returned to my little underground motel room suite.

Giving Calvert access to the feed wasn't that big of a deal. Helpful in the immediate situation, but not really anything beyond what the PRT could already do with satellites. Or helicopters. But it did get me thinking, again, about what I should build. And what I should share.

Would equipping every PRT trooper with a helmet, equivalent to mine, my real one, be good for the city? What about better armor? Guns?

I made my way to my rooms. Laid down on the bed, helmet still on. Watched the riots until I fell asleep.

Spoiler: End NoteMay 15, 2021

#223

"The Director will be with you shortly."

The secretary looked completely unfazed by the tinker-tech PR helmet on my head. Didn't so much as blink when a man's voice, angry and loud and not Calvert, leaked from the Director's office. I wondered who he was talking to, that would get so upset. Every interaction I had with Calvert had been reasonable and polite, so much so that it would have felt… foolish to shout.

The delay chafed.

Waiting, in a well appointed room that was out of place in PRT HQ. Plush carpeting, a display case, and no chairs. Just a desk for the secretary. Windows that must have been freshly cleaned looked out over the city, towards the bay. Elegant wood paneling, not quite thick enough to muffle the raised voices from Calvert's office.

I had too much to do, and the morning was already gone. Spent on meetings. On one level, I needed to look at the long term. It took me a year to get to the point where my technology started actually having an impact, a couple of days wasn't going to hurt anything. But my shell corporation was already burning credit. And after more than a month of captivity I felt behind where I should be.

I moved closer to the window, looked down on the streets instead of out over the city. Streets strewn with broken glass and trash. The blackened husks of burned cars, the detritus of smashed storefronts. And it all seemed trivial, compared to the wreckage of the north side, with people already going back to work. Brushing off a night of riots with bitter nonchalance. The violence was over, for a while at least, and life resumed.

Calvert's office door remained shut. The next rev of my helmet would need to incorporate better audio pickup. Well, if Calvert was going to make me wait, I could use the time.

I sat down cross legged on the luxurious carpet. Stretched my arms out, andwith a few sweeping gestures, pulled up a design interface. Maximized it, so that the interface was my world. And got to work.

So much to do.

Design a better helmet. Upgrade my drones for longer flight-time, maybe cover the surface in the same sort of display my helmet used for paint. Complete the next iteration of my phones. Try, again, to build smart glasses that didn't require strapping arrays of displays and lenses to my head. Start working towards true AR. Begin work on the PR armor Glenn wanted. Software to manage the masses of data I now had access to. Machine vision.

Weapons.

I was considering sonics, and maybe low powered lasers. Less gruesome than razor-wire and flechettes, with a decent power usage profile. Maybe request some schematics from Armsmaster to help with it. And see what code he could share too, if he wasn't upset over the press conference.

So much to do.

Work before play. Instead of armor or better drones or even a helmet that didn't suck, I pulled up a build in progress. A simplified fab chamber that could produce diamond glass to a given specification.

"I'm sorry, the Director's meeting is running long." The secretary sounded genuinely apologetic, polite smile awkward with the backdrop of an angry man's voice. "Can I get you anything?"

"Thank you, no." I thought about asking for a chair, but the carpet was surprisingly comfortable. "Who is he talking to anyways?"

"I'm not really supposed to say, but you'll still be here see whenever they leave. Some people are concerned with the new Director's policies."

I was tempted, again, to focus on the next rev of my helmet. I was missing enhanced audio more than I thought. But, the rapidly ticking counter at the center top of my vision, visualizing the shell company going deeper into debt, me going deeper into debt, continued to grind away. The burn rate.

The morning hadn't been a waste, per say. The working breakfast with Glenn had been kind of fun. We reviewed the press conference while eating donuts, the bagel shop Glenn preferred was damaged in the riots. Glenn managed to be caustic and encouraging at the same time, as we planned out the next couple of months or collaborated on armor designs. Directed me to talk with the resident physical trainer and nutritionist, and follow their instructions.

And to the last minute, he gave advice. Even as he crammed sketchbooks and computer peripherals into a rolling suitcase, and rushed to catch his flight back to New York.

The rest of the morning, while not as fun, still wasn't a waste. All the drudge work that needed to be done as a cog in the government machine. Introductions to PRT officials that I'd need to work with, being a Ward and a tinker. A tour of the building, including areas that were barred to me during the limbo-period of contract negotiations. Security protocols for entry and exit, though I didn't actually step outside. I came in half-expecting brainwashing, or at least a little hostility. Instead I got paperwork and procedure.

And all the while, so much to do.

With a sweep of my arms, the neat little widgets that remained in my design interface faded away. The video feeds from what drones were still in the air, status feeds on the covert fabs still distributed throughout the city. A heat map showing Brockton Bay and the surrounding areas, where the mesh network had coverage. All pushed to the background until it was just the build interface. And the burn rate.

I sat on the floor, lost in my work. Manipulating virtual components, borrowing logic and designs wholesale from prior builds. Triggered simulations, the hugely complicated code flashing across the network of distributed nodes and identifying points likely to fail. And repeat, modified design, new failure. Iteration.

I was confident I could make money.

Given time, given freedom, it was inevitable. But I wanted more than that. I wanted people to embrace my technology. And not because it'd mean more wealth for me, at least not entirely. Already, after just a year of work, I had stuff that could make lives better across the country, or even the world. And I wanted people to use it.

So, I was going for something simple. Something that would help people, while still making enough money to pay for a carrier grade internet connection. Get industry outside the bay and maybe even the government acclimated to my tech. Reliant upon it.

The door to Calvert's office banged opened and I jolted where I sat. My interface automatically receded in a sudden shift from work to reality that was jarring. Renick strode past the secretary's desk without pause, only to halt in front of me. Looming, and looking down at me. Irritated.

I sprang to my feet, and tried to relax. Actually relaxed when the man took half a step back. Renick looked better than he had, back in the interrogation room. Even somewhat flushed, his hair was neatly gelled and looked fresh-combed. The flag on his lapel was pinned on straight. His tie, neatly fastened.

I expected him to shout, or perhaps share more biting commentary. If he was happy to raise his voice to the Director, surely he wouldn't hesitate to berate me.

Instead, he sighed. Shook his head. And walked off without a word.

"The Director will see you now." Came the secretary's too cheery voice.

I stood there for a moment, confused. Unsure if I was disappointed or relieved.

"Tenjin." Calvert stood as I walked into his office, gesturing to the chairs in front of his desk and smiling widely. "Sit, please. Can I get you a coffee? Don't worry, a better brew than what they serve in the conference rooms."

I took a deep breath and settled into the plush chair. Calvert, always polite, always reasonable. There was never anything to get upset about or even resent with him. I kept on expecting the condescension, or the 'shut up and do it because I know better' orders. Not the bland competence and quiet confidence. Or unshakable confidence. Like he knew his view of the world was right, and the only reason problems existed is that others were too slow to understand, or to selfish and greedy to do what needed to be done.

Sometimes, it felt like he had the same worries or thoughts I did. But better. My half formed notions, given serious thought and rigor, voiced eloquently enough to make me feel a fool. And then off into some other consequence or ramification that I had completely missed.

"Thank you." I took the dark blue mug. The PRT logo faced me, a shield of gold, glinting against the dark blue. The coffee itself was amazing, hot enough to warm the mug, a patina of oil on the surface of the black liquid. A familiar, almost nostalgic smell. "I… think I've had this."

"Oh? It's somewhat of a rare brew, from an artisinal shop in Boston. I'll have some sent to your rooms if you wish." Calvert smiled. "But, on to more pressing matters."

"Why was Renick so upset?" I asked, before he got going.

Calvert sighed. "Dennis, Deputy Director Renick, he tries. His heart's in the right place. But he's a creature of the former director, and views parahumans with more suspicion than I feel they deserve."

Calvert looked sympathetic for a moment. "I think he does feel bad, though. About what happened, how you were treated. How he spoke to you."

"Sure." We'd talked about it before, how overwhelmed the previous administration was. It didn't matter anymore.

"Do you mind if we do this without the mask?" Calvert asked. "I've always found it just the littlest bit harder to communicate, if you can't see eye to eye."

I nodded, slid the PR helmet off my head, and promptly winced at unfiltered sunlight stabbing through the windows. Massaged my scalp, relieving itches I'd managed to ignore and freeing hair stuck to my head with a mixture of pressure and sweat.

I really needed to build a better helmet.

"Thank you Charles." Calvert smiled. "Now, I was going to cover the press conference but I'm afraid we have less time than planned. Glenn likely did a far better job than I could anyways.

"I'm disappointed you didn't heed my advice, but part of your job here is to learn. And that means making mistakes in as safe an environment as possible."

He waited a moment, as if giving me a chance to speak.

And then he smiled. "I'm confident you'll do better in the future."

My brows furrowed together. It hadn't been that bad. "Thank you?"

"I did want to go over one topic Glenn might have glossed over." He fixed me with a gaze, as if measuring my reaction. "Sphere."

I sighed. Glenn had gone over it. At length Considered it risky, but maybe bold. Something that set me up as a hero people could believe in, that might even inspire people. If I did everything perfectly.

"I'm referring to, of course, the danger. Not the optics." Calvert cut me off as I started to explain. "You may not realize this, but Alan Gramme became Sphere, and then Sphere became Mannequin.

"Mannequin has a history of… targetting tinkers that try to make the world better."

I knew, far earlier than the press conference. Was aware of it, on some level, when I first learned about Alan Gramme. When, on a clear night, hunched over a telescope that still smelled of plastic packaging and metal that hadn't yet been exposed to the air, I had asked what the strange outline on the moon was.

"I'm going to make the world a better place," I said. "If I succeed, he'd come for me anyways."

"Of course," Calvert nodded. "But in all of our interactions to date, you have stressed that you want to build. That you have no interest in cape fights, or 'punching crime in the face.'

"If you're challenging the Nine, you need to rethink that."

"You want weapons," I said. "Real weapons."

"Charles, have I ever pressed you on this?" Calvert looked aggrieved. "Have I ever treated you with anything other than kindness and respect?"

And that was it, wasn't it. Any objection I raised, there were always counters. A reason why I was being foolish or childish, or not thinking things through enough. Delivered politely and reasonably. I kept on waiting for him, for anyone, to reveal their true nature. To treat me with condescension. To express some sort of happiness in my situation, to gloat over me getting caught.

But even Renick hadn't done that. The closest anyone had come, Protectorate or PRT, was Glenn telling me to listen to the nutritionist, as he pushed another donut towards me.

I slowly shook my head. "… no."

"We have weapons. I wouldn't be opposed to you helping out there, maybe looking at our confoam applicators, or improving the helmets our officers use. All I'm asking is that you try to help us."

I nodded, hesitantingly.

"Anyways," He continued. "Think on it. For your sake, the sake of the men and women I'm responsible for, and Brockton Bay itself. If Mannequin decides to go after you, he won't come alone."

"You really think he'll be bothered by some random kid. I haven't even even done anything outside Brockton Bay. With so many better tinkers out there, why would he pay attention to me?"

If I succeeded that would likely change. But I'd hardly gotten started yet.

"They're madmen," Calvert said mildly. "And madmen are hard to predict. What you said last night likely made them aware of you.

"Just keep in mind that we are here to support you Charles. Making us stronger makes you stronger."

Again, and as always, reasonable. Shifting things so that what I had thought to be bold, maybe even noble, became a reckless and foolish act. Selfishly endangering the people around me, while not doing what I could to help them.

I considered, not for the first time, asking him what happened with my Dad. To look into it. But Renick's comment... I got the sense that most people saw it that way. Open and shut. It certainly made more sense. If you'd never met my dad.

"Thank you," I said instead. "I'll think about it."

A warm smile, teeth too perfect and too white. Which, again, felt unfair. Calvert had done his best to help.

"That's all I ask." He said, smiling sadly. "Try to take some time to relax, and get settled. Things will flare up again, but for now there's no need for the hectic schedule of the past few days."

"Isn't the Empire still in open revolt?" I asked, confused.

"Oh, they are. We're working on it." He picked up a remote and turned on the flatscreen TV behind him. A map of Brockton Bay, much of the south and south-west shaded red. "The data of where the phones are and when still exists, right?"

"Yes…"

"Including any standard phones nearby?" At my nod he continued. "We believe a small number of agitators, people close to the Empire, deliberately turned things violent last night. In hopes that we'd respond with disproportionate force, or maybe weaken our defenses dealing with a a large-scale riot.

"Now, surely these provocateurs woudl be smart enough not to use any of your devices. But perhaps they carried standard phones? That you could back-track? Even if it's a long shot, I think its worth pursuing."

"Armsmaster has just as much access as I do." I hedged.

"I'm sure you can appreciate how busy Armsmaster is right now. He leads the Protectorate, and the city is not stable." He leaned forward. "I'm asking you Charles."

"We've talked about this." I said. "Something of this scale would be akin to tracing and analyzing a haystack of innocent people, on the off chance we find a needle. Far more likely we find nothing conclusive.

"Yes, and I admire that you wish to stick to your principles," Calvert said. "But Charles. Even if I wouldn't say it at the press conference, or in front of anyone I didn't trust, they're Nazis."

I hesitated. It… wasn't impossible. It would take days to sift through the data. Or more realistically, write the software that would sift through the data. And, yes, people would know that we did it. That I did it. But most would probably say, oh, that's ok. They're Nazis.

And if it was just Nazi's, I'd do it. In a heart beat. But it was a tipping point. It'd mean building out the capability. Making something available that would be just a tad bit easier the next time we reached for it.

That didn't make it easier to say no. "I'm sorry."

Thomas Calvert stared at me silently, for a long while. I thought that this was it. Where he'd command me to start sifting through the information. Threaten that, as a Ward, defying a direct order from the Director of the PRT was not really a card I could play. The 'legal' fab seeds were still downstairs in lockup, and he could even just take those away.

Or just take away my gear and lock me in a room again.

"Very well." He finally said, turning off the display behind him. "Try to get settled, Charles. The city isn't peaceful, but if you're unwilling to help us with the Empire situation you should at least take this time to get settled.

"And if you'd like to get out of the building and stretch your legs, I'm sure Ms Grey can find time to accompany you. She has full accces to the motorpool, if you'd like to go further."

Calvert leaned back and took another sip of coffee. Gestured at me with his cup, reminding me of my own. Still warm.

The back and forth was… I didn't know how to take it. First, the hell of my initial confinement, the boredom and the itching need to build and improve. Only to give way to drawn-out negotiations, where the only people I really talked to were Calle, Calvert, and the occasional agent or officer in the fitness center. And all the while, unable to build. Followed by a manic pace after signing the contract, scrambling towards a press conference and getting my tech off the ground while a fucking riot erupted on the doorstep. A riot I slept through, safe and secure in my former jail cell.

And even this conversation. Have some coffee Charles. And hey, the Nine are probably coming to murder you and everyone else. So, get ready. Want to help us with the Nazi's? You'd have to spit on half of the sentiments you expressed to the city. No? Ok then, why don't you take it easy. Get settled in.

And always in a way that seemed so reasonable.

Calvert smiled. "Perhaps you'd like a ride to the production site for your little shell company?"

I startled. "I was… planning to make a trip."

"Charles," He shook his head, as if disappointed. "You don't need to waste your time and energy worrying about this. I'm not going to shut down your company, or stop what you're trying to do. We haven't even asked you to stop using your rogue fabricators.

"I worked hard, with you, for those exceptions. I want you to feel comfortable here, to work with us. Why would pull everything away?

"You want to help people. And you'll run any new designs by Armsmaster?"

"Yes…"

"Then you have nothing to worry about."

And once again, I'm the unreasonable one. "Thank you."

"Of course!" He smiled. "You're a Ward Charles. When you succeed, we succeed."

Calvert glanced at his monitor, a black flatscreen sitting at the edge of his expansive desk. It felt like the first time he'd broken eye contact, since asking me to remove my helmet.

"I'm sure we could talk for hours, but I do have other commitments." He said, sounding honestly regretful. He pulled the rev4 I'd handed him last night out of his pocket. "Before you go, do you mind if I keep this? Access to the feeds from your drones has been a big help."

Always so reasonable, and I wasn't giving him control. I got the feeling that even if I declined this simple little request he'd simply sigh, a little disappointed, and move on. Making me feel like an unruly child.

"Sure." It was just access, and Calvert was doing a lot for me. I even felt selfish. "I'll try to whip up a better interface for you. And drop a larger device in the meantime."

"That'd be wonderful. Thank you Charles."

I put the PR helmet, ash gray, blue, and orange, back on my head. Adjusted it so the lenses lined up properly, and the world snapped into crisp focus. My hands swept through the air and, with a few gestures, implied keystrokes, a large developer tablet was queued up for Calvert.

Always so much to do.

Aegis was waiting when I left the office. Large, wearing a rust-colored costume that left his eyes exposed. Silver-white shield on his chest. He filled the space in a way that even Renick hadn't. Or maybe that was just me. The appeared completely unfazed.

"Tenjin," His hand engulfed mine firmly. "Good to finally meet you."

A few people turned to look at us as we walked through the halls, but the majority kept on with whatever they were doing. We were just two random teenagers in costumes walking down the corridors. Nothing remarkable. Aegis talked on and on about the Wards, and how glad he was to have me on the team. Babbling, but in a way that was somehow endearing.

We accessed Ward HQ the same way I accessed my cell; an elevator that my power said interesting things about. Aegis continued talking, seemingly unaware that he began floating, a few centimeters off the floor, once the elevator began to descend.

Another security door, and we walked into Ward HQ. An arced ceiling rose over head into a dome, the apex far taller than the standard PRT corriders. Clever lights, hid along the base of the dome and pointed upwards, lit the space up with a soft welcoming glow that gave the place an airy sort of feel, despite being underground.

And beneath the dome, as if waiting for us, the Wards.

They were all in full costume and masked. Except for Clockblocker, getting up from the couch and stretching, wearing casual clothes with his white helmet. The blank face mask ridiculous without the rest of his costume, though I probably looked similar. With my angular helmet and standard PRT fatigues.

Huh. I didn't have any other clothes.

Vista had a welcoming smile. Gallant, in power armor that hinted at tantalising insight. At a glance, it was simpler than Armsmaster's. It'd be an easier starting point for me to work with, if I had to make some sort of armor.

Kid Win was smiling eagerly, as if excited. I was looking forward to working with him. Gallant's armor was kind of neat, but Kid Win had a hoverboard that was just… I had no idea how any aspect of it would even begin to work. I suspected he outclassed me as much as Armsmaster did. Which wasn't a bad thing, I'd much rather work with people that were better than me. People more experienced and capable, that I could learn from. Become better.

And, leaning against the curved wall and separate from the rest, Shadow Stalker. The black and gray of her costume a contrast to everyone else. Body language that of a cat, bored of everything and convinced of its superiority.

"Newguy!" Clockblocker exclaimed, blank face-plate of his helmet bobbing without the anchor of the rest of his costume.

"This is Tenjin," Aegis stressed. "You— "

"Relax, me and Charles go way back." Dennis took off his helmet, revealing red hair, freckles, and half a smile. He held out a hand. "Good to meet you face to mask."

"Jesus Christ Clock, don't just do that." Aegis said, before turning to me. "I'm sorry about this. You only, technically, need to unmask to the team captain—"

"Which is you," Dennis chimed in.

Aegis continued as if he hadn't spoken "— and Clockblocker really shouldn't have shared even your first name—"

"Which you just confirmed." Clockblocker cut in again.

"Dennis." Vista said. "Please."

"Yeah," Dennis looked towards the dome over head and sighed. Some of the… frisson seemed to seep out of him. "Sorry Aegis. Welcome to the team Charles."

Aegis removed his mask and shook out hair that looked like it'd be uncomfortable under the costume. "Carlos, team Captain. As of a week ago."

I removed my helmet. Blinked a few times to get used to unfiltered reality, and tried to smile reassuringly. "Charles. And no worries about the identiy thing, seems a little silly really. I think half of Winslow already knows who I am."

"Still, not a habit to get into." Carlos gestured at the power-armored knight. "This is Gallant."

Gallant took his helmet off like he'd been waiting to be introduced, and offered a gauntlet covered hand to shake. "Dean. Good to have you."

"Thank you." I wanted to take his hand, to touch the armor and learn. But these people were going to be my teammates. "I get a sort of insight into tech that I touch, and might discover something you'd like to keep hidden if I come into contact with your armor. Is that OK?"

Gallant looked to Kid Win for some reason, but before he could respond, Shadow stalker pushed herself off the wall and sauntered closer.

"Hey Killer."

I stared at her, Gallant's armor forgotten. She wore her 'hero' mask, a stern woman, frowning. The same mask that had stared me down, back on that crumbling pier. When she shot me, after I'd surrendered. And she fucking joked about it.

"Sophia," I said.

"Always figured you must have known." She laughed, a mocking thing that didn't match the frown of her mask. She took the stern woman's face off, revealing a smirking girl, the same one that had sat in front of me in study hall. "Guess that pretty shit about you not spying on people was just that. Welcome to the team."

"Did Stalker just welcome someone?" Dennis stage-whispered to Vista.

"Why wouldn't I?" Sophia turned to Dennis, raising an eyebrow. "He's actually done something. Unlike the rest of you."

I wanted to lash out, to blame her. But in a way, she was right. I had killed that guy. Daisuke Katajima, Armsmaster had said. Probably just a high school student, chasing a payout. An asshole, sure, but it wasn't like I wanted him to die. And she shot me before I could even try to help him.

"Why did you do it?" I asked. "Why shoot me? I had surrendered, dropped the gun and everything."

Sophia smiled. "Cuz you're dangerous."

"Well then," Dean cut in, glancing briefly at Carlos before continuing. "You've met Sophia. This is—"

"That dumbshit's thighs were sliced to the bone," Sophia talked over him. "Blood everywhere, and I didn't even see what happened."

"If that's what you really thought," I stared at her. "Why the hell did you come out of hiding and fucking pose in front of me before firing?"

She smiled again, wider than before. "Hah, you got me. Want—"

"Stalker." Carlos cut in, stepping towards her. Somehow seeming even larger. "Enough."

"You're the one that wanted me here." She spat out. "Nazis have half the fucking city and you want to welcome the new guy with cake?"

She glared at him for a tense moment, like she was about to attack. Dean looked back and forth between Sophia and Carlos, as if about to step in. Vista was poised, but more than anything seemed exasperated. And Dennis watched the whole thing with a sort of detached amusement. Kid Win was grimacing.

My new team.

Sophia put her mask back on. "I'm done."

She hopped backwards with an elegant half jump, toes trailing downwards as she snapped into a shadowy figure that continued moving. Passed through the curved wall like it wasn't there. Someone sighed.

Carlos ran a hand over his face. "I'm really sorry about this."

"Not your fault," I said.

"It kind of is." Carlos shook his head. "Team Captain."

"You'll grow into it." Dean said from the side, smiling again. "Anyways, I was about confess that the armor's not mine."

"Well, it is his. But he didn't build it," Kid Win finally spoke. He removed his Visor and smiled awkwardly. "I did. I'm Chris. Looking forward to bouncing ideas around with you. If you have any insights from Gallant's armor, I'd love to— "

"Maybe you two can cover that later?" Dean, said, kindly. "I'm actually a blaster-thinker. The armor is a bit of misdirection. And protection."

Vista took off her own visor. "Missy, but I prefer Vista when possible. Welcome to the team. Sorry about Stalker, she can be a bit…"

"Of a Bitch?" Dennis moved towards where a kitchen was visible. "Anyhow, pizza? Cake? Mountain Dew?"

Despite the rocky start, they were welcoming. Friendly in a way I'd thought lost to me. Maybe it was just because they were the first people my age I'd really interacted with for over a month. And even before that I'd been… mostly self isolated. Especially once Hiro stopped working with me.

Just relaxing with the wards, eating junk food. Groaning at some of Dennis' jokes, once he tried to be funny instead of just sarcastic and cynical. It was fun in a way I'd forgotten about.

"Come on, I'll show you my lab," Chris said. "Well, technically it's a Ward's communal lab, so I guess it's our lab now." He looked, if anything, happy about that.

"No. Work." Dennis cut in, herding us towards the couch and forcing a plastic controller into my hand. Missy was already starting up a game console. "Smash. Missy's some sort of savant at the game, and Dean's too high-brow to play. Carlos accidentally crushed three controllers and is banned.

"You two are my last hope. We need to take her down."

"You're just bad." Missy said.

It would have been nice. Just sitting on the couch, burning through the rest of the afternoon playing video games. They'd ordered another Pizza, from somewhere, and everyone had been really welcoming. Once Sophia left. And I itched to start looking at some of Kid Win's tech. He had a hoverboard, which sounded amazing. Surely, one day wouldn't matter.

But I had so much to do. And Sophia was right, in a way.

I wondered if, right now, the Empire were dragging people out of their homes. Or people up and deciding their neighbors weren't white enough and feeling like they could, or should 'do something'. And even without my helmet's overlay, I was aware of the other problems. The temporary shelters set up throughout the city, helping people driven out of their homes by racist or just rampaging capes, cheap tents poor protection against the cold.

"Um, maybe another time." I handed the controller back to Dennis. "I have a lot to get done."

"Dude. Your first day was non-stop work. After, apparently, working through the night. And I bet today they had you doing paperwork or whatever." He pushed the controller back at me. "You need to chillax."

Why was it so hard to say no to people. "Thank you Dennis, but… soon. I just need to get some stuff working."

"Ugh. Fine." He plopped on the couch.

"Anything I can help with?" Chris asked.

"No." Dennis said from the couch. "You're playing smash with us. I am not 1v1'ing her."

I smiled at Chris and gestured towards the couch. "Thanks, but it's mostly boring stuff. Can't wait to actually work on some tech with you though."

Dean had already left, some sort of family commitments, but Carlos walked with me to the elevator.

"Oh, I should have given this to you before." He held out a phone. The casing was different, and it was a newer model, but I recognised it at a glance.

It was far more advanced than the one I'd found in Tanaka's pawn shop, all those months ago. Newer even than the one Sophia had carried to class, or Renick almost set down on the table in the interrogation room. Eagerly, hesitantly, I took it. Awareness of its history and capabilities blooming in my mind. I cast about, getting a deeper sense of how it worked.

And was disappointed.

Antenna, inferior to what I could already make. Battery slightly better energy density but requiring all sorts of materials and something that wouldn't integrate well with my current build process. Some minor efficiencies to glean from the radio, that I could already see myself implementing. The camera was a joke, both the lens and the sensor.

The processor was interesting. And some of the design decisions would carry over to the compute in my own tech. But it was based on a completely different method of production. Massive machines firing short-wavelength light at silicon bathed in solvents. I could work towards that, maybe. Adapt my lasers to a similar process. But it wasn't something I could leverage anytime soon.

I looked up from the phone, bemused. I had strived towards an obsolete version of this phone for over a year. Felt helpless frustation when Brock had taken it from me. Worked, feverishily, to build something like it.

Only to surpass it.

I put the phone in my pocket, I'd clone it later and keep using my own tech.

"Thank you Carlos."

Walking through the corridors of the PRT building alone was a strange experience, some part of me still thinking of them as an enemy. As if office workers in khaki's and button up's would draw their concealed carry's and shout at me to surrender. Instead, it was all polite, disinterested nods. If they even noticed me.

The upper levels consisted, mostly, of office spaces. Expanses of cubicles, each indistinguishable from the next except for the etched metal tags outside the doors. I stepped into one of the larger cubicle farms on the seventh floor, filled with the hum of phone calls and muted conversations. People typing on cheap keyboards or shuffling paper.

I navigated the maze of cubicles, my helmet helping me get to the right place, and for lack of a better option, knocked softly on a fabric covered half-wall.

"Hmm?" Agent Grey, a rail thin woman with red-hair starting to fade, looked up. "Tenjin? I swear, if Clock sent you back up here as some kind of a joke— "

"Nothing like that. Director Calvert said you could… give me a ride?"

She glanced at the clock and sighed. "Sure. Why not. Where we going?"

Her eyebrows rose when I told her. Looked at me skeptically while she made a few phone calls. We'd spent enough time together earlier, going through paperwork, for me to know she didn't mean anything by it. If anything, she was nicer to me than most of the other people.

We met in the motor-pool a little while later. Me, with one of the Armsmaster-validated fab-seeds tucked under my arm. Her, with a pistol strapped over her business casual outfit, and trailed by a younger man with a neck wider than his head. Dressed in PRT fatigues similar to the ones I wore.

We left in a sedan, just a normal car with tinted windows, and for the first time in over a month I was outside the building.

The streets were worse, seen at ground level. Shops that looked 'wrecked' from above were actually devestated. I'd seen pictures of what campsites could look like after bears went through it looking for food. Downtown was like that, with botiques and cafe's instead of campsites. Handbags and pastries, office equipment and print-outs instead of torn open coolers and plastic bags.

"Hey kid," The muscley guy said from the passenger seat. "You thinking about calling out any other S-class threats? You know, just so I can tell my family to get the fuck out the bay while the going's good."

"Diego." Gray said warningly, not taking her eyes off the road.

She maneuvered the car onto the onramp to the 95. Expertly merging with what little traffic there was. The highway, south of downtown, crossed through what people had started ironically calling 'The Empire.'

"I'm just trying to help people," I said.

The officer, Diego, snorted. "Funny way of going about it."

"Don't listen to him kid," Grey said, looking back at me through the rear-view mirror. "You did good."

"What, do you want those psychos to pay a visit?" Diego stared at Gray like the older woman had offended him. "Some of us have families you know."

"Yeah, I know." Agent Grey smiled, or grimaced. It was hard to tell from the back seat. "But you think they aren't out there, right now, murdering someone? Or worse?"

"Yeah," Diego said. "Somewhere not here."

The highway was a good bit higher than city, the skyline of downtown lit orange in the setting sun. It was pretty, in a way. They'd managed to put out the fires in the north side, but even I could tell the skyline was different. The remnants of loading cranes sticking out more, without the giant warehouses nearby. I absently ran my hand over the fab-seed, next to me on the back seat of the car, the hair-like tendrils curling slightly.

"Well, better if they were doing it here." Grey said, quietly.

"Shut the fuck up." Diego said. "You want them to visit? That's— "

"Here, New York, LA, somewhere that can fight back." Agent Grey's voice was calm, even as she moved into the passing lane. "This is Brockton Fucking Bay. I was here when those assholes rolled through the first time, before you were even out of— "

"Yeah, well I mighta been young but I still watched them take a school hostage." Diego said.

"And we got two of em." Gray was driving faster, passing more traffic. "Got them. Two murderous fucks that didn't go on to ruin thousands of other lives. We have the strongest non-triumverate Protectorate team in the country. And more seasoned officers than cities four times our size."

"And a brand new Director." Diego muttered. "One that's a fucking politician."

"Hah, Don't let him fool you." Grey said. "Calvert was in Ellisberg too. I guarantee he'll make the hard calls, just as well as Piggot."

She seemed to realise I was still in the back seat, just as she slowed to take an exit. "Sorry kid."

"No, you're right." I said. "Better they attack somewhere that can fight against them than some little town out in the middle of nowhere."

"Fuck, now you got him saying it." Diego muttered.

"No." Grey turned around to stare at me, ignoring Diego's squawks that she watch the road. "They come here? You take the first evac out."

"But you were just—"

"That's me, that's our job." She turned back around and continued talking. "You're a Ward, your job is to learn and, one day, do a helluva lot better than we can. Or I don't know where the world's going."

Diego snorted, and continued looking out the window. I wondered, for just a bit, if Calvert assigning Agent Grey to me wasn't random. And felt guilty just for thinking it.

We turned off onto a narrower road and Gray switched to high-beams as the sun finally set. I gave her directions as we got further from the highway. When I asked Calle for land, some place out of the way, he simply asked how much space. And then, a few days later, came back asking if it mattered how 'clean' the site was.

"There should be a gate further up," I said.

Our headlights played over a chainlink fence, dark with rust, and a tilted sign: ' - WARNING - HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCES PRESENT - KEEP OUT -', in faded black and yellow.

"Why don't capes ever pick nice places for their shit." Diego said. "A beach-side resort. A nice cheery mountain field. No, we get a fucking toxic waste dump."

"Shut-up Diego." Grey said, approaching an old gate that might have been locked, once.

"It's just a bunch of land with old oil leakage. They used to dump it here, or try to recycle it, process into something useful." I felt oddly defensive of my new property. "It was a superfund site. But someone took the money without doing any of the cleaning and sold it to someone who didn't know what they were getting into."

The sedan crunched up the gravel road and around the bend. An open, roofed area loomed up ahead. Hundreds of rusted old chemical barrels covered from the rain and sun. And countless others stacked outside, alongside larger tanks. We were far enough from the road, and in an open enough area that there'd be enough light. I didn't have signal, the site being too far for the mesh network to cover, but I could drop repeaters as soon as I was back in range.

We got out of the car, Diego and Grey wielding flashlights. Me relying on my mask.

I lobbed the seed onto a pile of dirt. It'd self deploy, burning stored energy as it grew through the night, providing as much surface area as possible to absorb sunlight in the morning. Circulating air and extracting the gasses therein.

"Uh… that it?" Diego asked.

"Yeah," I said, feeling sheepish.

It would have been easy to just over-juice a drone and send it to the site with a fresh fab seed. If I started using the shell company to really piss people off, or do something downright evil, polite fictions wouldn't stop them from shutting it down.

But we were going for the grey area. Trying to line things up such that it was too much of a hassle to go after us. Make the PRT as responsible for the company as possible, without granting them any authority. Manufacturing as many complicated little nuances as possible and making it so, if someone did try to shut me down, the legal battles could be dragged out until public opinion helped us.

If I succeeded. And if I could get enough money to make it past the first few weeks.

And if the PRT put me back in a cell? Well, hopefully by that point the company could continue without me.

"Shit," Diego said, settling back in the front seat and shutting the heavy door of the sedan. "Easiest OT I ever had."

Spoiler: End Note

Last edited: May 15, 2021

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ReasonableDoubt

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

May 20, 2021

#252

"Look kid, I get it." The voice on the other end of the line sounded as frustrated as I felt "If this thing does half of what you say it does, it's a game changer."

I was sat cross legged on the floor of my new room in Wards HQ, using my helmet as a glorified phone. The room was smaller than my cell had been, but managed to feel bigger. Part of that was because I hadn't been detained inside of it. But there was also the well stocked kitchen in Wards HQ. A couch and game systems. And more than anything else, other people around.

The Wards were pretty cool. Except for Sophia.

"What if I gave you a discount?" I asked, ever conscious of the burn-rate visualisation center-top my vision. "Provided an extra demo unit? For free?"

It wasn't healthy, obsessing over how long my company had left. What should have been months worth of runway had shrank to weeks. My phones were proliferating, and there were fewere people sharing their internet connections than before. More ISP's terminating the contracts of anyone that dared to try.

And, what really pissed me off, the chunk of the city under Nazi control. Consuming internet. That I was paying for.

"My approval limit is 10k—"

"OK." I cut in quickly, before they could walk it back. I'd take anything at this point. "I'll ship out two units today."

Ten thousand dollars wasn't much, not against the cost of providing internet to Brockton Bay, but it was a start.

Getting the diamond-glass extruders into something an actual product had taken more effort than I thought. The tech, consuming and aligning carbon molecules to spec, was easy. It was all the fiddly bits that killed me.

Figuring out how power the device with a three phase 480 industrial line, safely, reliably. Adding interop with industry standard CAD formats. Building in all the little double-checks and fool-proofing necessary if some random person was going to be using the device. On and on, and I was still probably missing a ton of 'critical' features.

There was heavy sigh from the other end of the line, and I braced myself for yet another rejection. Miracle tech from the future, an absolute game changer. And people came back with their maybe laters. The due diligence and approval limits. Net 60, after integration and demonstartion of validity.

Immensely frustrating. And something I should have foreseen.

"Please," I said, quietly, before the rejection could come. "The tech works. I'll support you if you have questions, or requests for approval. Work with you to make improvements so you can implement it to your existing process. Just try it. Show it to people. We can work out a real arrangement afterwards."

Half the companies I cold-called wouldn't even talk to me. Ironically, I couldn't even give the things away, not to already established businesses.

"I'll see what I can do…"

"Thank you. I'll ship out two units right away," And one of my phones, and… hell, I'd send them three. They provided the PRT with up-armored vehicles, it should be a no brainer. "You won't regret this."

"Oh, I probably will," She said. "But fuck'em. Let's see if we can't use it."

I sat there for a while, basking in the glow of my first success, until reality came crashing back in. Ten thousand bought me a little extra time, but it wasn't recurring revenue. With a few gestures, a map of Brockton Bay filled my vision, overlayed a visualisation of how wide the phones had spread. Where the mesh-network covered.

A healthy, deep green glow suffused the first tent city, near Captain's Hill. People driven from their homes when Lung and Purity were trying to kill each other. Joined later by those that lost their home in the fighting with the Empire, before starting another group of tents further to the west, also suffused in green.

And a constant trickle of new residents, or realistically, refugees, as the Empire ran people out of their 'territory'. Anyone they didn't approve of. Claiming they were being generous, 'given the alternative'.

Again, I considered ashing every phone in their territory. A long swathe, south of the city proper. Suburbs and trailers, strip malls and faded business parks. And a narrow bit that touched the ocean. The only thing that really seemed to concern Calvert.

And all of it glowing the same green as the rest of the city, maybe just a bit paler. Consuming more of my bandwidth every day, as traditional telcos cut service.

I could, in theory, cut them off too.

My devices formed a mesh-network, deliberately designed to anonymise and obfuscate. The problem was that all traffic to and from the normal internet went through the 'DNet'. Implementing the kind of controls that would let me corral the Nazis would affect everyone. And would be an easy tool to reach for in the future.

There was also the faint, distant hope that people would use access to humanities greatest repository of knowledge and learn. Especially as the situation wore on.

A few more swipes and the map vanished, leaving the burn rate. Always the burn rate, ever progressing. I stood, stretched, and went searching for distraction.

"Chris?" I called out, hoping he wasn't in another fugue.

I leaned into the lab that we technically shared. So much smaller than my lab in the north side, and even then I'd only claimed one corner of it. The PRT was working on clearing a store-room for me, a few levels up. And in the meantime, I had all the production space I could use north of the city. It was just inconvenient.

"Hey!" Chris looked up, actually present and not in a fugue. "Heard you talking to someone earlier. Any luck?"

"Kind of. A start, at least." I stepped over a long cylinder of metal and into the lab. "I need a break."

"That bad?"

I hadn't actually spent much time with Chris. Or any of the Wards. They were around, but no one else actually lived in the PRT building, and everyone was busy. They had patrols, school. Family. Other commitments.

I… worked.

Even without school, there wasn't enough time to do all the things I wanted to do. The diamond-glass fabs had stopped being fun a while ago. Shifted from an interesting project to an endless mess of fiddly little tasks. Cold calling people, trying to get some sort of revenue going. All while dreading the end of my company.

Sometimes, I felt like giving up. It'd be easy, really. The shell company wasn't much, just a Delaware C Corp that held a plot of toxic land north of the city, half a rack in a shared datacenter near PRT HQ, and a growing pile of debt. And even if I wasn't personaly liable for those debts, I would still lose control of the company. And with the Wards contract already signed, it'd be years before I could try again.

I carefully moved some of the clutter from my portion of the lab back to Chris's area. "I thought it'd be easier."

Chris snorted. "Story of my life."

At least the tech was going well.

Calvert had asked for more drones. And I found myself wanting to help. When the Empire declaring 'sovereignty', whatever the hell they meant by that, about a quarter of the cities police force had quit. And then when Padillo won the mayoral election, vowing to take an axe to corruption and reform the Bay's police, another chunk quit.

The police had already been underfunded and understaffed, and that problem got a lot worse.

And Lung was laying low. Which was actually more terrifying than him stomping around burning things. But even if the brothels were gone, people were still vanishing. Thugs in green and red still collected protection money. Still dealed, and not just the benign stuff.

Drones would help monitor the city, and what was happening in the Empire… fuck, I was calling it that now too. It was suburbs and trailer parks, not an empire. And I felt a little bit better about providing the PRT with drones than full priviliges over the DNet. Fewer ramifications, I hoped, and if things got out of control, I could always stop launching more. Or even ash the ones already in flight.

Besides, improving the drones was fun.

I had originally designed them as a disposable delivery mechanism. Building them up into something that could stay in the air for days or even weeks was incredibly satisfying. More sensory capability. Greater energy storage and solar capacity. Wings that extended after the initial launch, yeilding a greater aspect ratio and even more hang time. The same display variant I used to color my helmet, layered on the bottom and sides. An adaptive camo hack that only worked because the drones flew so high overhead.

Calvert had looked like Christmas came early when I shared the new specs. Even Renick seemed mollified.

My PR helmet also got upgrades. Or rather, I started over.

Instead of iterating off that first version, cobbled together in three hours while sitting in a conference room with Glenn, I want back to my original line. Removed most of the spines, hid sensors behind wafer-thin panels, aligned what couldn't be obscured so they were symmetrical.

I compressed compute and energy storage into boxier elements closer to my head, and then the upper chest and shoulders when that wasn't enough. Fused and condensed what remained of the spines into dual 'antennas', protruding from the upper sides. All of it ash-gray and blue, with orange highlights. A revision number, 003, rendered on the side such that it appeared stenciled on.

"So what are you working on?" I asked Chris.

"A big gun, or at least that's the idea." He looked at the cylinder of metal I'd almost tripped over when entering the lab, and then the chaotic mess of components strewn across the lab. He seemed to sag in place, shoulders drooping. "Damnit."

"Hey… mind if I take a look at your hoverboard?"

"Only if you promise not to… you want to use your power on it." Chris grimaced. "Power interactions are no joke. Did Armsmaster run you through procedures already?"

I'd been wanting to take a closer look at some of Chris's tech since… before even becoming a Ward. We weren't supposed to, of course. Not until we knew what my power was doing, how it affected the tech. How it affected me.

The plan was to work with Armsmaster, gradually trying a sample of different types of Tinker Tech. Confisicated, broken, older versions, simple device that Armsmaster put together solely for the purpose of testing the limits of my power. It all sounded great, in theory.

There just hadn't been time. The city wasn't an active war-zone right now but it wasn't peaceful. And with the police gutted, the new Mayor had officially requested support from the PRT.

"He's… busy." I said. "I think he also might be kinda pissed about the whole press conference thing. Where I kind of sort of made the DNet his problem on national TV."

"Oof," Chris said. "I doubt he's pissed but, yeah. He's always working. Not that you're one to talk."

"Hey, I'm here now aren't I?" I said. "And you're not in some super-fugue. Let's do this."

Chris looked at the tangled heap of wires and exotic materials heaped on his work-bench. "Why not."

When he came back, it was with a red and gold vambrace on one arm, and his his hoverboard tucked under the other. It was the general shape and size of a snowboard, but thicker. Smooth lines in red and gold that evoked the go-fast feel of a classic sports car.

Chris kicked aside some shipping boxes, clearing a section of floor, and set the board down. He went through a flurry of taps on the vambrace, and a sub-sonic hum suddenly filled the air. Something felt in spine and nerves, in the gut, more than heard. Picked up by my helmet and visualised.

The hoverboard rose from the floor with fluid, langorus motion. Came to rest at about chest height, hung in the air completely still, in much the same way bricks don't. Burnished red and gold, gleaming in the soft down-light of the Wards lab.

Impossible wonder-tech stolen from a brighter, distant future.

"This is amazing." My voice was hushed.

For a moment, I forgot about the burn-rate, about racists using my phones. About Delaware C Corps and people too stuck in their ways or too skeptical to make the world a better place. For a moment, everything gave way to sheer, childlike, awe.

"Right!?" Chris had a bright smile on his face. "Coolest thing I've built. By far."

Without thought, my hand reached out towards the unnaturally still board.

Chris stopped me. "Whoah, wait. Procedure. I shouldn't even have pulled it out of the locker."

"Please?"

"Wait till you go through some testing."

"And when would that be? Brockton Bay is… kind of a mess right now."

"I get it… not like he has much time for me either." Chris let my hand go, but he stayed within reach. "But untested power interactions are no joke. Some of my tech just stopped working when Vista did her thing, and that was a best-case failure scenario. Just wait a little while longer."

More paperwork, more procedure. I knew, rationally, that there were reasons for it. I'd almost killed Hiro, back when I was building out my first lab. And, that, thinking back, was kind of when things stopped being enjoyable. The satisfaction was there, the sense of achievement. But Hiro had been my only friend. Even if he had, at best probably saw me as something of an annoying little brother.

But this was just me on the line, Chris wouldn't be in any danger. And I'd touched tech that was beyond me before. The power source to Tanaka's laser was… not something I could reasonably compare to whatever the fuck Chris's hoverboard was doing.

But I had to know.

"I don't affect the real world at all, I just get insight to whatever tech I'm touching. The further it is from something I already understand, the more I get, but the harder it is to work with. To grok.

"I get it, Vista warps space. That's pretty intense. Clock somehow locks things in time while still maintaining a sort of geo-synchrous state that makes my head hurt just thinking about.

"I just get insight. I've already gotten a little by looking at it.

"And come on this is… awesome. Please?"

"I guess…"

While he was still talking, before he could reconsider, or qualify it, I reached out. Towards the strange work of art, hanging silently in the middle of the lab, utterly still. Brushed the tips of my fingers across curves of burnished red and shining gold.

Grains of reality, infinitesimal yet larger than the universe, woven together in a triumphant dance of relation and effect. Spanning space and time and other aspects of the fundament made my mind ache. Future and past collapsing into something that was not the present. The rules and bounds of my existence nothing more than a pale shadow of the truth that underwrote everything.

And all of it so horribly, overwhelmingly, vast.

"Shit shit shit," Someone was shaking me. "Tenjin— Charles. Come on."

"I'm…" I was on the floor, rolled to the side.

The world came rushing back in, and with it came blinding pain. Sudden, overpowering, nausea. I curled up tighter as the muscles in my chest and stomach contracted and vomit splattered on the floor of the lab with a sick, wet noise.

I got to my hands and knees, uncaring of the mess, and heaved up everything in my stomach. Again and again until I was coughing. The stinging pain of my throat and aching muscles almost pleasant compared to the pain in my head.

All that, and I still wanted to look. To know.

"Oh man, we shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have done that. Think Chris, think." He was patting my back, somewhat more forcefully than was comfortable. "How do we get your helmet off? Oh man, Armsmaster's going to be so pissed."

I wiped my hands on a clean part of my pants and disengaged the helmet. Thankful, for once, that it still didn't have a full atmospheric seal. My view of the lab, enhanced and filtered through the sensors of my helmet, winked out. Leaving me in in the dark with a throbbing headache and the vile after taste of vomit.

Chris helped pull the helmet from my head and shoulders. It was more functional than the PR helmet, but also heavier. And far harder to take off.

"I'm… fine." I knelt on the floor pressing the back of my hands against my eyes.

"I still think— "

"Chris, I'm OK." My head throbbed with each word, but the nausea was already gone. And so was most of the insight. For a brief moment, I had seen the universe. Felt the fabric of reality. And then it slipped away. "Your hoverboard is fine, nothing happened. It's no big deal."

"You had a seizure and puked all over the floor," Chris said. "We're telling Armsmaster. And medical."

"Can I have a minute?"

I climbed to my feet and slowly looked around, wincing whenever my eyes fell on something Chris was working on. The stinking puddle embarrassing proof of what had happened. An embarrasment that would a horrid pain to clean, on account of all the random crap strewn over the floor. It was already seeping into one of the cardboard boxes.

Were there procedures to requisition a mop? Some way to request a janitor to come clean up a tinker lab where Chris toyed with the forces of reality itself? The hoverboard still hanging in the air as if nothing had happened?

"So… your power doesn't really work with my tech?" Chris asked, after I'd cleaned myself up. He sounded dejected.

"Oh, it worked." I tried to sound enthusiastic but my head was still throbbing in pain. "Too well, if anything. Whatever you have going on in that hoverboard, it's… so much."

"Oh well." Chris said. "Was hoping we'd be able to work together…"

"Hey, we're not giving up." I started wiping vomit from my helmet, cleanup had to start somewhere. "This wasn't a failure, just information. A completed project, especially something as complicated as your hoverboard, is too much."

I forced myself to smile, to appear confident. "We'll try something simpler next."

"No," His reply was instant. "We're going to talk to Arsmaster and next time, we do this properly."

Chris walked across to his hoverboard, uncaring of the puddle of vomit. Another of flurry of taps across his vambrace, and he snapped his arm out as gravity reclaimed the board. He caught it in a smooth motion as it fell, tucked it back under his arm.

I sighed, and continued to clean up.

More phone calls, more rejections. The PRT relied on a sprawling network of suppliers, and that's where I focused most of my efforts. Manufacturers that provided the bulk of the armor officers used, suppliers that provided the monitors that sat on agent's desk. Makers of special gear and equipment.

Some were downright hostile, and I found out that this had happened before. That people still told cautionary tales of what had happened when Dragon came on the scene. The canadian mega-tinker casually replacing the phones agents and officers had used with her own tech. Putting 'people out of jobs'.

The parallels were easy to see, even if I thought they were being short sighted. And also kind of surreal… I could already mass produce phones that were better than what Dragon sold to the entire PRT. If only they'd buy them.

But that was a contract I wasn't winning anytime soon. Even in Brockton Bay.

"Tenjin, come in." Armsmaster called out from within his lab.

He sat on a stool, in an undergarment with the same coloring as his armor and wearing a helmet. He was adjusting a counter-top device that, at a glance, was related to a scanning tunneling microscope. I almost reached out towards the device, though the pain from touching Chris's hoverboard still lingered.

The door slid shut behind me and, instead of 'violating procedure' I looked around the lab.

Armsmaster's armor stood on its own in one corner, a shade of blue similar to my own that gleamed softly in the light of the lab. A demo version of my diamond-glass fab sat in another corner, along with various other pieces of equipment, and one of my larger display panels hung on the far wall. It showed a live feed from a drone, soaring high above the north side.

Always a depressing view.

The feed changed. A quaint wooden pier that had likely never seen a boat docked. Someone manipulated the drone's camera and the image zoomed in, revealing an altercation I hadn't noticed. Armsmaster must have the panel paired, to the PRT main console or tasked directly by an agent using one of my phones.

Two boardwalk enforcers chased a man in ragged clothes. One of the armored security guards dove in a tackle, like he was re-living glory days on the high school football team. Kneeled on the ragged-looking man's back, while his partner fumbled with white zip-ties. The camera snapped back to a wide angle view as whoever had tasked the drone moved on to something else.

And then then the whole image shifted as the drone banked, on its way to catch a thermal.

The drones were having an impact but… it was too much.

Everone was saying that they made the city safer. Helped people do their jobs, helped protect the city. Enabled the PRT to meet the new Mayor's request for help. PRT agents praised me in the hallways, Calvert congratulated me in our last one-on-one, and the voices online, be it PHO or the DNet, didn't seem to care.

Or maybe that just meant the adaptive camo was doing its job, and people didn't realise how much coverage the PRT had.

It was too much.

But it was just while the city was recovering. And if things got bad, I could ash them all at any time.

"Um," I looked towards Armsmaster, still focused on his work. Maybe this would be a good time to apologise for… throwing him under the bus during the press conference. "You wanted to see me?"

"Yes, just a moment please." Armsmaster continued to work with the microscope. Well, everyone was busy.

The feed on the lab wall switched again, to one of Brockton Bay's growing tent cities.

Irregular rows of tents blanketing a too large parking lot, in the shadow of some crumbling event center. Most tents were made of faded white canvas, sagging and tired. About one in ten were different. Precise octagonal domes of a gray so dark it appeared black. Solar exterior, near perfect insulation, and a little bit of energy storage. And, embarrassingly, a small stylized V tucked away near the entrance. A logo in gray, blue, and orange.

Simple things that helped people.

The tents still… sucked. Condensation was an issue, and consequently drainage. People left them partially open because I'd completely screwed up the airflow, and set-up was too complicated.

The next revision would be better.

Always, so much to do.

Armsmaster finally spun around on the stool he was sitting on and faced me directly. "Sorry about that. Needed to get this to a good stopping place."

"I understand."

Armsmaster exhaled, and, to my surprise, reached up and began to remove his helmet. He was surprisingly young. Tired eyes and close-cropped brown hair, stuck to his head in the shape of his helmet. A somewhat wry smile.

"Call me Colin." He held out a hand to shake. "It's good to meet you. Again."

"Um, one sec."

I disengaged the helmet. Began the the laborious procedure shucking myself of it. Feeling ridiculous as first everything went black, and then I peeled it off my upper torso and head. Something to improve in the next rev.

Armsmaster, Colin, looked like he was trying not to laugh when I finally got it off. He held out his hand again, and I took it.

"You already unmasked," He pointed to a surface I could set my helme… thing on. "When you changed masks on the roof."

"Oh Yeah…" I felt my face burning. "I just felt like I should return the gesture?"

"I understand." He reached up and ran his hands over his scalp, leaving his hair even more of a mess. "You might want to work on a better way to remove your helmet."

"Next rev," I said, without thinking.

"I'll share some schematics. Maybe there's something that'll work for you."

"That'd be… awesome." I looked towards his armor, standing by itself in the corner of the lab. I gestured with one arm. "Do you mind if I…

"I don't, but I heard what happened with Kid Win." He sat back down on the stool and rested his elbows on his knees. "Let's talk about that first."

That kept on coming up. "It really wasn't that big of a deal…"

"Really." He raised an eyebrow. "Do you know why we asked you to wait?"

I didn't blame Chris for reporting what happened but the whole thing had turned into a huge waste of time. Lectures, in depth. First by medical, then by Aegis. Assigned reading, a college dissertation on the potential dangers of power interactions. Another paper on the dangers of over-stressing thinker abilities. More lectures, by Agent Gray. Endless mocking from first Dennis, and then Sophia.

"Yes."

"Ok." Colin said, simply. "Do you still feel any lingering effects?"

I sighed in relief at not having to go through another lecture, and thought about how to answer. It would be easy to just tell him no. A little bit of the headache lingered but it was a trivial thing. And who knows when I'd have time to work with the man again.

"A slight headache."

"I see." He looked to his armor again. "Thank you for being honest with me."

He got up and crossed the room, unlocking one of the big metal cabinets near the door. Another complete set of armor, somewhat bulkier looking than the one standing on its own in the corner of the lab. A large patch of scoring damage across the chest and one thigh. He pulled out an even older looking helmet from a bin I hadn't noticed while staring at the armor, and set it on the table next to my own.

"I was hoping to do two things today. First," He gestured to the helmet he set next to mine. "See how your power interacts with different type of tech. We can still do that, provided that you promise to tell me if your headache worsens."

I nodded, and he continued. "Second, I hoped we could get some work done."

He put his own helmet back on, and then glanced at the screen hanging on the wall. The feed switched from a birds-eye view of suburban houses, unfairly peaceful, to a collage of… vile images and videos. Infographics visualising categories of media and amounts, ways in which they were being shared.

People had long since figured out how to use the SDK I published to create distributed apps, servers that sat on the DNet. A sort of shadow PHO was one of the first usages, followed closely by sites pirating media and, of course, porn. All of it benefitting from the same anonymization as the phones and impossible to shut down.

Impossible for anyone but me. And, as of my induction to the Wards, Armsmaster.

"I'm hesitant to show this sort of material to a minor," Colin said. "But, well, you've kind of made it my problem."

"I am sorry about that," I said. "I shouldn't have just… said you'd deal with it on national Television. I hadn't really thought it out."

He glanced at the panel on the wall again, and the images vanished, leaving behind the infographics. Breakdowns of which distributed apps were most responsible for what.

"I was a little annoyed at first," He said. "More at the extra work load than anything else. But really, it would have fallen on me anyways.. I'd still appreciate if you talk to me first, next time."

I nodded. "Of course."

He moved back to where my helmet sat on the bench. Somehow, it didn't look bad, next to one of Armsmaster's earlier helmets.

"So," Colin hefted the helmet he'd grabbed from the locker. "Where do you want to start?"

The tech was, as always, tempting. It wouldn't even take long, either. Just a brush of my fingers, and sudden insight.

Moderating the DNet, no the other hand, was going to be an endless, thankless, mess. I didn't want any part of it. I'd rather go back to making cold calls to PRT suppliers.

And if I just focused on the tech, maybe claimed my headache was bothering, that Armsmaster would take care of it. That Colin, already likely overloaded with work I had no inkling of, would deal with it.

But that would be another dick move.

I sighed. "Let's clean up the DNet."

Spoiler: End Note

Last edited: May 20, 2021

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ReasonableDoubt

May 25, 2021

#267

"Gunshots on Seventh and Main," I notified the PRT console, though they likely already saw it. Gunfire was easy for the drones to pick up. "One male down, gunshot wound to the, um, abdomen. Shooter on foot, headed west on Seventh."

"We have it," Officer Doughty, the PRT officer looking over us from the 'real' console, replied. "Stalker, no units nearby. Seventh and Main if you wish provide aid."

I moved my hands through the air, bringing up a new window in my interface with a few gestures. I'd stolen an idea from Armsmaster with my newest helmet, sensors on the inside sensitive enough to track the patterns of neurons firing. It'd still be a long process before the software mapped even the most common actions though. So, for a little while longer at least, I was stuck with gestures.

The new window showed a feed from a different drone, trained on Shadow Stalker as she leapt from a littered rooftop and vanished back into her breaker state. Gallant followed on the streets below, heavy, clomping steps that had already left him blocks behind.

The city was, by the numbers, more peaceful than it had been in a decade. But I was gaining a new appreciation for how easy it was to mislead with statistics. The numbers we shared with the city only told the story that the Mayor and Calvert wanted told.

A story of more arrests and fewer murders. A story of no parahuman crime. One that ignored the unease we all felt, not knowing what Lung was up to. A story that didn't mention all the 'little' atrocities happening in Empire territory.

"You know," Dennis said, seated next to me. "Console duty used to be boring."

His helmet was perched on the end of the console, though he wore the rest of his costume. We had our own mirror console in Wards HQ, but were still expected to be fully equipped while on duty. Even though there was almost zero chance of either of us leaving the building.

"When was that?" I asked. "Brockton Bay's always been kind of.."

"Yeah.." Dennis shrugged. "But it wasn't this bad. Or at least, console wasn't."

The police department was still at half capacity or less, and they were understaffed before half of them quit. The half that remained almost killed themselves working, but that still wouldn't ahve been enough to make all those numbers go up. So, with the new mayor's backing, the PRT had stepped up.

Calvert's speech from the day of the Riot, about overstepping authority, seemed laughable now.

The PRT wasn't a police force, but everyone helped. Agents, Officers, administrative staff. The Protectorate. Even the Wards were offered extra duty. Volunteer only, but then, we had all volunteered. I'd much rather build, or do any one of a hundred other things I needed to get done.

The damned burn rate still floated at center top of my interface. I needed a scalable way to keep the DNet from turning into a reviled cesspool. Do another iteration on the emergency shelters. Or start on the smart-glasses I dreamed of getting out to people, a project that was looking feasible after Armsmaster gave me one of his old helmets to learn from.

And that wasn't even touching on all the ideas I had for my own gear. Armor. Defensive options. Some sort of mobility, though I didn't know what I was going to do there. Further improvements to the helmet, though that was becoming more of a software than a hardware problem, the sensors already varied enough and sensitive enough that it picked up more than I could reasonably comprehend.

I had no desire to go on patrol, but it was hard to dismiss Calvert's warning. And even Colin recommended I be better equipped to defend myself in some capacity, even if it was just to run away.

With so much to do, sitting at the console chafed. It wasn't quite so stupid as walking around the city on patrol, but it was always hard to get over the nagging feeling that my time was better spent elsewhere.

But turning down extra duty when everyone else was stepping up, saying no when a twelve year old had already proclaimed how eager she was to help, was hard.

On the feed, Stalker faded back into reality atop another building. She leaned over the edge, confident in a way only someone with nothing to fear from heights could be. The victim was barely moving, far below. Stalker leaned forward, out over the edge, melting back into shadow just past the point someone like me would have fallen to their death. The drone tracked her breaker form, visible against the harsh yellow illumination of ageing street-lights.

She was chasing the shooter.

"Stalker!" Doughty's voice came over comms the instant she returned from her breaker state. "Provide aid! Do not engage!"

"It's a gut wound," She said, too casual. But she stopped. "What do you expect me to do? Perp is—"

"Get to the victim, I'll walk you through it." Doughty bit out. "An ambulance is en route. Move!"

Next to me, Dennis sighed. "What a shitshow."

I pushed the video feed to a panel tacked on the wall so he could see the same thing I was. Stalker was following Doughty's instructions, positioning the victim on his back, flexing the knees. Applying pressure. Gallant arrived a few moments later, and Stalker immediately left him with the victim as she bolted after the shooter. Ignoring Doughty.

"Fuck!" Stalker's voice, over comms. "Tenjin, where is he?! I know you're watching this."

"Do not answer that Tenjin," Doughty's voice again. "Stalker, get back to your partner. You're both riding back to HQ."

"I can—"

"Stalker." Doughty talked over her again. Clock and I didn't hear the rest of the… conversation.

On one feed, Gallant continued to apply pressure to the bleeding man's gut. Another window showed Shadow Stalker, glaring down an empty street as if she wanted to attack it. And in a third view the shooter strolled out of an alley, two blocks away.

I hesitated for a moment, and then pulled up old code. The application I used to track Sophia and Tanaka, back before everything went to shit. It would still work, anywhere my network had coverage, but I'd need to use super-user credentials. And anyone that bothered to look would see what I was doing. There were already community apps that visualized the audit trail. Forums, on both the DNet and regular internet, dedicated to tracking and discussing everything Armsmaster and I did with elevated privileges.

But when it came to tracking a signal, I didn't really need the DNet, not anymore. My drones could do it even easier.

Modifying the code to rely on drones was the work of moments. Another set of gestures to tag the shooter's phone for real-time tracking. The video feed from a drone high overhead lost him as he ducked into another alley with high walls. The buildings shielding him from the cameras but doing nothing to obscure the signal from his phone.

I set the app to continue following him, and to automatically tag any other phones he came in contact with.

The other man died before the ambulance arrived.

Gallant stayed there, kneeling next to the victim, until an EMT gently guided him away. An up-armored PRT van wobbled slightly as Gallant joined Stalker in the back before it pulled away, their patrol done for the night.

"Looks like there's more toilets to be cleaned in Stalker's future." Dennis quipped.

I stared at him.

"Sorry." He grimaced. "This is... fuck."

He stood, abruptly. Batted his helmet off the console, sending it bouncing and skidding across the floor to bang into the wall. He shook his head and walked off towards the common area. Probably to the kitchen.

I should have gone after him. Said something, let him know I got it.

Instead, I dove back into the myriad of feeds. The drones would automatically flag something like a gunshot or a car crash, but not all crimes were loud. And felt burning frustration as I avoided any feeds from over Empire territory. I knew from experience that watching something going down and being unable to do anything about it was worse than not looking at all.

I couldn't imagine console duty ever being boring. Wards in other cities didn't respond to "shots fired", didn't even go on evening patrols. Wards in Boston or New York didn't listen in on domestic violence situations when the PRT main desk forgot to mute our circuit. Wards in other cities didn't sit hear officers, PRT and police, dispassionately summarized rape and murder and all the other terrible things that happened every day in a city like Brockton Bay.

Apparently, Wards in other cities did their fucking homework while on console duty.

But there was no one to blame. We chose this. Were told, again and again, that we could stop at any time. Encouraged to, even. Given numbers to call if we felt pressured, as if any of us would ever reach out to the 'youth guard'. There was already far too much to do and far too little time. To make things worse, I was scheduled to start school soon. The last thing any of us needed was some mid-level bureaucrat telling us to join a soccer team, or whatever they even did.

I took a deep breath. Pulled up a feed, far above the ocean to the southeast. Some of my drones had been blown so far out to sea there wasn't really much hope of them getting back to the city. Instead of ashing them, I let them soar, curious how far they'd make it. And when I needed space I'd look through their cameras. Fill my vision with an endless, undulating pattern of waves. Tiny and uniform from high overhead, marred only by the occasional wake of a ship.

We didn't do full shifts, not even Brockton Bay was that bad. In some ways though, the shortened shifts made it worse. Enough time spent that it felt heavy, but not significant enough to make a difference. Most days, I wondered why we were even involved.

Not that it wasn't instructional, or that it didn't change the way I saw the city. I came to realize that, even after being put into a group home and transferred to Winslow, I'd been sheltered. That every day, people went through situations far worse than a bored punk pointing a gun at their heads.

The rest of the Wards didn't seemed… happy, or perhaps proud, which made me question my own feelings again. Stalker in particular was, if anything, weirdly happy. Said we were making the city safer. And on some level, we were. But I saw the numbers.

Saw how many incidents the police, even critically understaffed, handled. How many emergency calls PRT officers responded to. And the occasional Protectorate reply to what would have normally been handled by the police, in what often felt more like a shock and awe publicity stunt than an attempt at law enforcement.

Such as Dauntless dropping out of the sky on some hapless carjackers. An avatar of Jupiter, wreathed in lightning and floating above a trash-strewn street. The would-be car thieves throwing away their weapons and laying face down on cold asphault before Dauntless even spoke.

What the Wards did, what we did, felt… small. I could do more, wanted to do more. But how to express that, without sounding arrogant? How did I explain to Chris, who was genuinely disappointed when his parents didn't approve him for extra duty, that I felt my time was better spent elsewhere? What would Missy think if she knew that getting my shell corporation out of debt was more important to me than catching the shooter in a drug-deal gone wrong?

And then, just when I was about to work up the conviction to call it off, Carlos would stop a rape from happening. Or Sophia would save someone from being beaten to death. Maybe Gallant would comfort a sobbing child whose parents were missing, never to be found. And I went right back to feeling like an ass for thinking there were better uses of my time. Because even if it was only a drop in the bucket, it did help.

Dennis came back from the kitchen with a bag of chips. And then he set some almond M&M's down on my half of the console. I looked up at him in surpise.

"Saw you eat them at the party."

"Thanks," I said, trying to find a polite way to decline. "The nutritionist…"

"Charles," Dennis interrupted, as he flopped back into his chair. "You don't have tryhard every little fucking thing. Eat the M&Ms."

I sighed, gave into temptation, and ripped open the package. The rest of the night went as well as any of them did. Incident after incident, Doughty talking us through it when he had time, until our alloted hours were up.

Dennis went home. I stayed behind, sitting at a dark console. Dead tired but too wired to sleep.

My drones had followed the shooter to an old apartment building west of the Trainyard. Even from a thousand meters up the building looked awful. Condemned, or at least it should be. A handful of cars parked in the street outside, hoods still lingering with heat when viewed on thermal. Five other phones in building, none them mine, already tagged and tracked.

I closed the feed and stretched in my chair. And almost fell out of it when I noticed Sophia, leaned against the wall watching me.

"Gah!" My panic at being startled morphed to annoyance, at myself as much as her. My helmet should have alerted me as soon as she entered the room. "Don't do that."

"What, is it creepy being watched?" She sneered. "Pay some fucking attention to your surroundings."

"Sure." I shook my head, it wasn't worth engaging. I headed towards my room. "Good night Sophia."

"Hold up." She blocked the exit.

She was wearing comfortable looking sweats and her hair was still damp from the shower, tied back in a loose pony tail. Anyone else would likely look relaxed, but not Sophia. It was like a rabid mountain lion had snuck into the room while I was lost in the feeds.

"You're still tracking that guy." She said as much as asked.

"That guy?" I asked, hoping she'd just go away.

"Don't fucking pretend to be stupid. You know what I'm talking about."

I sighed. "So?"

She wasn't getting out of the way so I returned to my chair. Kicked my feet up on the console. It would be easy to just give her what she wanted. Some part of me wanted to. Send her out like an ignorant attack dog. But with my luck she'd get found out, and it'd trace right back to me. And even if she found the guy, it wasn't like it'd solve anything. Or even if he'd deserve whatever Sophia would do to him. He shot someone, but I had no idea why, or what sort of circumstances he had going on. Fuck. I just wanted to build.

"Tell me where he is." Sophia demanded.

"And you'll what… go blazing out into the night and shoot him with your crossbow? Maybe knock out some teeth? Break some bones?"

"Damn straight I will. And you're not going to tell anyone about it either."

I laughed, a little huff at how ridiculous it all was. "Nah."

She clenched her jaw, the tendons on her neck standing out. My head was turned in a different direction, giving her the impression I wasn't even looking at her, even as the helmet kept a picture of her up in my vision. She stomped towards me, somehow looking dangerous wearing pajamas. For a moment, I thought she was going to lose it.

"What are you going to do?" I forced myself to stay relaxed, leaned back a bit further in the chair. "Hit me? Go get your dumb little crossbow and shoot me again?"

She made a frustrated noise and stomped off. I stayed there for another long while and only went to my own room when it was clear she was gone. I locked the door, though it wouldn't do anything if Sophia did decide to mess with me.

I wanted to lay down, but knew from experience that sleep wouldn't come.

So instead I sat on the floor, helmet still on my head, the rest still covering my shoulders and upper chest. The lower part would, hopfeully, grow into functional armor. If I ever got the time to work on it. I increased the sensitivity on my helmet's proximity alarm, still annoyed that Sophia had gotten so close without tripping it before pulling up a build interface.

And worked.

On a whim, I created a copy of my generic fab design. Not the seeds, just the completed fab unit. From there, I stripped away anything inessential to drone production. Added the three-phase power hookup that I'd spent so much time on, along with a feedstock hopper taken from yet another design. Packaged the whole thing into something that looked like an over-wide cylinder that would rest upright. Covered the surface with displays to 'paint' it orange, blue. The surface itself would already be gray.

A device that could fit comfortably in the back of a pickup truck. Something any PRT office in the country could use to blanket a city with drones. An easily portable device that anyone could use to do the same.

I carefully set the design aside.

My shift had long since ended, and I was sitting on the floor of my room instead of at the console. But the drones were still mine, and I found myself flicking through feeds. Brockton Bay, from a thousand meters up. The business towers of Downtown rising above a clean grid of flowing lights and darker cubes. Everything abstract and neat. I let the feed occlude my vision, the undecorated little room and neatly made bed vanishing until it felt like I was hanging in space above Brockton Bay.

I opened up another interface, and got back to work.

The DNet was an ever growing problem, even aside from how much bandwidth it consumed uplinking to the standard internet.

Armsmaster, Colin, had helped me get started on policing it, but I was trying to accomplish something more. His plan had been to automaticaly flag 'objectionable' content and level escalating penalties to the devices or accounts responsible. The PRT already had software packages for crawling the internet and identifying anything too sensitive, adapting it would have been straightforward. Not easy, and still a tremendous amount of work, but it was a problem already solved. At least, solved in a way the PRT was happy with.

I pushed back, said that we could do better. And to my surprise, Colin listened.

We had a lot of options that weren't really applicable on the old internet. Points, originally incentives to contribute internet to the DNet or facilitate the spread of devices, had real-world value. That value had crashed, hard, when I stopped dropping tech during my captivity, but it had recovered just as quickly when I started shipping again.

Points weren't real money, but if people valued them, it didn't really matter.

We worked to create a sort of distributed prediction market. A system where pseudonymous individuals could wager on how harmful reported content was to the DNet as a whole. And then be rewarded, or penalized, based on how near their prediction was to the eventual consensus.

It wasn't that simple, and it certainly wasn't perfect, but it was a start.

The actual implementation was a nightmare I was still working on. The DNet was loosely related to the web, most of the community just porting over existing code. But there were no rules, no clearly defined content structure other than what people made. It was an ever evolving tangle of media formats and ad-hoc applications or sub-networks. Populated by an ever growing mess of pseudonymous accounts.

Colin worked with me on the initial design and approach. And he still listened when I was stuck. Pointed out potential flaws in my reasoning, or suggested alrenative approaches. He even got me limited access the PRT's enormous repository of software, code that had been seized or contributed over more than a decade of operation.

Beautiful, hideous, amazing code. Some of which triggered the visual and tactile elements of my power simultaneously, in a strange hybrid I hadn't experienced before. The wonder-greed that hit me when I saw a piece of advanced tech, blended with the sweet reward of insight from actually touching it. The balance shifting more towards insight as I interacted with the code.

Colin helped, but the work was on me. As it should be.

I created a meta-app that people could interact with to report things. Reports fed into a distributed database of interaction patterns and content signatures. It wouldn't scale, but hopefully by the time it became a problem I'd have something better in place. I had loose plans of modifying Colin's combat analysis program, to train the altered program on the collected reports of DNet users.

I fell asleep at some point, still working.

And I woke to a long, wailing, siren. Distinctive. Horrifying

Impossibly loud in the confines of my little room. Adrenaline and a base, instinctive fear chased away the fog of sleep. My vision was still filled with code, and a backdrop of Downtown that was seemed to hitch as people on the sidewalks froze to listen to the sirens.

I was on my feet before the first siren ended. Leaned out the door as the second began, just in time to see Sophia blink into shadow at the end of the hallway. I was already dressed, and confused, unsure what to do.

An alert came in from Armsmaster. Simurgh. Australia.

Last edited: May 25, 2021

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ReasonableDoubt

May 30, 2021

#286

My hands were shaking.

The corridors of Ward HQ, dark and empty, still seemed to echo with the last wailing call of Endbringer siren. I tried to pull up status screens on the city, on what Protectorate members were on duty, what they were doing but kept on failing— the panicky gestures of my hands too erratic for my helmet to properly interpret.

I stopped. Took a deep breath. Steadied my hands long enough to pull up more information. Reminded myself that the Simurgh was not hitting Brockton Bay, or or even the same continent.

No one would expect me to fight. Wards rarely fought the monsters, and I had just started. Had no armor, no weapons, hardly any training aside from console. Still needed to clear Endbringer Readiness Training, which was apparently a thing

I'd just be in the way. A liability.

But as I stood there in the hallway, only a few steps away from my room, I couldn't help but be disappointed in myself. One of my drones monitored Armsmaster as he blasted across town, patrol aborted while he raced to make the as of yet undefined teleporter pickup. Further down the corridor, Sophia flashed back into existence, fully kitted out as Shadow Stalker. Stared at me with obvious contempt before she entered the elevator.

I stood there for a bit longer, alone. Shame, and a weird sort of guilt urging me onwards. To just fucking do it.

I took a deep breath. Maybe the next fight. Maybe after I'd been a Ward for more than a month and had something resembling actual armor. So instead of rushing to the Elevator and joining the capes already gathering on the roof, I sat back down at the console.

And, through cameras and drones, watched.

Lady Photon and Glory Girl flitted through the sky towards PRT HQ and touched down on the rooftop landing pad with casual grace. Armsmaster and Militia strode out of the rooftop elevator a few long moments later. The rest of the protectorate, even Dauntless, didn't show.

Shadowstalker phased up through the floor despite having left Wards HQ via elevator. Armsmaster exchanged words with her and his mouth tightened but shortly he simply nodded. Allowed her to stand with him and Militia. I wondered again how she did it. Sophia was horrible be around but she was also fearless. She trained endlessly, constantly asked for extra patrols, was always trying to do more. She'd fought against Behemoth just three months earlier, and now she was going up against the Simurgh without a hint of hesitation.

Dennis had implied more than once that she was just a thug, that the only reason she tried so hard was so she could 'beat the shit out of people without going to jail'. But it was hard to reconcile that, and how much of a legitimate bitch she was, with her dedication. With throwing herself at every Endbringer fight she could.

Another drone feed caught my attention— five Empire capes glided towards the PRT building on a platform of steel.

Max Anders— Kaiser, console had drilled the importance of consistent communication into me —standing at the forefront. His face bare, squinting slightly against the wind. I hadn't realised Rune could move so fast. Fenja and Menja, Rune and Othala, were all arrayed on the platform behind him. ALong with another cape I hadn't seen before. The unknown cape wore steel armor similar to Kaiser but also had the full helmet of a medieval knight. Along with over-built gauntlets and boots, covered with wicked knife-edges and spikes.

I made a few gestures, the motions deliberate and smooth, and opened a comms channel. "Console, this is Tenjin."

"Console One." An unfamiliar voice, but it didn't matter. "Go ahead Tenjin."

"Kaiser, Othala, Rune, Fenja, Menja, and one Unknown cape, are flying towards PRT HQ. Pushing a feed to panel zero-one now."

"Copy. We'll send it up."

Rune's platform slid through the sky, low enough that it was passing between office buildings on the final approach. Armsmaster, likely notified by console, stared at them as they approached. There were more capes on Max's steel sky-raft than on the roof, and it wasn't even his full roster. And they were recruiting more. Fuck.

I brought a handful of drones closer to the roof. It was a risk, the camouflage wouldn't hold up at close range, not against a clear sky and slanted beams of light from a just-risen morning sun.

Armsmaster glanced up, clearly saw the drones, but didn't say anything.

No one else noticed, too focused on the approaching Empire Capes. Sophia had cocked both of her crossbows at some point, and Miss Militia's weapon flickered into amorphous green energy before reforming as a wicked assault rifle.

Calvert and Dauntless walked out of the elevator and crossed the roof, just as the Empire platform set down.

My drones picked up a harsh grinding noise, and the steel rails that boredred the Empire's platform shimmered and one entire section broke free with a sharp crack. Gothic-themed flourishes of sharpened steel, ready to impale a person, flowered and grew together as the section fell, forming into a ramp that hit the roof with a deep clang.

Kaiser opened his mouth, but Calvert spoke first.

"Anders." He smiled, like he was greeting an old friend. "Thank you for volunteering to fight the Simurgh. Rather brave of you."

Calvert looked calm. He wore the same uniform he always did, standard issue, all but identical to the PRT guards at the corners of the roof. A tall, skeletally thin black man in militarized police gear facing off against the super-powered leader of Brockton Bay's Nazis.

"Director," Anders' mouth twisted, like he smelled something foul. "I'm offering Othala's services."

"Against the Endbringers, we'll take anyone." Calvert said mildly, and then turned his back on Anders. "Pickup is est— "

"Our aid is contingent," Anders interrupted, in a voice that carried clear across the roof. "On the release of Purity."

My drones picked up faint mutters

"Out of the question." Calvert responded, without missing a beat.

"Oh?" Kaiser glanced towards Lady Photon and Glory Girl, who were standing with the Protectorate. "Even with New Wave keeping their biokinetic tucked away?"

"You're a piece of shit, Max." Lady Photon's voice rang out, clear.

He just smiled, and turned back to Calvert. "It's the Simurgh, yes? Can your organization afford to turn down the services of a competent healer? And Purity's firepower?"

Calvert looked apologetically at Lady Photon, but she seemed calm, more than anything else. One hand on Glory Girl's shoulder, saying something to her, too quiet for my drones to pick up. Another thing to work on— I had ideas for laser-based microphones but there was never enough time.

Calvert returned his attention to Anders. "Do I have your word, that you and Purity will go to Canberra and help against the Simurgh?"

Anders raised an eyebrow. "You will have Othala's aid. And Purity, once she is healed."

"Then no." Again, without hesitation.

Anders frowned. "Perhaps you should check with your… superiors."

"I am the authority here." Calvert said. "You go to Canberra, and help, or you get off my roof."

"Ten minutes until pickup." Armsmaster added.

Calvert shouldn't even be talking to the Empire. Max Anders presented himself as a noble savior, but the only thing keeping him honest was his own self interest. Releasing Purity, even if she did help fight the Simurgh, was madness.

She was terrifying. Even back when she was 'casually' hitting the north-side her attacks would tear up streets and punch through concrete with horrifying ease. We all had treated it like an air rade, whenever that harsh white light shone against the night time clouds, even though the rest of the city hadn't done a fucking thing. And I had thought that had been close to the limits of her power.

Then she flipped out and started hitting things for real, knocking over apartment blocks like an angry child knocked over wooden blocks.

"Running out of time, Max." Calvert said. "Miss Anders, you understand, cannot be easily moved in her current condition."

"She's conscious?" Anders asked.

"Somewhat," Calvert said, as if it was of no concern. "Do I have your word?"

I was close to opening a channel to him and asking him what the hell he was thinking. The current strategy with the Empire, as much as I hated it, seemed to be working. They lost more of the little amenities that people took for granted every day. And as people found out that being cut off from the rest of society meant rationing single ply toilet paper and trying to grow 'victory gardens' in the middle of a new england winter, they started to realize Kaiser was full of shit. Or at least, some of them did.

Giving the empire a flying artillery platform would not help. At all. And if Kaiser was even making this offer he thought he had more to gain. Or things were growing even worse in his little hillbilly haven than it seemed.

"Yes." Kaiser said, with a sneer.

"Say the words, Mr. Anders." Calvert said, with an almost kindly smile.

Though there was some satisfaction in seeing Max Anders talked down to.

"You simple, petty, bureaucrat." Anders voice was laced with disdain. "Purity and I will fight the Simurgh."

"Very well." Calvert said, and then subvocalised something into his throat-mic.

A moment later, as if prepared, the elevator opened again. Two PRT officers and an orderly pushed an elaborate wheelchair out onto the roof. Wind billowed the pale blue hospital gown of the woman slumped listlessly in the chair. Kayden Anders.

Purity.

I'd never gotten the official story of what had happend, how the protectorate had brought her in, only rumors from Dennis that 'Dauntless had fucked her up.' Tubes ran over the arms of the chair and vanished under her the gown. Her left leg ended in a bandaged stump and her face was sunken and sallow.

My drones picked up a sharp intake of breath from someone.

"How… prescient of you." Kaiser's mouth twisted as he stared at Calvert, instead of his ex-wife. "Enjoy your little moment of power."

Kaiser gestured with one steel-clad hand towards Othala. The woman rushed towards the wheel chair only to be blocked by PRT officers. Kaiser turned back to Calvert, showing actual anger for the first time since landing on the roof.

"Othala may begin healing her in…" He held up one hand towards Kaiser, and pressed his ear-bud with the other. Pure theatrics. "Two minutes."

Grinding metal noises, low and harsh, filled the rooftop again. The steel posts decorating their flying platform stretched, grew taller, already sharp edges elongating almost organically. Kaiser stared at Calvert and, gradually, the grinding noise subsided.

Calvert stared gazed back, uncaring.

Kaiser broke first, gesturing sharply to Fenja and Menja like he was calling dogs to his side, and all three strode down the ramp to join Purity. He sneered at the officers that still stood between Othala and the wheel chair.

The other armored cape, with his nightmarish boots and gauntlets, moved to follow.

"You stay," Kaiser said to him. "Listen to Victor."

The armored cape paused, oddly hesitant for a steel-armored man covered in Nazi Regalia and gleaming edges. And then, he started moving again. Kaiser negligently gestured, and the grinding metal noise was back. Steel twine twisting out and binding the other cape to the platform.

Kaiser looked to Rune. "Go."

The girl, who couldn't have been much older than me, shrugged. The steel platform lifted off, smooth and silent, tilted slightly towards Rune's new vector. The other armored cape struggled and actually snapped a foot free, too late. They were already well past the edges of the roof, hundreds of meters above the ground.

At Calverts nod the officers let Othala reach Purity. Moments later the listless, absent look in Kayden Anders' eyes faded. Her skin regained color and then lost it again as, still bound to the chair, she began to glow.

"Thirty seconds." Armsmaster said.

Everyone else on the pad stared at the Empire capes, wary. Sophia's crossbows were still cocked, and even Armsmaster looked tense. Dauntless pushed off the ground and floated backwards, never turning away from Kaiser's group. Calvert simply turned and walked away, flanked by two PRT officers.

A flicker, as if the feed from my drone skipped a frame, and a new cape in blue and black stood on landing pad.

Strider stood up straight and took everything in. Stared at Purity for a moment, and then exchanged a few words with Armsmaster. And then, another frame skip, and they were gone.

Long after they left, I sat there. Warm and safe in Wards HQ. Alone in the dark, while Colin and Sophia fought the Simurgh on the other side of the world.

I should have gotten off the couch and done something. Worked. Made some calls. Instead, I wormed my way further into PRT strategic command channels. I was already tied into the system, getting the feed from Canberra wasn't even a hack, not really. I'd hoped that the information would make me feel better. Put my mind at ease.

But just like on console, knowing what was happening and being unable to affect it was worse. All it did was confirm that people were dying.

I kept listening.

Without anything else to watch, while a dispassionate voice called out every time the Simurgh put someone down, everytime someone died, my eyes turned towards the burn-gauge. Still pulsing red at the edges of my vision, almost visibly growing. My company paid for internet access by the gigabit, and during a disaster traffic surged. People afraid, people like me, seeking to sooth themselves with information even though the Endbringer was on the other side of the world.

I was happy to do it. Giving Brockton Bay internet access, and providing shelters, felt like the only worthwhile things I'd managed to do as a 'Hero'. But one more month without paying off the interest on my loan and it'd all be over. The pipe to the original internet would close. My LLC would go into default, the courts would begin their work, and the bank would probably sell the debt to someone that wanted to control the company.

I laughed at myself. Worried about the fate of a Delaware C Corp, while the Simurgh was killing people.

"Tenjin…" Someone asked. "You OK?"

I snapped awake, the sound feed from the Simurgh fight still, still playing in my helmet. How the fuck had I fallen asleep while listening to that.

The lights, carefully crafted to convey of comfort and modern comfort through PR shots, reflected off the domed ceiling of the common area. Dean crouched a short distance from the couch , mask off and a concerned expression on his face. Wearing casual clothes, similar to what Mom would have dressed me in, back before. What was once common now foreign, after living in a group home and attending Winslow for a year.

I must have dozed off, to not notice him walking in.

"Thanks… just tired." I started thinking of excuses for why I didn't go. He'd know I could have made the Teleport pickup if I wanted to, I never left HQ. "And worried."

"No one expects you to go to Endbringer fights," he said, and I remembered he could read emotions.

I laughed. "Because I'm a coward?"

"What? No." He shook his head. "No one thinks that. None of us are expected to go. Most Protectorate capes don't go to Endbringer battles in foreign countries, let alone Wards."

"Sophia—"

"Stalker is…" Dean gave a wry smile. "Forget about her for now. What you're feeling— guilt, and then relief that feeds back into guilt? It's normal. We all feel it. So please, stop beating yourself up over it."

"Thanks…" I sighed. The sound channel from Canberra was still going. Another four lives lost, just while we talked. "I should get back to work."

Dean shook his head. "Stay. Take off the mask. Try to… not relax. But just let yourself worry. The others will be here soon, and we'll sit together until its over. It's… better than being alone."

The fight lasted hours.

Missy and Chris joined us first, and then Carlos and Dennis a short time later. We sat there on the comfortable couches. My helmet upside down on the coffee table, amidst packages of junk-food, still played the audio from Canberra. Loud enough for the sound to bounce off the domed ceiling and surround all of us. The TV played a sanitized version of events, still horrible, but tame in comparison to the real feed.

It was a quiet camaraderie. And even though we weren't doing anything, it felt like being part of a team for the first time. Despite the screamed commands and clinical notifications of capes down or deceased, a strange peace settled over us. An ease that came with being together.

I woke to an empty room, alone. The lights turned down and the television off.

Someone had covered me with a blanket and taken off my shoes, all without waking me. My helmet quietly glowed, still upside down on the coffee table. Discarded junk-food wrappers casting strange shadows across the surface and the floor, the domed cieling overhead seeming to shift across the spectrum between blue and orange as the helmet's accent-surfaces slowly cycled.

I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. Checked that Sophia and Colin were both OK. Slid the helmet back on.

Got to work.

Colin was stuck in Canberra, but that didn't matter as much when we were working on code. If anything, being away from his own lab meant he had more time to help me. He was good at getting me to think about more than the problem in front of me, about building with future improvements in mind. He was skeptical of my idea, to modify his combat analysis program to help with moderation. But gave me full access to the code anyways, and even started to teach me how it worked. The insight-effect I got from my power seemed more intense because of it, or maybe it was just me hiding from all my worries by drowning myself in work. Again.

Even if he didn't think my first idea was feasible, we both knew there would be no way to effectively moderate the network manually. So we ensured that the data coming in from reports, that the consensus, and actions reached by the moderation-market could be fed into an ever growing dataset we could use to train an automated system at some point.

And, before Colin had even left Australia, we shipped it.

I hosted a live-stream, my first since the press conference when I joined the Wards. It started awkward and cringey; me standing alone in an empty conference room since Chris asked me not to stream from the 'shared' lab.

So it was just me, in helmet and incomplete armor, going over how the system would work and then answering the top voted questions, one after another.

My first stream, held in conjunction with an official PRT press conference, had insane viewership. Partly because I pushed a notification to every phone on the network, but also because of the mystery surrounding 'Cobble', concerns about whether the DNet would continue to exist, and of course whether they'd be able get more stuff.

The moderation-market was a non-event by comparison; no push notifications, no prior notice in traditional media, no existing interest. Just an announcement on the same DNet site I used to post patch notes and a link to the stream.

We started with seventeen people watching. It climbed rapidly— I had to stop checking the number when it passed ten thousand— but we never got to the crazy fervor of the first stream. Thankfully. Mostly just people in it for the tech, outvoting the trolls and cape groupies for question selection, and after a while I found myself having fun. All of Glenn's advice about posture and presentation vanishing from my head as I just got lost talking about the tech with people who seemed to care.

Overall sentiment on any sort of moderation was negative. People who noticed it happening grumbled, but continued to use my phones. Continued to grow the network, to contributed power and even network access. Accumulated and then spent points for new gear.

A small core of users started to flag content, and we got rid of the truly vile stuff. Gated the questionable content. And once people saw that we weren't deleting pirated content, that we didn't filter out content that made the PRT look bad or censor certain political views — no matter how radical — it became a non-issue.

The vast majority of people just… didn't care.

Fractional points and the ease of sharing them was more exciting, more relevant, than some byzantine moderation system. The, porn, political, and pirated content was still there so apparently it was a non-issue.

Then it was back to drudge-work.

I made cold-calls, weathered rejection after rejection, and then looked for more numbers to call. Firms outside the PRT's network of suppliers were even worse to deal with. Architecture offices and construction companies greeted me with outright skepticism. Or, at best, helpless statements of how they'd love to try my tech but couldn't, due to regulations.

I still sent demo units to anyone that would take them, but the sales shit ended up being a crushing waste of time.

I begged creditors for more time. Considered additional investors that Calvert introduced me to, and started to look into what was actually required for companies to adopt my technology.

It was just a replacement for glass— stronger, safer, cheaper, able to be produced to spec on site. Better in every conceivable way, except that it was tarred with the legal distinction of 'tinker-tech'. And no one at the big companies cared enough to fight through the thousand and one tiny regulations and established processes that stood in the way of progress.

At least the situation Brockton Bay improved.

Chris helped me revise the emergency shelters. We fixed the ventilation and drainage, integrated the same air filtration system I used for my helmet. Added displays, far better than any TV, to the walls. Chris had amazing ideas for making the shelters self-deploying, and a slick system for combining multiple shelters into lightweight family domiciles. Increased the size of an individual unit, making it more of a hexagonal room with an arched ceiling than a domed tent.

I continued to expand the sprawling mass of fabricators, drone-launchers, gass-exchanges, as well as solar generators north of the city. The PRT database had a detailed schematic of a hyper efficient wind turbine that looked like something a nest of insects would build and I started to use wind power as well. It was necessary, to keep up with the demand for phones and screen, and shelters.

The dollar value of points continued to rise.

The system was set up from the beginning to reward behavior that benefited the network: Points for keeping a device charged and connected; Points for helping the network spread; Points for sharing a legitimate internet connection. When people cashed in to purchase gear, the points were destroyed— a naive solution copied from an Aleph video game that seemed clever at the time.

That I regretted now.

There were positive aspects about the fledgling economy I'd accidentally created. The point-trail was public. Anonymized, but viewable in real time through the audit log. People built dashboards showing how points were being issued and burned, how many were in circulation at any one time. Automated markets— piggy backing on the moderation market code we released — emerged on the DNet and even the traditional internet. Ways of wrapping dollars in DNet data-structures emerged.

There had always been a weird in-person sort of gray market of people trading points for dollars and vice versa, but once it was possible to do it online things really took off.

I continued to improve every aspect of my tech. People started to trust me. Or, Tenjin rather. The devices worked, the network worked, and I had the halo of PRT credibility.

People throughout the city and surrounding areas began to use points for every day transactions. Some of it was pure convenience. But there were also a lot of people that couldn't open their own bank account for a variety of reasons; too young, too poor, too illegal, no real address. Some of these people started to rely on my systems— easier to to keep an account on the DNet secret and safe than to have a stash of cash in the floorboards or wherever. People started to keep their live's savings on their phones. In DP's and virtualized dollars.

It was ridiculous and terrifying.

People relied on, fed themselves with, my imaginary DNet money. And the whole thing was an accident.

It seemed to be making people's lives better, which was amazing. Satisfying in a way I'd never experienced. But it was also pressure. Crushing, paralyzing, pressure. I could bring the entire thing crumbling down with one mistake. With one ill-thought out comment or line of code that broke the systems or the tech, or just broke people's trust.

"You look like shit," Glenn said, from the other side of the video call.

Glenn was, as always, blunt. I found myself smiling despite everything else going on. Colin and Sophia still weren't back from Australia, my company went further further into the red every day, and the only thing that was really working— the DNet and the growing shadow economy — was just more pressure.

"Well so do you." I tried to smile into primitive camera of the system.

The TV mounted on the wall of the conference room showed Glenn in a chaotic office. Framed posters of different Heroes hung on the wall behind him. None of the Triumverate, it was all capes that had started in relative obscurity but still made it large. Tecton, Rime, Chevalier. Armsmaster.

There were display-cases full of figurenes, and countless shirts and who-knows what else placed haphazard stacks or draped over chairs and surfaces. The PRT's shitty teleconferencing equipment couldn't pick up all the detail, and portions of the video would freeze annoyingly from time to time. Even the sound would cut out, occasionally. I made a note to talk to someone about it, see if they could just replace the equipment with a few of my tablets.

"Yes, but in my case it's a deliberate choice." Glenn didn't return my smile. "What in the world is going on up there?"

"Well, Stalker and Armsmaster are still on their way back from Canberra. The Empire is—"

"No no no, not the state of the city." Glenn cut in. "Important, sure, but not a good use of our time together.

"What is going on with you, Charles."

"I'm okay?" I replied. "Busy, but so is everyone, right?"

Glenn raised both of his eyebrows and stared at me through the camera for a moment. "Your eyes are bloodshot. You've lost weight when you should be gaining mass, and that's despite access to some of the best personal trainers and nutritionists in the country and— posture!"

I sat up straight, despite myself. My one month check-in with Glenn had been postponed after the Simurgh attack, and I thought he'd written it off. And then I found my afternoon full of training suddenly canceled, my freshly clear calendar then immediately blocked off by a mandatory meeting with PR.

Not that I minded talking to Glenn, and it wasn't like he booked the meeting over my 'free' time.

There was never enough of that— free time.

They'd made me go back to school. Half days, and Arcadia was just a few blocks away from PRT HQ, but it was still a massive time sink. A limiter on what I could do. Combined with all the other little duties and tasks, training and enforced socialization, it felt crippling.

"I'm fine Glenn." I forced myself to sit up straight. "Just a little busy is all."

Glenn stared into the camera long enough to make me wonder if the system had hitched again. "How much have you slept?"

"A few hours." Miss Militia's got a perfect memory and the ability to go without sleep as a side effect of her power. Why couldn't I have gotten that? "I'll sleep—"

"How many full nights in the past week?" Glenn pressed.

I didn't answer.

He continued. "In the past month? Passing out with your helmet on doesn't count. Real sleep, where you feel rested and refreshed when you wake up. How many nights Charles? Your best guess."

"Maybe… three?"

"In over a month." Glenn stared at me, deadpan. "OK. Fine. No therapist yet? Right. Of course not."

"I'm still catching up from… captivity. And getting used to being a Ward. Things will settle down soon."

Glenn just sighed. "Nope. I don't like doing this, but this is literally why they exist. I'm notifying the Youth Guard."

"What? No, please—"

"Charles. You're fifteen years old and you're pushing yourself harder than Armsmaster." He paused, staring at me. "Let that sink in for a moment."

"No one's forcing me to—"

"That's not the point. This is unhealthy, and it needs to stop." I tried to get a word in edgewise, but he continued talking. "Why your branch doesn't have a full time therapist is beyond me but, alas, I have no authority there."

"Look, just give me… another month." I'd either have found a solution by then, or have lost the company. And then it wouldn't matter. "There's too much to do."

"I could have seen this coming, should have seen it coming. We get it a lot with Tinkers." Glenn sighed. "You need to slow down, Charles."

"It's not that! The tech is kind of the easy part." I protested.

He just raised an eyebrow, took a slurp of coffee from a gigantic paper cup, and waited.

"School, console, homework, training. Meetings. Team exercises, PT and paperwork. And only then is there all the stuff I'm trying to do. For me, for the city.

"Better shelters. Functional smart glasses. Armsmaster and I are getting the DNet to a manageable state but it's still a huge, complicated network that has evolved into a side economy that a third of the Bay depend upon.

"And I still need to build actual armor, something that you yourself have been nagging me about. Along with a PR-friendly weapon, though I'd rather have some sort of mobility, even if that'd probably be a full new research path to blunder down. And always so much more that I want to build.

"On top of all that, my company is about to go under." I sighed, maybe it should happen. I'd tried, and failed.

Glenn sat there, on the other side of the screen, as if waiting to see if I'd say more. I could, but already felt kind of ridiculous. He looked away from the camera and moved some papers around on his desk, revealing a keyboard. He muttered something at the computer and then looked back to me. Confused.

"Alright, there's a lot there," he said. "Let's start with what confuses me the most— why on earth would your company go under?"

"No revenue to speak of, providing internet to half of the city is expensive, and if I miss another interest payment on the initial loan I go into default."

"You're having money problems." He looked more confused when I nodded, and double checked his computer.

"Help me to understand," He said.

"Your phones sell for a thousand dollars. There are people clamoring to buy 'danger-points', and there's even a 'DApp', whatever that is, to facilitate the exchange of dollars for your own personal currency? Honestly, the names are ridiculous but the simple fact that people are coming up with their own language for what you've created…"

He shook his head. "Nevermind. Can't you just sell points? Or phones?"

I shrugged. "Phones, yeah, but it doesn't scale. And handing them out for cash just feels… cheap and grubby?"

He frowned, and nodded. "Fair. And the points?"

"I've thought about it." I said. "And it's tempting. But they're not something that I can just 'create'.

"If I go in and grant myself a bunch of points it might crash the whole economy. An economy that, again, people are relying on. It's ultimately just pretend money, and if I break people's trust, break the illusion, the value will likely plummet."

"Oookay." He said. "How do people get points?"

"Keeping phones charged and providing internet, mostly." And spreading the network, but I kept that to myself.

"And how much internet do you, or I guess your company, provide the network?"

"Most of it…"

I lowered my head to the conference room table with a hollow clunk, the cheap laminate cool against my forehead.

I was a moron.

So. Fucking. Obvious. A half-rack full of devices, a few blocks from where I sat, chugging away in a datacenter routing traffic from the DNet to the Internet. Through a carrier grade circuit. At the time, I'd just been relieved to restore the connection to the old internet, and hadn't really thought about it. But each of those devices, sitting in that rack, were essentially an identity on the DNet, accumulating points.

"That is a good face-desk?" Glenn asked. "Yes? Wonderful.

"Do you think that, maybe, you're missing obvious stuff because you don't sleep.? Or… ask people for help? I'm sure Colin could have come up with this, or Kid Win, or just about anyone."

I looked at him, and nodded. Relieved to have a way forward, embarrassed for not having seen it sooner. Already thinking of ways to exchange a massive amount of points for real-world money without crashing the market. I'd need to see how much volume the community-built exchanges did.

Glenn rolled his eyes. "Next: Sales calls. Do you enjoy that?"

"Absolutely not."

"Then, again, ask for help

"Hire someone. Sub-contract it out to a firm. Put an ad up offering commissions. Whatever, you get the idea. You're not some kid stuck in a basement building rogue tech.

"You're a Ward." He emphasized.

Glenn used the rest of the call to go through my problems one by one. He didn't solve anything, but the external perspective helped me see the problems differently. I didn't need battlefield quality armor, just a costume that could be improved on later. There was no requirement for a weapon, no need for a mobility option when there was no expectation for me to 'patrol'. On and on.

He also threatened to call the Youth Guard if I didn't protect my sleep. At least eight hours every day without the helmet. No books, no screen of any sort. No work. He even called Renick, and had me removed from the extra console rotation. I was annoyed, and relieved, at the same time.

Sophia and Colin made it back safely. I sold points for just enough money to make my loan payments. Without the looming threat of losing my fledgling company, I stopped making sales calls. I was still happy to send demo equipment to anyone that reached out to me, through whatever PRT department handled that sort of communication or even directly, but for the most part I stopped worrying about it.

There was so much I could do. I wasn't going to waste any more time trying to convince businesses to take a risk or overturn decades-old legislation. I'd just keep building, until I was too big for them to ignore.

Sleep still didn't come easily though. I'd lay in bed. Stared at the dark ceiling until I dozed off, only to snap awake moments later. Penned in by too close walls and the lingering memory of a metal orb ready to strike me down. The itch to do something would come again, and my mind would catalog all the projects I had in progress. Play over all the little mistakes I'd made that could be corrected. Plans and new ideas. Even as I stared at the dark ceiling.

It felt like failure, even as my work started to come together and my priorities became clear.

I finished the prototype smart-glasses. Dropped them to a handful of early adopters and began the long process of going through the feedback. Fixed all the dumb little things I'd missed. Chris continued to help with the shelters; we added reconfigurable furniture that switched from bed to desk to dining table whenever the person living there wanted. Colin helped design a water purification system that worked with my build process and only consumed a tiny amount of energy, and we integrated that to the shelters too.

And through it all, the time sinks. School. Meetings. Training.

Carlos held briefings twice a week. He also added meetings to our calendars to go over anything that changed, be it new capes identified in the Bay or different procedures for working with BBPD. The Wards would assemble in our ready room and go over the same reports the PRT's analysis division emailed twice a day.

I tried to pay attention but Carlos just repeated information already covered in the reports, at a slower pace. Dennis would make some joke. Dean and Missy paid attention, diligently enough to make me feel bad. Chris on the other hand spaced out even more than I did. And Sophia, of course, did her absolute best to broadcast her contempt without going so far as to collect more punishment detail.

"Alright, that's the schedule for this week." Carlos started to wrap up. "Questions?"

The background chatter continued and with a mental flex I pushed my view of the 'real' world to the side. The fMRI capability and software I'd pulled from Armsmaster's early helmet was starting to pay off. It should have taken months longer but I'd been tweaking it. Incessantly. Working to apply some of the concepts I'd learned with other code— what Colin taught me about his combat analysis program, what I was starting to do with the DNet moderation system, self-learning systems I'd found in the PRT's code repo— and integrating it all with my own interface.

I could already do some work without flailing my hands around, and the helmet systems were starting to learn faster. It certainly made meetings more tolerable.

"— Tenjin," Sophia's voice triggered one of the alerts I'd configured, pulling me away from the self-learning code I was tinkering with. "You got anything for us?"

At the front of the conference room, Carlos sighed, huge shoulders sagging. He tended not to wear his mask in Ward HQ, and his face showed how frustrated he was. We had all welcomed Sophia back from Canberra. It was hard not to respect what she did. Going up against first Behemoth, and then the Simurgh. Unflinchingly. And Sophia seemed to bask in that respect. For a little while, she was almost tolerable to be around.

"Stalker," Carlos warned.

It didn't take her long to burn through the goodwill.

"Come on! You know he's sitting on more info than he's sharing." She leaned back in the cheap metal and plastic chair, her combat-booted feet up on the backrest of another. "We ever gonna fucking do something?"

"We are," Carlos said.

"Prancing around on display," She said. "Can we at least get him back on console? So we can find shit?"

Everyone looked at me, and even with my helmet on I wanted to cringe. Carlos answered before I could.

"He's still benched." Sophia started to object, but he talked over her. "And that's all I'll say. Unless you want to discuss your disciplinary history in front of everyone as well?"

"Fucked if I care— go for it." She leaned even further back in her chair. "Most of you know it all anyways."

Carlos took a deep breath and looked to the ceiling before responding. "No."

She leaned forward abruptly, the front legs of her chair hitting the the floor with a clang even as she leaned in my direction. "You got something for us."

"I really don't." I responded.

"Bullshit." Sophia stood and walked towards me. Or rather, Stalker did. We were encouraged to think of others by their cape-names when masked. "A bum can't take a shit in the street without your drones recording it.

"Come on, give me something. You got Kaiser? Purity? What about that fuck Grue?"

I glanced towards Carlos, expecting him to do something but he just stood at the front of the conference room rubbing his forehead. I got the sense that he agreed at least somewhat with Stalker. A good portion of the PRT's information came in through my tech. And while I wasn't, technically, supposed to go through that information, I still picked up on things.

"Hey!," Stalker said drawing my attention back to her. "We're sitting here doing fuck-all. Even the goddamn police are out there doing more than we are. Give us something!"

"You had three arrests this week," I replied.

"Fucking hobos, or some low-level nobody out the next day on Calvert's catch-and-release plan," she scoffed. "We're better than this!"

"Stalker," Carlos more resigned than upset. "That's enough."

"Oh fuck you, write me a memo or something." Stalker was more of an ass to the head of the Wards than anyone else. "Tenjin has intel."

At any given moment, there were hundreds of drones hanging over Brockton Bay. I'd stopped fiddling with them, mostly, but they were still pulling in far more raw information than Calvert's analysts could ever hope to process. And I had ideas, so many ideas, on how to improve them. Or even how to improve the data problem— how to better turn information into intelligence. There just wasn't enough time.

Or rather, there were other things I wanted to work on.

Sophia— Shadow Stalker — pushed into my personal space and tried to loom over me. "Well?"

I looked around her, to Carlos, but even he looked more interested in what I might be able to provide than in controlling Stalker. I shrugged, pushed away the code I was working on with a mental flex and started pulling up information.

I could share my own observations with them, perhaps. I'd also been given access to some of the analysis Calvert's teams generated. Stuff a Ward would never be given permission to, even if they had provided the information used to generate the intelligence. The Director gave me access when I explained that, given enough time, I might be able to make software that can analyze the mountain of information from the drones automatically.

That didn't mean I was supposed to have that access, or that I could share it with the rest of the Wards.

And it would be obvious if I shared anything.

If I let them know where Grue was, Stalker would fly off the handle. It was tempting to let them know about the pseudo tinker lurking in the trainyards, but Calvert already knew about it and had made the decision to leave them alone. Hellhound was in the woods to the north with a bunch of wolves, but mostly minded her own business or clashed with the Empire and Merchants. A boy jumped into the icy bay and likely triggered, but that wouldn't interest anyone else on the team. Carlos and Dean would probably be tagged for a first approach anyways.

I knew where Skidmark and Squealer were squatting— an abandoned suburb outside Brockton Bay proper— but again Calvert was well aware and had told me to let it be. For now.

Lung popped up from time to time, analysis suggesting that he was keeping various ABB elements cowed and in line, before disappearing again for extended periods of time to either recruit more Parahuman muscle or build presence elsewhere.

It was tempting to share it all with the rest of the Wards. They'd welcomed me, and supported me. Well, aside from Sophia, but even she had become a sort of teammate I could rely on in certain situations… she was at least predictable. But if I gave them something, they'd act on it. Get hurt, or kick off something ridiculous that would get other people killed. Like the three way brawl from December.

"Well," I finally spoke, conscious of how everyone was staring at me. Paying more attention to me than they had to any of the briefing so far. "Purity hasn't returned from Canberra. You all know Fenja and Menja are confirmed KIA, if you were paying read the reports at least."

Sophia rolled her eyes, and I continued.

"Othala is trickier, we have no idea where she is. It's unlikely she's in the exclusion zone, or that she's made it back to Brockton Bay. There'd be evidence of her healing at the very least in either case."

I was amazed the Empire was able to keep the section of territory they controlled going. They'd lost people of course. As they ran out of toilet paper and rationed food and gasoline. As the shelters Chris and I provided for free became more attractive. And all the people they drove out for being the 'wrong' types, or not dedicated enough to the cause.

But for every person that left Empire territory, two found their way in through the loose cordon or via boat. An influx of hillbillies and bigots, converging on the strip of land like it was some sort of Nazi Mecca.

"What about Kaiser?" Sophia asked.

"We went over this on Tuesday." Carlos gave her an exasperated look. "Kaiser would have made some sort of spectacle to re-assert control over the gang if he were back. We'd know."

"Then where the fuck are they?" Sophia asked. "What's taking them so long?"

"Here's an idea," Dennis leaned forward in his chair, mask off and smiling. His creepy-ass clock mask bunched up at the back of his neck. "Maybe, for a world famous Super Nazi Douchebag whose seeeecret identity has been exposed, getting all the way from Australia to Brockton Bay is hard."

"Whatever." Sophia turned her attention back to me. "What about the rest of the Empire? All the other two-bit fucks in the Bay? You gotta have something."

I did. Of course I did.

Sophia was the most abrasive about it, but everyone in the room knew I had access to more information than I shared. More information than I, or the team of analysts, could ever hope to actually process.

Despite myself, I again started thinking of ways to attack the problem. Of my growing confidence with Colin's predictive code, and the self-learning code I'd implemented in my helmet's interface system. The drones provided a fire-house of raw data, but PRT analysts were able to vet some of it. Providing a separate set of data I could easily use as a sort of training set. Then, if I could—

Carlos coughed, and I snapped out of it to find the whole room staring at me again. Even Missy was looking at me, though not in the same way she stared at Dean. Dennis was rolling his eyes at me.

"Look at him," Stalker said. "He knows shit he isn't sharing."

"Nah, that was a tinker space-out," Dennis drawled.

I understood how they felt. I've known for over a month where the remnants of the Merchants were hiding and yet we did nothing. It chafed that we just let them… go about their day. Making shit worse, when we could bring them in. The Wards had been putting up with that for longer than I had— apparently Piggot had been even more 'risk-averse' than Calvert.

The Wards had been good to me, welcomed me in. Didn't they deserve to know as much as I did? It wasn't like I cared about the rules— I exploited loopholes and ignored laws and regulations that I knew were unlikely to be enforced.

What held me back, what had held me back every time I had this conversation with the rest of the team, was that the Director had all this information and more, and had decided not to share it with the Wards.

And though Calvert weirded me out on some level, I still felt like I owed him.

He supported me. Not like the Wards did— Calvert was friendly and said all the right things, but that felt oddly formulaic. Something told me he didn't really care about me, or anyone really, as anything more than an asset. But he did shield me from higher-ups in the PRT.

He also played the political game better than I ever would, or cared to.

My tech was proving to be more than a fad. People cared about it. The skeptics were still the majority, but even outside Brockton Bay people were asking why they couldn't have phones that were hilariously better than anything money could buy. Why the millions of people displaced by Endbringer attacks couldn't benefit from our shelters.

Politicians in Concord, Boston, and even Washington were paying attention now— some trying to set me up as a threat. They claimed my tech was dangerous, and that if it didn't break down or go rouge it would still be too disruptive. Phones I essentially gave away, and shelters that we literally did give away that were significantly better than paying rent for some shithole Brockton Bay slum.

Calvert worked to counter that, or so he said. Built allies with other politicians, made sure that any bill that could hurt what we were trying to do couldn't get enough support to move forward.

The Directory didn't share any of the actual intel with the Wards, and I talked with him enough to know that it wasn't some sort of oversight. He deliberately withheld the information. He had a plan, and it didn't include the Wards taking down the Merchants, or raiding some bloodsports-arena in Empire territory.

"That's all I can share."

"Fucking worthless." Sophia kicked a chair, sending it screeching against the floor as she left the conference room.

Dennis stared at her as she left, before shaking his head. "Whelp. I've got three hours of patrol with that."

Carlos sighed. "I guess we're done."

Everyone filed out except for me and, unsurprisingly, Chris. He was tucked away in the corner of the conference room. Hunched over his notebook, lost in whatever he was dreaming up. Some god-tier physics defying creation no doubt.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. Thinking about all the work I had waiting for me. So many ideas, so much to do. So much to learn. Feedback on the smart-glasses to go through and integrate into the next iteration of the product. Gallant's armor needed yet another once-over— it had hundreds of little servos and dozens of them went out of whack every time he wore it. Mails and forum posts and messages.

Hell, I even had homework.

And of course the self-learning code, still minimized at the corner of my vision.

But my mind kept playing over the briefing. Like it did whenever I fucked something up. Trying to find some way in which it could have gone better, something I could have done where everything would have worked and everyone would have been happy.

"Oh, shit." Chris, still in the corner, startled up from his notebook. "I miss anything?"

"No," I said, feeling better when he laughed. "What're you working on?"

"Check it out!" He brought the notebook over.

You'd think, with how messy he let the lab get, that his notebook would be full of squiggles and indecipherable nonsense. But the pages were covered with achingly precise drawings that could have come out a CAD program. No measurements or calculations— but it was clear that every sketch, every cut-away and cross-section, was precisely to scale. That every blown-up manifest of sub-components would slot together in that oddly satisfying precision so unique to his tech.

"I have no idea what I'm looking at." I admitted after staring at various renditions of slender rod-like structures. "More alternator cannon stuff?"

"Nah, gave up on that. The meds make me feel awful, and when I'm not on em the whole project is just too… big" Normally, he'd say something like that with an air of depression but his smile never wavered. "But this is something else— you'll see. It's gonna be great."

Spoiler: End Note

Last edited: Dec 4, 2022

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ReasonableDoubt

May 30, 2021

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Threadmarks 2.A - Taylor

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

Dec 4, 2022

#305

Spoiler: Author's Note

Content Warning: Depression, harassment.

248350024835002483500…

'911, an operator will—'

' Oh god help, I need—'

' be with you as—'

' —help! Oh fuck, no, this can't—'

' soon as possible. Please—'

' please…'

' stay on the line, an Oper-'

…248350024835002483500

Taylor startled awake as a wave of static slammed into her mind. She gripped the sides of her skull and ground her teeth, used the physical pain like as a lifeline to weather the crush of noise. Like a wave, it crested and finally crashed through her. She drowned in static.

And then it receeded.

Reality returned as she woke for a second time. Tangled sheets clung to her skin, damp with sweat. Dim light seeped in around the edges of the curtain covering her window, and a red blur to the side of the bed pulsed ominously.

For a long, horrible moment she thought that the static had broken something. That the boundary between how she perceived the world and how her power did had cracked.

Then her sleep addled mind caught up.

She shook her head, took comfort in the mundane pain of a headache. Fingers brushed against the cold metal frames of her glasses, right where they were supposed to be, resting next to the red blur. Her room came into focus, familiar and boring. LED numerals on her clock showed she still had enough time to get ready for school. Regrettably.

Her power had gifted her with an entirely new world, where waves and math and order were everything. Her mind, open to the greater spectrum.

It was freedom and joy. Potential, even if she couldn't affect that beautiful other world, could not broadcast. But she was still thankful. Happy, on some level. That other world wasn't the one that needed to be changed. She could observe it, and use that knowledge to make the real world better. She had thought that, for once, something had gone right with her life.

Then the static had hit.

At first, the surges of noise had overwhelmed her. Threatened to sweep her away. And each time, she had managed to claw her way back to the flat gray of the real world. She had weathered it and learned how to widen the divide between her power and her mind. Dammed the static away, at the edges of her mind.

Coped.

But not without cost. The headaches were frequent enough, severe enough, that she wasn't able to hide them. Not from school. Not even from Dad.

She climbed out of bed, aching like an old woman as she stiffly walked over to the laundry basket and sifted through it for something to wear. And, when she was ready, when she was awake enough she sampled the spectrum.

Tentative, ready to close her mind in an instant if the static was too strong, she allowed her mind to flower open. Allowed that extra sense granted by her power to function as it was meant to.

The digital alarm-clock next to her bed and the electrical wires in the wall were steady presences, well known and comfortable. The slowly dying pulse of the smoke alarm in the hallway still beat. Downstairs, the fridge sparkled in a flare of activity as something inside it clicked and whirred to life, drawing more power. The regular heartbeat of her Dad's old Timex watch, always strapped to his left wrist. A new surge, distant and faint, as somewhere down the street a car started.

And the tide of static— higher than it had been yesterday, but bearable.

Some of the tension left her shoulders. She checked again for nearby cameras. A regular, depressing habit she performed over and over again. If the static let her.

She had assumed the photos were from hidden cameras. Still did, even though she could never find any— even with her new powers. Whoever had placed them must have retrieved them, and she just hoped they were done with their sick shit.

Emma was behind it, probably. Paid someone, or knew people willing to stalk a high school girl for free. In a weird way, that made it less creepy than if a complete stranger had decided to go after her. As if blaming Emma was less disturbing than the idea of someone she wasn't even aware of being responsible.

It still made her skin crawl. Her habit of scanning with her power for hidden cameras was a comfort, but the damage was already done. Done long ago.

The house was clear of any hidden electronics, as best she could tell. Nothing to worry about, nothing at all. So she took the clothes with her to the bathroom and began to get ready for the day. Wiped down the half-dried splatters of urine on and around the toilet with a sigh of mild disgust. Scanned again with her power before sitting down on it herself. Turned on the shower, the rattle of hot water moving through old pipes familiar and comforting. Scanned again, and stepped inside once it had warmed up.

The static was still tolerable so she reached out and sampled the greater spectrum. Tried not to think about hidden cameras. Or some shadowed, unknown figure watching her.

169016901690…

'which is what they WANT you to—'

'Jim—'

'—believe. We all know the ELeCtEd OFfiCiaLs are not who's really in charge—'

'Now, hold on a—'

'that the PRT is a JOKE—'

'Can I please—'

'and the god-damned capes ALREADY control everything! It's all one big ridiculous farce!'

…169016901690

She scoffed and pushed the signal down. Scanned again. Continued to sample the information that permeated everything as she finished her shower. Listened to the latest, and likely the last, Canary single. Scanned again. Let her power range as she pulled clothes on and moved about the house. Doing all the little things that failed to make it a home.

112511251125…

'It's coming up on five thirty on this fine monday morning and you're listening to KBBX, Brockton Bay's number one source for smooth, easy listening.

'Our hearts go out to the victims of Purity's attack, and to all those who have lost their loved ones, their homes, and their livelihood.

'The Food Drive, organized by the Lions Club of BB and Brockton Bay Central Savings and Loan, is still in progress. Drop off sites can be found at every public library and throughout Downtown.

'Now, please enjoy thirty seven uninterrupted minutes of chilled out tracks, starting with Wun Two, by Winter in Rio.

…112511251125

Taylor paused in the stairwell to open a window as the scratchy rhythms only she could hear washed over her. Felt the damp cold air hit her face, and felt herself relax as the tangy odor of beer permeating the house faded. Scanned for foreign signals again, and continued down to the living room.

Awareness of the full spectrum had come naturally, effortlessly. Like opening her eyes, able to see for the first time in her life.

From the low background hum of the earth to the riotous scatter-shot of solar flares and everything in between, all of it splashed against her mind. Radio and television. The TV remote in the living room. The cell-phone traffic that bounced through the entire city. WiFi and its variants. Everything floated across the spectrum in a jumbled, beautiful, mess.

But even if awareness had come naturally, making sense of it… hadn't.

Wires in the wall, or her dad's old wrist-watch, were easy enough to interpret. Simple sources of interference, easily traceable and understood. The more complicated, more abstract signals were frustrating and opaque, at least at first.

She knew from the beginning that there had to be more to her power. That radio and cellular traffic, and whatever else danced across the spectrum, carried information. That being able to understand it would give her at least something useful, something more worthwhile being able to point out sources of interference.

But getting at that information had taken effort. Practice and study.

Stupid, stubborn, work.

169016901690…

'—let me ask you something. Do you think it's right, that Kayden Anders, that Purity, is being sent to the Bird Cage? Without even being granted a trial?

'While Lung— the murderer, walks free? Raping our women and peddling drugs to our children?

'Video evidence! On the so-called DNet! Or, at least until Cobble inevitably bends knee to the PRT. Dauntless and Militia ignored Lung! Ignored him!

Even as he burned down half the city, a mindless beast, the so-called hero focused on the woman trying to stop him!

'Instead of fighting the monster, they put down Purity— with such brutality that she's being kept in a coma!'

'Well, the video evidence also shows that Purity attacked first, and that Lung was responding to—'

'Video evidence? From one of Cobble's devices no doubt—'

'And eyewitnesses, and every official record stating that Purity was the aggressor— '

'Of course, that's the narrative. After the protectorate stooges failed to do anything against Lung, they need to take whatever victory they can. Even if it's against a single mother, trying to defend her child.

'The fact of the matter is, Miss Anders wasn't kidnapping people and making sex slaves of them, she wasn't pushing drugs on our children. She was just trying to get her baby back, and putting down the animals that—'

'Now hold on, Purity is responsible for as many if not more deaths than— '

'Factually incorrect! And my entire objection is that we can't even look at the case objectively because the PRT is keeping everything under wraps! Unlawfully! Sending her to the Bird Cage without a trial!

'Are you gonna let—'

…169016901690

Sighing, she pushed the signal to the edges and focused on the low-fi music as she picked up empty cans around the living room.

AM radio was full of blow-hards and nut-jobs, but it had been her first breakthrough and remained the most comfortable medium. She'd spent countless hours immersed in the waves, only pulling her senses back when the static became too much. More hours at the library, learning how it all worked from another angle. The waxing and waning of the carrier wave, and how that mapped back to simple sound as her ears would perceive it.

The trick, when she got it, was deceptively simple.

Like one of those old dot-pictures that hid a 3D image of Alexandria or Armsmaster. But instead of simple blots of color popping off the page to reveal a trademarked silhouette, it was differing amplitudes of waves flowing together into sound. The soft tones of Debussy echoing through her mind even as she cracked the other stations one after another. That first breakthrough like a domino that toppled the rest.

She rinsed the cans before setting them aside to dry. She'd talked to him about it before, or tried to, but his promises to cut back never mattered. Nothing changed. If she didn't clean up after him the house just became a reeking pit of beer cans and the occasional TV dinner.

She put the last can on the drying rack and scanned again for cameras or phones. For anything unknown, anything unfamiliar. Prepared a lunch of left-over pasta and wilted salad. Placed another note on the fridge asking for grocery money.

And all the while, she flickered through the signals.

270752707527075…

'yeah I'm on I95, just up into Brockton Bay. I swear. You would not believe what hee and haw are doin up here. Fucking iron walls three times as high as my rig, running along either side of the road.'

'Shit man, that just means a clean shot from Boston to Portland'

…270752707527075

AM radio was the most difficult, but only because it was the first she learned to understand. After that, the various CB channels were an easy next step. Simple wireless-phones, like the one in the kitchen, were even more trivial. FM radio, and then television, were harder, but by then she had known it could be done. And that had made all the difference. She had dived into the more complicated signals. Contorted her mind to balance the layers of encoding until it meshed together into meaning.

She closed the windows before grabbing her jacket. The sleeve was still tacky from where Madison had 'accidentally' spilled cola on it, but January in Brockton Bay was cold enough that she pulled it on anyways. She locked the door behind her and stepped over the half-rotted step, into a cold, misty morning.

Opened up that extra sense granted by her power, let her attention fall on the simple waves of a cordless phone three blocks away.

248150024815002481500…

— mmmhhmmm… —

— Hey. Good morning. How're you doing? —

— sleeping. Why aren't you home? —

- Had another load come in and they had hours for me. —

— you don't need to work so hard… we'll be ok —

— I just worry you know. What if something goes wrong? —

— nothing will go wrong. The doctors say everything's fine. But thank you. —

— Love you. —

— Love you too. You'll be home for lunch? —

— yeah. —

— good. Be safe. —

— I will. Love you bye —

— love-you- bye —

…248150024815002481500

It was fun at first, in a scandalous, guilty sort of way. That same titillating sensation of witnessing a heated argument. Of watching someone else being scolded or punished. Of hearing a private conversation.

But most of the spectrum was clogged by boring, mundane details. Appointments and telemarketers. Status updates and requests. Harmless gossip. Some guy with a smoker's voice bitching about his HOA.

572500057250005725000…

' Where the hell are you? Do you have any idea what hour it is? Your mother is worried si—'

' Mr. Gensler, you—'

' Who is this, what are you doing with my son's phone?'

' Your son has an obligation. He says your good for it.'

' If you think for one moment I'll cave to some—'

' If you value your son's health, that is exactly what you will do.'

.

.

.

.

' … how much? '

' thirteen thousand dollars. Be at'

' well, he's fucked then. '

' I don't think you understand just—'

'*click*'

…572500057250005725000

And, because it was Brockton Bay, a lot of it was just fucking depressing.

A cold patter of rain hit the cement like the prelude to a song played on a scratchy old record. Taylor pulled the hood of her jacket forward— even water-logged it still provided some protection. She could already hear the comments from Julia or Emma, likely something nasty about dripping, but maybe the rain would help with the stinking cola scent.

She kept walking, as the water seeped into her shoes. Found herself enjoying the staccato of water on the hood of her jacket. Once, she might have ran, maybe moved from tree to tree to save herself from some of the rain. Now though, it wasn't worth the effort.

17525017431017975…

Grating, cheery music as "Brockton Bay 6 O'Clock News" scrolls across the bottom third of the video feed in blocky, low-pixel text. The camera finishes panning and the anchor's somewhat waxy, held-too-long smile finally relaxes.

"Welcome back to Good Morning Brockton Bay! The wet storm from the weekend will continue throughout the day, shifting to snow in the evening as a cold front …

…

…

…

"… Mayor Christensen's administration was rocked with yet another scandal last night as leaked documents revealed that majority donors to his previous campaigns had significant ties to Medhall. Medhall Corporation, previously considered the gem of the city, was revealed last month to be a front for the Parahuman Neo Nazi gang Empire Eighty Eight, its CEO and much of its board actual Super Villains."

The anchor's perfect, too white teeth seem to shine as he laughs awkwardly with his co-host, a petite blond woman. The co-host, who also has perfect teeth, begins to speak.

"Indeed Jared.

"Analysts say that this latest blow, combined with populist cries of incompetence, corruption, along with a worsening economy all but gauntnesses the motion for a recall will pass— at which point Mayor Christensen's chances of— "

…17525017431017975

Television had been another challenge.

Easier than that first step with AM Radio, the difficulty wasn't in decoding the signals but rather in processing the extra sensory data. Vision. The headaches had rivaled anything the static could do, at first. But her power, or she herself, had adapted. And now her mind was filled with more squawking boxes of light than Fugly Bob's. All pushed to the edges and passively scanned.

17525017431017975…

A clumsy picture-in-picture edit shows the PRT Headquarters. Reporters push against PRT officers as the metal barricade slides along rails, opening just enough for a prisoner-transport motorcade to roll through. Cameras flash, strobe-like against the wet vehicles and assorted umbrellas.

"The Tinker known as Cobble has been in custody for weeks now and sources claim he has begun cooperating with the PRT.

"Supporting this claim, there have been no deliveries of 'DTech' devices for three days now, and the capability to pirate and share internet access has been removed from existing devices.

"Many who have already managed to procure the tinker-tech phones continue to use them though, insisting that they are superior to anything else on the market.

"The PRT remains close-lipped but has commented that they are working towards an equitable solution with the rogue Tinker, to be announced later this week.

"In other news, thousands are still without homes, and taking—

…17525017431017975

Taylor knew the static was Cobble.

She suspected from the beginning, and the way in which the tide of noise receded, shortly after he was captured, was proof enough.

People had bitched about the loss of 'free points' when school started back up, but fuck them. She'd just been happy that the PRT was doing something. Fixing a problem for once, instead of letting things slowly rot. She'd even hoped, briefly, that they'd kill the fucking DNet and everything on it.

So much for that.

The swell of static started rising again just as the news started to report that the PRT was working with him. Working with a criminal.

'Equitable solution'.

Right.

There were laws against shitting all over the spectrum, for good reason, and her power couldn't be the only thing Cobble's tech interfered with. But of course, none of that mattered as soon as someone in power could benefit from it. Rules are for thee and not for me.

The static continued to worsen throughout the day.

Wave after wave of noise like shards of broken glass, grinding at the walls of her mind. Gradually splashing higher.

She walked through school and attended class in a daze. Focused almost entirely on keeping the static dammed off at the edges of her power. In some ways, the struggle was welcome.

Simple, unlike Emma's barbs or the random cruelty of her entourage. Clean, unlike the leers and smirks that followed her through the dirty hallways of Winslow.

The static had no malice, no cunning tricks or means of further betrayal. Just a relentless flood of honest pain. It was also constant proof that she was more. That she wasn't what they thought.

"Taylor, are you alright?" Gladly asked, face drooping with false concern from the front of the classroom.

Her skin crawled under his gaze. It wasn't anything new, but every time she wondered. Had he seen the pictures, too? Was he paying more attention to her because of the videos? Was he watching her more closely than he would have otherwise?

The useless teacher still pretended not to notice any of the real problems. Let all the little barbs and comments slide. Didn't call out Madison when she threw chewing gum into her hair. Stayed quiet, when Janice tripped her.

But if Taylor closed her eyes in class for one fucking moment, he suddenly cared. Acted concerned. Did his job, when it was easy and wouldn't upset anyone.

"I'm fine," she said, even as the static surged against her mind again. "Just a migraine."

"If you need to go to the nurses office…"

Madison raised her hand, spoke in a cutesy perky voice. "I'll help her get there Mr. Gladly."

"Thank you Madison." Gladly smiled.

"I said I'm fine," Taylor's voice hitched.

The whole class stared, some laughed— as usual someone's suffering was far more entertaining than class. Gladly looked at her like she was crazy, and Greg was staring at her again. It was ridiculous, but she couldn't take it anymore. She shoved her books into her bag, ignored Gladly's protests, and strode past him towards the door.

Only to stumble into the frame as another wave of noise crashed into her mind. The static wasn't bad, the tide not as high as it had gotten back in December. She would have managed, if they'd let her fucking focus.

White lines of static flickered across her vision.

A dizzying moment of surreality where what was real and what was not flipped. As if the real world, the one seen through her eyes and not her power, was fake. Nothing more than an old TV with bad reception. A shallow reflection of reality.

In a daze, unaware of her surroundings, she flailed about and latched onto a complicated signal— encrypted or modulated in a way she had yet to crack. A lifeline, and she clung to it. Focused on it. A line of order against the pounding waves of noise.

800000800000800000…

000000000000100200000000000000000A36373839313031363734000000000000000000001B000310864D000306120624205611010B104C2CF9F3F5EBD73E700000000210020207028CE95DCC65800601FC08150003168D3001061024183060800306101004044847000000000000100200000000000000000A36373839313031363734000000000000000000001B000310864D000306120624205611010B104C2CF9F3F5EBD73E7000

…800000800000800000

"Shit Taylor," Madison said, supporting her as the world came back.

The shorter girl staggered under Taylor's weight as they continued down the hallway. "Bet you're loving this."

Madison snorted, the noise at odds with her normal cutesy image. But she didn't say anything, didn't do anything. Just stayed, supported her. All the way to the nurses office. A constant physical presence she could rely on, even as Taylor focused on that lifeline transmission.

Worked at the soothing puzzle of a clear, ordered signal.

At some point, they left the hallway and Madison spoke to a large woman in comfortable looking blue clothing. Without any understanding of how it happened, Taylor found herself laying on a stiff bed with crinkling sheets, a privacy curtain drawn around her.

It didn't matter.

Her mind, her power, she herself wormed away at the regular-seeming signal. Found the way the pattern seemed to dance among multiple waves at the same time, and picked at its regularity. Poked and prodded, until the puzzle came undone.

Another level of reality exploded into existence.

Like a sluice-gate opening, the information hidden in the ordered signal collapsed into meaning.

— you said a fucking latte, I got a fucking latte— how may I help you? — pick up Ana by — and just what in the hell do you mean by — you what!? — hello, I'm calling to — have fun! — you foul, seeping cunt, I'm gonna — calm down, you're being — really? Do we have to do this now? — love you — help me — happy hour at Ron's, be there —

The static was still there, pushing at her mind, but atop it were webs of light, individual strands winking in and out of existence. Mobile subscriber identities and keys. Cell-tower hand-off information. SMS. Conversations—

— take your sister and get out of town. Hurry. —

— is this safe? You said he could see everything —

— can't be helped. Don't use proper nouns. Doesn't matter anymore, he's won. But he's busy right now, consolidating. Get out. —

— What? I thought they got him —

— Not him, the boss —

— you're not making any sense —

.

.

.

— L? —

Cheap metal rings scraped against a rail and light spilled inside as the curtain was pulled back. Taylor wrenched herself out of the new sphere of perception and blinked up at the nurse.

The puzzle of cellular signals had helped, somewhat. The… richer protocol, the layers of encapsulation. Even after solving it, the clean hum of it still buffered her mind from the static. Somewhat.

But it made her skull seem too small, her brain over-full as she processed hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of transactions. Protocol level hand-offs and error correction and re-authentications and snippets of conversation without context or meaning.

"I'm sorry, what?" She asked, as something the nurse said registered.

"I said, your Dad's on the way." The nurse was brusque, but in a kind way. "And he did not sound happy about it. Now, I don't know what your family situation is like but some parents can be dismissive of this type of problem. I have a note here—"

The nurse kept talking, the words an insignificant patter of rain against the lake of data. Her power continued to churn away at the new signal— it wasn't anywhere near all cellular traffic— but it was more than she'd ever accessed before. An overwhelming amount of information.

"What time is…" Taylor started to ask, but trailed off. She knew the answer already, in the same way she knew where her hand was, or that she was laying down.

"Too damned late," the nurse said, and stepped away.

Dad arrived, rail thin and balding, jaw clenched as he listened to the nurse's explanation. Jaw still clenched as he helped her to the car.

Cellphone conversations and texts and protocol chatter continued to float around at the edges of her mind, but the novelty was fading. Ultimately, it was all still the same shit. More of it, with worse grammar. Processing it became as automatic as breathing, and the sheltering effect of new stimuli began to wane.

The static worsened.

Dad seemed to notice and handed her a box of Advil, faded and dusty but unopened. It did fuck-all. The glass of the passenger-side window, cool against the side of her head, did more.

But the thought was nice.

"Where are we going?" She asked, hating how weak her voice sounded.

She knew precisely where they were. Knew, in the same way she knew what time it was, that they weren't headed home.

"The hospital," Dad said, focused on traffic. "Get some answers this time."

She sighed. He didn't seem ashamed of her, though she knew he was. And he'd dropped everything to come get her. Looted a box of Advil from the Association for her, from the looks of it. Was taking her to the hospital, though it wouldn't help.

"Don't," she said. "They'll just imply that I'm crazy, and bill us anyways."

"We're getting an MRI this time," he said.

Despite herself, her heart warmed. Then reality came crashing back down. "We can't afford that."

"Let me worry about—"

"Dad," she said. "Please. Just take me home."

She shifted against the door to find another cool patch of glass. At some point between collapsing in the nurses office and her dad coming to get her, the day had started to die. She looked out the car window at lights of traffic and flickering neon lights, the transmutation of electrical energy into light more stark and real in the haze of twilight than the decaying city city itself. Dad's reflection, faint against the backdrop of everything else, frowned before he turned his attention back to the road.

"If that's what you want," he said, shoulders sagged.

Her body moved through a world that was hollow and fake while her mind moved through one that was brimming with life. One that increased in depth and complexity with each passing moment.

While back there, with her Dad, she was powerless and weak. Leaned on him to get out of the car and into the house. But it was somehow… nice. Simply knowing that he was there. The simple can of Minestrone heated up on the stove was the most cooking he'd done in years. Taste was lost to her, beyond a distant sense of heat and salt, but she savored the companionship. The comfortable silence, as he sat at the table with her.

The old cordless on the wall of the kitchen warbled, a shrill noise that shattered the moment of peace. Another sigh, and he took the phone to the next room.

247450024745002474500…

'we really needed you here'

'sorry, my daughter—'

'well, is she ok now?'

...247450024745002474500

For a moment, Taylor threw everything she had into disrupting the signal. Tried to force a hangup, block the conversation with static.

But as always, she was merely an observer. Passively spying. Unable to even stop herself from eavesdropping.

'Can't this wait until tomorrow?'

Taylor tore her attention away from the call. Flitted across the spectrum. She couldn't turn off Dad's conversation, but she could listen to others. Seek out more. Dip back into that web of light, the abstracted data floating on top of the raw radio waves. Drown the voices with something else.

" Fuck you! You think I'm going to live in the fourth reich or whatever they're calling it now? "

" look, honey, it's not like that. Just some people "

" They put up fucking metal walls with nazi decorations, and everyone follows the orders of a guy who calls himself Kaiser. "

" Look, our house is here. The Johnson's are staying, and you really like Betty! We'll be fine— "

" Nazis. I don't feel safe, and I won't support— "

" safe? Have you seen the news? The Free State is safer than the rest of the city! "

" Steve, I'm not coming back. "

" Well at least let Alice— "

" Stop. Calling."

— 8 USD per point. Best offer. —

— ur crazy, it was 85 last month —

— cobble got canned. No way PRTs gonna let some digital currency fly —

— ugh. I'll be at Bob's by 11 —

She read inane texts, as Dad's conversation lurked at the edges of her mind. Listened to private calls, while Dad came to the conclusion that he was needed more at the Association, than with his embarrassment of a daughter.

And all the while, the static raged. For a moment, she considered throwing herself into it. How easy it would be, to lower all the barriers, to let the noise crash over her, let it sweep her away.

Instead, with a flex of effort, she watched. Listened. To everything.

News, showing the protesters Downtown. Men and women in faux Nazi-regalia cooking burgers on the tailgates of trucks. Some held poster board signs. Shouted about rights and corruption and conspiracy. A festive protest, complete with food and craft beer.

A dozen and one sitcoms and soap operas. More news, the anchors impeccably dressed and implausibly tanned. Politicians in a tiered room richly decorated with polished wood. Looking very concerned, diligent, as they discussed some new piece of legislature. Byzantine and unclear.

She wondered if any of them had seen a crumbling dock or took the long way around, so they wouldn't have to walk through a trash-and-needle strewn alley. If any of them had ridden a bus and looked out the window to see gaunt addicts swaying up and down the street.

247450024745002474500…

'you can be here in fifteen minutes?'

'it'll take longer'

'whatever, just get here.'

…247450024745002474500

She watched a reporter awkwardly juggle a microphone and an umbrella, her cheeks red in the January wind. Standing at the edges of Capital Hill's tent-city, security people looming nearby. Behind her, a ragged line of refuges waited for their turn at a cluster of battered chemical toilets. A young boy stepped away from the crowd, pulled down his pants and began to squat before the feed cut back to a pristine news desk and unprepared anchors.

And all the while, the noise grew. Lines of static danced across her vision, obscuring more of the table and the cooling bowl of soup. Like she was looking at the kitchen, at reality, through a cheap TV and poor reception. The signal in her head more real than the physical space in front of her.

"Taylor," He already had his jacket on, keys in hand. "Do you need anything?"

A low hissing rose in her ears, though every sound her power teased out of the spectrum and decoded was crystal clear. Pins and needles against her skin. Cold metal in her mouth, though she hadn't moved her spoon since Dad took his call.

"I'm fine."

"Maybe something else to eat? I can get some of that lo mein you like…"

"Chen's burned down," she said. "Not that hungry, anyways. Thanks for the soup."

"Ok," He stood at the edge of the kitchen, face broken by lines of static. "They need me, At the Association. Call if there's anything, anything at all, I can do. Please."

She needed him too. "Sure."

"Are you sure you're—"

"Just go Dad." Why did she have to be the one to ask him to stay? "I'm fine."

The steady pulse of his Timex faded out of range as he drove off, as he left again. She let her head fall to the table. The static continued to grow, like a vice crushing her skull. She welcomed the struggle, welcomed the pain. It was a simple battle, one she knew how to fight.

She reached for more signal.

800000800000800000…

'BBPD 13th Precinct.'

'Hello? May I speak to Detective Travers?'

'Name and number? I'll have him call—'

'He left me his number but isn't picking up.'

'Ma'am, we don't forward general public calls to the Detectives. Best I can do—'

'Please. He was going to find my daughter. I've been on hold for three hours trying to call you. Just… please. He was going to find her.'

…

'Please hold.'

…

…80000080000080000

It wasn't enough, so she latched onto the opaque-yet-orderly transmissions of the neighbor's WiFi. Categorized the pattern, relentlessly tore through the math that obfuscated the data.

The new challenge afforded distance from the pain, her mind expanded, reached further. Processed more. The neighbor's wireless folded to her power faster than the cellular network had. Easier. And the the mystery of it, the challenge, was gone. Complicated encryption and encapsulation, beautiful in its own way, disappeared amongst the lower layers and revealed the banal day-to-day of people using the internet and devices endlessly chattering to each other. Shopping recipes and porn— at the same time? She snorted, head still on the table.

Another lance of pain and the amusement died.

Static. She lost the wobbling kitchen table and linoleum flooring, the countless texts and video and sound feeds. The dripping of the faucet, and the hard edge of the chair pressed against the back of her thighs, all drowned-out by an ocean of noise.

The static surged up and covered everything. Even the pain.

In eighth grade, she'd read about a man lost in the mountains. How, when he was climbing, when he was moving, his body heat was enough to keep him going. But as he tired and ran out of food, as he stopped fighting, he grew colder.

At first, the cold became pain. But then, after a certain point, the pain went away. The shivering stopped, and the biting cold gradually disappeared, leaving behind a pleasant, numb, warmth.

The static began to feel like that— a comfortable numbness.

But the world came back, in fits and spurts. She found herself laying on the floor, the side of her face cold and wet from the spilled soup. Her hair heavy with it.

Her heart hammered in her chest and the stabbing pain in her head flared with each beat.

The static was still there. Receded, somewhat, but still tempting her with the comfortable numbness. It'd be so easy to just let her self fall into it, to let go.

But she flailed about with her power instead. Latched onto whatever she could, whatever had meaning. Clung to signal like it was a lifeline, keeping her head above water.

Another cellphone network. Additional WiFi connections. Wireless headphones and encrypted police radio channels and whatever communications the newer cars used. She lurched from signal to signal. All the complexity she hadn't been able to breach before became, if anything, too easy. A heartbeat of soothing, ordered, mathematical puzzles before she was flooded with yet more senseless, inane data.

People suffered. People rejoiced. People cheated and people loved. People were angry, people were bored, people lived and people died.

None of it mattered.

She picked herself up from the kitchen floor. Staggered through the living room and found herself happy to drip soup across the carpeting. Wondered if Dad would even notice, and if he noticed if he would say aynthing, even as she climbed the stairs and made it to her room.

She stripped off sodden clothes and collapsed into bed, not bothering to check for cameras.

The night passed in a fever-mash of signal and static.

Every distinct network, everything in range was ripped apart and reassembled, revealing the contents within. Dumb, human, information that wouldn't sweep her away. Text and voice. Photo and video. Telemetry and updates and background syncs of data. More and more.

Until it all washed together into an info-mosaic of the bay. Every signal, every fetch, every idle contact.

Private moments, all naked before her. And none of it mattered.

Dad returned, briefly. Left again, some indeterminate number of increments later.

247450024745002474500…

'What are you saying, that should I force her?'

'No, of course not. But you gotta do something.'

'She doesn't do anything. Won't go to school. Doesn't respond when I try to talk to her. Other than to say that she's fine.'

'Maybe she just needs space?'

'I've given her space, it isn't helping.'

…

'Don't know what to tell ya man.'

…

'I can't lose her too.'

…247450024745002474500

She dipped in and out of lucidity.

Dad became more insistent. The usual words no longer placated him, and he refused to leave until she promised to go to the hospital with him if "it" didn't get any better. Made her promise to call him at work, at least once a day, if she wouldn't go to school.

"Just let me sleep Dad!"

She couldn't quite mask the pain in her voice, but maybe that helped. Or maybe it was because she gave him something he could do. Whatever the reason, he left, and she leaned into the spectrum again. Used signal like a raft to pull herself above the static, even as it blended with her perception of her room and she again lost track of what was real and what wasn't, floating in the sea of information.

— Good morning Brockton Bay! — White teeth and inane chatter about beautiful weather. Traffic conditions. Basketball scores. The recall election. — the Bundy, Captain's, and Mason Street exits are closed — The anchor danced around the reason, that those exits led to Empire's little fief — and Main remains blocked by demonstrations. Now, over to Sandy at North Beach where a local parish has found, and tamed, a family of river otters! —

Time ground on, undulating and wave-like. Seconds and hours going by in bursts that would have lost all meaning, were it not for precise timestamps on so many transmitted packets of data. Somehow she made the requisite calls to her father. Managed, barely, to attend to her physical needs.

And, gradually, she brought it under control. Into a delicate balance of processed, ordered signal. She hammered everything that made sense into a hull, and used to float above the static. Began to function as a person again.

She attended school. Ignored the stares and the jeers. Answered when called upon, when spoken to. Did her homework.

Sat for meals with Dad, when he had the time. Cleaned up the house. Cooked.

Talked about 'her problems'.

He nodded at the appropriate places and made the right noises. She promised to see a therapist, if 'it got any worse.'. Promised that she was OK now.

Attended school.

"What's it like?" Vanessa asked.

Their group was arranged in a circle of wobbly desk-chairs near the windows. Vanessa, who carried herself like she was the only one that mattered. A quiet boy that seemed annoyed to be there. Greg, who never stopped staring at her.

"You'll need to be more specific," Taylor said, voice flat.

Wind howled off the bay slammed into the windows next to them with a sharp crack of rattling frames, and they all jumped in their seats.

Taylor raised an eyebrow at Vanessa.

Emma's barbs still got to her, sometimes. When she pulled up private moments and shared secrets. Everything else though was just so much noise.

She used to dread the group projects. Part of why she hated Gladly so much was because he assigned so many of them. Now though she just didn't care.

Vanessa pulled herself together and smirked at Greg. "You know he looks at them, right? In the middle of the night. Maybe this morning, before he got out of bed?"

"I wouldn't do that!" Greg protested, too loud.

"Does it bother you?" Vanessa simpered at Taylor. "Maybe he's the one who put them up in the first place."

Winslow was a little quieter, after the events of December. Less crowded, enough that they had to shift the schedules around and condense some of the classes. A third of the student body simply hadn't come back, after Lung and Purity destroyed half the city. And the Empire started their territory thing.

"No, that's right. You'd have kept it all for yourself, wouldn't you?" Vanessa continued, before Greg could even protest. She smiled, a cruel little twist of the lips. "You dirty little boy."

The sharp-faced girl wasn't pretty, not traditionally, but she obviously wanted to be. Her phone usage was dominated by searches for fashion tips and makeup tutorials. Her texts, to boys, to girls, reeked of insecurity about her appearance. It was interesting, in an abstract way. Observing Vanessa's place in the social hierarchy of Winslow through the lens of her texts and search history.

Brief, almost friendly messages to some girls. Her calculated messages to an upperclassman on the basketball team, responses to the boy's texts carefully timed. The obsequious texts to Emma, like some kind of lesser hyena trying to curry favor. It was obvious who was higher in the order from the words used and the raw difference in data sent.

"No! I mean, I—" Greg struggled with the conversation.

He met her eyes, as he turned away from Vanessa. There was panic there. Greg used a DTech phone, and she couldn't monitor it. And he was enough of a social outcast that he didn't send enough texts to non-secure phones for her to really have an idea of what his persona was.

But she figured he didn't really have any ill-will. Mostly harmless.

That didn't lessen the crawling sensation across her skin though, as he looked at her for too long, and she very deliberately turned to look out the window.

"God, why do you even bother with the baggy clothes Taylor? Not like— "

She could shut Vanessa down, if she wanted to. Use all the little insecurities revealed by her behavior. Take the tactics Emma had demonstrated and reference private moments, sent to those she thought of as friends, to sow doubt. Make her question her own place, and those she thought she could trust. Occupy her mind with things more important than getting a rise out of Taylor Hebert.

But no. She was better than that.

Taylor pulled up her hood, turned her chair with a scraping, grinding noise against the grits of dirt on the floor, and gazed out the window. A bright, clean, day. Windy. Hoodies, hats, huge jackets and a dozen ather articles of clothing were not, technically, allowed to be worn during class. But sometimes Gladly's negligence worked in her favor.

"Let me know if you want to work on the project," she said, talking over whatever Vanessa was yapping on about.

Taylor dipped in to the sound of someone streaming a classical playlist and watched the sun rise over the bay. Bright, warm beams light highlighted just how fucking shabby the city was. People accepted it when she stared blankly out the window, expected it even. And she let the world fade away. Fell just a little bit more deeply, into her power.

Topic: Friday's PRT ENE Press Conference

In: Boards ► Places ► America ► Brockton Bay Discussion

4th_E (Original Poster) (Veteran Member)

Posted On Jan 26th 2011:

PRT ENE Official Announcement HERE.

This will be the first sanctioned press conference by the local PRT branch since the new Director was officially instated (he's always been referred to as 'acting' or 'interim' until now)

Guesses as to what the main talking points are going to be? The release, other than the updated title, is frustratingly vague.

(Showing page 1 of 5)

►Divide

Replied On Jan 26th 2011:

cities going to shit. It's going to be about that.

►MainLineLiberty

Replied On Jan 26th 2011:

The city is finally looking better, now that the bad parts have burned down.

►Pika-sheeeeeet

Replied On Jan 26th 2011:

fuck you. Seriously, FUCK YOU, you racist piece of shit.

People, good people were living in the north side. Half the culture in the bay was on the North side. An Empire cape goes and kills a bunch of people who's skin isn't white enough and you celebrate?

►MainLineLiberty

Replied On Jan 26th 2011:

What the fuck are you talking about.

Lung burned down a bunch of his own crack houses while getting his ass kicked by a Nazi Soccer Mom. I can celebrate that and not be racist.

Mods, can you do your jobs for once?

►Pika-sheeeeeet

Replied On Jan 26th 2011:

Purity flattened an apartment block.

I'm going to hope that maybe there's a decent bone in your body and share some perspective.

I was there, pulling people from the fucking rubble. Yeah, maybe some of them might have worn green and red while they were at school, or out at night. Like one in eight? One in ten?

Most of them were just trying to get by.

There were kids in the rubble, you know. They were the hardest.

You see some floral print moo-moo or a walker or whatever sticking out of the cement and rebar, you make peace with it and move on. You see a little pink and white sneaker with a disney-princess on it, you dig and you dig and you fucking dig because that little four year old girl might still be alive under all that.

That's what you're celebrating when you say 'the bad parts have burned down.'

Show some fucking compassion.

►Redshift_13

Replied On Jan 26th 2011:

Ok, Let's... keep this on topic. The press conference people- there's a whole other subforum for 1220.

End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Taylor let her attention flow through the sea of data. At first, she tried to avoid the porn and vitriol. And the parts that were even darker.

It only took four days of exposure to the shit people used their phones and computers for to become inured to it all though. To the point where the idea of being disturbed by mere porn was laughable.

At least it had made school easier. Seeing the sides of people that they kept hidden from polite company put it all in perspective.

She'd always feared that she didn't matter, but there was peace in knowing that she didn't.

She still cringed, when people looked longer than necessary. Dreaded what they might be thinking. And, though she'd been getting better about it, the deep sickening shame still rose up on occasion. Disgusting and hot. Triggered by a smirk or a leer or a giggle that just as likely had nothing to do with her.

But that was an emotional response, slowly fading. She realized, rationally, that none of it really mattered. What everyone in school saw, their expectations of her, their thoughts, were built on a shallow reflection that little to do with her. Leading to a flawed, fake model that they constructed in their heads. Their opinions meaningless.

Dad had been the only person who mattered.

(Showing page 8 of 11)

►Bagrat (The Guy in the Know) (Veteran Member)

Replied On Jan 28th 2011:

Calvert always pushed for a more active role, even when he was just a consultant. We saw the PRT move more aggressively, upend more apple carts, as soon as he became interim director.

Now that he's formally instated, we can expect that trend to continue.

►DToM_BB

Replied On Jan 28th 2011:

guy's a fucking politician and therefore a snake.

►Bagrat (The Guy in the Know) (Veteran Member)

Replied On Jan 28th 2011:

Anyone at Director level is a politician, just like any other government or military org. Piggot was too- just with less polish.

►SlowMater77

Replied On Jan 28th 2011:

Yeah but... have you ever heard of a PRT Director speak out against the current Mayor of the city their based in?

Calvert's actively supporting the recall too! Seems like poor form. Not to mention how sketch it is having the head of a paramilitary organization interfere with civilian elections.

Surprising, is all.

►Aloha

Replied On Jan 28th 2011:

You are... surprised.

The first black PRT Director in history, speaks out against a mayor who multiple millions in campaign funds from MEDHALL, and you're surprised?

A mayor who regularly dined with the Anders, and whose administration ignored some very interesting financials for over a decade?

►SlowMater77

Replied On Jan 28th 2011:

well, when you put it like that.

End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

In a way, the confrontation with Dad had been a blessing.

The disappointment, the embarrassment had hurt as much as she had expected it to. And he got so angry that for a moment she was scared. Rage so strong that she had flinched away, despite herself, even though she knew that he'd never, ever hit her.

As much as it hurt, it was also a relief.

He knew, and she could stop fucking worrying. The sword had fallen, the bomb went off, the ship sank.

It no longer mattered.

Topic: DNet Update from Cobble

In: Boards ► Tech ► Tinker Tech ► Consumer Tech ► Cobble

TowerPower (Original Poster) (Wiki Warrior) (Not a tinker)

Posted On Jan 21st 2011:

Cobble pushed out a second broadcast message to every (opted-in) device on the DNet: /ipfs/7d875a2520ab0bcba2614905e25c509b

Backwardation (the anonymous internet-DNet proxy) is still down, so for the uninitiated unable to access the DNet link, he's announcing that he'll be a part of the PRT ENE's press conference tonight (discussion *here*). He's asking for people to submit questions.

There's a DApp embedded in the page above- One question, one upvote per unique DNDID, and it's already starting to populate.

(Showing page 6 of 10)

►MidnightDarkly

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

Ok, yeah- you're right. all of you are. He has to be joining, nothing else makes any sense.

Thing is though, the grey markets aren't reacting like you think they would- price of DP's is skyrocketing and someone or multiple someones are continuing to buy up every point they can.

Someone with a lot of money, which usually means a lot of insider knowledge, is betting on DP's being more valuable after tonights press conference.

►Answer Key

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

People with money can also be dumb. At least people stuck with points can get some real money out of it before the whole thing tanks.

Once Cobble's protectorate, there's no way he'll be allowed to keep running his own shadow economy. Can't believe they got away with it for this long.

►White Fairy (Veteran Member)

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

If he's joining, (yes he) it'll be the Wards. Can't say more on PHO, but check out the (uncensored, thank you very much) DNet forums.

►Bill_Kill

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

That's dangerously close to speculation on a capes identity.

►TowerPower (Original Poster) (Wiki Warrior) (Not a tinker)

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

UPDATE: update, Cobble's announcement and AMA will be part of the PRT's press release, but he's also streaming it realtime on the DNet.

The embedded app linked in the OP has been updated to include a live video stream (not active yet, obviously)

►MidnightDarkly

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

what.

►Chilldrizzle

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

keeping it real— I know which one I'll be watching. And it's not the time-delay, censored, low-res broadcast full of commercials.

►White Fairy (Veteran Member)

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

it'll be interesting to watch both, to see if they do cut anything from the official feed.

►RaisonD

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

no. Seriously, I'm with darkly. What? I thought the PRT killed the DNet.

►TowerPower (Original Poster) (Wiki Warrior) (Not a tinker)

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

Try to keep up.

Cobble announced a few days ago he was paying for internet access. Anyone who wants it still has internet access, just none of the pirate stuff we had going on before.

End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

(Showing page 7 of 10)

►Answer Key

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

friendly reminder for all you fools that anything you do on the DNet is in fact NOT private, and that Cobble has started paying for legit internet access makes it less, not more, secure. Previously at the very least your access back to the standard net was randomly distributed through over a thousand access points. Even if Cobble could spy on your traffic, the government and the telcos would have had a very hard time doing so. Now though, even if it feels faster, everything is funneled through one access point which is much easier to log and do analysis on .

►Chilldrizzle

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

umm… I'm happy for you bro, or sorry for your loss.

►Answer Key

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

►MidnightDarkly

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

how are they letting this shit fly?

►White Fairy (Veteran Member)

Replied On Jan 21st 2011:

you're comfortable with Nazi's establishing their own state but have a problem with municipal internet access?

End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

The rest of the day was more of the same. Girls babbled at her, and lost interest when she failed to respond. A few boys stared. Someone called out 'Eyyyyyy Taylor, how ya doin?', and raucous laughter followed her through the halls.

She wore multiple layers of loose, baggy clothing and somehow she still felt naked.

But that was school.

A space her body was required to occupy, while her mind was elsewhere.

Home was cold and empty, when she finally finished her day. It wasn't much better than school really, but at least she didn't have to be on guard. Didn't have to go through the motions.

She retreated to her room and let the world fall alway. Let herself soar over the sea of information. She no longer needed to study each signal, or to pick apart the various types of encapsulation. It all mixed together in an endless mass. Data, flowing in shimmering currents.

— hey —

Some of it always floated to the top, impossible to ignore once noticed.

— yeah —

She was better than this. Spying on Emma was beneath her.

But then, it wasn't really intentional, was it? The spectrum and the bits of data encoded within it were all laid out before her on display, so it couldn't really be considered spying. It was like a neighbor, leaving the drapes open at night. Or a couple arguing so loudly you could hear them two houses down. Besides, she'd already collected information on everyone else.

Anger and hate came bubbling up, familiar and hot. Scoured away some of the numbness. And then came the old hurt.

The thought that maybe they were right. Everyone seemed to think she was worthless— everyone at school, her best friend. And she never could understand why.

She followed the flows. Lingering echoes, not consciously witnessed when transmitted, but still floating around in this strange alternate world her power created.

Emma's calls, her texts— more vapid bullshit with an edge of cruelty. Texts to her Mother. To Madison, to other girls at school or her photo shoots. A third of the people she communicated with were using Cobble-phones, but if one end of the channel was open whe whole thing may as well be, and Taylor still got the conversation.

She couldn't pierce the static, but even it conformed to something intelligible when communicating with a normal phone.

Emma texted a lot.

Taylor followed the the of information through the sea of data. Assigned identities to those that it touched— Mrs. Barnes. Julia. Vanessa. Madison. Sandra.

No proof, no names, but another phone that must have been Sophia. A clear power dynamic between the two girls that was absent in the other communication. Emma all but fawning, where her texts to everyone else was backhanded praise and unsubtle digs.

A fresh transmission, at the very edges of her awareness.

— u still at work? —

— duh —

That was enough.

Two replies. Context from the news broadcast and independent feeds of what was happening at the center of the city. The contents of a day's worth of unanswered texts from Emma. Similar patterns in the past. A gnawing realization that she just couldn't swallow.

— will u b ok? —

— lol. Bunch of drunk trailer trash got nothing. Evn troopers cn take care of this shit. —

— what if the empire attacks? —

— hope they do —

Taylor already knew, but she didn't believe. Didn't want to believe.

She dipped into the wide channel of internet traffic and TV signals, a river within the ocean. She could only watch, only listen, but she didn't need to execute a search or follow a link.

With a large enough sample size, over a long enough period of time, someone would look up what she wanted. Someone else would happen to click on a link she may have wanted to follow herself, if she was capable of action instead of being restricted to merely watching.

Every old email an app helpfully fetched in the background, each file and photo backed up to remote storage. Whenever someone glanced at the first few sentences of a web page without reading the rest, or loaded a tab in the background to never be viewed again, that data was still sent.

And, increasingly, that transmission fell across the web of her power.

Tens of thousands of people, were looking up information on Brockton Bay's Wards program. She focused, gave shape to the thought she hadn't wanted to think.

Shadow Stalker.

It was like pieces of a puzzle assembling themselves.

Images of Shadow Stalker. Video. Audio clips of a teenage girl with familiar speech patterns answering a reporter's questions. Shadow Stalker casually shoving a camera aside while saying 'fuck-off', in a way Taylor had heard a hundred times before.

Images of Sophia herself were harder to come by, she wasn't a celebrity. But her own memories were sharp enough. Sophia was a horrible bitch, but she was a distinctive horrible bitch. The way she moved and talked. The casual arrogance she held herself with.

When Taylor threw away what she wanted to believe, abandoned the last shreds of trust and looked, honestly looked, it was obvious.

All the frustrated rage fountained back up from the depths.

What little faith she had in the world, still there despite everything that happened, flickered and died.

It was all bullshit.

The delicate balance that let her listen in on the countless different signals, that abstracted away the protocols and the ciphers, broke. The twists of thought and not-looking subconscious pattern matching that had protected her against the the static washed crumbled. Like a castle in the sand, washed away by the waves.

The static flowed over her mind, an endless flood. And she let it happen.

It was all bullshit anyways.

.

139

ReasonableDoubt

Dec 4, 2022

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

Dec 11, 2022

#329

Spoiler: Note

"Charles!" A girl called out.

The locker door, pristine in a way that still felt unreal after two semesters at Winslow, closed with a smooth click. All of Arcadia was like that— pristine. Concrete floors polished to a low shine, ergonomic desks that didn't wobble. Brightly lit bathrooms that smelled faintly of potpourri, instead of the ammonia piss-reek of Winslow's toilets. A ceiling of canted hardwood arced overhead like something out of a trade magazine, and windows of frosted glass high up along the south wall glowed with diffuse sunlight.

The money spent on this hallway alone would be enough to renovate an entire floor of Winslow. Or provide free lunch to its students for years.

I turned to the vaguely familiar girl. "Umm.. hi?"

People glanced our way, curious. Some nodded at me in a distant but respectful way— many of the students suspected I was was Tenjin. Others looked at the pretty blond standing in front of me with something like scorn. At Winslow, it would have been for some sort of racist reason but Arcadia wasn't like that, so far as I could tell. There was, however, a strong culture of not randomly approaching someone who 'might' be a ward.

Our secret identities were flimsy. Mine particularly so.

"You… don't recognize me." She said, with less cheer.

Most of the hallway just went about their own business. Talking and walking, laughing or complaining about homework over the weekend. Unknowing, or uncaring, who the wards were in their midst. Even if one had sort-of-not-quite-accidentally become famous from streaming, and creating a surveillance state.

"Sorry, got lost in my own little world."

My mind cast back through the classes I had on Fridays, trying to place her. Even on the best of days, most of my attention was on everything else going on in the city and with my tech. The state of the PRT, and their increasing adoption of stuff that I build and supplied.

Being unaware of my surroundings was a bad habit, one various instructors nagged me about, but I still had a tendency to drift off into my own thoughts. Especially in a place that felt safe which, strangely enough, Arcadia did.

There was always so much more to do.

Things had gotten easier, momentarily, when I started selling points for dollars. My company flipped into cash-flow positive, so much so that money started to feel almost meaningless. It was a strange feeling, when six months ago I would rather run through the bad parts of town than burn a dollar fifty on bus fare. Even more so that now I didn't really have any use for the money in my personal life.

"We have Parahuman Studies together?" I asked the girl in front of me, wishing I had my helmet or a pair of smart-glasses on

But then I'd just be working again. We had all but eliminated the ABB in Brockton Bay, and had an op planned that would put the nail in the coffin. But they'd finally learned how to avoid the drones, at least partially.

And, worse, the think tank gave it even odds that Lung had managed to recruit the bomb-tinker that almost blew up Cornell earlier in the month.

"Yes!" She brightened, and took a deep breath. I managed to keep my eyes on her face. "I'm Ashley and, would you like to maybe eat lunch together?"

I blinked, a flutter of surprise and embarrassment coming over me. The girl standing in front of me Ashley, had never really talked to me before but she seemed nice. Awkward, almost flighty, but in a cute way.

Though, if it weren't for all the coaching, hours of live streaming, and interviews I'd be just as fidgety.

It'd be nice, to grab a little bit of normal life back. Hang out with friends, go to the movies. Date someone.

All of it was foreign to me.

Before Dad was taken away, I spent most of my time studying or in lessons. Any free time was hoarded preciously— spent on video games, or the rare relaxed day with Dad. And now I was even busier, with matters far more important than any test score or Math Olympiad.

"Sorry, I— "

"Oh, OK! Totally OK, sorry to bother you!" She sort of wilted, in a way that made me feel awful.

"Wait!" I stopped her from walking away. "I'd like to but I have… work today."

It was dumb. There was no reason for me to spend time talking about whatever normal teenagers talked about. There might be a bomb tinker in Brockton Bay, and I hadn't spotted Lung in over a week— which was much scarier than knowing where he was.

But maybe I was worrying too much.

Brockton Bay had changed in the past four months or so. The PRT and Protectorate had cracked down on all violent crime, not just what was Parahuman related. I still played back the footage of Dauntless dropping out of the sky on a group of would-be carjackers. Or Velocity simply appearing wherever there was a gunshot or a mugging.

There'd been some fights with Lung, and skirmishes along the Naziland border, but nothing like Brockton Bay used to be. Compared to even a year ago, the city felt almost peaceful. Safe.

And all it took was me putting cameras in the sky, and the Protectorate and PRT wildly overstepping their authority.

"Maybe another time."

Her whole face lit up in a smile. "Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow's Saturday…"

"Yes, and?" Her smile turned into something a little more challenging. "Even better!"

I laughed, despite myself, and gave in. "Fine."

She walked with me towards the gates. Arcadia's 'Faraday Cage'— which was just a few commercial jamming units— didn't hinder my phones, but that wasn't the point. Regardless of whether or not they worked properly, phones were not allowed inside the School. And, Arcadia being the type of school that it was, people respected that. Cellphones were used in the Cafeteria and the grounds outside the build, and that was it.

We stepped out into a beautiful spring day. A small crowd of students were already taking advantage of the warm sunlight. Groups sat on the stone steps or sprawled on the grass— eating lunch, laughing, complaining. Reading or napping. And staring at their phones. Brockton Bay was miserable in the winter, and far too humid in the summer but spring— spring was wonderful.

Ashley paused at the top of the steps and swung the comically large backpack off her shoulders. I expected her to take out a phone. Instead she extracted a pair of smart-glasses from a case within the bag.

Rev 3's.

I had just released them last week. An attempt to bring the interface in my helmet to everyone. It was still rough around the edges— not literally, I'd learned that lesson with my first batch of phones— but they were frustrating to use.

The glasses sat comfortably on the nose, and the stems were pleasantly contoured, but the actual interface still had a ridiculous learning curve. I'd kept distribution limited to three hundred units.

And I only gave those out to top developers, those that gave consistent feedback, and a few random units. Anyone else had to pay a ridiculous amount of points for a beta product.

I wondered which one she was. I could check of course, if I had my helmet. But I'd been trying to curtail that impulse. It was, once again, too easy to just dig up information on someone.

"I can just… get your email?" I tried asking, while Ashley flailed around without a hint of shame, navigating an interface only she could see.

The glasses looked and felt like a finished product. Slim-profile frames masked dozens of sensors and cameras in such a way that it'd be hard to tell they weren't normal glasses— were it not for the ash-gray material I'd made this version out of.

Inward facing cameras tracked the wearer's eyes, down to the curvature of the lens and the movement of muscles in the ciliary body. Software used that data to paint images directly on the retina with precision microlaser arrays. More cameras and low powered lasers observed the surrounding world, allowing software to parse everything in the environment and assign meaning to it. Colin had helped me fit sensors capable of limited fMRI capture into the rear of the stems, the thicker part that rested behind the ears. Something I hoped would, eventually, allow the same ease of use as my helmet.

"No no, I got this." Ashley mumbled while trying to navigate the smart-glass interface, utterly uncaring of the laughing around us. "It was working this morning."

It wasn't there yet.

The glasses used a scaled down version of the system in my helmet, driven by another application of Colin's self-learning code. Code which I should probably start calling my own, considering how much of it I'd butchered and iterated on.

The software would, over time, learn to map what the user did via awkward hand-movements to the fMRI data from the frames to predict a user's intent. And through this lens of inferred intent, manipulate the user interface without physical gestures.

Or at least, that was the idea.

Colin had been doing this for years. I had it working beautifully on my helmet in a matter of weeks.

Watching Ashley flail around, I was again reminded of the difference between a one-off custom product and something ready for the general public.

One reviewer had likened the experience to 'learning how to play the world's nerdiest musical instrument just to send a text message.'

"Aha!" Ashley said, not bothered by the clumsy interface.

She made a few more gestures, managing to push her contact info to me. I raised my eyebrows in surprise as I accepted the transmission on my phone, and she smiled in triumph.

I hesitated to share my own contact info, and her smile faded.

The combination of awkward shyness and confidence was oddly endearing, and it wasn't like there had ever really been a girl that was interested in me. That part of my mind that always pointed out my failures, always reminded me that I wasn't good enough, pointed out that Ashley's interest couldn't really have been about me.

I ignored it.

"Call me!" she said, smiling, after I sent her my own DNet address.

I couldn't help but return the smile before crossing the parking lot and leaving Arcadia's grounds. I looked to see her still standing on the steps waving. Feeling even more awkward, I waved and walked on.

A huge SUV, government-agency black with mirrored windows, waited for me just out of sight of the school. The front window was down and Laetitia Gray raised two fingers off the steering wheel in a sort of wave. The cavernous back seat was empty except for a large duffle-bag.

Diego leaned back from the passenger side and gave me a fist bump as I sat down. He had a large panel on his lap, which he started to manipulate with practiced gestures as Laetitia put the vehicle into drive.

"She's cute," he said.

He tilted the panel so I could see it. A live overhead-view of our surroundings stitched together from multiple drones. Our predicted route glowed in a soft green to indicate the system hadn't identified any threats— something it was getting better at.

And on the side, a different feed— Ashley and I on the front steps of Arcadia. Her, flailing about wildly. Me, standing aside embarrassed on her behalf. And a transcript of our entire conversation in blocky text, rolling by as the video played. Complete with error bars around the words the system had lower confidence for.

I'd worked out long-range audio pickup a ways back.

The drones utilized my laser-tech for a number of functions— terrain mapping, range finding, what amounted to radar that could penetrate foliage and even the ground in some cases, a secondary communication channel and, well, the list went on. They had a very capable suite of hardware on them already.

Sound waves from a conversation on the ground didn't propagate far enough upwards to be picked up by the drones directly, but anything, even people's voices, could cause tiny vibrations in surrounding materials. Vibrations that could be measured by laser and reconstructed into sound.

Translating those vibrations into sound was almost trivial— not that I wrote the software for it myself. Just another application of the self-learning, adaptive code. I was then able to use the laser-mic data and the high-definition video the drones were always taking to spawn yet another instance of the software, one that learned how to do very accurate lip-reading.

The software wasn't intelligent by any means, just narrow-focus machine learning, but over time and with each subsequent iteration, it was becoming more capable. I was starting to think of each instance as a different sort of Virtual Assistant, and was constantly finding new applications for them.

It was like I couldn't help myself. I'd read 1984, knew the dangers. Was forced to join the Wards after being arrested, and maintained suspicions of the PRT.

And yet, here I was, always creating ever more efficient ways to big-brother Brockton Bay.

"I guess." I pulled my latest costume from the duffle bag.

It was hard to argue with the results though. It just did so much good that arguing against making everyone so much more effective seemed immature and naive.

Besides, I still kept control of the entire platform. I could ash it all at any moment.

"So… hot date tomorrow?" Diego turned around and actually waggled his eyebrows at me.

Laetitia focused on traffic as she spoke. "We'll run a background check."

I sighed. "Do you really have to?"

"Yes." Her eyes met mine, briefly, through the rear-view mirror before flicking back to the street. "If she's clear, we'll provide a list of locations for your 'lunch'."

"Do any of the other Wards go through this?" I couldn't stop myself from asking. I took a deep breath and tried to slow down— unsure why I was getting irritated.

I focused on getting dressed.

Graphene-weave fatigues— somewhat baggy and full of pockets— and a scaled down helmet made up the latest iteration of my costume. A regression, in some ways, but it at least looked like a cohesive outfit. My original approach— growing the helmet, gradually adding more to the build until it covered my entire body, didn't work out. It would have, eventually. It was certainly what felt like the most natural way to build. But I'd come to believe that it a flawed way of building armor. Far too limited in the long run.

Most of my focus, for the past two months, had been on software. Modifying Colin's predictive code— breaking it and bringing it back into working order again and again, getting something just a little more functional, a little more capable, with each iteration. Creating a base platform for the virtual assistants that learned faster and reached better results with less data.

But even with most of my focus on the VA's, I had still spent hundreds of hours working on some of the best personal armor on the east coast. Maintaining the Gallant suit, which invariably led to questions which both Chris and Colin were happy to answer. Even implementing some of my own changes, if only to make maintenance easier.

Most of my learning, my progress, was through a sort of self-directed fumbling. Aided by flashes of insight from my power. Working with the two other tinkers, learning from them, accelerated that. Having them to teach me, to bounce ideas off of, meant that even if I spent less time on armor and defensive tech, I'd still learned a lot.

Enough to convince me to abandon my original idea of just growing my helmet until it covered my entire body.

I could have made it work— kept expanding the helmet build and addressing the problems that crept into it, until I had a body-sized construct that I could simply step into. It was an approach that played to my existing strengths.

But working with Chris and Colin made me realize it was a method that would lead me towards a local-maxima, at least with regards to armor. Climbing the mountain ahead of me, only to realize later that there was another path that could take me higher— open new opportunities.

I could take my time with it.

There wasn't a pressing need for armor— i wasn't a field combatant, and only ever went on 'safe' patrols. Even if I had power-armor on par with Colin's, I wouldn't go out and fight crime in it.

The desire to be the cool hero, coming in to save the day, was still there in the back of my mind. But if I sat back and thought about it, charging into the action was also a limiting approach.

If I wanted to make life better for people, there were better ways to do it.

Right now, expanding the DNet and increasing production capacity, as well as learning how to make more things that would help people, was a better way of doing that. Bad-ass armor wasn't.

Being a Ward wasn't a free ride. I had obligations, and a lot of it felt like busy work. At first, I'd kind of resented it. But over the last couple of months I'd gotten increasingly better at turning all the little asks to my own benefit.

I finished with the costume itself, and pulled the much sleeker looking helmet from the bag.

I'd kept the extra sensors and the fMRI tech. The slow-creeping mass that had extended down past my shoulders was gone though, as was the full-face shield. Instead, the helmet now had a translucent visor, and my HUD was powered by the same micro-laser array I was using for the smart-glasses.

It wasn't as immersive as the previous design, but it was easier to take on and off. And, more importantly, it made me more relatable. More Personable.

Which was important because I was streaming more. A lot more. And it wasn't just tinkering sessions and AMAs any more.

My streams had grown beyond tinkering sessions and AMA's. Now I'd talk with PRT Agents and Officers, or the other Wards. I showed people what my everyday life looked like, and how the Wards and the PRT worked. Gave them a closer, more real glimpse into the life of a so-called 'Hero' than anyone ever had before.

At some level it was Parahuman reality TV, and it worked. The streams exploded.

As I started showing more of how the Wards and the PRT operated, as I talked to the Protectorate and even other capes in the Bay, my streams became must-watch material. People re-hosted them on the legacy internet, and people across the nation started watching them.

Most of the time it was about tech. My tech, or that of other Tinkers when the audience asked for it. Detailed explanation of how the drones worked, taken on the roof of the PRT building. An in-depth explanation of the smart-glasses I was developing. My work-flow, or even just me working on something. A virtual agent splicing imagery from my helmet's development environment into the video feed for the stream.

But I also ventured out into the city on low-risk patrols and talked to people directly. Visited the refuge camps— streaming while helping people with the shelters Chris and I continued to develop and deploy.

I gave virtual tours of Wards HQ and the PRT building and done marathon tinker sessions with Chris. Colin even joined me in what remained the most popular episode by far— an 'AMA with Armsmaster' where we walked through the Protectorate base answering questions from across PHO and the DNet.

It was surreal— my streams were more popular than any cape show on TV. And my audience continued to grow.

Parts of the PRT flipped out, but it hadn't really mattered because Calvert covered for me.

My in-box filled up with strongly worded emails ordering me to stop. When emails failed, they escalated to meeting requests that I mostly ignored. Then it was threats of legal action.

They withheld my pay— the minimum wage I still couldn't believe they paid Wards. They even threatened to take away the promised college fund, and zeroed my tinker budget.

Which was amusing.

I might not have much use for money personally, but having it was freedom and my LLC was now quite profitable. In an ironic twist, the popularity of the streams and my growing fame made it even more profitable. Both because of the dollar point and demand for points, and companies actually reaching out to license some of my tech.

They couldn't physically stop me while I had Calvert's support, and I had more than enough money to operate independently. They could have fired me, but no one wanted that. It'd just mean less oversight.

My streams were popular enough, my tech valuable enough, that putting me back in a cell wasn't a good option either. Even if Calvert had let it happen, the PR cost of doing so was greater than whatever their real objection was to the streams.

"Your case is different," Laetitia said, checking her blind-spot as she switched lanes, downtown traffic reluctantly giving way to the heavy SUV.

"Yeah." I sighed, reminding myself that it was worth it.

My streams were popular, I was popular, but that was with a helmet that exposed more of my face and had a transparent visor. Hundreds of hours of high definition video, recorded and spread across the internet. Regular streams, in real-time, so people could easily rule out who else might be Tenjin.

So, yeah— my secret identity wasn't. Anyone at Arcadia that wanted to knew exactly who Tenjin was.

"Hey," Diego interrupted me before I put the helmet on. "I've still got hours this week. I'll get a spot on your detail and make sure it's low-key."

"If it happens." Laetitia stressed.

Diego gave her a look, eyebrows raised.

She huffed, even as she accelerated to make a yellow light.

"You think I want to be the bad guy here?" Her eyes met mine in the rear-view mirror. "It's great that you're starting to relax a little bit, but you should probably figure out your priorities."

"Oh come on," I said, even though I didn't really feel like arguing. "I got pulled from console back in February because I was doing too much. Now you want me to work more?"

"No—"

"Then what?"

"You just said it— you try to do too much. You want to date some fan-girl? By all means, go ahead. But what are you going to drop? You're back on console, your lab should be ready next week—"

I snorted at that. My lab had been two weeks away for three months now.

She pretended not to hear me. "You insist on streaming every single day, and when you're not on camera you're holed up in your helmet doing god knows what. On top of that, you're working with Armsmaster to improve your AI—"

"Virtual Agents- they're not AI. Please, if you listen to anything I say, do not ever refer to it as AI."

"Your VA's, whatever." If she wasn't so focused on driving I got the feeling she might have rolled her eyes. "And on top of all that you're maintaining Gallant's armor. Which I know takes more time than you log."

"Hey, let's chill out a bit." Diego ignored Laetitia's glare with aplomb. "You gonna slow down, or should I put the flashers on?"

Laetitia breathed out slowly, but eased her foot off the gas. "Look, I'm not telling you to work harder, and I'm not saying you can't date. But you're starting to cut into your sleep again. You already do too much you can't just keep on adding things."

"Armsmaster—"

"Armsmaster is a grown-ass man that you need to stop comparing yourself to." Diego cut in, surprisingly.

"Who doesn't date." Laetitia added.

"Did you not just hear me say he shouldn't be comparing himself to Armsmaster?" Diego said, eyebrows raised.

I rolled my eyes. "Fine. I get it. Forget about the background check— I'll cancel it."

Laetitia gave me an exasperated look through the mirror. "That's not the point—"

I put my helmet on.

It was petty of me, but I felt better as soon as the liner compressed comfortably around my skull. The liner was the most notable thing carried over from my previous design— semi-permeable in a way that made hair a non-issue, comfortable for days at a time, and shock absorbent.

Colored static rioted across my vision for a fraction of a second as the micro-laser arrays came online and calibrated.

And then my HUD bloomed into existence.

Countless screens— status updates, build readouts, applications, autonomous agent failure rates, network coverage, drones in flight— on and on. A constellation of information sprouting across my entire field of vision. News clips and snippets from forums and DNET boards.

— — nothing but reinforce the Empire border. And despite all that surveillance and power, they've done nothing about the Merchants! A two-bit — —

Location and status of PRT Officers and on-duty Protectorate members. A system projected location for all Wards— currently in school. Social media analysis generated by yet another VA— useless gibberish. The latest media analysis from the PRT PR team— mostly positive and showing how the far VA's needed to go. They excelled at interpolation of technical data but anything to do with humans was still squirrelly. I made a note to take a look at what had messed it up this time.

— — A bunch of illegals, incels, and cripples living in glowing tents watching cartoons instead of getting a fucking job. And the PRT is enabling these deg— —

Power generation and consumption of the various shelter-camps. A three dimensional contour map of the northeastern United States showing the spread of non-camp shelters. Independent little communities springing up wherever someone else didn't have an active claim: in the woods, along the ocean further north, and in the grown-over skeletons of small towns.

So much had been abandoned, due to economics, fear, or some cape's rampage. And it was risky, but it was nice that people were taking some of it back. Better than them being homeless in the streets.

— —

… a sweet little side hustle. Get points, get drops, drive it down to Boston, sell for cash. Turn cash into points. Repeat. I'm looking for someone I can trust to help me out with…

— —

On and on, an flood of data.

— — bring guns, you can get reliable ones for cheap from the nazis. Shelters are nice, and it's all well and good calling yourselves a commune, but if some fuckwit comes up there to mess with you, you need to be able to defend — —

And then it simplified. Visualizations and text windows compressed and condensed, vanished into the distance, until only the most relevant bits of information showed.

There was an update on the Cornell bomber recruitment scenario— PRT analysts rated it as extremely unlikely that Lung succeeded. Which would be great, but I kept the VA's scanning everyone's face for a match, in real time. They'd already gone through all the recorded footage, with no matches.

But then, the ABB was getting better at working around the drones. Even if it had come too late for them.

Calvert's ABB strategy had worked. Small strikes, whenever Lung was out of town or otherwise occupied. Relentlessly chipping away at ABB resources— property as well as people. Stalling Lung whenever he pushed back, and never directly engaging him with capes.

We ran when Lung showed up, and hit hard wherever he wasn't.

Sophia hated it, and a number of the more gun-ho PRT officers grumbled about it in the cafeteria, but it worked. Losing Oni Lee had hurt Lung more than anyone had thought possible and current analysis was that Lung wouldn't even be able to hold the ABB together much longer.

"That's a… big op." I said, reviewing the latest data and changing the subject at the same time.

She gave me a look through the mirror, but answered anyways. "You'd know better than me. Captain Doughty will want… will request you on console if you're up for it."

"Of course," I said.

That is, if it happened. Calvert had access to a lot of information, more than just the drones. He tended to make the go-no-go decision at the very last moment, or sometimes call actions with almost zero prep time. He'd have us preemptively strike a target with the same sort of urgency firefighters used to respond to fires one day, and then around and cancel an op we'd spent a week planning for at the last moment.

Sometimes he shared the reasoning— a high value target we could catch them 'red-handed', or a limited opportunity while Lung was otherwise occupied. Other times he kept his thoughts to himself and we all were expected to follow orders.

Another thing the 'new director' did that pissed people off.

"Man, this shit makes me nervous." Diego said, gaze once again focused on the tablet in his lap.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "It's working, and we just withdraw if Lung does show up."

"Well, sooner or later Lung's going to do something about it, and it ain't gonna be pretty."

"You think so? He seems kind of… lazy." I mused aloud. "He hasn't really built anything, even the ABB is just a bunch of existing gangs he threatened into working for him, and they're already starting to fracture again.

"From the sounds of it, Lee did the actual work of keeping them in line. Why wouldn't Lung just take a pile of cash and go somewhere else?"

"Maybe. Don't be talking like that on your streams though."

I snorted. "I'm not completely clueless— I don't want to provoke him any more than you do."

The current strategy didn't have flashy cape battles, but it was effective. The ABB, as an organization, needed people. And the ABB was a mess— something like thirteen different factions depending on how you counted, split along business and racial lines, that hated each other almost as much as they hated the Nazi's.

And on top of that, most of the rank and file didn't really even want to be in the gang.

Sure, a certain kind of kid on the North Side, sick of the slurs and tired of getting pushed around at school, might dream of joining the 'ABB'. Crave the instant power and respect that came with wearing Green and Red. Wanted it bad enough to be 'beaten in', or to prove that they had what it took some other way.

But a bigger part of the 'gang' just didn't have a choice. They joined, if that was even the right word, because their families lived in ABB territory— and following the orders of some petty little crime lord working under someone who reported to Lung was the surest way to make sure no one snatched your little sister off the street. Or maybe their grandma ran a corner store, selling candies and cookies to kids, and being in the gang was better than trying to make 'protection' payments.

People had all sorts of reasons for joining, and staying, in the ABB even if they didn't want to be a 'gang member'.

And we were taking those reasons away.

Stopping violent crime was a part of it, but I thought the shelters had a larger effect.

Anyone who lived in Brockton Bay could get one of my phones and call down a little house that was more comfortable and safer than any crumbling tenement on the north side.

It had started as a project to build temporary housing for people displaced by the fighting back in December, but it had become so much more. My iterative work style had led to Chris and Colin also making suggestions and improvements, which rolled forward into yet another iteration.

The most recent version was a durable hexagonal structure of mostly graphene. It could be easily slotted into clusters of six units, with the center dedicated to a module with functions like waste processing, heat exchange, and energy storage, and limited repair capability. And the initial deployment was still light weight enough, still low-mass enough that they could still be delivered by drone.

And the new mayor, Padillo, let people use them. The old administration would have certainly kept the shelters to designated areas, mostly out of sight, but the new administration was more forgiving.

Food was still an issue, but people were at least guaranteed a warm, safe home if they wanted one. With clean water and plumbing, of a sort. Anyone forced into the ABB because they needed a place to live, or were worried about their families, had another option.

We estimated that the ABB had lost more than three quarters of their members.

And the op that was planned tonight would shut down the rest of their 'businesses'.

The SUV jostled as Laetitia pulled off the street and under the heavy cement overhang of PRT HQ. Up first through the first tier of security, and then down a wide spiraling ramp. The city noises disappeared, our overlarge engine overpowering in the narrow space, until we exited on one of the many sublevels. One bustling with mechanics and other support staff going about their work.

Diego rolled down the window and shouted at someone wrestling a tube into an APC. He laughed when the man dropped the tube and flipped us off.

The whole level was like that— people hard at work but with a sense of camaraderie I'd never seen anywhere else. Not at prep school, not at the group home, certainly not at Winslow, and not at Arcadia.

Diego hopped out the moment we stopped and opened my door while I was still going over reports via my helmet's interface. He bowed, in mockery of a chauffeur.

I rolled my eyes but smiled anyways. "Thanks."

"Hey man, this right here is the cushiest gig we got." He nodded towards where Laetitia had disappeared through yet another security check. "Don't hold it against her, she's just looking out for ya."

"Yeah…," I said, "Thank you."

He clapped me lightly on the shoulder and strode off towards where a bunch of sat around a concrete structural support, and I made my own way through HQ.

The Wards lab was, as usual, a disaster.

Workbenches along the walls showed the aftermath of one of Chris's sessions. Spirals spilled from the mill's catchment tray, gleaming under the smooth LED lighting. A millimeter of steel-blue dust covered everything like a blanket of early snow, and the exotic tools that Chris used in his process were strewn wherever he had last used them.

The virtual agent running my helmet combined the state of the lab with my own past behavior and habits and blood-flow patterns in my brain picked up by the fMRI sensors. Used all that data to do a poor, but in this case effective, impression of mind reading.

Panels unfolded around the open portion of my helmet and formed an environmental seal with a satisfying click.

The air inside the lab was technically safe, but I'd be moving around and testing a device that would kick up a bunch of metal-dust, which I had no desire to breathe in. As it was, I cheerfully ignored the plume of blueish particles spreading like spores as I wiped down one of my fabricators.

Chris usually wasn't this bad, which meant meant he'd had a good session. It'd be interesting to see what he came up with.

The VA was on a roll and managed to correctly predict my intent again— sending a signal to the fab as I finished wiping it clear of dust. The upper half cycled open with a small hiss of broken near-vacuum.

Thirty two lumpy cylinders, arrayed at the bottom of the build-chamber. Not perfectly neat, they'd shifted a little at the end of the build, but all the waste product had been sucked away to be recycled.

They weren't much to look at, dark gray material wadded into the size and shape of a too-fat pen. I kind of liked it that way— that the devices looked so unassuming. Unremarkable, when in reality each was a sophisticated product built at the molecular scale with incredible precision.

If I could get one to work.

My helmet threw up a detailed three dimensional render of the devices as I started going through the build record. Another virtual window opened, showing blurring logs of boot sequences and self-checks passing or failing even as a muted green glow flowed along the different renders.

A flicker of orange or red inevitably flashed on each individual read out. Occasionally at first, but then more frequently, the red would cascade across the entire build, marking it a failure. Tagging the inert wad of material still at the bottom of the fabricator as a complete failure.

My power bombarded me with all the little ways in which the various builds had failed, and I did my best to corral it. Look for commonalities. To bend the insight towards iterative changes that would affect as many of the different prototypes as possible, and thereby yield greater results. Insights that crystallized as I brushed my fingers along each of the failed little cylinders.

The suggestion had come from Dragon, actually, though I had not yet had the opportunity to talk to her directly. She apparently was very comfortable working with multiple parallel builds, and saw how such a process could help me immediately.

I was still struggling to get used to it, but already it seemed to be paying off.

Singly at first, and then in twos or threes at the same time, the newest iteration failed to fully pass the various self-checks. They might work, in some sense, but I didn't need to have something functional now.

Until finally a single build out of the original thirty two remained. The render almost entirely green, the occasional specs of orange and red minor enough to be dismissed. Covered for by redundancies, or structural failures that might reduce operational lifespan.

The checks completed with a deep, satisfying sound and I reached into the fab to pick up the solitary, successful build. Turned it in my hands briefly, running my power through it, before I tossed it towards the center of the lab.

Only to sigh as it flopped to the floor, lost in discarded packaging and another plume of steel-blue dust.

I went through my helmet's interface manually— it didn't require gestures, the VA had long since learned to read my intent when it came to things like keystrokes and menu manipulation— and triggered the deploy sequence.

A small puff of metal dust and packing peanuts as the wadded up cylinder snap-expanded into a geodesic sphere. Photovoltaic surfaces ate the light and the somewhat eerily dark sphere slowly rose into the air. Visualizations on my HUD monitored internal ballast adjustments and structural integrity as the lighter-than-air drone prototype self-calibrated.

Until it hung at two hundred centimeters from the floor of the lab, stable. Levitation, though without any of the bullshittery Chris's hoverboard utilized. Simply a light, strong structure floating gently in the air the same way a buoy floated on the water.

I smiled despite myself, only to frown as the VA snapped open the seal on my helmet. Despite there being no one around, and bits of metal dust still settling. A few absent minded intent-gestures corrected the VA and resealed my helmet.

Software was fun, and the rapid pace of progress, of iteration was exhilarating. But building something real, something that existed in the actual physical world, was viscerally satisfying in a way that manipulating lines of code to yield virtual effects couldn't quite match.

I reached up and lightly batted the little LTA drone away, letting it glide serenely around the lab while I cleaned up.

Chris was an amazing tinker, and a good friend. I still couldn't wrap my head around his hoverboard, and even his spark pistols— little things that somehow shot hard light— made my head hurt. He was also a good guy to just hang out with, bouncing ideas back and forth, or playing games whenever Dennis dragged us out of the lab. But cleaning up after anyone was deeply aggravating.

I really wanted my own lab.

The doors slid open and Dean clomped in, fully suited up in the Gallant suit. He paused, his silver-knight helmet tracking the LTA micro-drone as it circled the room.

"Hey… Tenjin. Is that recording?"

"Nah, just burning in a new build— seeing how long it'll stay afloat. Efficient little thing, but I'm still worried about structural integrity. Near-vacuum is great for lift without ongoing power consumption, but the weight of the atmosphere—"

"That's great." Dean cut in. "About the armor— my left arm's moving differently than the right."

"Ah."

I'd worked with the Gallant armor enough by now that it no longer seemed that impressive. Already, I could build something better than it entirely with my own tech… or could if I threw enough iterative cycles at the effort. But the more I worked with it, the more I learned about different approaches towards armor, powered and non-powered, the less impressed I was with the Gallant suit.

It wasn't that there was anything wrong with it. Chris built it shortly after becoming a Ward, with the help of Colin, and then Colin had maintained it for almost a year before passing it to me. It was a capable piece of tech.

But it wasn't an approach, a branch of research, I wanted to waste time on.

The Gallant armor was far too finicky— four hundred and seventy three separate servos, powered by one of Chris's bullshittium energy-cells. I could service the armor easily enough, it took less time for me to keep it running than it had Chris or even Colin.

But ultimately the Gallant armor felt… clumsy. Crude, in every aspect other than the power-cell. Especially compared to some of the tech Colin had showed me. I could do better. Artificial muscle fibers were—

"Ah?" Dean prompted, snapping me out of it.

"Well… you can only re-build the original servos so many times. The material broke down and I needed to fab new ones."

I pulled up a larger than life schematic of the Gallant suit, setting the wireframe to slowly rotate in the air between us, and shared the virtual working space with Dean. I'd long since replaced the HUD in his helmet — and those of most of the Wards— with my own tech. Even Chris ran one of my HUDs in his costume these days.

As I spoke, the the visualization lit up. Various servos in the gauntlet, running up the forearm, elbow, and finally the back of the shoulder pulsed a soft blue. A few other components, and most of the armor panels, also pulsed blue to show they'd been replaced.

"I had to start replacing them two months ago." I added a time-line to the visualisation, starting when I took over maintenance of the armor back in February, and changed the armor wireframe back to its original state. "I built the new servos to the same spec and tested the hell out of them— I'm honestly surprised you noticed."

As I spoke, the timeline marched forward. Little flecks of blue appearing in the wireframe as the original components became too degraded. First trivial locations— the back of the gauntlet, or the forearms— as I swapped them for more critical locations. Chris's tech was lovely like that, modular and swappable.

"Has it been approved by the board?"

"Umm." I didn't have the greatest relationship with 'the board'— another PRT sub-organization based out of Cambridge. "I submitted the new servos for review before I started using them."

I pulled up another window— a queue of all the tech I'd submitted for review, and when. The VA controlling my interface populated the rest of the virtual space around it with visualisations. Histograms and more exotic graphics gave an idea of expected turn around times for different types of tech, along with rejection rates.

A huge mountain of red, back when Washington was trying to shut down my streams. Which coincided with when I started to ignore the Tinker Tech Review Board. I still submitted, of course. Well, a VA did it for me.

I pushed everything, the entire visualization space, at Dean. He stared for a while, lost in the forest of information.

"So… no?" He finally asked, tech-knight aesthetic helm tilted questioningly.

I sighed. "They haven't even looked at it. I submitted the first rev of those servos in your left arm back in March, but they're still focused on the drones. On like, the third rev of the Drones. I'm on rev nine now."

"Servos are the motors that move the armor right? Can't Kid Win or Armsmaster make more of the original ones?"

"Kind of— but it's a poor use of their time," I pulled up another visualization. "Also, when Chris makes something, it's bespoke. He doesn't manufacture, he crafts. If you're trying to follow the rules, that will land you back in the TTRB queue as well."

Chris was also easily distracted, but that wasn't anything Dean needed to be concerned with. Chris beat himself up about it enough as it was. And the last thing Colin needed to be spending his time on was making mediocre servos.

Dean was a master of conveying emotion, even without his face exposed. Even wearing power armor— something about the tilt of the helmet, and the timbre of his voice conveyed a concerned frown.

"I don't know if I'm comfortable going out there with unapproved Tinker-tech."

"Look— a stamp of approval from 'the board' means nothing— most of them are politically appointed hacks anyways. It took them six weeks to 'approve' putting a bigger screen on a phone— I've been waiting months for them to give the OK on the new servos. And they're built to the exact same tolerances as the originals."

"The review board exists for a reason," Dean said. "Rules exist for a reason. There needs to be some sort of peer review. Has Chris looked at the new components? Has Armsmaster?"

"Of course— I show them both of them all my designs."

"And did either of them say anything? Did either of them actually review this exact piece of tech? Looking at this submission queue," He waved at the review board backlog still hanging in the virtual space. "You seem to be more… productive than people were expecting."

The VA in my helmet picked up on my vague desire to express myself better, to make Dean see how dumb all this was, and retracted the material covering the lower half of my face— the thin panels cascading smoothly up and back into the helmet itself. Correctly this time.

"OK, that's a good point. And maybe they didn't specifically examine each iteration. But I'm not sure what you want from me here.

"I stretched the original components as far as they'd go— any further and they'd have become an outright danger to you. It'll be months before the review board makes any kind of a decision, and Armsmaster's time is limited. I'm happy to hand maintenance of your armor back over to Colin but he's already re-allocated that time."

The board was still, supposedly, reviewing tech I'd already phased out. The even decided to block one rev of the drones, months after I had moved past it. Thankfully, without the local PRT Director's support they were toothless.

And Calvert had always backed me up.

I just hoped that I didn't fuck up. That was the most frustrating thing about the review board— I'd love to have actual qualified engineers looking over my tech and providing feedback. I'd pay for that. Instead, the TTRPB was all obstruction, with no upside.

"Hey, I get that you're annoyed," Dean started, I had to force my eyes not to roll. Classic Dean— empathic listening backed by a Thinker power. He was a good guy but sometimes… "But I count on this armor to keep me alive. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we followed procedure."

"Procedure would have you sitting on console." I snapped back. And immediately felt like an asshole.

I looked away from the gleaming silver and gunmetal knight. Watched, instead, the dark orb as it floated by with a whisper of displaced air.

My HUD showed the amount of energy left, distributed through the spherical shell and the support struts holding back the pressure of the atmosphere. Hardly any drain, even with the comparatively expensive initial spin-up. The little LTA drone was designed to be efficient, used electroaerodynamic thrust for propulsion so there was no need for whirring propellers or the bursts of compressed gas that propelled my fixed-wing drones. It'd fly for weeks, even without accounting for the photovoltaics.

With solar, it would stay in the air until its components failed.

A notice flashed in my HUD— the raid was a go.

"Are you going?" I asked Dean, after pushing the details of the op to the virtual space so he could see it.

It was the biggest one against the ABB yet— seven targets in total. I highlighted the one they'd want Gallant present for. A brothel.

"I don't know…"

My VA helpfully pulled up more of the details, made available in the last couple of minutes. An ABB brothel usually meant a bunch of trafficked, traumatized girls that didn't speak English. Who had been convinced that, however horrible their lives had been, it would be worse if the PRT 'got them'.

Dean was incredible in such situations, in a way that had nothing to do with his 'blaster' power or the Gallant suit. And he was tagged as a potential asset. Voluntary only— like any Ward.

He sighed. "I still want to talk about this."

"Ok, how about this— I'm on console for that op. I'll keep an eye on your armor the entire time." I waved to the wireframe of his armor, still hanging in space. "Your interface has this too, of course."

"That's not really the point I'm— you haven't even told me why my left arm feels different."

"Different good, or different bad?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

It was obvious that he was frowning, despite the gunmetal grey knight's helmet and glowing silver visor that covered his face. He moved his shoulders, and a cascade of servos emitted whurrrrs so low that my helmet's amplification was the only reason I could hear it.

The wireframe still rotating between us synced with the live state of his armor, and relayed the actions of all the little pieces that made the Gallant suit work.

Dean stepped further away and, after double checking his surroundings, windmilled his arms a few times.

"Different good," he finally said, voice neutral. "Why though? Your stuff is the same spec right? And why now, if you've been replacing them for over a month?"

I fought to keep the exasperation out of my voice. "Because every component in your armor degrades— especially the older servos. That little dance routine you just did would have cost a traditional shop three thousand dollars in wear and tear.

"Your armor is constantly in a state of breaking down, and my servos down-tune themselves to match the surrounding ones. The left-arm shoulder assembly is just the first contiguous system to not have any legacy components, so the whole thing can perform at a hundred percent. In some situations."

"I would really appreciate it if you'd be more open about this stuff with me."

"Look, if you want to make the effort, I'm happy to have you sit with me whenever I work on your armor. Walk you through everything I do and why. Explain how it works. Hell, you have one of my HUDs— I can teach you to queue a build for failed components and replace them yourself.

"Whatever you want to do, Dean."

He stared at the wireframe of the Gallant armor, and I wondered how much of it he understood, or even appreciated. It wasn't his choice to pass himself off as a Tinker, to hide the Master/Thinker aspect of his power behind something that was 'an easier sell'. To wear the bulky power armor his parents paid to have made.

It wasn't his choice, but but he also had done nothing to increase his understanding of the technology he relied on.

I pulled up a viewport from one of the drones, gliding high above the docks, and pushed it to the shared virtual space. Like a window through space, impossibly high resolution, hanging there in the lab between us.

The sun was setting, and the taller buildings cast long shadows towards the waterfront, partially covering three of the target sites, including the brothel. It was an apartment building just outside the bocks proper, where the industrialized portion gave way to smaller stores and residences. The building was company housing, back in the days when the Bay had an economy, and from the outside it looked like any other rundown building native to Brockton Bay.

Until you noticed the bars on the windows, and the tricked out cars parked nearby.

Arrayed to the right of the viewport was our best analysis of the women… and girls, within. Photos where we had them. Most of them had no legal presence we could find. Other profiles were tagged as estimates— information gathered from heat-signatures and speculative renders based on long range millimeter-wave scans.

Arrayed to the left was a collection of anyone else who was likely to be present. Here we had mugshots and photos. Known associates. Aliases and home addresses. The weapons they were likely to be carrying— knives and small arms, though the heavy sealed cases threw all that into question.

Not all of them had mugshots. There were professional photos listed from company web pages or school year books. The brothel was a business with a depressingly wide range of clientele, especially considering that the iron bars on the windows weren't to keep people out.

Another VA assisted render showed one of the men, a forty-three year old with a squashed nose and pock-marked face, as a heat signature in a room with one of the unidentified silhouettes. A small one.

This wasn't even the first, or the worst, such site we had shut down over the past three months. Shit like this was the hardest part of being a Ward. Worse than the bureaucracy and the paperwork. Worse than following orders and meetings, or being retired to attend school.

The constant knowledge of all the fucked up shit that happened in the city, coupled with the forced understanding that I couldn't go out and do something about it. At least not right away. That, in the long run, doing something on my own was less effective than working with the organization.

And that made putting up with all the bullshit worth it. I might have fought against it, and I still felt that all the surveillance was an overreach. But I didn't think I could accomplish half as much on my own, at least not so quickly.

I technically shouldn't have shared all of it with Dean, but he was likely to go on the op anyways. And there were better things to do than argue about procedure. Him getting upset about servos in a multi million dollar suit of armor paid for by his parents that he neither built, maintained, or showed any interest in learning about was getting on my nerves.

"Many of those women have been conditioned to believe that the police, and the PRT, are evil. That we'll send them back to Cambodia or Myanmar, use them for human experimentation, or consume their souls to fuel our devilish powers."

It was always surreal, dealing with this sort of thing when four hours ago I was sitting in Civics class learning about taxes. It was still hard to believe, that this sort of thing existed, despite dealing with it day after day.

Being a Ward in Brockton Bay was an education in and of itself.

"The PRT wants you there for your people skills, not the power armor. If things get hot, they'll pull you out," I said quietly. "But you know all this."

"It's not that…"

"Then I don't know what to tell you Dean. The Gallant suit doesn't even deliver all that much power— it's just a bunch of little motors, designed to move the armor so you don't have to. It was designed with hard-safes so it can't break your back or anything— the worst thing that would happen is you pull some muscles. The servos are incapable of exploding, and can't spontaneously generate enough energy to launch you into the Bay, or whatever scenario you're afraid of. If something breaks, it's just one part of a whole that stops moving, covered by enough redundancies you likely won't even notice."

He shook his head and left, without saying anything.

I tracked him for a while. He was headed to the motor-pool, not the Wards ready-room where he'd be able to remove the armor. Which is probably what he would have done anyways, without me trying to guilt-trip him. Even if he could be a little by the book, he was a good person in a way that made me feel like even more of an impostor.

The various visualizations winked out of existence, and the prototype ball-drone continued to glide around the lab. Serene, in a way that helped.

I pulled up the consumer-grade virtual agent I'd designed for the smart-glasses and worked on it for a bit. Just wrote code, without thinking. And stopped when I realized what I was doing.

Working on VA code when upset had resulted in weird behavior before.

Dean never thanked me for my work on his armor, not really. He'd given the well-trained platitudes— talked about how he looked forward to working with me. Or 'I appreciate your efforts, Charles', but it rang hollow. Like he was just taking it for granted that Colin or Chris or I would maintain his armor for him. Armor that his parents had paid for, that he hadn't shown the slightest bit of actual interest in.

Fuck— I let out a deep breath. Took comfort in the smooth arc my newest micro drone took through the lab, like a little moon orbiting. Completely uncaring of all the people issues and stress. Just gliding through space. Let myself feel, for a moment, the wonder of bringing a new creation into the world. Something with the potential to have an impact on the lives of thousands or even millions of people.

I needed to stop working myself up over things that didn't matter. Dean was a good person, trying to help others. Getting upset over some perceived slight was ridiculous.

The work I'd done since talking to Dean was a mess, and I reverted it to a previous known state before saving the workspace. Did one more pass through the lab, though I'd been tidying up as I'd worked and it was pretty much as clean as it ever got.

And then I headed to the real-console for another relaxing night of being a Ward in Brockton Bay.

Spoiler: Edits

Last edited: Dec 11, 2022

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ReasonableDoubt

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

Dec 18, 2022

#346

Spoiler: Note

The odors of stale coffee and cologne washed over me as I entered the New Console, as most people still called it, an hour later than originally planned.

Calvert pushed back the op at the last moment again and it was easy to see the annoyiance and borderline resentment on some of the Officers and Agents present.

The New Console was a vast room buried deep in the sub levels of HQ. It consumed the better part of two floors and was laid out like a lecture hall with extra space between the staircased tiers of desks. PRT Agents and Officers filled each level, going through pre-op tasks for what was at least the second time tonight with quiet intensity.

I never met the previous Director, Emily Piggot, but I'd heard enough about her from the other Wards and even some of the Officers to understand that Calvert ran things completely different.

Suddenly switching up operations at the last moment was only the start of it. He spent far more money on upgrades to the facilities and gear PRT Officers used in the field, and had more of a tendency to micromanage. And the biggest difference was how willing he was to integrate the capes under his command into daily PRT operations. Including Tinker-tech.

And the new Console showed this.

The wall at the front was covered with panels, such that the two-story high surface looked more like a portal through reality than a cinder-block wall covered in monitors. Rows of workstations led up towards the back of the room, where an enclosed observation deck loomed over everything, and glowing tiles on the ceiling illuminated the space with soft directed light optimized for long hours staring at screens.

Almost all of it, aside from the structural construction, was my tech.

The panels, the software that ran it all— integrating information from the drones, analysts, BBPD, and tech that PRT officers were starting to wear more frequently into the field. Body-cams and passive scanners that provided audio and visual as a matter of course, but also EM scatter. All of it provided by me, via my LLC, at what only felt like an obscene amount of money until I looked at the rest of the PRT's budget.

"Tenjin," a round-faced man with silver framed called out, carelessly shattering the quiet. "Over here."

I made my way through two rows of analysts and agents. Past officers in black PRT uniforms decorated with rank and squad insignia chatting with Agents wearing rumpled business-casual.

The new-paint smell had only lasted for two weeks. Now console smelled of coffee and cologne, strong enough to make my nose itch. I considered sealing my helmet, but I'd learned enough to know that doing so without a reason felt was rude.

"Doughty," I greeted the man with a smile.

One of my VA's pulled up his profile and positioned it behind Doughty's left shoulder— a rich info-graphic hanging in space, visible only to me. My helmet was always scanning my surroundings, and added that the man was stressed, smoked frequently and recently, and had not gotten enough sleep.

As if the bags under his eyes and the acrid stink of cigarettes didn't make that obvious. But the virtual agent was still a work in progress and nothing it indicated was wrong so, with a thought, I marked the results as positive. An imaginary biscuit for a digital dog that had successfully performed a trick.

It'd be a while, if ever, before I could replicate Colin's lie detector.

"You ready for this?" Doughty was intense, and often seemed to forget he was talking to a Ward. Not that I minded. "No problems with the drones? No recent sighting of Lung?"

The wall of panels at the front of the room showed a representation of our theatre of operation. One of my simpler virtual agents took the video and data from dozens of drones and stitched it together in realtime, such that it looked like we were peering down on a giant, photorealistic game-board version of the docks district.

Suspected ABB assets— cars, people, buildings, were highlighted in red. The seven target sites of tonight's were both highlighted and had specific callout tags floating next to them. PRT units glowed a comfortable green, and Protectorate capes were outlined in their brand colors. A glance told me Gallant and Vista were in a transport headed across town.

"Yes." I answered Doughty, keeping my voice positive with much practice. He'd asked the same things last time, and the time before that. It was all automatically provided to him, but he always wanted to hear it direct from me. "The drones are fine— Rune knocked a few down a few of the lower-flying ones this morning, but nothing meaningful. And if I had something on Lung you'd know. Believe me."

"Good." Doughty rubbed his face. "Look, I know I ask the same shit each time. But all of this is built on your tech, and it's new. It's cool, I'll give you that, but it's new. And new breaks."

"I know," I said. Maybe I hadn't masked my annoyance as well as I'd thought. "All the systems have redundancies— nothing is going to suddenly fail. And they're still running the old console in parallel."

Doughty grunted. "Well, this is how we do things now. Far be it from me to say anything against it. Just let me know if you see anything funny, alright?"

"I will."

I claimed a seat once Doughty started talking to an analyst in front of a terminal. I didn't need a workstation, my helmet— even with prototype VA's— was far more effective than typing away at a keyboard. Within five minutes I'd done another quick run through the op plan and current state.

Dauntless was on standby, hanging in the sky higher than any of the drones. If everything went well, he wouldn't even make an appearance. Militia and Armsmaster were cruising along Seaside drive on their motorcycles— a pretense of a standard patrol. Their route would position them to swoop into the North Side as soon as the op started. Velocity was doing a 'PR Patrol' on the boardwalk, but he could be anywhere in the city within a minute.

"Time," a woman called out. "All units ready."

Doughty looked up at the observation deck in the back of the room.

My helmet constantly scanned my surroundings with a variety of sensors— a good chunk of them copied from Colin. Nothing harmful— I didn't have the battery capacity to be blasting radiation or perceivable lasers even if I wanted to. But it was more than enough to build a sense of what was happening around me. A cloud of data, rendered into a sphere of perception. Generated and monitored by a virtual agent.

"Abort targets one through six. Target seven is a go." Calvert's voice sounded out through the room.

Some of the PRT Agents glanced at Doughty, and began relaying the commands when the man didn't say anything differently. Orders were translated and visualized, as some teams to returned to base and others moved closer to site seven.

Doughty's upward glance, and my own surprise at such a drastic, last minute change, was enough to trip some internal calculus of the VA. It acted.

The VA took all the inconsequential bits of information my helmet was picking up— the sliver of ceiling in the observation room directly observable from my seat, reflections and changes in illumination, vibrations in the glass, past recordings of individuals— on and on, and munged it all together. Extrapolated. Inferred what was happening in the conference room and formed a model of it for human consumption. A model it updated in real-time.

A simulated video feed of Calvert and Renick, standing at the edge of the observation deck, popped into existence on my HUD. Complete with a running transcript of their conversation. The VA-generated video flickered, or distorted bizarrely whenever the software guessed wrong or the data it was picking upshifted, but it was likely accurate.

— I thought we were going to finish the ABB tonight? —

— Analysis got back to me with an update, it's likely that Lung does have the Cornell Bomber in his pocket. —

— They tell us this now? —

— Better now than after something explodes. —

— We should abort. —

"We have a go for site seven," Doughty confirmed, and relayed it through all comms.

As usual, the compartmentalization of data bothered me, even if it was just a change in the analysts models. A change that Calvert was already reacting to by scaling back the operation, and something that wasn't really all that pertinent to a Ward.

— Some risk is necessary for progress. —

— At least tell people what they're up against. —

— To what end? We are still unsure, and that uncertainty would just make the men more fearful and hesitant. —

Flashing yellow and white lights came alive on the map as troop transports picked up speed. Strobes of illumination coloring entire city blocks, reduced to the scale of a diorama by the visualization on the front wall.

System generated call-outs, indicating Militia and Armsmaster's positions, adjusted course sharply as they turned off Seaside Drive and accelerated inland.

— You're not weighing the risks properly. Lung is going to hit back eventually, he has to. And if he has a Bomb Tinker… —

— Again, we can't let what might happen prevent us from acting. —

— Yes, but we can at least give him an out, an option that lets him save face. Putting him up against a wall won't end well for anyone. —

— You and Emily gave him options for eight years. Look where that's gotten us. —

— More than eight hundred people died last year as collateral damage. He wasn't even trying. And now you're backing him into a corner… —

— Letting him enslave people is not an option. Moreover he's unstable, and growing more so. And if he does have the Cornell Bomber, giving them time is the worst thing we could do. —

The more time I spent as a Ward, the more I realized how much horrible shit people did to each other. I thought Lung, and the ABB, were bad when I was attending Winslow. But back then I hadn't even begun to understand what they did.

A lot of the rumors were exaggerations of course— they didn't kidnap people off the streets, not in the United States at least. Why would they, when things were bad enough throughout Southeast Asia that people climbed into shipping containers all on their own. All it took was the promise of a better life in America. Once they were here, with no legal identity and little to no understanding of English, the ABB did whatever it wanted with them.

It was all so fucked.

— You're not bothering the Empire. —

— Victor is in charge, and he's more rational than Lung. Predictable. As repulsive as I find them, they are a known element. —

— And so they get a pass on slavery? —

— You're being ridiculous. I'm beginning to regret keeping you on, Renick. —

— So fire me. —

Additional feeds bloomed into existence at the front of the room. A sad apartment building with iron bars over the windows rapidly growing in size. The image jostled as the transport rumbled over the curb and then slammed a car aside.

More windows opened up and tiled across the side walls of console. Automatically subdued, as they were not particularly relevant just yet, but still there. Displayed for everyone without a HUD to scan at a glance.

— The Empire, for all their… ideology, isn't sex-trafficking or imprisoning people. Victor is still pushing the master race white man's burden angle. —

— Aggressive debt collection and conscription isn't much better. —

— Do you think I am an Empire sympathizer? —

— Of course not. —

— Then come out and say whatever it is you want to say. Comparing fools who borrow money from the Nazis to what the ABB does to twelve year old girls? Implying that I think any of it is permissible? The Empire will fall eventually, but we will focus on the ABB first. —

— I just don't see why we are letting a bunch of Neo-nazis create a new nation on our doorstep. —

— It is not a nation, and I doubt Victor will be able to keep it stable. Let them fail, then we clear them out. —

More views came alive on the wall wall. Pebbled asphalt blurred close to the camera as Armsmaster leaned his bike over to circle the site. Other feeds were from body-cams, a patchwork of footage as officers spilled out of transports. Another window showed a sweeping view of the entire site— like an establishing shot in a movie— as Militia took up overwatch from across the street.

— It's been five months, and they made it through winter. —

— Only because Tenjin gave shelters out to everyone, even them. They would have collapsed on their own. Regardless, they're beginning to frament into factions and fight amongst themselves. —

— I disagree. You blame me and Emily for not pushing Lung, but you're not pushing the Empire when you should. Every day you leave them alone, they get stronger. —

— It doesn't matter, their little fiefdom is not self sufficient. Besides, they do serve a purpose. —

— Need a credible enemy eh? —

In the simulated feed, Calvert glared at Renick.

"Go." Doughty's voice, over all channels.

— There needs to be some areas of… disorder. Where people can buy drugs and gamble, hire a prostitute. An escape valve. —

— And you expect me to believe that? Fascists are a far cry from Amsterdam. —

Site seven was a sort of strip club with an attached lounge.

The building itself was a hodgepodge of old construction and new that probably violated a bunch of safety codes, not that it mattered in comparison to everything else going on. It was likely two separate buildings in the past, joined together to make a larger lounge type area in the middle, with the original two tenements forming separate wings of a sort.

At some point, the ABB had reinforced the entrances to the building. Heavy metal security doors set in re-bar enforced concrete. Padded with a veneer of fake padded leather such that they looked more like a pimp's couch than an entrance.

— And the Merchants? You know where they are, Tenjin has had their activities mapped for months now. We could have cleaned them up with half of what we deployed tonight. —

— Again, we focus on Lung first. —

— Really? Sure you're not just banking an easy win? —

Some part of me, conditioned from a young age to go somewhere else when the grown-ups were talking, convinced of how rude and 'bad' it was to eavesdrop, wanted to shut down the feed. Wanted to correct the VA that had spun up the extrapolated video feed and transcript to make sure it wouldn't do something like this in the future. Even thought about letting Calvert know I'd overheard him talking, and apologizing for it.

But for all that he did for me, how helpful he had been, I'd never been able to shake the feeling that there was something off about Calvert. He was kind to me, helped me, yes. He was always so reasonable. Which was a weird thing to complain about. But no one else I interacted with was that smooth, that easy to work with. I even clashed with Colin, sometimes. But never Calvert.

— Hardly. We also have people struggling with addiction who can't or won't deal with the Empire. I'd rather they have some recourse, rather than become desperate and violent. —

— Save your bullshit for the Press. —

— The best time to deal with the Merchants was years ago, Robert. —

The way Calvert interacted with other people was radically different. The way he spoke with Dennis or Chris nothing like how he spoke to me. Or how he spoke to people in the PRT and during press releases.

And now, listening to him speak in private to Renick, was yet another new aspect of the man.

— Always back on us, eh? Emily never did like you. —

— I'm aware. —

One of the Agents magnified a rendered view of the interior, composited from multiple drones. I'd played around a lot over the past months with different wavelengths of light, but the drones had a limited energy budget. They were mostly passive, super-efficient fixed wing constructs that stayed aloft mostly thanks to thermals, and used solar for everything else.

Active scanning would have been nice, but it consumed way too much energy. However, any kind of city already had a plethora of radio waves bouncing around it. The drones were precise sensor platforms that provided multiple points of reference. With an understanding of how different frequencies radio waves were affected by what materials, we could to some extent extrapolate the interior of buildings even if we couldn't directly see into them.

Also, stupidly, the brothel had WI-Fi. Which made it even easier to build a rough image of the interior.

The Agent double checked the render before speaking. "Breach site clear."

The overbuilt security doors at the front of the building did absolutely nothing as the APC rammed through the rear wall. Plush u-shaped couches arranged around a glittering table burst apart as oversized tires rolled over them and into the strip club area. The timing was important— late enough in the day that there were likely to be important gang members there, but early enough, even with the initial delay, that it wasn't crowded.

The transport reversed and officers rushed into the building. Around me, sitting safely in the depths of the PRT building, body-cam feeds came off the side walls of Console and moved to the front.

I tapped into an unedited audio feed from one of the officers. Panicked shouts and distorted calls for surrender played in my helmet. Gunshots, engine roar, and screams of confusion.

The juxtaposition was always strange. Out there in the city, chaos, while PRT HQ was quiet and comfortable. Elegantly lit with glare-free lighting. Console was dispassionate, even as officers stormed a building and fired bean-bag rounds or tazers at anyone who didn't immediately hit the ground.

"Assault rifle," one of the sergeant's voice came over global comms.

It still amazed me how calm the officers were, in these situations. The sergeant's voice had an intensity, a stress to it, but he wasn't shouting. Just a controlled statement, a fact that the rest of the team, and the other teams, needed to be aware of.

Field-staff, the officers, would talk about the stuff they trained for, the stuff they went up against if you asked them about it. And I got the sense that while they didn't like going up against guns, let alone Assault Rifles, they preferred it to the alternative.

Firearms, at least, operated by rules that everyone understood. Assault rifles wouldn't make a man turn on his own. Guns wouldn't suck the air from their chests or explode the blood from their eyes. Wouldn't melt their skin off with acid, or crush their skulls with an errant swipe.

— This is new. —

— I don't appreciate you nitpicking every little thing that goes wrong. The ABB has used rifles before. —

— Not against us. —

— Regardless, we anticipated something like this happening. —

— And if this is just the beginning? —

— What do you propose then? We continue your policy of letting Lung do whatever he wants? —

— Keep him contained, and don't push him. If we had a kill order on him it'd be different, but without that the best you can do is minimize the damage. —

— You didn't minimize the damage, you just spread it out over a decade. Your quarterly reports looked better, but really you were just paying tribute to the a dragon you should have slain. —

— Eight hundred and forty three deaths, Thomas. —

PRT officers covered each other with practiced motions as they moved through the structure. It was still hard for me to understand what was happening just by looking at the different camera feeds. Especially when they were arrayed as a bunch of jostling body-cam video. Another thing to tailor a VA for— it'd be trivial to just give the officers better cameras, with a wider field of view and then have a VA trim it down so it felt steady.

"Too much…" Doughty muttered. "Why are they fighting back so hard?"

Renick had a point— assault rifles were new. Most of the ABB carried handguns and flashy melee weapons for intimidation. Especially at a brothel— deterrents and threat displays to keep people in line more than something to fight with. They certainly didn't normally have anything that could have fended off a coordinated assault by two PRT strike teams.

Every other site we had hit over the past couple of months had folded as soon as they understood what was happening. The ABB members on site fleeing, and surrendering when they couldn't. Some of them even seemed happy about it— a lot of the ABB rank and file didn't really want to work for Lung.

One of the analysts had a bewildered look on his face. My helmet pulled up his profile as I glanced at him. He'd been hired a few months ago— newer than me even. He was trying to watch everything at once, his head swiveling from the front of the room to the body cam footage tiled along the side walls, to his workstation, and then back to the front wall again.

The feeds were diverging more as the Officers started to clear the building, spreading out into the wings that shot off from the lounge area.

The agent flinched as one of the feeds flickered violently. "Officer down!"

— The Empire is making guns now, you know. This is just a whore-house. If we are ever going to move on the Empire, it's going to be a lot worse than this. —

— Tenjin will have better armor for us eventually. —

I found myself paying more attention to Calvert than the operation, and almost turned to look up at the observation deck directly. He wasn't wrong, really, we had talked about it. Armor was a common topic during or one on one meetings. But it wasn't a focus of mine at the moment— more of a side project. And I certainly hadn't discussed outfitting the entire PRT with it.

— The PRT can not rely on a Ward. Especially one we have so little control over. What you are doing is madness. —

— Look around you Robert. I've worked with men that would kill for this much visibility into an op. Not to mention what the drones do for us every day. We use the tools available. —

He so easily seemed to become a different person, depending on who he talked to.

But… that was natural, wasn't it? We all, to some extent, changed depending on who were talking to. I'm sure my friends from Exeter wouldn't even recognize me after a semester of school at Winslow, not to mention almost a year at the group home. Walking through parts of Brockton Bay that, back then, most people were nervous about driving through.

And I changed again after becoming a Ward. And when I enrolled at Arcadia. I'm also a different person, in a sense, when streaming— despite all my efforts to remain 'authentic'.

Different personas, for different contexts.

Why was I weirded out when Calvert did it?

— Well, I've formally filed my objections. —

— I'm aware. —

— Those drones break so many privacy laws and FAA regs I don't even know where to begin. —

— Tinker-tech utilized by the PRT can be exempted. —

— Regardless. The boy has no love for us, and we have no handles on him. —

— He's coming around. The PRT isn't perfect but it is a force for good. For order. Tenjin has come to understand this. —

— Then why is he working so hard to establish his own influence? Those streams are a PR and OPSEC nightmare. —

— We taught him that lesson ourselves I believe. I have no illusions that he'll go on to join the Protectorate, but he's working well with us now and I'm confident that will continue. —

Part of what bothered me was the casual way they were chatting.

PRT officers— people I'd come to known over meals in the mess hall, men and women who had spent hours teaching me everything from situational awareness to close quarters combat— were being shot at with assault rifles.

Calvert and Renick's conversation was at odds with the intensity of it all. Maybe they'd just been doing it for so long they were desensitized, or maybe it was an artifact of the VA-generated video and transcript, but Calvert in particular seemed… cold. To casual, talking about other matters, in the midst of an operation where one officer was already down.

Things were starting to settle down though. An officer was dragging the man who'd been shot back towards the breach-point, his camera panning over the men and women still prone on the floor of the strip-club. Another PRT fire-team filtered past him, orderly and practiced.

"Grenade!?" The same officer who called out the assault rifles, his voice no longer as calm.

More jostled flashes of chaos, contained in neat little rectangular video feeds, pinned to the wall of console.

And then we lost two.

I froze, for a moment, wondering what happened. Hoping it was just the cameras, and that the men were alright. Or that they were at least alive. Part of my mind jumping towards ways to monitor life signs. Or providing officers in with a simpler version of my helmet— it already had enough biometrics to extr—

"Grenade!" Another voice called out, and this time it was a pipe-bomb arcing towards the forward team.

Velocity appeared between one frame and the next, amongst the wreckage and smoke of the first grenade. He cradled the capped pipe with the inside of his foot, just as it tumbled off the marred concrete floor. Like a soccer player mid-kick, he lofted the pipe back past the cowering gunmen and the sallow-faced fellow that had thrown it, deep into the corner of the hallway.

The pipe didn't explode— at least, not like the first grenade did.

A weird distortion in the air tore at the back wall of the lobby, daylight leaking through the jagged hole. A moment later, the man who'd thrown the pipe collapsed into a mangled pile of flesh. Blood didn't spray so much as it simply flowed out of the man in a wave of red fluid— like a full bottle of tomato juice shattering on the floor.

— That confirms the Bomb Tinker, we need to rethink this strategy. —

— We need to finish this now. —

— Imagine if Velocity hadn't been there. —

— We had him on standby for a reason. —

— Damnit Thomas, what if it was something else? What if the whole block went up? You're provoking a madman— who despite what your vaunted intelligence department told us, very obviously has a Bomb Tinker in his pocket. —

— What ifs don't help us here. It is what it is, now we'll deal with it. —

— He's had her for what, a week? And they're already arming pimps with whatever the hell that was? —

Neither of them looked surprised, or even particularly bothered. Though that could have been an artifact of the VA generated image. It had access to a variety of data to work from but ultimately it was translating a cloud of data from senses that had very little in common with how my eyes worked. The process involved some guess work.

The actual command center, or console, was buzzing with a panicky sort of energy. I relayed the relevant video to Colin, and he started running towards the building.

— We're lucky we didn't lose half the squad. We need to abort. —

— Doughty has it handled. This is the work, Robert. Better we face the threat now, on our terms, than when they take out a bridge or a power plant. —

"Pull back," Doughty said, evenly. "Velocity— any more of those?"

"Negative," Velocity replied as soon as Doughty finished speaking.

That's when things really started to go wrong.

I nudged one of the drones lower— the pipe bomb had torn a jagged hole in a rear exterior wall, allowing for line of sight into the corridor. One of the Analysts spotted what I was doing, and pushed the higher resolution feed onto the wall.

One of the remaining gunmen— my helmet auto-populated my HUD with his name and details: Jared Tung, nineteen years old, an unfortunate history in and out of juvenile detention before dropping out of Winslow. A collection of warrants and offenses, a low credit score.

Jared stared blankly at the pool of blood, slowly soaking into the garish carpeting of the hallway. The blood began to over-saturate the carpet and collect on the concrete exposed by the first, normal, grenade. Bits of drywall and wood floated on the surface, flecks of white and gray like dirty snow against the dark red.

The length of pipe blocked part of the flow of blood, still mostly intact. It hadn't exploded, but tiny panels had opened along its length. Like a pine cone that had spread its seeds.

Jared sighed, as if in relief. Smiled.

And then he exploded into a fine mist.

Three other gunmen, and one of the men on the floor in the lounge, died at the same time. All detonated in a variety of ways.

The top two-thirds of one man's head became what appeared to be crystal. Another man fell to the floor and burst like a delicate water balloon, his bones vanished or transmuted into something non-structural. The third simply died, and the one in the lounge crumpled into a baseball-sized knot of flesh before decompressing in a spray of viscera.

The new agent, the bewildered one, vomited all over his workstation. The bottom portion of my helmet unfolded and clicked shut automatically and filled my nose and mouth with cool, oxygen-rich air. It was the only thing that kept me from throwing up as well.

What I did to Daisuke, that ABB guy, back in December with my bolo-gun was nothing compared to this.

"Get that off the main display," Doughty barked out. "And someone tell me what the hell just happened."

I forced my thoughts back on track, and resisted the urge to flick through video feeds until I could see if the two officers whose feed we'd lost were still alive. Tried to stay focused on the larger picture.

A scatter of explosions detonated throughout the rest of tenement-turned-brothel.

The eastern part of the building sagged briefly and then collapsed in a slow cloud of dust and debris. Something akin to gelatin oozed out of the wreckage.

All within a four seconds of the first man dying to his own grenade.

Calvert was holding his face in his hands, his fingers outstretched to press into his forehead and the sides of his skull.

I sifted through the sea of information generated by the drones and other sensors. A pattern emerged— a short pulse of exotic radiation microseconds before the detonation. Uniform radiation signature, despite the… variety of effects. It originated at the epicenter of the explosions though, so it wasn't a triggering effect.

I put it up on the large screen at the front of the Console, even as I started to walk everyone through what we knew. A nice clean abstract model of the brothel, with renders of where the detonations had occurred. And where the survivors I could detect were.

Then I tasked a VA to pour through the data again, trying to find the signal that triggered the detonation. If there was one.

— Jesus Christ. Is this what you wanted, Thomas? —

— Not now Renick. —

"Bring squads one and two back in. Contain the area." Calvert's voice sounded overhead and on all-comms at the same time. "Velocity— are the explosions a threat to you?"

"Some. The crystal thing was instant." Velocity replied, slightly too fast.

I played the event back— data and video.

Made myself watch the gunman dissolve in slow motion, confirming again the origin of the radiation spike. Still the epicenter of the effect. An expanding sphere, turning Jared into mist. It was only on the playback that I noticed his feet were still solid, or at least the bottom halves of them. Expensive sneakers cut off, right below the ankle. The bright green and red of the rest of the shoe sprayed with little droplets of blood.

I explained what I knew on the command channel. That the effect tended to be spherical in nature, centered around people's heads, with a maximum observed radius of 165 centimeters, though not to rely on that as an absolute maximum. How it was preceded by a short spike of exotic radiation.

And the obvious conclusion— that someone had implanted a fucking bomb in these people's heads.

"Velocity— survivors," Colin's voice came over the shared channel, continuing to give orders and ask for PRT assistance.

His cobalt-blue and silver form gleamed, despite the debris and gray dust scattered over everything else, as he strode into the partially collapsed building. He'd be blaming himself, likely. The whole thing happened fast enough that he'd been waiting outside, where he could respond if Lung started to act.

After that, it was routine. A sad routine. Colin scanned the site for more bombs, as did I, and then everyone went into the same mode of operation used after any parahuman fight. Carefully combing over the wreckage for survivors.

Miss Militia kept Dean and Missy back from the wreckage, and both Wards instead walked across the street to where Officers were coralling the people they were escorting out of the brothel.

Dean's silver armor and Missy's brightly colored costume should have looked ridiculous moving amongst the shocked men and women huddling underneath metallic emergency blankets. But somehow, they didn't. It was obvious how the women lost some of their fear, some of their panick, as they talked to Vista. Or when Dean crouched down and talked to them, even briefly, in a language many of them didn't understand. A counterpoint, to the menacing black armor of the PRT officers.

— I'll start locking this down. We need to think about next steps. —

Renick pulled up an overlay— for all his complaints he didn't hesitate to use my tech when it benefited him. The overlay showed phones with an active signal in the immediate area— both traditional and my own devices. A few dozen, including some of the morons laying on the floor of the strip club that had started taking video.

Renick tasked two officers to go around grabbing phones. Not that it'd do any good— videos of the operation had already appeared on the DNet. No direct shots of a detonation, but a few different angles on the building collapsing. Clips of the Officer that went down first getting dragged out, and the shocked look on people's faces. Pictures of Dean and Missy walking through the small crowd filling the parking lot across the street.

— You should order Tenjin to pull it from the DNet. —

— The Wards report to you, Robert. —

— He responds better to you. —

— You handle it. I need to start getting ahead of this with Washington. —

— Damnit Thomas, —

Renick glared at Calvert's back as he left the observation room. The VA killed the inferred video feed shortly afterwards.

On site, one of the drones picked up Armsmaster through the jagged hole towards the back of the building. He extended his halberd towards a piece of metal laying between the truncated green-and-red high tops. Somehow lifted it from the blood without actually touching it, and smoothly placed it in a metal container.

"Tenjin," Renick's voice rang out through console, deeper than Calvert's had been. "Scrub video of this from the DNet before it spreads."

"May I ask why?" I said, hating that he made this public.

Colin continued to move in and out of the drone-feed as he examined the site. Body cams showed PRT officers as they moved through the rest of the building, continuing to pull people out of it.

Some of the survivors went with them quietly.

Others fought bitterly, terrified and confused. A girl that had to be younger than me thrashed and kicked until armored gloves closed around her ankle. Another Officer pressed her into the floor until she gave up and laid there, sobbing. It was easy for me to see that they were being as gentle as they could, given the situation, but there was only so much they could do. Faceless in their armor and helmets, unable to explain the situation to someone who didn't speak English.

I found myself thankful Vista and Gallant were there— even if they weren't in the building itself. Both were great at helping people, at bringing hope.

Renick's voice came over the speaker again. "We lost here. Some of that video will be graphic, and terrifying in nature. That benfits the ABB— makes them look strong. They gain credibility at our expense, and that limits our options. Especially if something like this gets plastered all over the ten o'clock news.

"And because I'm giving you a direct order."

I was aware of the agents in Console looking at me, even as they continued to relay information to various squads and coordinated a response from emergency services. Ambulances were prepped ahead of time, but the fallout was bigger than anticipated.

Renick's request made sense, in a way. But it felt like a mistake to me. People should know a threat existed, so they could make better choices. If Lung's new Tinker was putting bombs in people's heads, the entire city should know that so they can run the fuck away or fight back with everything they had. Or however they wanted to respond.

It would easiest to just agree with Renick. Even if I didn't follow through and censor everything, I could tell him 'I tried', and that would likely be the end of it.

But for some reason the thought of doing that pissed me off.

"Respectfully, no."

Doughty's eyebrows raised, and the room quieted further. I had turned towards the observation deck, and at some point Renick had toggled the glass to be two-way transparent instead of near opaque like it had been. He was staring down at me.

"You are disobeying a direct order?"

"I guess so."

He sighed, heavily. "Get out of here. You're removed from duty."

Spoiler: Edits

Last edited: Dec 18, 2022

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ReasonableDoubt

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

Jan 1, 2023

#366

Spoiler: Note

My helmet's proximity alarm went off, twice, waking me up just as someone shook my shoulder. Half formed reflexes from the CQC training they gave me kicked in, badly, and I half fell out of my chair to get away. It was one of those abnormally high seats we had in the lab too— I'd fallen asleep while waiting for a build to finish.

"Sorry." A man in a business jacket and a PRT PT t-shirt backed away from me, his hands held up peacefully. "You weren't answering your calls."

My HUD populated with his profile, and I half-heartedly took note of his name. Kevan. The same agent that had vomited all over console. He looked as exhausted as I felt.

After Renick kicked me out, I'd shut myself in the lab and went to work on the the smart glasses. Trying to distract myself while I waited for the VA's to find something in the mountain of signal data.

I failed.

Worried about the ABB's new Tinker putting more bombs in people's heads, I had started up a stream. Told people what was happening, what I knew, what I suspected. Then, the VA's still not having found anything, I went back to working on the glasses.

"They sent me to check on you." Kevan continued, like he was talking to a startled animal.

A mental flex, and the various alerts and messages I'd missed while asleep exploded into a cloud around me. The fabricator was still mid-build, no errors. My prototype LTA drone had collapsed inward upon itself and was laying in the corner. My VA was still iterating over the signal logs from last night, trying to isolate whatever it was that triggered the bombs. And a high priority email from Renick, some other people in the PRT East structure. Along with a meeting request, that I was already late to.

"Meeting?" I asked Keven, while I walked over and picked up the little LTA drone from the floor.

Still half asleep, my mind was flooded with how the little vacuum balloon had failed. Part of the housing near one of the electroaerodynamic thrust sources had overheated— not enough to make a difference normally, but with the atmosphere pressing down on the sphere at a little more than fourteen pounds per inch, it was a critical failure. The surface, measured in microns, weakened. As a result, an internal strut had pushed through and caused vacuum breach followed by partial collapse.

Ways to improve it came to me, from the obvious step of just making the shell thicker, to subtler ways of optimizing the little thruster blisters to more efficiently expel with the air it was pushing. Other ways of perhaps integrating the heat reclamation tech Colin had helped integrate with the shelte—

"I'm supposed to take you to the conference room on 3B," Keven said.

I shook my head to clear it, set broken little sphere on the counter, and followed Agent Keven out the door.

The walk helped to wake me up somewhat. It was five-thirteen in the morning and I'd slept for less than an hour. The blazing florescent tubes of PRT HQ's sub-level lighting did nothing for my headache. I hadn't… hate tinkered, I guess, like that in a while. Just lost myself in the work until I had passed out.

Keven left me at the door. I walked in on Calvert, Renick and Colin sitting around an oval table surrounded by 'secure' teleconference equipment.

Renick looked particularly rumpled, bags under his eyes and the cuffs of his sleeves rolled up. Colin was in full Armsmaster gear, and I had the impression he was using his HUD to get work done— he simply nodded at me. Without his usual smile.

Calvert, as always, wore a standard PRT Officer's uniform, and looked calmer and more rested than the other two men.

"Good morning," I said, hating how hesitant I sounded.

The room was also, somewhat stupidly, oval in shape. Big flat-screens mounted on the walls and plush leather chairs around the table. The screens were obsolete in that painful way tech that was top of the line and expensive ten years ago got— thick bezels of plastic faded and discolored with age. Bulky, with a palpable sense of weight.

Three of the screens pulsated with a subtle shade of red, still hot from whatever call they'd been used for. I absently rewarded the VA responsible for mapping extra-sensory data onto my vision, indicating a job well done, and it almost instantly built on the positive feedback and integrated other less obvious signs of heat across my augmented vision. Renick's cup of coffee. The screen that was still on, showing a frozen frame from my latest stream.

"I saw that you collected one of the bombs." I sat down next to Colin. "Would it be alright if I take a look at it? I'm still searching for the detonation signal and I'm starting to think it wasn't tradi—"

"Tenjin," Renick cut in, putting his phone away. "Do you know why you are here?"

I glanced at the monitor with my helmeted face on it.

"Yes," Renick said. "That."

He unpaused the video, and my voice filled the room. "The ABB has a Tinker, and they are putting bombs in people's heads. This isn't a joke, and I'm not exagerrating.

"If you are living near the ABB, please be careful. Consider leaving, if you can. "

Three icons populated the bottom right quarter of the screen. Viewed on one of my devices, people would be able to interact with them to pull up video of the bombs, and the raid from the night before.

It wasn't something I had done— my streams regularly had millions of viewers, something that still blew my mind. They had done the work, finding relevant videos on the DNet in a matter of minutes, and linked it to my stream in real time. Each link was further vetted by yet more viewers, who piled their trust and rep rating onto it, boosting it to the point where it showed up on the main stream.

I'd considered putting up what we suspected about the Tinker, her real identity, but held off. We weren't sure yet, and I still remembered the frantic search for me back in December. I didn't want to kick off anything like that.

"Everyone in Brockton Bay needs to understand what is happening. We're fighting this—"

Renick paused the video again. "Were you going to tell us about this?"

"I submit pre and post forms for every stream." Automatically, by VA. "This one was filed properly as — "

"You submit more paperwork than any three departments— you know damn well we can't go through everying. Especially on a night like this! What in the world possessed you to broadcast to six million people what I explicitly ordered you to suppress!"

I made it a habit not to actually look at viewership numbers. Six million seemed high, but plausible. The legacy internet was still many orders of magnitude larger than the DNet, and people had been re-broadcasting my streams for a while now.

"People need to know when there's such a threat to their safety that they can take steps themselves to avoid. Everyone deserves to decide for themselves, to be capable of doing what's right for them."

"In one night you've done more damage to the image of the PRT and of Parahumans in general than any Ward in the history of the program. The Vice President called the Chief Director after this was re-broadcasted on CNN! It hasn't even been six hours! Do you have any idea what manner of—"

"Robert," Calvert talked over him, calmly. "I think that's enough. It's done, and I'm sure Tenjin understands the ramifications of his actions."

"Why are we even wasting time on this?" I asked, failing to keep the frustration from my voice. "I haven't found the trigger yet, but if I can look at one of the bombs, if—"

"No," Renick shook his head. "You're suspended."

"What?"

"You're off the team. Formally suspended."

"Are you crazy? I'm not as good as Armsmaster but this is what I do. I can help find—"

Renick shook his head, and then talked over me. "If it was up to me, you'd be finished as a Ward, or at least shipped out to Alaska."

"That's enough," Calvert said, concilliatory. "I'm sorry Tenjin— there's too much heat on this. I'm working on getting it resolved, but some sort of formal apology on your part would go a long way towards that. I can help you draft an email—"

"No."

"I'm sorry?" Calvert's skin twisted across his skull as he raised an eyebrow.

"I'm not. I refuse to apologize for actions that I still believe were correct."

Calvert sighed his disappointed sigh. "Surely you can see we need to put this behind us, and get back to work. It's just a statement."

Left unsaid was that I didn't have to actually mean it. Renick was looking at Calvert with something like disgust, and Colin was frowning— though I also got the impression he was working on something through his helmet's interface.

I understood what he meant. It was one of the things Calvert tried to coach me on. How it was better in the long run to go along with people. To avoid the sort of confrontation that could alienate people.

It was right out of "How to Win Friends and Influence People", and I hated it.

If that was something I was willing to do, I would have simply said 'yes sir' to Renick, and then never completed the order. He would have never known, and the information about the Bomb-Tinker would have been leaked anonymously.

"I'm not going to follow an immoral order—"

Renick scoffed.

"Very well." Calvert put on his disappointed face. "You're still a minor, and a legal ward of the PRT. That means you have a safe place here while we work through this, even if you are suspended. You will however be restricted from secure areas."

I looked at Colin. Hoping at least someone would stand with me.

"I'm sorry," He said, with a frown.

"Are you seriously doing this?" I turned back to Renick.

He seemed to have gotten himself under control. "It's already done. Your civilian possessions are being moved to a guest suite on eleven."

"Every Ward besides Stalker has my tech integrated into their costume. I've been maintaining Gallant's armor for months—"

"We did fine without you, we'll make do. An institution as important as the PRT, or the Wards, cannot afford to be dependent upon any one individual."

I wanted to bring up the drones they relied on, the console I'd just helped them build, but everything integrated into daily operations was automated as much as possible. Design to function without my active participation, or that of any Tinker. Perhaps not as well— but enough for the service to be worth far more than the monthly fee Brockton Bay and the PRT paid to my LLC.

Renick put his phone back in his pocket, again. "You'll turn in your helmet and costume immediately after this meeting."

"That's his mask," Calvert said, still calmly seated at the head of the table. "Is he under arrest?"

Renick glared at him. "He has flouted the identity protection guidelines for months so I can only conclude he doesn't care. His helmet controls everything— he's turning it in. He can have a domino if he suddenly develops a sense of self preservation."

Colin shook his head shook, minutely. I thought he looked regretful, but he didn't say anything.

"Whatever." I threw my helmet on the table. Vanilla reality flooded back in even as the glowing orange and blue panels automatically dimmed. No feed of information, no profiles or extra context. No clever shading to indicate heat signatures or EM. "Anything else?"

Renick rolled his eyes.

"I'll be taking control of the DNet, and revoking your admin credentials." Colin said, softly.

"Of course. Fine."

"Your Wards phone," Renick prompted, still standing between me and the door.

"I cloned it… it's my personal phone as well."

"Regardless."

My phone clattered lightly on the conference room table, coming to rest next to the helmet, and Renick moved out of the way.

Keven was still waiting for me outside the conference room. He didn't seem surprised to see me without my helmet.

"I'm supposed to escort you to the locker room, and take care of the rest of your gear." He said, tiredly.

He followed me into the locker room, and even if he turned around while I changed, it still made me feel like a prisoner. He wasn't smug about it— he didn't smirk or anything so crude. But he seemed… satisfied.

I folded the shimmering, dark-gray cloth so that the blue and orange logo that rested over the chest when worn was on top, and handed it to him. He took it and escorted me out of the locker room with the air of a job well done.

It shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did. Once I got my hands on a phone, I could rebuild everything on one of the fabricators up north. The costume in its entirety was easily within the mass envelope capable of being delivered by drone.

"Thank you Agent Kennedy," Calvert's urbane voice tore me from my thoughts. "I'll take it from here."

The Director dressed like an officer, like the grunt soldiers of the PRT. But the Agent practically came to attention before hurrying off. Taking my costume with him, and leaving me alone with Calvert.

"I'm sorry Charles. Truly." Calvert started walking as soon as Agent Kevan left. "I tried to shelter you but this hit me… harder than I'd expected. I'm working to get you re-instated as soon as possible.

"In the meantime… I don't believe Renick understands just how capable your tech is. As long as you are subtle about it, Armsmaster and myself won't correct him."

My headache was back full force, and I wished, for once, he'd just speak plainly. "Am I suspended or not?"

I put my badge against the elevator panel out of habit, only for it to flash red and buzz at me. We were still on a secure floor. Calvert smiled apologetically and used his own.

"We've talked about this before. In the real world, it becomes impossible to divide things so clearly. You still have support— myself, Colin. The more progressive elements of the PRT and even some of the congressional oversight committee. People that understand how much value you provide."

"So why suspend me? Why now, when I could be the most useful?"

"The Wards, the PRT, and the Chief Director need to appear in control. Your message to the public last night, well intentioned as it was, undermined that."

"And that's more important than shutting down the ABB's Tinker?"

The elevator dinged open on floor eleven. It was primarily guest rooms and non secure conference rooms. The room I'd brainstormed ideas in with Glenn back in January was just down the hallway. It was also empty and eerily quiet at this hour, especially compared to the hustle of the secure floors.

"You're falling into the trap of binary thinking again." Calvert guided me down the corridor, away from the conference room I'd used with Glenn. "We will address the ABB. Not as effectively as we would with you of course, but— and I say this out of kindness and respect— your suspension will not stop this Department from performing its duty. And even if you personally are not involved, you've done a marvelous job in making your tech accessible to the rest of our analysts."

He stopped at the end of the hallway, in front of a door with 1103 on it in golden numbers. Like something you'd see in a hotel.

"Try your badge," Calvert said.

The lock clicked over, and opened the door to one of the PRT's guest suites. For a moment, I thought it was the same one they'd locked me into five months ago. But as my heart rate calmed, I noticed the differences. A real window, of the same ballistic glass as Calvert's office, instead of the simulated light planet they'd had in my cell. Even if it looked out on an office building across the street, it was a world of difference. The TV, remote, and telephone were unprotected. I even had control over the HVAC unit, softly rattling away.

The door was just as solid though.

"Try to relax," Calvert said from the hallway. "And please, don't do anything drastic. We still depend on you, whatever Renick says. I'll get this ridiculous suspension lifted."

The door thudded shut behind him.

I flopped backwards on the bed and stared at the ceiling. I was exhausted— falling asleep in the lab never felt restful— but couldn't asleep. My head throbbed in pain every second as the old-school analog clock on the wall incremented time. I kept going back over the meeting in my mind. And then the stream, and finally to the raid on the brothel last night. Trying to find something I could have done better, done different.

It wasn't long before the urge to build surged up, stronger than it had last night. The need to check on the latest build of the smart glasses, to pull up an interface and start iterating on the LTA drone. Visualizing either build in my head, without the aid of my environment and unable to progress it, made my headache even worse.

Eventually, I gave up and started going through body weight exercises. It helped, a little bit. To dull the urge to iterate, to build. But it also made my situation seem all the more pathetic. Reminded me of the last time I was locked in rooms similar to these. The last time I'd tried to work myself to exhaustion with pushups and bodyweight squats.

I stopped.

The difference, this time, was that I wasn't a prisoner. The door wasn't locked.

I threw the PRT fatigues on the suitcase rack, showered, and dug some casual clothes out of the pile someone had brought up from room in Wards HQ.

Someone knocked on the door before I finished dressing.

Dennis was standing there in civilian clothes when I opened it. "This is bullshit."

The only time I'd seen him at HQ before noon was when he'd spent the night. Instinctively, my eyes flicked to where a clock would be on my HUD. Then I reached for my pocket for a phone. Finally I glanced at the old analog clock on the wall that had been driving me nuts with it's incessant ticking.

"Isn't it a little early for you to be here?"

He snorted and pushed past me. Looked around the room curiously. Whoever had took my stuff from Wards HQ had piled everything on the table in the corner— clothes and textbooks. Guess that was all they felt was 'acceptable'. Didn't even leave me with a computer.

"Emergency all-hands," he said, turning back to me. "At least they put you up in luxury."

I snorted.

He sighed. "Yeah."

He tossed a phone at me.

I caught it without thinking— DTech, two iterations old. Probably the one he had used until I gave him an upgrade. Dennis didn't really get my tech, not like Chris did, but he wasn't dumb. It was… a surprisingly thoughtful gesture. He must have put together what being suspended would mean, and immediately sought to help.

But it wasn't needed, and would just bring heat down on him too.

My phones were all over the city. The whole point was to make my tech so ubiquitous that anyone that wanted it could have it. I hadn't… quite gotten to that stage yet. People, scalpers really, kept on collecting as much as they could and reselling them outside the city. But I had money— I could get a phone.

"I appreciate it, really." I held it out towards him. "But no need getting you suspended too."

He held his hands out to the side, as far away from the phone as possible, and stepped backwards to sit on the shelf by the window.

"Nah, more like chewed out." He grinned. "I've been chewed out before."

"I can get one— "

"Look, this makes it easier right? Saves you time? You don't have to go scrounging around, offering people money or something?"

"Well, yeah. But if they ask, I want to tell them honestly that I went out and got one on my own. Still not sure what Renick was thinking."

"He still uses a Blackberry." He shrugged, as if that was answer enough. "Look. Stop being such a try-hard— I'm doing this because I want to. If Renick or Calvert want to come down on me too? Let them. Fuck both of them.

"I used to think Renick was alright but this is just dumb. And I'm sure the rest of us feel the same way. Well, maybe not Dean. And not Missy, because Dean. And Carlos is taking the leadership thing pretty seriously. And Sophia… yeeesh.

"But anyway! You're one of us, and I gotchu. And if I get in trouble too? Good."

The phone wouldn't make things that much easier— it'd save a bit of time at best. But the gesture, after Colin and Calvert stood by and did nothing, meant more than the convenience. It struck me that Dennis would probably even go down to the Wards lab and grab anything I wanted, if I asked him. And if he had access.

"Thank you."

"If they ask, make sure you tell them where you got it." He slapped his hands on his knees, like an old man, before getting up and heading to the door. "Suppose I should get changed and head on over for the emergency power point."

He have a sarcastic salute with two fingers, just before the heavy door thudded shut. Leaving alone, again, in a guest suite that seemed to so perfectly mirror the cell they'd put me in five months prior.

Well, first step: assess the damage.

I picked up the phone Dennis had left me, and tried to log in. Only to fail.

With a sinking sensation, I logged in with my civilian account— the same one I used while at Arcadia. All the apps I never used (I hardly touched my civilian account) were already there and configured— the messages and mail, the contacts, reminders and bookmarks and whatnot. Each individual user environment was stored as much in the DNet, storage and compute distributed amongst all the contributing devices, as it was on any individual piece of hardware. My civilian account was, sadly, just that. No special access, no tools.

But that didn't matter.

Ignoring the various alerts and waiting messages, I pulled up a command line. Using a terminal on a touch screen was, as always, annoying. But at least it gave me options. Let me confirm what I'd feared.

Colin hadn't just removed my admin credentials. He'd disabled the entire Tenjin account.

I thought he'd be on my side, even if he'd been quiet during the meeting. He could have easily followed the letter of the PRT's request and removed my Admin rights. That would have been a mostly symbolic gesture.

Instead he genuinely hurt me.

My funds, in the form of DP's, were inacessible. My various privileges— preferred computing on the distributed supercomputer that was the DNet, statistics and information feeds, access to the data driving the moderation market, the evolving decision trees of VA's that supported it— all gone.

I'd also lost the sheer reach I'd enjoyed— which was probably why he did it. My other accounts didn't have the rep or trust scores of the Tenjin identity, and while I could build those scores back up, it would take time.

If I openly defied my 'suspension'— if I claimed to be Tenjin on a new stream and did something to prove it, or something similar— Colin could just clobber the account before it gained any sort of following. Or nuke the reputation and trust scores.

He wouldn't even have to do it manually— the VA's were based on his code. I'm sure he could train one to do dumb manual work like that for him.

My infrastructure was also mostly tied to the Tenjin account— but at least there, I could do something about it.

From the beginning, I'd kept the DNet as its own, distinct, thing. Eventually I wanted to hand control over the DNet to some sort of community aggregator, so it could continue to grow and expand without being at the mercy of one person. Long term, I wanted to destroy the admin credentials, both mine and Colin's

So much for that idea.

But with the DNet being it's own separate thing, access to everything else was handled differently. It all belonged to my LLC, not necessarily the Tenjin account.

The production facilities up north. The drones. Backups of my development environments and code. Datasets and various iterations of Virtual Agents. Countless builds I'd fiddled with over the past months. I could fabricate an entire Gallant Suit— minus the bullshittium power supply— and have it dropped to me somewhere. If I could get access to everything again.

The company also held contracts with various telco companies for internet access, and leased the rack in a nearby datacenter where I bridged the DNet and the legacy internet.

It all continued to work. Even the surveillance-state-as-a-service the PRT subscribed to. Colin, and some Agents, had elevated privileges to it but not true control.

Well, neither did I at the moment. But I built it all, and should be able to get at other system level accounts where I could start to regain access.

I poked around a bit more. Hit service accounts and private interfaces to no real gain. The DNet may have originally been a half-assed, emergent thing full of inconsistencies that could be exploited, but part of my work with Colin was fixing that. And I'd applied everything I'd learned making the DNet secure to my LLC's private network and assets.

It wasn't perfect. Given my knowledge, and time, I could hack it. Maybe.

But it wasn't happening in a hotel room that reminded me of a prison cell, using a DD two iterations old, working on a twenty-four line terminal and a touchscreen keyboard.

It was time to test whether I was a prisoner or not.

The guest suites were on a non-secure floor and almost empty on a Saturday morning. The few people I passed on my way to the lobby hardly looked at me. I shared the elevator with a harried looking man in business casual, wheeling along one of those suitcases that should have been a backpack. I tensed, but he just politely said 'Good Morning' and went back to staring at his cellphone.

Anyone important would have been on one of the secure levels— working on the fallout from last night's raid. Or attending the all-hands meeting Dennis mentioned.

It… kind of sucked, not being a part of that.

I'd grown accustomed to being in the know. To understanding and even influencing what the PRT was doing at any given moment. Seeing all of our… all of their operations and personnel at a glance. Being in the dark, staring at the numbers of the elevator as they counted down to 1, made me aware of all the knowledge I was missing.

I felt the urge to go back and apologize, even though I hadn't done anything wrong, just to be involved again. Just to… matter, I guess.

The lobby was only half lit, not yet open to the public, but there was still a receptionist behind the desk. I expected him to look up, to ask where I was going.

The receptionist merely glanced at me, and the suitcase guy, as we passed through the security gates. Our badges flashed green with a pleasant chime— and that was it. Even the sleepy looking Officers standing on either side of the door didn't say anything, as I stepped out into a damp spring morning.

Free. All it took was walking out the front door.

It was my first time leaving HQ without a security detail… ever, really. Even when I'd gone out to get a bite to eat, Laetitia or Diego or some staffer had always accompanied me. And every morning, on the way to and from to school, I'd had an escort.

It was oddly freeing. More thrilling than it should have been, just standing there on the sidewalk. No obligations too, other than those I chose. It was like, along with everything Colin had taken away, a weight lifted off my shoulders.

When was the last time I'd felt that way?

I stopped at one of the parks scattered across Downtown and took a moment to appreciate the early morning sun. There was just enough moisture in the air to give definition to the lines of sunlight, godrays that pierced through the gaps between office buildings and condos. Closer to the waterfront, a drone swooped low to make a drop and caused a rippling effect in the rays of light, before it banked around to catch a thermal over a parking lot and disappeared. Engaging camouflage after making a delivery.

Brockton Bay, shithole that it was, could be beautiful.

The data center wasn't far— getting through the security procedures took longer than the walk. The security guard was taken aback by a fifteen year old trying to enter a colo facility, but after a few phone calls everything checked out. The contract was held by my LLC, and my civilian identity was on the access list. So, after a bit of bemusement on the part of the staff, I was standing in front of a freshly unlocked server rack.

Two carrier grade Texas Instruments routers dominated the upper half of the 42U rack— big metal things with noisy fans that pushed enough air through them to blow my hair back and dry out my eyes. Below the routers sat four of my own devices, simply placed on a metal shelf. One was essentially a phone built a bit larger to allow for six fiber optic connections. A hack. The other three devices were more elegant, designed from the ground up for their purpose.

All of them were connected by fiber to the routers, to each other, and through a circular conduit in the ceiling, to an antenna array on the roof. A neatly ordered rainbow of slender cables, arranged in carefully tied bundles.

It was a curious thing— the majority of Brockton Bay's internet access flowed through the four devices sitting in front of me, up to the bulky routers, and through them out to the legacy internet. It was hard to imagine the amount of traffic, the searches and queries, the games and messages, all reduced to pulses of light along specific wavelengths. Passed from one network to the next, much of it to come back again.

I dragged a step ladder over to the rack and, careful not to disturb the orderly runs of cables, moved the odd-ball phone so I could use it without disconnecting anything.

The purpose-built bridge devices used hardware-locked system accounts, or at least the three custom built ones did. The older device that— I'd never gotten around to replacing— was still running a session spawned off my Cobble account. An ugly hack that I'd put in place back when I first turned the internet back on for the DNet.

I carefully tilted the phone and unlocked it via biometrics. Pulled up yet another command line.

And then I spent the rest of the morning hunched over a phone in the datacenter, using a legacy account to execute a privilege escalation attack on my own system, all for the purpose of granting my civilian account the equivalent of root access.

Not to the DNet— that ship had sailed. But to the rest of my infrastructure.

Once done, still perched on the step ladder, I switched back to the phone Dennis gave me and poked around a bit, just to confirm to myself that it had worked.

I pulled up the build for my old helmet— the one I'd used as Cobble. The cramped interface of the phone did a poor job of visualizing it, but I'd worn the thing long enough for that not to matter. Opaque ash-grey with a slight shimmer. Optics and other sensors optimally placed across the surface with no concern for aesthetics. Long tendrils trailed down the back— an easy way to house everything from heat and gas exchange to extra compute and energy storage.

The build would need to be tweaked to work on my latest fabricators. But that'd be easy enough, even working on a phone. And it'd be an interesting path to start down again. Scale it up to cover the my entire body— it'd be trivial if I didn't worry about aesthetics. Cover it with my latest display surfaces, apply the adaptive cammo and signature masking I'd learned with the drones. Full environment seal, maybe something that would let me breathe underwater. Use it to disappear into the bay for a while, surfacing whenever I needed food or energy.

But no, that didn't get me closer to my goals. It'd be a regression.

I'd already proved to myself that my civilian account had the access I needed, so I should have locked up and left. Instead, I pulled up the build file for a fab-seed. A coconut sized ball of potential. I'd dropped one in a pile of contaminated dirt five months ago, and now it covered close to twenty acres with solar and wind power generation, carbon sequestration, launch facilities, and production.

For a moment, I considered it. Start the build, hop on a bus headed out of the city, and have a drone drop a fab-seed into my hands somewhere outside Brockton Bay. Maybe in Maine somewhere, or in upstate New York. Stuff it into a backpack and head west, maybe look for Hiro. He'd left the bay shortly after Oni Lee killed Stormtiger, and last I'd heard had set up some sort of ranch in Montana.

It sounded nice— just head out out into the middle of nowhere and build.

Maybe as a plan C.

Ultimately, I wanted to make things better. For as many people as possible.

Running away and building in isolation… would be relaxing. It might even be another path to the same destination— to where I'd made the world a bit better.

But I was already making process, if locally. I'd enabled free access to information, and communication. To entertainment, and a sense community that didn't depend on who you lived next to. With the help of Colin and Chris, I had provided free shelters to people. Comfortable, safe places to live for anyone who needed it. Complete with clean water, laundry, temperature control, waste processing, and a host of other base necessities.

My time as an independent taught me that cities would fight such changes with more effort than they fought the gangs or even crime. Not to mention how exposed it was. If I could make it through my time as a Ward without burning too many bridges, I'd be in a better position than if I'd just fucked off to the hinterland to build in peace.

And, in a way, Renick had given me exactly what I needed. Technically a Ward, without any of the obligations.

I closed the fab seed and pulled up my most recent project. It took a little bit of creativity to get the latest version— it was still an ephemeral thing that lived primarily in the active session on my helmet— but I was able to pull something close enough directly from my fabricator in the Wards lab. Smart Glasses, Rev 4. Not as good as my helmet, but they'd give me a full development environment to work in.

I kicked off the build, only to receive an error.

Groaning, I got up and shook out my legs and arms. Rubbed the machine-air induced dryness out of my eyes, and in general just moved around a bit. A step ladder, in the middle of a data center hot aisle, had horrible ergonomics— I'd do the rest somewhere else.

I locked up the rack and returned the step-ladder to the end of the aisle. Only to notice, too late, that they had a fucking chair there the entire time. Probably something to learn from that.

Exiting the data center was a lot easier than getting in, and twenty minutes later I was sitting in the back corner of a bagel shop— the same one Glenn preferred— taking bites of a bagel sandwich between annoyingly long strings of text commands on my phone. The more my tech progressed, the harder it was to work on something as limited as a two dimensional screen. It was easier to default back to a command line, as I painstakingly went through all of my infrastructure and clawed back my access.

"If you're not going to order anything else I need to ask you to leave." It was the girl who'd taken my first order.

I got up and ordered another sandwhich, and put two twenty's in the tip jar. Money, in any form, was incredibly useful.

It took the rest of the morning and four refills of coffee before I managed it. Control over my fabricators, and the ability to drop-ship myself whatever I wanted. The network of drones, a development environment, my VA's— all that could come later, when I had a proper interface.

I did take the time to write a quick script though— something to query the fabricator tasked with the smart-glasses. Status, and estimate to completion.

Nominal. Seven hours, fourteen minutes and twenty seven seconds until completion.

If nothing went wrong. Then it'd be another hour or so to fly it down to Brockton Bay.

Eight hours to kill.

I ordered yet another bagel sandwich, put another twenty in the tip jar, and sat back down. On a whim, I minimized the terminal. I intended to check some of the forums, but stopped when I noticed how many messages I had.

My civilian account normally didn't have much going on. Everything meaningful, I did as Tenjin. For the past five months, all the texts and calls and alerts, were as Tenjin. My identity, who I was— all of it was as a Ward.

It was kind of sad logging in as 'Charles', to a painfully vanilla interface. I'd stopped bothering, even at school. The other Wards, and my handlers at the PRT, knew of the account, but they never contacted me through it. Part of the identity protection policies. But it also reinforced the feeling that I wasn't anything, if I wasn't Tenjin.

Today however, I had mail.

/ Laetitia Grey /

0905 : Charles. Please call or respond when you get this.

0905 : I know it must be frustrating, but you're putting yourself at risk. Please return to home, or at least let us know where you are so we can help.

1100 : Please Charles, at lest let me know that you're safe.

1300 : I'm going to wait for another hour, and then start looking for you.

/ — /

I groaned. Her careful avoidance of terminology that would link my 'civilian' account to the PRT was like a backhanded criticism of how little care I gave to protecting my identity. Something we had fought over before.

But she did seem to care.

/ Laetitia Grey /

1321 - I'm fine— don't really feel like spending time at PRT HQ at the moment. I'll be careful.

/ — /

The other messages also made me feel like an asshole.

/ Ashley /

0013 : Hey! Just wanted to say it's cool if you don't want to do lunch tomorrow... today? I know there's a lot going on in the city.

0014 : but if you do want to, let me know!

0017 : oh yeah, this is Ashley, from school!

/—/

After a night of watching people's heads explode in slow motion, I had honestly forgotten about the girl from Arcadia. I'd intended to cancel anyways, after Laetitia ripped into me, but hadn't gotten sent the message.

A reply came in fram Laetitia, but I opened up a browser and went to DNF, a distributed forum equivalent on the DNet that absorbed most of the Brockton Bay PHO community.

It was hard to get a sense of how people were reacting to the bomb threat. Just looking around me, at a posh cafe in the business district, it was like nothing had changed. Like no one even cared.

Online though, people were upset. DNF at had thoughts.

But not about the ABB.

My stream was in fact deleted. Not de-indexed and hate-holed, but flat out deleted. Any attempts to upload related content was being actively contested.

All the normal work-arounds failed. Modifying the format, the aspect ratio, the framerate, the colors, all the trivial changes weren't enough to get past whatever Colin was doing.

He must have tasked a VA with maintaining the policy. It was the sort of semi-intelligent work they excellent at.

Ironically, all his efforts and efficiency only seemed to draw more attention to the situation. At least as far as DNF was concerned.

There were posts in multiple languages, links to other distributed applications. Links back to video hosted on the legacy internet, even.

They'd also parsed through the audit log, and determined what had happened. It was clear to anyone that knew how to look that Armsmaster had locked my account and deleted my admin credentials. Deleted.

People were pissed. Some started complaining that this was just the start, and that the DNet was going to end up just as much of a 'censored OSINT honey pot as PHO'. And of course, all the people gloating. There were quite a few, smug, 'I told you so.' Posts.

It was a mess, but as I checked other sites on the Legacy internet, and mainstream news, it was clear that outside the DNF, people… didn't really care. About my fall from grace, so to speak, or about the bombs.

It just wasn't as big a deal as I thought it would be.

DTech orders were still being fulfilled. The internet worked. The shelters hummed along. It seemed like what Renick had said, so long ago, was right— so long as people got free shit, they didn't care.

I sighed, fired the countdown script. Seven hours and fifty minutes.

Back into messages.

/ Ashley /

1343 - Sorry for the late reply. Things are a little strange right now. Maybe in the future?

/—/

Picking apart that whole situation was a welcome distraction. She must know that I was Tenjin, which made the whole thing feel awkward and disingenuous. At the same time, it would be good to talk to someone outside the PRT's filter bubble. And it was flattering to think that someone was so eager to meet, to spend time with, me.

But then, it wasn't really me, was it? For all my attempts at authenticity, there was always a disconnect between myself and the Tenjin identity. 'Tenjin' was someone I'd made up, with Glenn. A more confident, more polished person, with better posture and diction.

/ Ashley /

1344 : Yes! Just let me know. Good luck!

1344 : Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

/—/

The instant reply was a little unsettling, until I realized that she was probably using the smart glasses. It might be worth meeting up with her after all, I'd love to get feedback on the glasses. Ask what sort of features she'd like to see. What the biggest problems and annoyances were.

Hell, it'd probably be worth it to talk to someone outside the PRT and Wards.

But that wouldn't really be fair, not to her. I was miserable company when I wanted to get something done, and even if people didn't seem scared, a Tinker who put bombs in people's heads needed to be stopped. The very idea disgusted me.

I pulled up her information, everything I decided not to share on stream.

Ayaka Ellison. For whatever asinine reason, the PRT as a whole had scrubbed her information from the public internet, but I still had a record. She didn't have a criminal history, but she did win a number of academic awards. And there was an article from her highschool, where she'd made Valedictorian— along with a picture.

She looked earnest. Happy.

It was hard to imagine her threatening to blow up a university campus. Or putting bombs in people's heads.

First, I needed to full control over my infrastructure. Then, I needed to figure out a way to find the bomb Tinker. If I was being honest, some part of me hoped that if I found her the PRT would welcome me back, no matter how irrational it was. Still… I shouldn't fixate.

Next priority was improving the smart glasses, and getting them into as many hands as possible.

"Are you just going to let him sit here all day?"

I looked up to see one of the middle aged ladies that had been drinking coffee by the window complaining to the cashier. While pointing at me. Most of the kitchen staff had left after the lunch rush and the cafe wasn't crowded anymore. It was kind of nice, a relaxing place to work for a while. Or at least it had been.

"At least he's been buying drinks and food," The girl replied.

"He's loitering," She said, glancing at me, only to immediately look away.

"He hasn't been here much longer than you?" The girl seemed honestly confused.

The lady leaned in, saying something too quiet to hear, but the cashier just rolled her eyes.

I sighed, and opened up the message I'd been ignoring.

/ Laetitia Grey /

1325 : Charles, this is reckless. People tracked you down through even before you were rich, and now you've broadcasted your face all over the world. Please, come back. If you want to go out let someone go with you.

/ — /

The two ladies left the cafe in a huff, apparently so bothered by my presence they decided to leave. I snorted— obviously, neither of them had recognized me. Nor had anyone else.

I wasn't oblivious to the danger, but most people didn't think they'd run into a Ward or any celebrity walking down the street, or drinking coffee at a bagel shop.

And the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to return to HQ. Rationally, I understood that I wasn't a prisoner. I'd proven it to myself by walking out the front door.

But even aside from that, going back to the PRT would be to surround myself with people who were working on the problem, the way the PRT worked. While I was sat in the corner, like a kid on a time out.

Unable to build, unable to act. Until someone said it was OK.

And my corner just happened to remind me of the cell they'd kept me in while I was captive. The nicer cell, at least, but a cell nonetheless. And every time I left the room, there'd be that subtle disappointment from everyone who recognized me. Everyone who was working to solve the problem, while I wasn't.

I was already starting to regret defying Renick, on some level.

It was the right thing to do, but was it worth being right when it meant getting sidelined? I should be working with Armsmaster to go over the bombs and find a way to track the Tinker down. Not sitting in a fucking bagel shop trying to get back control of my own tech.

If I returned to the PRT, where everyone knew me as Tenjin regardless of whether I was wearing the costume on or not, where being a Ward was my entire identity, that feeling of regret would be so much worse. Calvert, I was starting to sense, practiced what he preached. So him not standing up for me publicly made sense.

I'd hoped for more from Colin though, and hadn't gotten it. I wasn't confident of myself, in that kind of environment. I'd cave. Do whatever they asked me to do, to get re-instated. Start toeing the line just a little more carefully.

Long term, the legit path was the right one. Finish my time as a Ward with a good reputation and connections.

But not if I turned into the very thing I wanted to change.

"Hey," The girl working the counter said as I returned my plate and cups. "You don't have to leave if you don't want to."

"Thanks, but I should get going anyways." I stopped at the door and turned back. "What was she going on about anyways?"

She rolled her eyes. "Aisian Suicide Bombers."

I raised my eyebrows. "You're not… worried about that?"

"The bombs in the head bit?" She shrugged. "It's messed up, but so far it's only ABB right?"

"That we know of,"

She looked at me funny. "Well, if it spreads, I'll worry. Until then I'll focus on finals."

It was a long walk to the nearest bus stop. Brockton Bay tried to keep the rumbling old machines— and the people they transported— out of the city center. I could have taken a cab, but I had time to burn, and taking the bus felt right.

My first stop was a Goodwill near Winslow.

If I wasn't going back to HQ, I'd need to sleep somewhere else. And the clothes that I wore to Arcadia, the ones that looked normal in Downtown, would stand out too much.

I picked up a faded shirt that hung off my frame like a jersey. Some baggy cargo pants that were frayed inside the right cuff, like someone had ridden a bicycle with them, and a pair of low-tops with broken heels but most of the soles left. Traded my North Face backpack in for an old army style duffel that looked like it had sat in a warehouse for a decade, and stuffed it with my nice clothes and a few other outfits.

And then it was back to riding around the city, on buses that belched blue smoke. I changed to another, whenever I got too close to the end of a route. Not quite willing to actually leave the city. Watched as people from different walks of life got on and off.

/ Laetitia Grey /

1402 : Are you really doing this?

1500 : Understood.

1501 : Best of luck, Charles.

/ — /

That hit me harder than I thought it would.

She was overbearing, and hardcore, but she always seemed to want the best for me. Or at least, what she thought was best. I sent her another message, saying I was fine. And thanked her, for her concern. For everything she'd done for me.

/ Dennis /

1530 : Uh, just so you know, people are kind of flipping out.

1531 : His schmooziness is pissed, even if for some mysterious reason no one else can see it.

1532 : If you need a place to crash, let me know. My mom's cool, and we got room.

/ — /

/ Carlos /

1351 : Hey, I know I'm not good at this team captain stuff, but I do have your back. We all do. Trying to get you back on the team.

1351 : It'd be easier if you came back.

1410 : Stay safe.

/ — /

/ Sophia /

1501 : Fuck them.

1501 : u find her, u let me know.

/ — /

There were messages from each of the Wards. The support surprised me, like a painful sort of lurch in my stomach. Dennis and Chris I'd almost expected, but everyone else? I still hadn't really thought of myself as a member of a team, as one of them.

They wanted me back.

A group of kids got on, laughing and talking loud enough to be heard over the bus. One of them eyed me up, in a confused sort of way, but got off without saying anything. A balding man in a rumpled suit stared at me suspiciously, while a mother with groceries and two small children smiled when I gave up my seat.

No one seemed that worried, or even aware, that the ABB had a bomb Tinker. I couldn't figure out if it was because Colin's suppression of information was working, or if most people just didn't actually care that much. Not until it directly affected them. After all, people ranted online about the Empire too— but if you walked around and listened to people talk, it hardly came up.

After five months as a ward, literally living in the PRT building, it had started to seem like that world was everything.

That being aware of how many violent crimes happened the night, the week, and the month before was normal. That the gangs and rogue Parahumans were more important than… I don't even know what. School? Groceries? Going out partying?

All around me, people just carried on.

Maybe that was for the best.

I caught myself nodding off and pulled out my phone before I could fall asleep. One of… something like fifty thousand units, that I'd essentially given away. It wasn't anything special— at least not in Brockton Bay— but it was a sleek piece of tech. Two iterations old and it was still a more capable smartphone than anything else on the market. Better even than the consumer stuff Dragon put out, especially now that the software was starting to catch up.

Used to be, using a top of the line phone on a city bus would have been asking for trouble. Now, no one so much as batted an eye. Everyone who wanted one had their own. And that felt good.

/ Carlos /

1742 : Good news, you're back on the team!

1742 : They do want a formal apology— written. There were some comments about how much you like paper work, and I think it's petty, but they want you to write it by hand. And include how you'll promise to do better.

1743 : But you'll be re-instated.

1744 - That's it? No other restrictions?

/ — /

It was tempting. But also annoying. It was the same offer Calvert gave me this morning.

Still, it would be easy. Safe. Simply apologise, and promise to do better. Say the words, even if I didn't mean them, and go right back to what I was doing last night. Slip into the same pattern that had become so comfortable.

And, part of me argued, it wasn't unreasonable. They talked about fighting a war on the gangs, of course they'd expect us to follow orders. Expected me to do what I was told.

But I still didn't think what I did was wrong. If this was something I was willing to do, it would have been better off to just agree with Renick in the first place, and then 'failed' to actually do what he asked.

/ Carlos /

1749 - Thank you for trying. Really. But not if I have to make an apology.

1749 : Really?

1750 - If put in the same situation, I'd do the same thing. An apology I don't mean would be a lie.

1751 : Well, can't you just… do the apology anyways? I'm confirming the restrictions, but I'm sure they'll be unreasonable.

1752 : Reasonable. I'm sure any restrictions will be reasonable.

/ — /

It was kind of odd how quickly they pivoted, usually the PRT took a while to come to any sort of decision of this magnitude. But then Calvert was effective at getting his way.

I was happy for the support, and honest about wanting to go back.

The bus rolled into the depot, and a wash of air that reeked of diesel and exhaust washed in as the door opened. Three hours, twenty-nine minutes until the build was ready.

I hopped on another bus. I should have just gone to sleep and picked up the drop tomorrow, but I knew myself well enough by now not to try it. Besides, I was still worried that the build would fail, even if it had completed this morning.

/ Carlos /

1810 - This is dumb, or idealistic, but no. If they tell me to do something I think is immoral, I'm not going to do it. Order or not.

1753 : Isn't the… you know, more important?

/ — /

He was right. It was selfish of me too— putting something trivial above stopping the Bomb Tinker. Ellison, if it was her. But it was like Calvert had told me— it didn't have to be an either or. And the more I thought about it, the more confident I grew. Both that I could find her, and that spending some time away from the PRT was a good idea.

/ Carlos /

1755 - It is, and I won't stop looking. I'll let you know when I find her.

/ — /

Finally decided, I opened up another app.

I'd spent a lot of time as a Ward making safe, comfortable housing available to anyone that needed it. To anyone that wanted it.

That might as well include me.

I didn't even need to use a special interface— there was no need to jump a queue or get some unlisted beta project, to request something special. Anyone could call down a shelter. Or, in this case, request an empty one that had already been deployed to a camp. There wasn't even a wait, and my phone was already telling me where to go.

I didn't head directly there.

Instead, I stepped off the bus on the corner of a country road. It was a sleepy area, not quite a neighborhood, just shy of Captain's Hill. Large houses, with long drive ways and mailboxes on posts by the shoulder of the road.

I walked a ways into a field— probably unnecessary, but I didn't want anyone to see me call down a unique drop.

A softly glowing orb fell out of the sky, small Tenjin logos ran across the surface. Pebbles scattered on the shoulder of the road cast strange shadows as the Tenjin logos slowly pulsed with blue and orange light, like the orb was taking slow breaths. And then it disintegrated, a light breeze blowing away fine ash, lost in the darkness.

I brushed my fingers across what looked like a sunglass case— the build was good. Standing, I turned away from the the distant lights of the city. And started walking towards where Captain's Hill rose in a gentle slope, covered with shelters and people.

Spoiler: Edits

Last edited: Jan 8, 2023

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ReasonableDoubt

Jan 1, 2023

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Threadmarks 2.B - Diego

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

Jan 8, 2023

#382

Spoiler: Note

"Why do you bother with that shit Perez?"

Diego looked up from the hardcover spread across his lap. The old hangar they were using as a muster point was too dark to make out Lasseter's face, beyond the glowing end of his cigarette. But the FNG, a transfer from BBPD, was was probably doing that stupid condescending grin of his.

"Thinking that maybe I don't want to be a fuckin' trooper the rest of my life." Left unsaid was how short that life was likely to be.

The PRT didn't publish life expectancy stats, not of its officers, but everyone knew the gist of it.

Short.

He went back to "Parahuman Response Team Agent Procedures and Policies Manual Volume III", trying to focus on the dry text. The red-filtered flashlight on his shoulder actually made it a little easier to read.

Lasseter ripped the book out of his hands.

Diego exploded up from where he'd been sitting, crosslegged, against the wheel of the APC. Lasseter dropped the book and flinched backwards. The lanky man held up his hands.

"Hey, easy big guy. Just fucking around."

Diego glared at him for a long, tense moment before bending down to pick up the book. Carefully unfolded the pages, so it'd close properly.

"Look alive people!" Dehlin's voice rattled the old sheet metal walls. "Squads one-two, and the capes, are moving. Get in the trucks!"

Diego tossed the book in the back of the APC, underneath the bench, and then squatted down to work his arms through the straps of his confoam rig. He was still struggling with the fasteners when Pollock took a knee next to him, already fully in his own rig.

"Can't do anything right," Pollock threaded the strap he'd been struggling with through the receiving buckle and tightened it before slapping him on the helmet. "Can you?"

"Asshole," Diego laughed, and nodded in thanks.

Pollock had been a tall, lanky fuck way back when they'd trained on confoam. But he'd filled out over the years to what must have been the exact build they'd designed the rigs for. Diego, on the other hand, still struggled to get everything to sit right on his own.

Two hours later, and they were sitting inside the fucking truck.

"So, uh. This happening or what?" Lasseter asked, for the fifth time.

"Protectorate is waiting for the right moment. We're still on alert." Dehlin's voice was painfully loud inside the back of the transport.

'Fuck it," Diego thought to himself, and slid off the bench. Contorted himself so the tanks wouldn't hit anybody. Rested the weight of the rig on a strip of metal that ran across the floor of the APC.

Both transports were still in the same position they'd been in all night— in a hangar on the edge of an abandoned old airfield a few miles from the target site. It wasn't a bad place to muster. Better than riding around until the call was made, but he suppose it didn't matter if they were stuck in the back of the trucks anyways.

He loosened the straps a bit and sighed in relief. Not so loose that he couldn't tighten them again on his own, but enough to move his shoulders a bit. He did what he could while still strapped in to work the blood back through the meat along his neck and upper back.

"Perez," Dehlin warned.

"Sarge," Diego replied, laconically, well aware that the man hated being called that.

"That shit's not protocol."

"Protocol is to take the tanks off." The metal ridge took the weight of the tanks, and he enjoyed being able to shrug his shoulders. "Takes too long."

If they knew exactly when the raid would start— for real— that'd be a different matter. The nervous state of readiness sucked more than anything else. Waiting for a 'GO' that could come at any moment.

"Pollock managed," Dehlin said.

Barely, Diego didn't say. Eight men, fully armored, two of them with big-ass confoam tanks strapped to their back, made for a cramped transport. Pollock, the cheeky fuck, didn't care and had taken off his tanks twenty minutes into the wait.

"Well good for Pollock," Diego said.

"Lay off the 'roids and you too can get in and out of your own rig." Pollock called out from further back.

"Oh fuck you."

Some of the squad laughed, and Dehlin grunted but didn't say anything else. The Sergeant wasn't a bad sort, and waiting inside the truck when they could have been lounging around it instead probably irritated him too. That, and the man got grumpy if he didn't get his smokes. And there was no way he'd light up inside.

"Why are we going after these fucks now anyways?" Lasseter asked around a piece of gum.

"You want to what, let 'em be?" Dehlin ground out.

"Nah," Lasseter said. "But, like, why didn't ya'all waste 'em when they only had Skidmark and Squealer? Now they got two more freaks and we're finally hitting em? That's fucked."

"Eyyy…," Diego said.

Lasseter rolled his eyes, and smacked his lips loudly as he chewed his gum.

Diego didn't like it any more than Lasseter did. Another bit of grand strategy tactical dickery on the Director's part, no doubt. Micromanaging everything from when the trucks left HQ to how many confoam grenades the officers carried.

Though, he had to admit, it had saved their assess two weeks ago.

The other ABB sites had all been properly rigged. One had blown up the day after the raid— a weirdly silent explosion that just sucked the entire building into itself. They didn't know how many— if any— people died in the explosion, only that it would have killed anyone inside of it. For a while, there was some hope? Consolation? That it might have been one Ohka's lab, that the bomber was a threat that had fixed itself.

Yeah, no. Shit never went down that nicely.

If he was being honest, he felt relieved to be hitting the Merchants instead of another ABB target.

Not that he'd let his guard down.

He went over the 'PRT Procedures III' in his head again— that transfer couldn't come soon enough. The paperwork would suck, but he'd take paperwork over this shit any day. Everyone knew Agents lived longer. And were paid better for it.

Diego kept on staring at Lassetter, and the gangly man finally corrected himself.

"Parahumans, capes, villains— whatever. What I'm saying is, if we wanted 'em gone, the time to do it was two months ago."

"And the next best time is now," Dehlin cut in.

"Now that they've got another tinker and shaker." Jones butted in from further back. "Of course."

They weren't wrong.

Hitting the Merchants was less scary than going after the ABB, better than walking into whatever nasty surprise Ohka planted. But that didn't mean it was safe, or that it felt right. Not when the Merchants had mostly just been growing weed and cooking meth. Not when an op on the merchants meant giving 'Ohka' more time to build.

"This is what we're paid for gentlemen," Dehlin said evenly.

"I get that." Lasseter spit his gum into a paper towel and looked around before stuffing it in a pocket. "But fuck do I wish you woulda hit them three months ago. Before they had time to dig in."

"You and me both, but that's the job," Dehlin said. "They tell us what, not why."

"Optics." Jones butted in again.

There was a collective sigh in the truck.

"Here we go…" Pollock said.

"Calvert, Piggot, Tagg. Burnswick, Sarkozy— fuck, even Armsmaster. You know what they all got in common?" Jones kept talking.

"I'm sure you're gonna tell us." Diego shifted his tanks again.

Jones jerked his chin at him. "Politicians— each and every one of them. They don't give a shit about you, me, or anyone. Just their own fucking careers. Calvert took an L, now he needs a W. And I guarantee you— the reason we didn't hit the Merchants when the hitting was easy, was because that motherfucker wanted maximum impact from taking them out.

"We're rolling now because he needs something to sweep away the bad press. Not because it's the best time to hit them, or because we didn't have the resources earlier."

Pollock rolled his eyes, and Lasseter bent another stick of gum into his mouth. Started smacking his lips as he chewed. Again.

Diego just leaned into his rig. They'd go loud sooner or later, and when they did, it would be sudden. And even if they were using overwhelming force, even if the Merchants were a bunch of no-names that never should have survived so long, nothing was ever a sure thing.

The radio in the cab squawked, and the APC's big engine coughed to life. The metal ridge on the floor rattled against the bottoms of his tanks, and he tightened up the straps.

"Helmets on people," Dehlin barked. "Perez— "

"On it."

He moved back to his assigned seat and belted in, ass still half off the bench on account of how thick the tanks were. He and every other foamie complained about the design to anyone that listened. Wrote in about it, every month, on the feedback forms.

And they still kept the same cheap, narrow benches.

The engine's low rumble built to a steady roar, and they blasted out of the ass end of the hanger. Hit the field that separated abandoned airfield from access road, and bounced over four hundred yards of scrubland and dirt. Slamming the edge of the bench into his tailbone, over and over again.

"Yeeee," Pollock said over comms, the engine and rattling too loud to talk normally. "Haaaww."

"Shut it," Dehlin said.

The thunk-rattle and scrape of the field gave way to a smooth thrum as rugged tires met up with pavement. Rythmic thuds from the edges of cement slabs. You couldn't see outside from the back— something that always made him uneasy— but he went over the route again in his head. Hangar, runway, field, access road. Then a brief bit of two-lane asphault on approach to half built community gates. And finally, more brush and dirt. What would have eventually been curving roads, marked by concrete curbs.

"Skidmark, Whirlygig, and Squealer are down." Dehlin relayed. "Armsmaster and Assault are working on Trainwreck, but stay alert."

The APC bounced again and slammed to a halt— not a crash. The driver was just default-aggressive. An asshole, in other words.

Pollock followed Jones and Dixon out into the pre-dawn. Diego jumped off the truck right after Dehlin and Lasseter. Bent his knees to take the weight of the tanks. Scanned his surroundings, lit up by the floodlights of the APC and rail-mounted flashlights.

The Merchants were smalltime.

Most people were under the perception that the Merchants were bigger than they were— but what most people thought of, when they heard 'Merchant', were affiliates. Two-bit dealers, spread through Brockton Bay, without any authority or autonomy of their own. Addicts peddling weed or smack or meth, just to fuel their own habit.

The real Merchants had always been harder to nail down. Part of why the PRT had never swept up the whole organisation before. He'd have thought things would be even more fragmented, after the gang gave up holding territory in the city.

Instead, intelligence had methodically cataloged and placed every one of the fucks.

Simultaneous raids were going down all over the county. Most handled by police. Some of the heavier sites had cape and PRT squads running point. And then there was the primary target. The big one.

"Be advised: Squealer is not down. Repeat, Squealer is not down. Position is unknown." Came over all-comms. "Trainwreck still active."

He winced, and wondered what had happened. Could have been a simple case of mistaken identity, or more likely, some sort of contingency by the Tinker.

It was always dicey, trying to take them alive. Prioritizing their safety over yours. He snorted, the sound covered by his helmet. Suppose that's whey they paid them the big bucks.

At least he'd be collecting hazard pay.

The main Merchant… compound? Commune? Nest? Was in a development project that'd ran out of money months before completion. Some sort of gated community, with fancy houses on the top of fake little hills. Apple and cherry trees to be planted along the roads, or some shit. The houses were mostly done, but everything else— the roads and utilities, all the fancy landscaping— wasn't.

Now, instead of a ritzy gated community, it was a few acres. Ovegrown. Covered in refuse. Reeking of chemicals and shit.

The Merchants had claimed the half-rotted McMansions at the beginning of the year. A sort of headquarters and retreat. Meth labs, grows, rave houses. Skate-board 'parks' that actually looked kind of fun. And god knew what else.

Diego stepped back before a skinny dude with a knife could test his armor.

"Lasseter!" He yelled— some rando wasn't worth the foam.

The new guy fired two bean-bag rounds into the skinny dude that had tried to stab Diego. When the dude didn't go down, Lasseter stepped in and bashed the butt of his shotgun into a moderate case of meth-mouth.

"Meth's a helluva drug." Lassetter kicked the guy in the face and spit his gum on him. Kicked him again.

"Hey, he's down," Diego said.

The other transport had its floods trained on a different house. More lights bounced across the weeds and garbage as officers poured out and rounded up runners.

Three transports, total. Each with a confoam turret and two squads of officers. Six squads and five Protectorate capes in all.

It should have been overkill.

Diego stepped around the now thoroughly unconscious skinny dude and kept moving towards the almost-finished McMansion. A handful of shots rang out, as well as screams from behind the house. But mostly, it was just a bunch of stumbling figures. Running away from the flashing lights, sirens, and shouting officers.

Everything was going to plan, aside from not having eyes on Squealer. And Trainwreck still being up.

Resistance was light. The rank and file of the Merchants were mostly— as intended— asleep or high when the Protectorate and first two squads had hit. He doubted the kid with his face pressed into the dirt, Dehlin's knee on his, even understood what was happening.

Some crazies tried to fight. A handful ran into the woods. Most just rolled over and assumed the position.

But when shit went wrong, it happened all at once.

A McMansion further up the street exploded in a ball of orange fire. It sat atop its own little hill and the fire shone down on everything else like fake sunrise. Made a sound like an old-style TV breaking, a booming, sucking noise that seemed to pull all the air towards it.

A silver-blue shape tore through the wall of the house like a cannonball, trailing smoke behind it.

Armsmaster uncurled mid-air, adjusted, and tucked back into a ball. Hit dirt and rolled, once, before coming to his feet and leaning against the momentum. Shining boots dug furrows halfway down the hill, even as Armsmaster raised one hand. His halberd came hurtling out of the fire and down the hill, slapping into the hero's waiting grip.

Assault came out of the fire a moment later, hunched over. Obviously just trying to get the fuck away. Diego was too far away to tell clearly, but he looked to be coughing.

Trainwreck slowly stepped out of the flames. Wading through collapsing walls and support beams like they were nothing more than weeds. A hulking black shape against the orange light, uncaring of the heat.

"Requesting foam units," Armsmaster said over comms— to everyone in the area. "ASAP"

Dehlin ack'd the order and started barking out commands. Diego wondered what happened to the two foamies that were on the initial strike, but lurched into a heavy jog anyways. Dehlin and Lasseter formed up around him and they all ran up the hill. Towards the fighting capes.

Halfway there, a sound like silverware in a blender erupted from somewhere beyond the house. It drowned out everything— the staccato of Armsmaster's weapon against Trainwreck's armor, the roar of the APC churning up the hill to bring it's foam-canon on target, and the crackling whoosh of the fire.

Assault staggered, still too close to the fire, and coughed hard enough to lose his balance. Velocity appeared, supporting the bigger man before he could fall.

Without really thinking about it, Diego operated the latch at the bottom of his helmet as he ran. The integrated gas-mask made each breath harder but he stepped up the pace anyways. And murmured a low prayer as he neared Trainwreck. Wished, not for the first time, that the applicators had more range. Fuck did he wish they had more range.

The blender-silverware noise ramped up into a shrieking whine that made his teeth ache— and then cut out. Imperfect silence, whatever it was still felt, but not heard. The house-fire flared with a low whoosh, and an erratic mass of noxious smoke blanketed them. His armor did nothing against the sudden spike of heat, but his gas-mask seemed to be holding. No, that wasn't right— they weren't rated for tem—

Something rocketed overhead, and prop wash kicked up dirt and gravel. The wall of air lifted all three of them off their feet, and the tank on his back was almost a comfort as it pulled him back down.

Clods of dirt started fountaining from the earth, hellish orange in the light of the fire. He rolled over and curled up, getting the metal on his back between himself and whatever the fuck it was. Bits of something wet splattered against his armor along with the dirt.

The impacts stitched a line through the burning house. Curved back, like the footsteps of some invisible, sprinting giant, tearing up the ground where Armsmaster had been standing.

Continued straight towards the APC.

"Squealer active," came over comms.

"No fucking shit." Diego wobbled into a roll, got his legs under him, and lurched to his feet. Sarge…

"Oh fuck. Oh fuck," Lasseter chanted, until someone yelled at him to keep it off comms.

"Foam!" Armsmaster cried out again.

Steam hissed out from Trainwreck's forearm and the black-iron monster clipped Armsmaster with some sort of piston-cocked punch. Launched the hero on a tumbling, wild arc. Right back into the fire.

"On it!" Diego replied, Pollock echoing him a moment later.

Confoam spilled out of the mangled APC, like an over-cooked marshmallow. Diego just hoped the driver and gunner were still alive. Lasseter was frozen, staring at what was left of Dehlin.

Diego got as close to Trainwreck as he dared, and squeezed the applicator's trigger.

Black-iron whirled on him, ponderous. Arms swollen and over-long— like some sort of bloated gorilla made of metal. Diego backpedaled, careful to keep the foam on the villain's right leg. It wasn't sticking to the metal like it should have, but that was OK. He was already getting a good billow, and he kept the nozzle low. Built a base to work from.

Armsmaster came back out of the fire, trailing embers and wisps of smoke as he danced around the bigger cape— and the foam. The halberd was a flickering, clanging blur that Diego didn't even try to track, confident that Armsmaster would keep it clear of his line of fire.

Diego had seen that thing tear through a structural i-beam like it was made of tinfoil, but it was only leaving deep rents in the black iron. Trainwreck retaliated with a shrieking blast of steam. They'd been briefed on that— warned not to get within five feet, for fear of him cooking the skin right off you. Even through PRT armor.

It didn't even slow Armsmaster.

The prop wash of Squealer's invisible deathtrap made its way back around. Billows of smoke. Dirt, twigs, and bits of garbage pattering against his armor, getting tangled up in the confoam. Diego cut the flow before it could spray back or start to speckle.

Militia was probably requesting clearance for lethal force. He sure as hell hoped she was. Piggot had never granted it, but hell, maybe the new Director would.

He braced against the prop wash and watched for more spouts of dirt.

Then the real shitshow started.

Armsmaster hitched. A barely noticeable pause before his halberd started moving again. Just as fast, with as much force, but somehow not as smooth. A different rhythm. There had been a grace to his movements that Diego hadn't really noticed until it was gone.

Velocity, who'd been helping a wheezing Assault get away from the mayhem, collapsed. Bringing the ass to the ground with him. No idea where Battery was, glowing costume or not, and he figured Militia was waiting to take a shot.

Trainwreck just locked up. A metal sculpture that slowly toppled forward, kicking up a tract of the lawn with him. Apparently he'd been rooting himself with fuck-off huge iron spikes.

The big cape laid there, not even moving as Armsmaster tangled his halberd in the foam.

And, for some god forsaken reason, released dissolving agent.

"Trigger," someone called over the radio.

"Fuuuuuuck—" Diego moved closer, but held off on applying foam. Armsmaster's armor must have been on some kind of auto-pilot, and had no concept of working with troopers. He couldn't get a clear shot.

Squealer's ride— at least, he assumed that's what the invisible catastrophe was— dropped out of the sky and slammed into the street behind him.

The sheer fucking noise of it was worse than a head on collision. What had to be rotors, somehow still cloaked and only visible by their outline, tore up dirt and flung the concrete borders of unfinished streets in every direction. Diego threw himself down, this time on purpose, keeping the tanks on his back between him and the ungodly noise.

Thought, for a good long moment, about foaming himself.

Seriously considered covering himself in a nice cocoon of sticky white wonder goo and waiting out the clusterfuck in peace. Would have done it, too, if he wasn't so close to the fire.

Ah, who was he kidding. He worked himself back to his feet as soon as the concrete stopped flying.

Squealer's invisible doom-chopper launched itself airborne— for a moment— and slammed back down into the rave-house next door. Where the other two squads still were. Fuck.

"Foam!" Armsmaster on the general channel, active again.

"I'm trying," Diego muttered to himself.

All his previous efforts were gone. Melted away by dissolution agent. Armsmaster worked on keeping Trainwreck prone. Pollock moved close enough to apply foam, finally, but most of it just slid off the downed cape— the whole area was doused in enough dissolver that the shit wouldn't bloom properly.

Lasseter pulled his head out of his ass and chucked one of his foam grenades. Only for a condensed jet of steam from the still downed Trainwreck to blast it off into the darkness.

Trainwreck bucked and rolled, the half-finished lawn of the McMansion now a raw pit of dirt. Armsmaster continued to dance around him, striking whenever a tree-trunk thick limb braced to get upright.

It happened too fast to understand— Armsmaster's leg vanished.

Just gone, along with Trainwreck's arm and half of the villian's bulbous metal shoulder. Then Pollock was sort of hanging in air for a moment, his legs missing beneath the knees. Screaming, even as he fell.

Trainwreck emitted a low moan, and a pustulating, steaming mass of flesh oozed from his wound. Armsmaster was still upright, somehow balanced on his remaining leg. The other one cleanly cut, yet not bleeding. Unlike Pollock.

Some kid, with hair so white it seemed to glow, stood dangerously close to the flames.

Mouth open in a scream that was lost in the chaos. Spheres of fire, and what was left of the house, flickering out of existence at random. Whatever was happening seemed to trigger more explosions, the flames flaring and whipping oddly in the wake of the void-spheres.

Diego unloaded on the fresh trigger, which only seemed to pull his attention. The void-spheres ate the plume of foam before it could hit, and then rapidly climbed back towards its source. Like lighting a stream of gasoline on fire.

The last sphere took his left arm, right forearm, and most of his torso. A flicker, a pop of air, and most of his body was gone.

"Foam!" Armsmaster called out, again, voice distant.

Squealer went airborne again, the prop wash racing up the hill. It didn't knock him over this time— he was already down. Vision dark and narrow.

He could just barely make out Lasseter, as the new officer hit the new cape with a taser. Again and again. He wanted to tell the man to lay off, but couldn't. Foam billowed out of his tanks— the damage too much for the failsafes.

"Huh," he breathed out. And found it funny, as everything went dark, that he couldn't breathe back in.

Last edited: Jan 8, 2023

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ReasonableDoubt

Jan 8, 2023

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ReasonableDoubt

ReasonableDoubt

Jun 11, 2023

#396

The siren trailed off as an ambulance and two police cars pulled to the side of the road. They left their flashers going, the sharp bank of the county road tilting the three vehicles such that their red and blue lights strobed across the crowd of gawking people on one side and stretched away into the dark sky on the other, rain giving the spinning beams an almost physical heft as they faded in the distance.

Two paramedics hopped out of the back of the ambulance, one with a flat board tucked underneath one arm, and three police officers escorted them through the crowd and towards Captain's Hill. Deeper into what had become more of a quasi-lawless city of its own than the refugee camp it had started as.

Captain's Hill, and its two sister camps, were accidental miracles. Close to twenty thousand people living for free in comfortable, safe shelters. Not having to worry about rent, or even being able to pay for water and electricity. We rarely saw the police, or even the PRT, but crime was surprisingly low, thanks to the ever-present phones and willingness of the community to take matters into their own hands.

But every time I saw the mass of humanity flowing in and out of the camp, from tiled rows of shelters that stretched up the hill and through the market that had sprung up at its base, I couldn't help but imagine how much damage a single bomb would do.

And how despite everything I'd done in the month since walking out of PRT HQ, none of it really made people safer.

Across the street a boombox started back up, and the heavy beats were like a signal for everyone to go back to whatever they were doing when the ambulance pulled up. The late hour and the rain, whatever the paramedics and the cops were there meaning nothing to a micro-city that slept far less than Brockton Bay. The still flashing emergency lights just another bit of color.

I took another step forward, mud oozing under my feet, and went back to my messages.

/ Charles Sakai - Agent Laetitia Grey ::: PRTG:SPNICS4.3 /

: The wake is at Father Ted's, this Thursday.

: It's casual, but don't feel obligated. Capes usually don't attend this sort of thing.

: Just thought you'd like to know.

/

I waved the message away and took another step forward. The line for the food truck moved like a giant, depressed caterpillar as everyone looked up from whatever they were staring at, took a step, and then went back to their devices.

Everyone, including me. I scanned a summarized mountain of email, chat flows and private messages. Even after filtering the obvious spam there was far more than I could realistically process.

At least my interface let me continue working while waiting in line.

"Three bits," the food truck said when it was my turn. Looked at me oddly, with none of his usual cheer.

I blinked, and for a moment I thought maybe it was something wrong with his glasses. Rev 5's were only a week old and even with auto-calibration something could go wrong. I always worried that some mis-configured or hacked pair of glasses would damage someone's eyes. Give my detractors all the proof they needed that my tech was 'dangerous' and it should be shut down.

But, as he and the man behind me in line continued to glare at me— not squinting, not as if their eyes were irritated— I realized it was something simpler but just as frustrating.

I looked asian and had my face covered— even if it wasn't by an actual mask.

Glowing lines lanced out from the frames of my glasses and into the rain. Layered patterns of color across my face. LED and laser in a crawling rainbow. A veil of light instead of lace.

My glasses were no different than anyone else's— same hardware, some base software. I wasn't even the only person in line with the veil up. People had all sorts of reasons to hide their face and identity, especially with how ubiquitous cameras were in the camps. To say nothing of smart-glasses.

But I was the only asian to do so.

The veil normally wasn't so flashy, so much of a barrier to social interaction. Most of the projected light was outside visible wavelengths, designed more to dazzle cameras and confuse face recognition systems than human eyes. But the dark and the rain seemed to amplify it, made it annoyingly obvious.

I'd always been casual with the whole mask thing, and that had finally came back to hurt me— my face was everywhere.

Even if Colin had deleted my stream about the ABB, it had still made it out to the legacy internet. Picked up and rebroadcasted by the mainstream media.

The PRT's efforts to delete and suppress it, even going so far as to purge a bunch of my older streams, only drew more attention to it. I kind of suspected Colin had taken such a hamfisted approach as a way to help me. Malicious compliance.

If so, it had certainly worked. Talk shows and international news broadcasts had picked up the story and flogged it for weeks. My face, barely obscured by the transparent visor I used on my streams, was as well known as any celebrity.

So I hid my face, and it sucked. Glenn had always said it was harder to work with people and nigh impossible to gain their trust or empathy when you hid your face, and he knew what he was talking about. But, for now and in the physical world at least, anonymity was more valuable than trust.

"Sorry, one sec,"

I gestured and began to broadcast my current 'identity'. Another gesture and a thought accessed one of the distributed applications I'd released to the DNet as Cobble, granted it access to my smart glasses. The DApp (the old paradigms didn't quite line up, it was a blend of server and code running autonomously on the distributed abstraction of the DNet itself) pulled raw data from the fMRI sensors running along the stems of my glasses. Compared the data to an ever growing corpus of sample data, more to ensure that the data was valid and not spoofed than anything else, and finally returned a digitally signed token.

Attesting that there wasn't a bomb in my head.

It wasn't perfect, but it was better than nothing, and helped set people at ease.

"Ah, you! Of course!" The vendor, Mehmet according to his own broadcasted identity, smiled. He began to slice meat from the rotating skewer, his glasses likely informing him of my ordering history— he didn't actually remember me. "Just to be safe, you can do the thing, yes?"

I rolled my eyes, though he probably couldn't see it through my veil. The virtual agent managing my interface took the interaction as a prompt to issue a fresh request to another autonomous utility app— Sooth.

I'd released the truth-speaking DApp eight days after the simple bomb-validator, again using the Cobble identity. Each time I did something public as Cobble I was afraid the PRT would lock that account too, but so far they hadn't. It was another reason I suspected Colin was actually trying to help me, even if he couldn't be overt about it.

"I don't have a bomb in my head, I'm not ABB or any other gang. I haven't committed a violent crime since coming to the camps."

A prompt flickered— vanishing as I almost subconsciously acknowledged it— and the app forwarded a signed message to Mehmet. A transcript, my own belief in the truth of my words, and the app's confidence rating. A summary of my reputation scores and public interactions with other people in the camp.

"Anything else?" I asked.

"No no. Sorry, but you understand, yes?" He signed off on the DApp's attestation— another grain of social proof. "You should not hide your face, my friend. Chinese guy with the lights, it does not look good."

"Not Chinese," I sighed, hardly caring anymore. "And she can implant anybody. Asian or not."

"How egalitarian." Mehmet shrugged. "Three bits."

I initiated a transfer of 30 bits instead. He took pita bread from somewhere underneath the counter and put it in a steamer.

"One now, nine to go?"

"Seven to go," I said, and he smiled, the last traces of suspicion vanishing with the substantial tip.

Money— whatever the currency— made things easier.

I went back to my scattering of virtual screens while Mehmet worked. Wasted a few minutes going over various status reports— VA's would have notified me if anything needed attention, but going over the actual information was something of an old habit. A soothing ritual, developed long before I became a Ward.

The habit might be old and familiar, but there was so much more now.

Alerts and warning messages from ongoing simulations. The defect-rate (nominal) and resource utilization (critical) of my fabricators up north. The status of thirteen drones floating along the upper reaches of the stratosphere, all that was left of their 32 unit test cohort— failure just another form of progress. News feeds. Summaries of PRT movements. Last suspected location of Empire capes.

Trend lines of deleted and suppressed DNet content and accounts, growing every day. An estimate of how much compute Colin's policy-bots consumed, enforcing PRT info-shaping protocols. Admin accounts— account, singular now— got free compute. Another mistake that used to benefit me but now just gave Colin unlimited processing power to back his VA's, without any real resource constraint.

Chat-flows for my various identities. Messages from known contacts automatically filtered to the top of a mountain of communication that fell in the gap between fan mail and spam.

I bumped 'VA email secretary' higher up on my priority list. The agent managing my interface handled most of it already— mundane spam was an easy problem— but I needed to go through and train it how to deal with humans. With fans and haters and businesses that seemed reach out to me nonstop, now that I wasn't acting as a Ward.

Nothing substantive from the PRT.

Calvert sent me a message every day, but never with anything meaningful. I felt like we'd only had one real conversation— weeks ago, back when I'd first found Ellison — and everything since then had just been empty platitudes. Keeping the lines of communication open, to use one of Calvert's phrases.

A glance and a thought was enough to bring the whole history up in a series of screens, a picture of Calvert next to the floating window of text.

/ Charles Sakai - Director Thomas Calvert ::: PRTG:SPNICS4.3 /

: Excellent work Charles, this is invaluable.

: And I'd love to include you in our planning sessions.

: When will you be returning to HQ?

- I'm re-instated? That's great!

: Well, not quite.

: Your disappearance has made things… difficult.

: I know you had your reasons, but it's past time you return to HQ.

- I'd rather not. The guest suite on 10 was nice and all, but it felt a little too much like a cell. And not being able to build… I don't know if Renick understands how hard that is for me.

: Things have changed Charles, we'd never lock you away in a cell.

: What happened to you was crimina and since becoming Director I've made sure something like that will never happen again.

: And we do need you to come in, if we want to make progress towards getting you re-instated.

- Why? What difference does it make if I sit in a room at HQ instead of where I'm comfortable?

: We need you to meet us halfway. If you don't like the guest suites we can find something that is comfortable for you

: I'm sure one of our agents would be happy to host you, or we can lease a condo in a secure building

: I promise you, nothing like what happened in Decemeber will happen.

/ /

It'd been hard to turn him down. Calvert had done a lot for me and saying 'no' to such a simple request left me feeling deeply uncomfortable. Like an ungrateful, spoiled child slapping away the hand extended to help him.

But even if the PRT were the good guys, their good didn't necessarily match my good. I knew that before I signed, and working with them for five months or so had just driven it home. Even if it had been… nice.

Hiding in the camps wasn't comfortable or safe, but I could build. I could act.

Even if Calvert supported me, there was too much of a chance that some bureaucrat in Washington or some comittee I didn't even know the name of would give the order to confine me. Take away my tools and access.

I had still wanted to find a compromise though, still did even now. But I never seemed to find a set of conditions Calvert could accept.

/ Charles Sakai - Director Thomas Calvert :::PRTG:SPNICS4.3 /

- I'll come in when I'm re-instated and have access to the Tenjin account. Even without Admin.

: We need to be able to show the rest of PRT Leadership that you are 'under control' before re-instating you.

: We don't even know where you are.

- I'm happy to return once the Tenjin account is unlocked.

/ /

After that, he'd just defaulted to banal pleasantries. The same message, in essence if not words. He shared no information, no news how the Wards or the organization itself was doing or what their plans were. He never lost his temper either— always unfailingly polite. Suggesting I return. Or attend classes at Arcadia. Or 'check in' with PRT staff to make sure I was still ok.

Day after day, regular as a cron job.

I automated my half of the conversation, afraid I'd give in if I had to compose my own response and go through all the emotions of guilt and obligation each time. But even then I still worried that I'd fucked up, that I'd burned a bridge with my biggest supporter in the PRT. Killed any chance I'd ever had of a relationship with the 'good guys'.

A deep chime and a new screen spawned— my primary VA had noticed me scanning through the Calvert Files, and tried to help.

Contextual information spread through my field of view, placed so the extra windows wouldn't obscure anything meaningful. Calvert's personal history, his resume. His graduating class at the Air Force Academy, and some high school in Iowa before that. A slew of similar, publicly available information. Security clearances, commendations for decisive action in Ellisberg along with a medal.

A curious interaction— I'd trained the VA on a number of investigative task while trying to find the ABB's bomb tinker, Ayaka Ellison. Ohka, to use the PRT's codename. It must have taken the same protocols and applied it to Calvert.

Most of it was familiar ground. I'd spent enough time outside the man's office, waiting for our meetings, to have dug into his past quite a bit. Despite how many officers referred to him as an 'REMF', and probably worse when I wasn't around, Calvert had a decorated career.

The VA picked up my familiarity with the background, and started populating the information space with newer data.

A video of Calvert, standing in front of a podium with a white-toothed smile. Announcing the 'unprecedented victory' over the 'Parahuman drug cartel that has plagued Brockton Bay and the North Eastern United States for the better part of a decade.'

I snorted.

Mehmet looked up but I waved him off and he went back to making sandwiches. We'd all grown used to people responding to something only they could see.

I waved away Calvert's thread, leaving me with Laetitia's invitation.

'Father Ted's' didn't have a web page, much less a DNet site, but my VA found an address and pulled up drone-footage. Instead of the church I was expecting, Father Ted's was a basement bar just down the street from HQ. Frequented, predictably, by PRT Officers and Agents.

I sighed, and dismissed the feed.

Diego had been… kind of awesome actually. Like a jolly older brother that seemed to look out for me, even as he attributed it all to being a 'cushy gig' or 'easy overtime'. Like I was the one doing him a favor.

Not going to his wake felt… disrespectful. Even though he was dead. And even though a wake at a bar sounded absolutely horrible— likely filled with cigarette smoke and drunks talking too loud— I would have gone. I wanted to go.

But for whatever broken reason I couldn't stop thinking about the hotel-room-cell they'd put me in. Or the looming anti-brute containment measures of the first cell they'd locked me up in. And how everything I've done— the drones and my production facilities, the distributed compute fabric of the DNet and the countless devices I'd made for people— wouldn't stop someone from simply grabbing me and bringing me back.

The weird, rote messages from Calvert just made more nervous. I imagined he reached out regularly to Lung in the same way. To Kaiser, well, Victor now.

I'd given him the ABB's bomb tinker. Her location, details of her three primary workshops. A mapped out network of individuals she'd interacted with and a list of people likely to have been implanted. Her full history, the prep school she attended before Cornell and her hobbies before that. Her manic depressive mother and CFO for a middling military supplier father.

He'd replied with backhanded criticism and platitudes. Colin hadn't even given me that much.

They hadn't used the information either, unless it was to give the ABB more space. Coil's mercenaries were doing more.

The only thing the PRT and Protectorate had done in the past month was conduct an utterly fucked raid against a gang— cartel, ha!— that didn't even matter any more. A gang that hadn't operated within city limits for months.

A bunch of good men and a bunch of idiot pot-heads dead. For nothing. For no positive outcome whatsoever.

A deep chime sounded and the array of virtual windows surrounding me softened, as if they were the background to some artistic bokeh photography.

The VA orchestrating my interface— I'd started referring to it as 'Prime'— condensed every AR and HUD element into an intricate orb. A three dimensional fractal, endlessly collapsing into itself.

I closed my eyes, even if I didn't feel like it. Breathed in the wet stink of Captain's Hill— the charred meat from Mehmet's truck and the damp scent of the rain. Fumes from humming engines and warbling diesel generators. Slowly let it all out, and started again.

Part of what bothered me is that while I could observe every action the PRT took, I was still out of the loop. Didn't know what they were thinking. Isolated, by my own choice.

From the outside it had probably looked like we weren't doing anything against Lung even before the Bomb Tinker joined them, but we'd had a plan. We were starving him out— economically and logistically. Driving the ABB's 'customers' away, and giving people in the gang other options.

Now we were dealing with a bomb tinker that could vaporize the city if she had a bad day, and I had no idea what the plan was. If there even was a plan.

Some stupid part of me wanted to take care of things myself. I'd learned a lot about her over the past couple of weeks, about the ABB in general. Ellison wasn't dumb, but she was arrogant. Narcissistic. And obviously under a lot of pressure. She'd work for two or three days straight, taking various amphetamines and red bulls, then crash.

I couldn't help but plan it out in my head. Sneak in when she was sleeping or too high to function. Suborn her tech. Capture her and bring her to PRT HQ.

Given what I'd learned about her, and the conditions she seemed to work under, it'd be doing her a favor.

But it'd be a stupid, senseless risk. Not for my own life, but what would happen if things went wrong. Some contingency I missed that resulted in who knew how many people dying.

She'd been capable of making time stop after four weeks of work. Who knew what she had now.

Capes like Ellison were the reason the PRT existed and yet Renick and others like him seemed far more concerned with me giving away free phones than a mentally ill Tinker surgically implanting bombs in people's heads.

Another deep breath, in and out.

The exercise felt goofy, but it helped. I opened my eyes to find that the roiling, fractal orb had calmed.

Wards training and the PRT's obsession with procedure, the various ARR's and performance evaluations, had driven home the idea of self reflection. On going over one's mistakes to see where there was room to improve.

And I had a lot of room to improve.

One pattern that had cropped up, over and over, was the stupid decisions I'd make when stressed or angry. When I felt like I was under pressure even if, in retrospect, I wasn't.

It was simple enough to train my interface VA, Prime, to monitor stress indicators. Direct it to shut everything down (if it was safe to do so), and force me to pause if I exceeded thresholds. Guide me through meditation and breathing exercises.

A hundred thousand people and counting depended on my tech. I couldn't afford to just wing it anymore, or do something dumb because I was pissed off or stressed.

It was a reductionist, mechanical way of looking at my own mind and emotions, and the woo-woo shit felt foolish, but it helped.

The ball of roiling math in front of me slowed as I continued to breathe, to pay attention to my thoughts. I could choose not to react. Waiting was action, and an opportunity would come.

The orb smoothed, and a bare minimum of my interface returned.

"Where you from?" Mehmet asked. His hands moved with routine certainty, teasing open a warm piece of pita bread and stuffing shredded cabbage inside of it. "Ah, maybe you don't talk about your past?"

"Just outside Boston. Originally." I disliked small talk, but old habits of politeness and etiquette had me doing it anyways. "Brockton Bay now, I guess. You?"

He sawed a long knife against the rotating sack of meat. "Atlanta."

"Atlanta? That's a ways…" It wasn't unusual, people came to the Camps from all over— better a comfortable shelter for free than paying some slumlord rent for roach-ridden hovel. Or having to be careful whose eyes you met every time you walked to the store. "Why?"

Prime, always monitoring my environment, interpreted the conversation and the pattern of blood flow in my brain as curiosity/interest. Like with Calvert, it tried to help.

A cloud of information condensed around Mehmet as it began to go through the same protocols I'd built to research the ABB and Ellison.

The age and activity of his account, analysis of his interests and posts. Who he tended to spend time with, and then a sub-categorization of who of those were likely to be customers of his food stall versus actual personal connections. His habits of motion throughout the city, mostly confined to Captain's Hill.

A detailed history of every fractional point— every bit— that he earned and spent.

Used to be, people created shadow wallets and sent points to them through distributed apps that tumbled everything together in a way that made it hard to track. It had enabled crime, but also savings that weren't explicitly linked to someone's identity. I'd read comments about prostitutes using it to keep their savings hidden, along with people in other bad situations.

Colin had ended that the day after I left.

People were pissed, of course. More at the loss of 'dollar value' as the exchange rate of points tanked than any loss of privacy, though the two were linked— digital cash wasn't as attractive when every transaction could be traced. And the privacy advocates were outraged, saying 'I told you' to anyone complaining about the drop in price.

But it was less of a big deal than I thought it would be. The DNet's economy had enough momentum, enough buy-in, that people just grumbled and carried on. No protests, no change in behavior. Just a bunch of whiney posts and videos.

One week later, Colin had used the ability to trace and analyze funds to freeze 3,407 Empire wallets. The pay-per-view cock fights collapsed overnight. The death matches and dog fights continued, but it was clear they made less money. And there were no more cleanly escrowed drug and gun deals.

Without Medhall to wash their funds, it was a bigger blow against the Empire than any of the countless little skirmishes along the border.

And then he censored everything else the Empire tried to do on the DNet. The racist religious revelries. The propaganda pieces. The hate speech and the attempts to 'inspire' the right types to be better. The fucking recruitment programs.

All stuff that I'd wanted to squash for months, but had always hesitated. Always valued the integrity of what I hoped the DNet would be, more than what I had thought would be a short term would inflected on the Empire. I had drawn more flak for that than continuing to ship shelters to Empire territory.

It was never black and white, and the right decision was rarely clear.

I didn't always agree with the institution, but the PRT always had a reason for every action they took. Sometimes political, or simply managing perception, but just as often a good, sound, reason.

"Rent is cheap, yeah?" Mehmet shrugged, and turned his attention back to the sandwich he was making.

Prime continued to dig into the man's past. Pulled and correlated more data.

With Ellison and Calvert, the VA hadn't had all that much to work with. Neither were active on the DNet, Calvert's publicly available records seemed almost cultivated, and Ellison hadn't really accumulated all the digital detritus and paper trails of life yet.

Mehmet lived in the camps though, and used the DNet for months. Prime had countless starting points to gestalt from, and began to show me what it had found.

Mehmet's high reputation, both within the Captain's Hill community and overall. A summary of thousands of comments and reviews by DNet users: a note of caution that he kept a shotgun behind the counter, endorsements that his Kebab's were the best 'North of New York'. Warnings for those with weak stomachs. A timeline of his actions and income and posts, beginning four months ago.

He'd made the equivalent of ten thousand dollars in the past month.

With an errant thought, another whim of curiosity, the same same point spending/accrual analysis expanded to every individual in sight— from the people in line behind me to the masses in the market across the road.

Every one of them with a tidy economic summary over their heads.

I breathed out slowly, taken aback. So many were just scraping by. I'd tried to design social programs, paying points for behaviors such as picking up trash or turning over shelters for new residents, but it was hard to see any kind of meaningful impact.

And the balance over their heads was probably all they had. Cash was too risky to hold for most people, even if its actual value didn't fluctuate. And it's not like they could open a proper bank account— Brockton Bay Central didn't accept 'Strand 712, Cluster 23, Shelter 3' as a valid address for opening an account.

Not everyone was poor though.

A man in the ubiquitous poncho lined up at another food truck had the number 13.43356 glowing above their head. Points, equivalent to eighteen thousand dollars, displayed like a gold chain to anyone that knew how to see it.

Prime gave me a leg up, but any thug could in theory make the same calculation. Build the same overlay. And then just beat the hell out of someone until they transferred the points. Yet another problem I needed to do something about, another task for the list.

I glanced back at Mehmet, his timeline rapidly shooting into the past as queries outside the DNet returned. Faded datapoints, where Prime made jumps of inference. Bolded events where the VA could corroborate with direct evidence.

An attack by The Fallen in Western Georgia. A faded photo from the back wall of Mehmet's truck— magnified and reconstructed to show a smiling Mehmet less worn by life, a laughing girl sitting on his shoulders.

Entire swathes of the contextual cloud darkened as Prime finally got a reply from some new government API about the plates on Mehmet's truck.

The text darkened and expanded as I focused on it, Prime pulling more data and burning more compute on inference in response to my interest. Digging through scholarly and news articles that had made it to the net. Blog posts, and social media comments.

Westfall. Something like one hundred and fifty people taken for the Fallen's compounds and the rest of the town all but wiped out.

Most of my life, I'd been isolated from all the madness. Coming to Brockton Bay and attending Winslow had been a rude awakening, but even then we were shielded from how bad the world really was. Even the Wards didn't get the whole picture, the 'little' atrocities like Westfall lost in the noise of Endbringer attacks and S-Class Threats.

"Yeah…" I dismissed the contextual cloud with a long blink and focused thought.

I rewarded Prime, for a job well done. Then gated the whole protocol behind a prompt. I wasn't principled enough to throw away such a tool, but I didn't want it firing every time I looked at someone.

"Hey, can I get one of those to eat now?" I gestured at the sandwich the man was currently making.

Mehmet grunted, and bits of shredded cabbage fell as I grabbed the sandwich and sat on one of the milk crates he had set up against the side of his truck.

The hot bread warmed my hands and the charred meat smothered in tangy yogurt sauce drove away the stale taste in my mouth.

Breakfast, two hours before midnight.

Captain's Hill had a variety of food, noodle stands and taco trucks, tables set up with bowls of some sort of stew. A full on soup kitchen that was supposed to be temporary but had grown into a massive permanent establishment.

But I still found myself missing the cafeteria at HQ. The convenience of it. And maybe the camaraderie.

Even surrounded by people, I felt weirdly isolated. Like I was slightly out of phase with the rest of the world. Entirely because I didn't reach out to anyone. My own fault, but knowing that didn't really help.

My own fault, of course. Even now, in the middle of the rain, a dozen people lined up at Mehmet's truck. Wearing graphene-weave ponchos or the same overalls I did, the display surfaces of the smart cloth set to cape logos or memes.

Half were lost in their phones, but the others were talking to each other. Two guys with glasses were playing what appeared to be AR Air Hockey.

Someone like Dennis or Dean would just start talking to them. Get their stories, maybe comment on the Hero logo one guy had set his poncho to show. Ask to play the winner of the virtual game of air hockey, or whatever they were doing.

Instead, I sat there and quietly ate my sandwich while Mehmet made the rest of my order. Looked above the line of people towards Captain's Hill. A low, dark slope that stretched towards the mountains. Blanketed with hexagonal shelters outlined in a soft blue glow.

Part of me wanted to blame the Wards for not reaching out. Took their silence, aside from Dennis, as proof that the rest of them felt they were better off without me.

Which was dumb, and me being a sad sack. I was the one who left. And Dennis— who had never stopped talking to me, our chat-flow an unending stream of shitposts and memes— had flat out told me they weren't 'supposed' to talk to me. It never bothered Dennis, but Chris would be afraid of disappointing his parents or the PRT slashing his Tinker budget.

Still, more to make myself feel better than because I expected a response, I sent off a bunch of messages with a thought. To Chris, to Carlos. To Dean and Misty even.

And, before I could stop myself, to Colin.

/ Charles Sakai - ARMSMASTER ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- I hope you're alright.

/ /

And immediately felt dumb— of course he wasn't alright. He'd lost a leg and been batted around by a walking tank. But what do you even say to someone crippled by some sort of horrid shaker effect?

Laetitia's message smoothly rose to the foreground as Prime tracked my gaze. Only to fade away as my attention shifted to a new notification.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: I can't tell you what's going on.

: Wish I could.

: Maybe you get how we felt when you wouldn't tell us what you knew.

: anyways, I'm supposed to encourage you to come back in.

/ /

Prime prompted me this time, and I ok'd it for recent information only— not a historical dig on everything Carlos had actually done. Another contextual display appeared next to the chatflow.

Video, originally posted on PHO only to propagate to the DNet— so sharp it had to have been from one of my phones— of Aegis and Vista on patrol. A little boy in a rust-red shirt walking up to Carlos, clearly in awe of 'Aegis'. Carlos bending down and gently lifting the child before floating away from the planks of the Boardwalk and gliding out in a quick loop over the water. Easily holding the child with outstretched arms, so the boy must have felt like he was flying himself.

Half the crowd smiled just as widely as the little boy when they set back down.

I loved my power. The potential to create, to make things better at scale. If I didn't fuck up, I knew I had the potential to change the course of humanity, in this dimension at least. Steer it away from the ruin it was headed towards.

But sometimes I wondered what it'd be like to be one of the more traditional kind of heros. Like something out of a comic book.

Another window showed a rust red line layered over a map. Over and over again, his patrol route never significantly deviating. Always in safe, populated places— something Carlos complained about when he let the 'team lead' mask slip.

Press releases, since the PRT was so fond of those— about Brockton Bay's Wards. More video, this time of Aegis welcoming two new Wards to the team. A brute and another tinker. So very different from my own… introduction? Conscription?

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- I know… just kind of wondered how you were doing.

- What's with the 'encourage' me to come back bit?

/ /

Prime started to dig deeper into Carlos's past and began inferences on his activities as most Aegis and as a civilian, but the new gating protocol stopped it.

In some weird re-direction of programmatic intent though, it tried to help in another way, and spawned an extended reality app. Something I'd whipped up in an almost idle effort to expand augmented reality beyond a mere HUD and floating monitors.

The side of Mehmet's food truck shimmered, faded menus and peeling paint melding into a featureless black mirror. An EMVD— environment mapped virtual display.

Prime populated the EMVD with a news broadcast out of Boston.

A Hollywood-handsome anchorman stared out from the simulated depths of Mehmet's truck. Dispassionately reporting on a conflict between the Teeth and the Empire on the outskirts of Boston. Insane flesh-mutilation themed gang led by a maniac S-threat fighting super powered Nazis was just another item to report, right next to Precinct Twelve's reduction in budget.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: The Director

- Calvert messages me every day, and I tell him the same thing each time.

- I'll come back when they unlock the Tenjin account.

: They're not giving you the account back until you agree to some ground rules. And oversight.

- Is someone feeding you lines?

: Don't be paranoid.

: Come back, we can work it out.

: They're not gonna arrest you or anything.

- Maybe.

- How're the new Wards working out?

/ /

The EMVD app sought out other 'dead space' in my environment. A billboard in the distance showing some old beer ad that hadn't changed since Brockton Bay's port died melted into another black mirror. This one showed one of my currently running simulations— how dynamic perturbation surfaces affected different fixed-wing configurations, which should let me shift the drones further towards a flying wing ideal without sacrificing stability.

I'd originally coded the EMVD, or the dumb VA driving it, to grab semi-random content from the DNet. It would then use fMRI feedback and gaze tracking as reward criteria.

Put simply, if I stared at something and thought happy thoughts, the VA would look for more content like that to scatter throughout my environment.

It took three hours for the feedback loop to devolve into an endless stream of athletic girls in skimpy clothing, high frame rate footage of industrial processes, and military aircraft pushing performance envelopes. A brain worm that left me staring slack jawed at the sides of parked semi trailers and blank walls.

Worse than useless. So I'd iterated.

I wanted to train a VA to distinguish between edification and base dopamine mesmerization but couldn't get it right. It was surprisingly difficult to get it to pick good content to learn from, without devolving into what it had before.

Changing the criteria to select only from my own projects as well as breaking news from credible sources worked in the meantime. I tasked Prime with managing the whole thing, just one more aspect of the interface, and let it go.

An inelegant hack to an idle experiment.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: I can't talk about internal Wards stuff.

- There was a press release.

: Public info is fine, but you sort of quit the team, in a weird way.

: A lot of people are saying we should just flat out declare you a rogue or vigilante, and shut down all your stuff.

- The PRT seems pretty dependent on my tech. The drones, the VA's for basic intel analysis, the body & helmet cams, the new console. And that's just the most obvious.

: Yeah, well I didn't say it made sense.

: Or that it was likely to happen.

: Then again, the response to a literal bomber in the city was to normalize our patrol routes for safety, so who knows what stupid things will get decided.

/ /

I looked up as a shimmer rolled across the low rain clouds. Fluffy gray irregularities flattening as Prime took liberties with the EMVD. I almost killed the protocol— a giant display in the sky was just a bit too much— but let it proceed. Curious how it'd develop.

VA's, especially one as overloaded as Prime, were hard to predict. The way they were trained, the incomprehensible mess of internal weights and balances, led to all sorts of emergent behavior. Painting the flat bottoms of rain clouds as another dead space EMVD candidate was a weird stretch, but within bounds.

Footage of PRT APC's, racing down an unfinished road, played out across the sky. Red and blue emergency lights spun through leafless trees, cast twisted shadows all the way to the horizon.

I sighed, but didn't kill it. Didn't let myself kill it.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- I didn't quit, I was suspended.

: You walked out of HQ and vanished into the city.

: before the rest of us had any clue you were being punished

: do you care about what we do here? About the team?

- of course I care.

: Funny way of showing it.

- What should I have done?

- Sat back and followed orders? Let people get implanted with Bombs because they didn't know what was going on?

/ /

The raid played out on the giant EMVD. Smoke billowed as the house on the hill exploded. PRT officers ran towards it, while the outlines of Capes fought at the top.

I'd spent days stitching together sensor data from seven drones, just to form a base template. More time adapting the same routine Prime's predecessor had used to render the conversation between Renick and Calvert. Turned the same sort of logic to bear on the full sensor feed the drones. Went back through the generated render of the raid to manually correct any aberrations in the model. Used those corrections to further tweak the routines, and then searched for more oddities. Over and over, until I'd reconstructed every step of every person that night.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: You shouldn't have left.

: We all screw up and catch shit for it— Stalker's scrubbed every toilet in HQ, Clock still complains about doing burpees until he vomited. In his costume.

- There's a big difference between toilets or burpees, and trying to keep people ignorant of very real danger.

- Staying quiet would have meant more people dead or walking around with a bomb in their head.

/ /

On the EMVD, Squealer's prop wash cut through the smoke. Wireframes reverted to crisp video of men I knew. Men I had shared meals with, that had helped train me, charging towards the flames.

Scrap metal accelerated to 857 meters per second tore through the first officer.

I'd watched it happen so many times it no longer caused me to flinch.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: Maybe

: I'll get shit for saying this, but I don't really care that you didn't follow orders.

: Clock breaks the rules and pushes boundaries all the time.

: But you left.

: Things got hard, someone hit you with a punishment that mattered, for once in your life. And you left.

- Hard? Saying 'yes sir' like a good little soldier would have been the easiest thing in the world.

: I don't care about Renick, or some stupid livestream.

: You ditched the team instead of sucking it up for two weeks.

: You'd be back on duty by now if you'd have just accepted the suspension.

/ /

I swallowed the last bite of sandwich and stuffed the wrapper in my pocket. Ran my hands through the water that had beaded on my overalls while I ate, yogurt and grease sliding off the smart fabric just as easily as the rain.

Mehmet had already moved on to the next customer but smiled at me as I grabbed the bag of sandwiches. Tucked it under my arm as I wove through the crowd of people at the base of Captain's Hill.

The cold and the wet hardly seemed affect the semi-permanent market that had sprung up. Dudes with tables or tents. Stalls and food trucks.

The original emergency shelters— heavy canvas tents on cheap metal frames— had been mostly been repurposed by the soup kitchen. And of course, an unending rotation of cars and buses and trucks headed back to the city or even down to Boston. Free rent and better living conditions more than enough to offset the cost of commuting for people that chose to live here.

A boy strutted through an opening in the crowd, the flair surface of his oversized poncho cycling through images in a jerky sort of animation— Narwhal moving like an erotic dancer, all but naked.

People scoffed at him, but he just laughed it off. My glasses picked up the ID he broadcasted, overridden to be something like an advertisement hanging above his head and automatically oriented towards anyone watching. An offer to create custom flairs and animations, in exchange for bits.

I shook my head, smiling as I passed him.

When I'd gotten to the camps I'd been… ashamed. Not necessarily by how bad things were, but by how much worse they were than I'd thought. By how out of touch I was.

I'd visited a few times of course— but it'd always been during the day. With the full security escort of armored officers and in Tenjin regalia. People, even with all the little ways I'd failed them, were grateful to Tenjin and that, along with my own biases, blinded me to a lot of the low level misery that permeated the camps.

The shelters were a start— more than a start really. Even aside from people dislocated by the fighting, the shelters gave anyone who had fallen through the cracks an easier chance to get their feet underneath them. A safe, clean place to live without worrying about rent. Points and the DNet helped that even further.

But there was still a lot of pain that I could have alleviated— if I'd bothered to really look.

One of the first, easiest ways I tried to help was making free clothes available. Good clothing, durable, that actually protected people from the elements. Something I should have done, was capable of doing, months ago.

In Aleph, where Endbringers and Capes hadn't fucked up global logistics, they had an abundance of clothing. People in the poorest villages that lacked even clean water still had access to modern textiles.

Things weren't quite so abundant on Bet.

I wasn't a designer but ponchos were simple enough to make, and the overalls were just a simplified iteration of my latest Wards costume, albeit with the display surfaces stripped out. The surfaces from my Wards costume would have tripled the build time, and people didn't really need clothes capable of adaptive camouflage.

Reviews of that first iteration had been… harsh.

Living in the camps and seeing people walk around in something akin to a prison outfit, ash-gray somehow worse than convict-orange, with looks of shameful acceptance on their face was far worse than the criticism and bad reviews.

I integrated 'cheaper' display surfaces into the second iteration. Low resolution and one tenth the refresh rate displays didn't blow out the build time. The original idea had been to offer color schemes for people to choose from, but I put in the extra effort to make the surfaces customizable. A bare-bones API that the community had run with.

And people had been far more creative than I'd ever imagined. In a good way.

The camps had always teetered between hope and despair. Having anyone too poor to waste money on clothes wearing an ash-grey jumpsuit would have put tipped things towards despair. Made the camps more of a dystopian hellscape than the refuge they could be. The refuge that they should be.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- You're 'team lead' for another five months. Don't worry so much.

: It's not about being in charge, the age system is dumb anyways. It's about having each other's backs.

/ /

The parking lot turned marketplace was separated from Captain's Hill proper by a constantly flooded drainage ditch. The rancid water, with bits of trash and foam floating atop and reeking of sewage, was likely the only thing preventing the stalls and tents of the parking lot from bleeding into the shelters proper.

And there were only three paths across. Each little more than dirt and gravel piled over a culvert. Chokepoints for the flow of foot traffic moving in and out of the camp.

Another easy target for a bomb.

Other capes could cause damage too, of course— Rune could pack one of the shipping containers she used to haul stuff around full of fertilizer. Rig it to blow and drop it in the middle of the marketplace— instant terror. Hookwolf or Lung just taking a walk would be catastrophic.

Probably my own biases, but neither of those options were quite as nerve wracking of the idea of a bomb hidden somewhere on the hill. With no way of estimating the yield or even the effect.

I wanted to think Ellison wasn't that crazy, but what I'd been able to find out of her background didn't really paint a flattering picture. Asshole father that demanded perfection, a mother with mental issues. And then whatever happened with Lung.

And she'd implanted bombs into people's heads. There was one gruesome exhibit of a thirteen year old boy caught in what looked like a frozen moment in time, pain and fear clear on his face.

Fuck.

Watching her through the drones didn't make me more comfortable leaving her alone either. She wasn't physically intimidating— she was kind of dumpy actually. Stomping around on the roof of her primary lab with a frenetic sort of energy while she smoked. Muttering, incomprehensibly, to herself. Or screaming incoherently at some guy before blowing his head off. Or weeping uncontrollably, alone in an apartment that wasn't shielded as well as her lab.

Not that threatening, until I thought about what she'd done. Part of why I hadn't shared her location with the entire city.

She seemed far more unstable than any of the bombs she built.

I was falling into the same trap I resented the PRT for— waiting for her to do something so that I could righteously react, instead of making a potentially dangerous call based on ambiguous data.

If she did something big, if she hit the camps or a civilian target, I'd act. Tell anyone who'd listen where her labs were, provide apps to track her and any poor soul implanted with a bomb to anyone that wanted them. Or at least I would until the PRT cut my access.

But I wasn't brave enough to swing first.

Not brave enough to tell everyone where she is. She'd already killed and mutilated normal people who were just trying to go about their lives and I was too scared of what she might do if I provoked her that I didn't act.

Sometimes I envied the brutes and the shakers— straightforward powers where your decisions were to fight or not.

Maybe that's why I was so disappointed with the PRT. I wanted them to do what I couldn't, to lock her up or at least get her away from Lung. Instead they didn't seem to be doing any better than me.

Just sitting, waiting for her to maybe do something awful.

The EMVD, splayed across the sky, seemed to selectively hitch as the new cape triggered. Every cape in the recording-simulation frozen at the same time.

Wards indoc had covered trigger events, but it was surreal seeing it actually happen.

For a moment, even with the trigger, it seemed like everything would be OK. When I watched it live, through a drone's sensors without the advantage of inferential reconstructive simulation, i'd thought they had it in the bag.

Colin's armor continued on autopilot. Squealer and Trainwreck were down. The PRT officers still moved about, not affected by the trigger event.

The Merchants were completely dependent on Capes for firepower and their 'regulars' were undisciplined. The PRT and Protectorate worked as a team, each squad of officers enough to take down most capes on their own.

And it showed.

But then the new cape turned it all around. Showed just why trigger events were still regarded as dangerous, even by non-parahuman officers. Sheer stupid chaos managed to upturn all the careful planning and competence of the Protectorate and PRT.

Colin's leg, gone. An officer I'd never met disappeared from the waist down. Diego a mess of containment foam streaked with red. Growing pinkish as the foam expanded, as I stared at the sky while waiting to cross the ditch.

The anger and grief didn't come, not anymore.

I'd watched it too much. Over and over again, first when I built the simulation and then while searching for some kind of meaning, until I was numb. Like repeating a word until the syllables mashed together into meaningless noise.

I shook my head— worrying about the Wards seemed petty in comparison. They'd been good to me. They were good people, doing dangerous work.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- Sorry.

: … what?

- I text faster than I can talk, and it gets ahead of me sometimes.

- You're just doing the best you can, and it's shitty of me to snipe at you like that.

- Also… I get it. About the intel thing.

- I should have given you everything I had, back then.

: Huh.

: The first time anyone apologizes to me and it's the AWOL Ward.

/ /

The crowd had hardly moved and a quick glance through a drone showed the police and paramedics pulling a body from one of the shelters. It wasn't anything unusual, so Prime hadn't flagged it.

The incidental deaths bothered me enough that I'd stopped the notifications. The suicides, the overdoses. The people who just stopped trying, curled up in a shelter to simply fade away.

I pushed through the crowd, towards the pond-like ditch instead the path across it. Hesitated a moment while Prime threw a safe-ish route up on my overlay, then waded into the reeking water.

Filth flowed up my pants, mud sucked at my shoes, and I didn't care— other than to raise the bag of sandwiches over my head.

It was better than standing in the press of people, staring at the EMVD in the sky while paramedics hauled a body back through the crowd.

The EMVD looped back to the beginning— APC's on an unfinished road, red and blue emergency lights spinning across the sky.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- They suspended me so technically I'm not AWOL.

: You can't see me, but I'm rolling my eyes.

- We could fix that.

: … what?

- I've got a mostly-finished telepresence app. It'd require access to the sensor package on your visor, but I can simulate being in the same room as you.

: No. And i'm rolling my eyes again.

: You know, refusing to follow Renick's order wouldn't have been that big of a deal, right?

: Most of us have gotten pissed off at some order or another— we're Wards, not soldiers.

- Could have fooled me.

: No, really. You never got a chance to talk to the youth guard, but that's one thing they made absolutely sure we all understood.

: Renick's 'responsible' for the Wards, but it's not a military chain of command.

- again… it sure feels like one.

: The problem is you doubled down. Went and blasted the thing he ordered you to scrub across the entire internet.

- Renick didn't say anything about streaming.

: Can you stop with the bullshit? Please?

: I know you can connect the dots.

- … sorry. You're right.

- You seem more upset than I would have thought.

: I am.

: You wouldn't share information with us, your teammates, when we flat out asked you for it.

: But you just… announce something more sensitive? Without thinking about the damage it could cause? After Renick tells you not to?

/ /

The graphene-weave of my overalls clung as I climbed out of the ditch. I'd built the material to be stiff enough for comfort and maintaining shape but the smart cloth was still about as thick as the cheapest plastic bag. With both sides of it caked with filth it stuck to my skin uncomfortably.

Ideas flowed through my mind, various stages of half-abandoned armor projects. I stared up at the EMVD again instead, forcing the thoughts aside as officers spilled out of the backs of APC's.

"Kill viz." I muttered. Inaudible to humans— especially in the rain- but more than enough for the glasses to pick up. Footage of the raid fuzzed into vague shapes as the EMVD sublimated back into heavy grey clouds. "Spawn content policing viz, past 48 hours, 100x until 2200, then 10x, then realtime."

A sphere fell from the sky, pushing the clouds aside until it halted a hundred meters overhead. The visualization large enough to cover Brockton Bay with pale light and brush the tips of the mountains to the west as it curved away up into the sky.

Half a million stars twinkled within, each representing an active node. Propagating data and servicing distributed compute tasks, keeping the network alive. Luminous wispy gas representing content. Lighting flashed and forked through the nebula-like graphic like an accelerated strobe-light, leaving behind slowly healing scars.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- If you, any of you, were headed into something dangerous and I knew about it, I'd let you know.

- Even if Calvert or Renick told me not to.

- It's not like I like keeping secrets.

- I wanted to share it all with you, everything I had.

: Then why didn't you?

: We're out there every day. They try to shield us from the really bad stuff, but you never know when crazy is gonna jump you.

- I get it.

: And it feels pretty shitty, knowing someone on your team is holding out on you.

- Calvert asked me not to.

- I wasn't supposed to have access to that level of intel, but everyone turned a blind eye to it.

- I was afraid that if I shared it around, if I 'abused my position', they'd take it away. Stop using my tech. That I wouldn't be useful anymore.

- silly, looking back at it.

- Well, I also worried about what Stalker would do.

/ /

The sphere-vis of the DNet was nothing more than a gimmick.

Flashy, but not to scale, inefficient, and it obscured complexities.

Various bad actors pumped out inflammatory content. Targeted trolling, designed more to trip Colin's filters than upset people. They then used the inevitable ban as a way to stir up more controversy. Lend legitimacy to whatever crackpot narrative they were trying to push.

The Empire did this more than any other identifiable group. And when Colin, or his bots at least, hit them, they'd point at it and shout to anyone that would listen 'look! We're being oppressed!'.

The sphere didn't visualize any of that, it only showed how much was deleted, not what. Didn't distinguish child porn and snuff and a hundred other categories that shook my faith in humanity, from content people needed in order to form an opinion for themselves.

Video of PRT fuck-ups and Endbringer battles. Statistics— not just the death tolls but data showing the economic impact of all the fighting. Of major population centers being hit by unstoppable monsters every three month.

All the little hints why people should worry about the state of the world, and the status quo, washed away with the actual filth.

The sphere was an idle exercise in AR visuals I'd wasted far too much time on. A frivolous exercise, training VA's to render environmental effects.

A waste of time.

But as the flashes of light from the sphere glinted off the ripples of water at my feet, I couldn't bring myself to regret it. There was an… art, to polishing something whimsical. In following flights of fancy with no real purpose.

It also made it more real for me. The galaxy of nodes, and the cobalt lighting carving scars through a nebula of content, took the abstract concept of the DNet and how people used it, how it was being censored, and grounded it in a way my monkey-brain could understand. Something I could assign importance too.

It would be so easy to simply move on. To give up on the DNet, on making information and communication available and accessible to anyone that wanted it.

To let it the whole thing be another project I iterated past, to let it be someone else's responsibility.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: Shadow Stalker is a fully trained Ward with a strong defensive power.

: How many civilians do you think suicided-by-cape due to your stream?

- Seventeen.

: … what.

- That's an upper bound and includes people who fought back unreasonably hard when someone wearing red-and-green tried to pull them off the streets.

- Seven of the implanted killed themselves directly, trying to catch Ohka in the blast I assume. Or just refusing one of her orders.

: And you still think you're in the right.

- Yes. Give people information and let them choose.

- She was starting to implant people who had nothing to do with the ABB, people who wanted nothing to do with the ABB.

- Like she was building an army of bomb-drones, as stupid and horrifying as that sounds.

: You can't know that.

- Easily inferred, with a high degree of confidence.

: We could have saved those people.

- But we didn't.

- We don't even help any of them now.

: You want untrained civilians to fight an insane bomb tinker?

- I want to give them the information they need to make that choice.

- She's created Grayboy loops— imagine that.

- Imagine being forced to pull someone else in to be implanted.

- I'd rather fight, rather die, than let her put one of those things in me. Or force me to conscript someone else.

- Wouldn't you?

- That's what upset me so much.

- People are braver, smarter, more capable than we give them credit for. Give them what they need to make their own choices.

- Renick wanted to control information. To 'manage the narrative'.

- And every moment a committee wrung their hands over the course of action least likely to blow back on them, another bomb was shoved into someone's head.

/ /

Older shelters bordered the far side of the ditch. Rev 1's— simple graphene composite, the light-eating black of my solar tech without the accents and external lighting we'd added to later revisions. Functional, but no one had lived in them for months. Not since the R2's became widely available.

They remained though. Left up as a sort of boundary for the camp, and as an erosion stop. Even the Rev1's would slowly grow tendrils into the ground, branching out to interlock with other shelters for stability and resource sharing.

In the rain, even with the boost my glasses gave me, they seemed ancient and alien. Hexagonal relics embedded in mud, layers of graffiti streaking off them in the rain. Frothing brown water from ditch washing against their sides and up into the narrow paths between.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- Also, 'Ohka' is a completely fucked name.

: Okay?

: If you had stayed you could have suggested something better.

/ /

I rolled my eyes. The XR elements of my environment remained stable— the sphere and its lightning, the virtual monitors, the persistent chat-flow with Aegis. Another finicky optimization I spent far too much time on, even if the end result was satisfying.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- Because they ask me before they assign code-names.

: I don't see why they wouldn't.

: Most of our intel on her comes from you anyways.

/ /

I shrugged, though he couldn't see it, and then called up a list of side-projects with a bit of focused thought. Raised the priority of the telepresence app Carlos had turned down earlier, and added his concerns about security. And privacy. The app was mostly done, but the last bit of polish, getting it to where it was intuitive for someone else to use, always seemed to take longer than the core of the project itself.

Actually… I could probably just release the code and let someone else polish it. Not having school, or Wards duties, had freed up a lot of time but I still got stuck trying to do too much.

I waded between shelters, making note of the corded 'roots' under my feet— carrying signal and electricity even from the unused, older units. They could also carry water and trace nutrients used by the shelters to maintain themselves and expand the mycelium like a network of roots, but Brockton Bay saw enough rain that it wasn't really necessary.

There'd be eventually enough demand outside Brockton Bay though. Politicians could paint the phones as frivolous luxuries, keep them soft-banned. But it'd be downright inhumane to keep the shelters confined to Brockton Bay and the rest of the world would eventually realize that.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- Anyways, you still want that intel?

: What?

- The PRT still uses my tech, that means I still track everything.

- Ellison shielded her labs, finally, but I have enough data to model around that.

: Ellison?

- The bomb tinker.

: Dammit Charles, you can't just use someone's name like that.

- She's killed more people than Hookwolf.

- Everyone knows it's the Cornell bomber anyways.

/ /

Rev 1 shelters gave way to Rev 2's, and the flooded passageways yielded to packed dirt covered with a slime of mud. A warren of turns and intersections between uncomfortably close graphene walls, but the Rev2's had exterior lighting.

I had to press myself against the wall to let a family of five pass. The father watched me guardedly as the other four squeezed by.

Each shelter was capable of functioning standalone but cluster deploys were optimal. Six units, arrayed edge to edge in a circular pattern, with a shared utility module occupying the dead-space at the center. A geometric flower, with six hexagonal petals.

At first, we'd put more space between each cluster. Captain's Hill was something of a nature reserve— featured in fancy magazines with articles like 'Top 20 hiking trails in New England' and '12 fantastic getaways accessible from New York'— and we'd tried to preserve some of that.

It hadn't lasted long.

Within a month we'd realized that the camps would never stop growing. Far before Ellison threatened to blow up a University campus because of bad grades or whatever, a constant trickle of people had swelled the population of all three camps. Abandoning failing small towns, or taking one of the free bus tickets to Brockton Bay that surrounding cities were starting to give out.

So we'd packed the clusters closer together. Linking them end to end, like strands of honeycomb that stretched diagonally up the hill, with just enough space left between to walk through. We'd planned for thoroughfares of sort, but it was always a balancing act. Too wide, and people would fill them with lawn chairs, tents, and smalltime gangs would start 'claiming' space. Too narrow and people couldn't move in and out of the camps.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: You over-estimate how many people know that.

: And check your figures. Hookwolf's been active for more than a decade and even his official numbers have got to be higher than Ohka's.

- You don't give people enough credit. And fair enough, I was only looking at actions I've directly observed and Hookwolf's been relatively contained.

: Unless you attribute all the death-match murders to him.

- … yeah.

- So, you want the intel on the Empire first?

- Squealer's working with them now, if you didn't know.

- Or straight to Ellison and Lung?

- How about an app that traces every member of the ABB. Realtime maps of everyone with a fucking bomb in their head, how convenient.

: Wait. Stop.

: I'm still not telling you what's going on at HQ.

- This isn't some quid pro quo thing. You were right, I never should have hid intel from you and the others, and now I'm trying to make up for that.

- You're still using that visor I made for you, right? Open this: [LINK:: Ayaka Ellison, AKA 'Ohka']

/ /

I stepped out from the shoulder width path between strands of clusters, and onto one of the thoroughfares that ran from the base of the hill to the rounded top. Just being able to walk without making a sixty degree turn every couple of steps or squeezing by people was a relief.

"Mirror," I whispered.

Ambiguous, but my gaze on the access log as Carlos opened the presentation combined with past interaction patterns was enough for Prime to understand what I wanted.

Virtual Agents were based on Dragon's code. The same predictive engine she'd provided for the PRT's security system— the borderline eerie system that asked a bunch of subjective questions as a form of 2FA— adapted and streamlined by Colin for predictive combat analysis, and then further iterated on by all three of us at an attempt to model Endbringer behavior.

All of that was next level bullshit— i just adapted it for UX, and some basic analysis.

Though I was still disappointed Dragon never worked with me directly. But she was famously reclusive, and even if she'd do video calls with Colin, it was understandable that she wouldn't have time for a Ward.

Though it would have been amazing to work with her.

Prime spawned another virtual display, one that mirrored everything Carlos saw and did as he worked through the intel I'd collected on Ellison and the ABB.

Simply finding her had been easy. So easy that I was sure Calvert's analysts knew where she was.

But they weren't moving on first-level intel, so I took it further. Spent days stitching data together into an interactive presentation on Ellison, the ABB, the forcibly recruited bomb-slaves. Built a complete model of the entirety of the ABB and how what was left of them in Brockton Bay affected the social networks around them, and then explained how that model evolved in real time as more data came in. Why it was reliable.

All in a manner a lay-person could follow.

I'd started with the men at the brothel— the ones with bombs in their heads and the one who'd thrown the pipe-bomb.

Carlos passively watched as the presentation showed how I'd trained a VA to follow the men backward in time. Meticulously parsing mountains of video and captured EM readings from hundreds of vantage points to build a map. Of every place they'd been to, every person they interacted with, reaching back to before Ellison even came to the Bay.

The ABB had of course told their members not to carry my tech— even the Merchants had taken that step— but it hadn't really mattered.

Everyone the men had talked to— in person or over the phone was tagged and fed into the model. Meaning parsed out of each conversation— directly recorded, reconstructed through partial capture of sound waves reverberating in the materials near them, or simply lip-read if captured on video.

Carlos paused the presentation to follow a reconstructed conversation in realtime.

The pimp who'd thrown the dimensional shear pipe-bomb— and wasn't that a ridiculous thought— screamed at a prostitute. Subtitles provided an English translation, but the content wasn't important. Visuals on the side, showing the man's stress and confidence levels. Both higher than past norms.

The dots, when taken in context of the whole, were easy enough to connect. The VA's just did the same thing at scale.

Carlos stopped the presentation a few more times as the analysis continued, dug deeper at random points. Watched video of Ellison on the roof of her lab, smoking. The inferred analysis of what manner of stimulants she was on— a small amount of Adderall at the beginning, graduating to nootropics out of Boston over time.

The way she'd twitch and squint at the sky, and then go right back to her manic pacing would be sad if she wasn't capable of so much damage. If she hadn't already done so much damage.

It made me wonder how I would have fared if Lung had captured me instead of Sophia, back in December.

Carlos sped the presentation up as VA analysis followed the social graph outward, integrating a second generation of individuals, then the third and forth, into the model. The cross references continued, showing how each of those rings connected back to confirmed members of the ABB. To locations Ellison was known or inferred to be at.

Carlos let the presentation unfold, no longer bothering to spot check anything.

Farming out the compute necessary to run the VA's doing the analysis to the DNet had burned half a million dollars worth of points— but that was fine. Healthy even, I had more points than I knew what to do with. Far more than I could convert to cash without crashing the nascent economy.

The glowing path had me turn onto one of the paths that cut laterally across the camp. We'd started organizing things a little better recently— putting a shelter with external displays at the end of each strand and using it to show a number and a graphic as a sort of basic address system— but it was still far too easy to get lost.

I reached strand 73— a cartoonish palm tree glowing on the endmost shelter— as Carlos neared the end of the presentation. A glowing line guided me down the narrow path between strands and it was another long walk full of mud and sixty degree zig-zags.

Carlos left the app open as it finished the presentation and transitioned to realtime monitoring. A map of the city, with the bomb-slaves closest to him highlighted. Live footage from a fixed-wing drone, zoomed in on a lowered impala as it cruised down Main Street. A frail woman in a halter top and too much makeup in the back seat, looking up at the sky listlessly.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: Have you shared this with Renick?

- Hah, no. He still won't touch my tech.

- Calvert and Armsmaster have seen it though.

: This can't be legal.

- Yeah, I never really got that, two-party consent and all that.

- But Calvert says its OK in pursuit of Parahuman criminals and gangs, just inadmissible in court.

- Anyways, we've been doing it for months and no one's complained. Not really.

: People complain all the time.

- crazies on the internet, sure.

: And this is a lot more than anything we've done before..

- No, it really isn't. In fact, most of the data is old. I'm just putting everything together differently.

: You're tracking… everything. All of it. Every person they talk to, who they call, what they say. Who they fucking look at.

- None of this is new.

- Even the lip reading and the laser-mics have been live since march.

- The only really novel thing here is applying analysis at scale via virtual agent.

- I could do nearly the same thing with the records of a cellphone company.

/ /

I stumbled as what I'd taken for another shallow puddle turned out to be a knee-deep hole. Soupy mud reeking of shit plastered itself to my calf and filled my shoe as I pulled myself out. It drove me nuts— each shelter had access to a fully functional toilet via the utility unit and some people still felt the need to shit in the middle of the path. Not to mention dogs, cats, pigeons and seagulls.

My clothes were waterproof but that was hardly enough in the face of so much filth.

The various armor projects I'd worked on raced through my brain again. More subtle than when I touched a piece of tinker tech or deliberately worked on something. If it wasn't for the sharpness of recall, it'd be indistinguishable from my own thoughts.

At times, it felt as if my power was little more than another VA, reading patterns of frustration, curiosity, and want in my mind and trying to help. And like a VA, instead of providing something that would fix the actual problem, some sort of clever social program or incentives to make the camps a better place, it gave me whatever its statistical model landed on.

In this, case, Colin's undersuit.

I'd adapted it to the Gallant armor but Dean had never used it. Waiting for full TTRB approval. It'd be easy enough to adapt it into a standalone environmental suit. Integrate some of the self-cleaning tech from the rev 5 shelters, and updated sensors for full body monitoring. Non-newtonian fluid over vitals.

It 'felt' better than my other attempts at armor. I'd always tried to go too far in one leap. Trying to make something better than what PRT officers or the other wards already had. Or forcing something into a sub-optimal path, like when I was extending my helmet.

A reply from Carlos brought me out of it.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: I need to think about this.

- Think, debate, check with stakeholders. Whatever we can do to avoid actually acting.

: Sometimes you make it really hard to like you.

: I don't see you out there, taking down the ABB and breaching a bomb tinker's lair.

/ /

I sighed— the fluidity of my interface was a double edged sword at times. Fast and convenient— far better than a keyboard— but also too easy to send something that I'd normally filter.

Rev3 shelters gave way to Rev2's as I continued down the hill. The lower areas of the hill tended to be a little rougher— older shelters, the smell of shit and piss more intense. And the lower I went, the worse it got. Less ambient illumination as there started to be more Rev 1's mixed in with the Rev 2's. People would back up to an intersection rather than squeeze by when traveling in opposite directions.

It was mostly empty, at this time of night. Better to be inside your shelter than walking around in the rain.

But there was an old man sitting in the middle of the path, uncaring of the mud. Legs stretched out across the way. He had his own shelter— I'd helped him to it before— but he rarely stayed in it, though he never said why.

"Need help?" I asked.

"Fuck off."

I crouched down and held out a sandwich. He grumbled, but he took it. Bits of cabbage falling around him as he tore into it, even as I stepped over him.

If you'd asked me what life in the camps was like two months ago, I'd have said that it wasn't perfect. I wasn't ignorant, per se. I was aware of the darker aspects— addicts securing a place to quietly die, the struggle to get enough food, the estrangement. How some people came here and lost any kind of connection or community, subsumed in the manufactured regularity of it all.

But even if I knew the facts, back then, I hadn't understood them. It was all abstract. The occasional visit wasn't enough for it to sink in. Wasn't enough to make it real.

Living here was another matter.

Individual shelters or communes out in the woods and along the coast seemed to have it better. A sort of techno-bohemian experience, nestled in nature.

It was tempting to join one of them. Or even just drop myself a Rev-5 near the top of the hill. Pay someone to bring meals to me.

I had a tendency to simply move past whatever problem I was facing, without truly addressing it. Always chasing the next shiny thing, building something more fun, more dynamic, rather than fix the original problem.

Just iterate. Better to build the next version than to try to fix something that already exists. Easier.

It worked well for tech. For people, for the camps or even the DNet, not so much.

So I kept myself to a Rev 2, in what most people agreed was the 'bad' part of Captain's Hill. Forced myself to trek through it all at least every other day, when hunger forced me outside.

The camps, even with all their failings, were a net positive. An enormous success, when you stepped back and looked at the numbers. It was just harder to see that at ground level.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- Sorry, I'm just frustrated.

- I want to do more. Have thought about building another Gallant suit.

- Thought about fabbing another Gallant suit for myself, but without Chris's generator it'd be really heavy plate-armor after fifteen minutes or so.

- Guess I'm not really a fight-y cape.

: No one can do everything.

: It's why most capes are part of a team.

/ /

It wasn't anything new.

Wards training may have focused on procedure, liability, and PR— they saved the 'good stuff' for the various training camps over summer— but they had stressed how important teamwork was.

How it was the biggest advantage the Heroes had. Any Protectorate cape could expect backup by a squad of PRT officers at minimum, and there was also an active effort to pair heroes whose powers were synergistic. Battery and Assault. Vista and Clockblocker.

The PRT, and I myself, saw myself as more of a support type. A force multiplier. Colin and Chris made gear that they used themselves, but it was obvious that I could be more effective by enabling other people— be they Parahumans or not.

I directed most of that enabling effort towards 'civilians'. Just trying to help people live their lives. But if I really wanted to do something about the ABB, and Ellison, maybe I should re-think that.

Prime pushed an 'all clear' indicator to my HUD as I walked into the last intersection before my helmet. The VA monitored my surroundings— analysing data picked up by my glasses, by drones flying overhead, by the passive external sensors of the shelters themselves— and would have alerted me if it had spotted anything suspicious. Someone following me, of course, but also just someone unknown looking at me for too long.

I still reviewed the summary though. Another soothing ritual.

The lows, the worst area of the camp, was in some ways safer for me. The pooled runoff and distance from the market and any other approaches to Captain's Hill meant no one really passed through if they could avoid it, and anyone who lived here tended to stay inside their own shelters.

Anyone actively looking for 'Tenjin', or even just Charles, would stand out.

But like every other time I went through the paranoid little ritual, no one was following me. My Rev 2 opened automatically, smoothly, as I drew near and I knocked my shoes against the wall before ducking inside.

The hexagonal room was comforting in its stark simplicity.

A strip of lighting ran along all six sides where the walls met the ceiling. My duffel and clothes sat neatly stacked adjacent to the entrance.

And mottled two-by-fours arranged next to the door, marking out an impromptu mudroom. The wood looked out of place against the clean lines and otherworldly material of the shelter, but it was better than spreading the reeking filth further inside.

I shucked my clothes and sat on a towel while I waited for the shower to open. Prime had attempted to book the utility unit for me but one of my cluster-mates got to it first.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: Just come back Charles.

: Please.

: Once they see you're following the rules, they'll lift the suspension.

: and it'll all be good.

- Maybe.

- Not worth the risk.

: … what? What risk?

- Never mind. Over-tuned BMI.

:… OK? What does your weight have to do with anything

- Sorry— brain machine interface. Shorthand for how the glasses work.

/ /

I de-tuned the text interface, made it wait for confirmation before sending.

The PRT could make my life difficult. Maybe not shut me down, but destroy so much of what I worked for.

Colin could kill the DNet with a single command. Ash every phone, zero every account, delete every bit of data spread throughout the distributed network.

The organization itself could simply shut down my leased circuits, the ones bridging the DNet and legacy internet. Or they could cut power to my facilities up north— even with my increased solar and wind footprint the electrical grid was like a drug addiction I couldn't shake myself of.

But they also had to realize I wasn't playing all of my cards either.

I wasn't opening my tech to independents. I hadn't attempted to use captured footage— the DNet might be automatically censored but I'm sure CNN or Fox would love to get their hands on footage of a PRT raid gone wrong. Especially one that they touted as such a success.

And that was, in a way, some of the tamer ways I had of striking back.

My fixed-wing drones were now capable of carrying a fab-seed anywhere in North America, and stealthy enough that I was confident even Dragon would have trouble tracking them. And the next iteration would be capable of indefinite flight, given the right conditions.

I could feed facilities all over the world, grow exponentially before anyone had a chance to react. And, though I understood it was an immediate ticket to the Birdcage if not a kill order, I could automate all of it.

But I didn't want to take that route. Didn't want to be one more parahuman, cramming the way he thought things should be down people's throats, no matter what they thought.

I wanted to be so good they couldn't ignore me. Have enough good will, enough utility, that the people themselves— not complacent politicians and bureaucrats— demanded the change I offered.

Being thought of 'positively' wasn't enough. I needed to be at the point where if the PRT or Government cracked down on me there'd be nationwide protests and outrage.

So, I waited. And the PRT seemed to be happy to play the game. I didn't have the Tenjin account back, didn't have the same reach. But I had the Cobble account and could still, for now at least, release products.

A stupid game of brinksmanship, but probably safer than returning to HQ?

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

- I want to help people. Make everyone's lives a little bit better, make the world a little bit better.

- You can believe that right? Can agree with it?

: Yes.

- Out here, I can work.

- The PRT granted me legitimacy five months ago when they introduced me as a ward.

- The longer my tech continues to work, the more it improves, the greater that legitimacy grows. Suspended or not.

- Right now, the waiting game works for me.

- There's not really much upside to coming in. The PRT, process bound bureaucrats like Renick or whoever keeps on harassing Calvert, have all the power. And I have to just hope they'll let me do the work.

: So that's what it comes down to.

: Your tech is more important than the team.

- The impact I can have on people's lives is more important than what's comfortable for me. And while there's great people at the PRT, I'm not sure the institution, the organization as it currently operates, is the right entity to decide how big that impact can be.

/ /

The same thing that applied to Ellison worked for me— the more time they gave me the stronger I became. But it wasn't just about my tech. Even without streaming, I'd been visibly helping people in a way very few capes did.

My reputation continued to grow.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: We're on the same side.

- But we have different goals. Renick made that clear.

- The PRT does do good, and is full of good, brave people.

- But any good the organization does will always be secondary to propagating its own existence, to increasing its own power. The whole thing is setup in such a way that it doesn't tolerate anything that reduces its own influence.

- And my tech does just that. By giving people more power, more information.

: um… sure.

: Look, Renick's the main person you have a problem with right?

: He's sort of on the outs right now, especially after the Merchant Raid went.

- Why, did he plan it or something?

: No, rumor has it he was opposed to the whole thing.

: Went above Calvert's head to try to get it called off.

: Which backfired on him when it all went so smoothly.

- Smooth?

- It was a clusterfuck.

: What?

: The Merchants are done, there's no coming back from this.

: PRTENE has never had a win like this.

: Ever. Even going back decades— Marquis was taken down by New Wave, and the fucking Empire did more to fight off the Teeth than we did.

- Seven Officers and eleven people died.

: Are you sure about that?

: I heard there were no casualties on our side.

: And it would have been better to take everyone alive, but it was collateral from their own capes. You can't protect people from themselves.

: And it's not like anyone forced them to join the Merchants.

- Yes. Seven Officers: [LINK]

- And most of those eleven people probably weren't actual members of the Merchants, or were forced to join.

- That's not even getting into how, in this shithole of a city, a gang is the only form of protection or belonging people have access to.

- That doesn't mean they should die for being swept up in it.

: They forced drugs on people.

: Armed robberies, muggings, breaking and entering.

: The merchants were scum.

- A year ago, maybe.

- Lately they've just been out in the woods partying, overdosing, and running weed.

: Look, it's not like they had to choose between starving or pushing drugs.

: You're the one giving away free housing. Your camps even have free food! There's no excuse.

: And weed was just a sideline. The Merchants pushed meth, heroin, and crack.

- It was just Weed.

: I've been a Ward for three years and lived in this city my entire life.

: Merchants have always pushed the hard stuff.

- Historically.

- Not for the past six months or so though.

- They can't… couldn't make money off of the hard stuff after Lung drove them out of the city.

- The Empire's has some synthetic opioid now, that they manufacture in medical grade labs, and it's completely collapsed the heroin market.

- They've also got access to a fucking port, as ridiculous as that is. I've watched them ship in literal tons of pure Cocaine. No one's buying Merchant crack cut with who-knows-what when they can get pure cocaine from the Nazi's for a third of the price.

- I'm less sure about the Meth, but again, Empire is running medical grade labs.

- Victor has had months and half the staff of Medhall. He's got fucking production lines now.

- If we were going to mobilize the entire Protectorate and four squads of officers, we should have hit the Nazis. Not a bunch of nobodies out in the woods.

: No one's happy with the Empire situation.

: But The Merchants were scum.

: How can you not be happy that they're gone?

- I'm glad to see the last of them, but they were 'gone' before we wasted a lot of lives on fucked up raids.

- Only thing I can think of was that the whole thing was just a flashy way for the PRT to take credit for what economics had already accomplished.

- Posturing. At the cost of lives.

: You keep saying that.

: I just double-checked the AARs— we had no casualties.

- Bullshit. Seven officers.

- And for what? What actual positive change has this made for the people of Brockton Bay?

: Are you even in the city still?

: I'm here, at HQ, working. And I'm saying we had no casualties.

- No capes died.

- The Protectorate had no casualties.

- Seven officers sure as hell did though.

: That doesn't sound right.

- [LINK::20110424DIEGO]

: Is this going to hack my visor?

- Do you even care about the people that back you up in the field?

/ /

The deep tone of the stress-chime sounded and my interface collapsed into a softly pulsing ball of graphical math.

I took the glasses off and forced myself to breath. Sat there. Naked, stinking of sewage-mud. Staring at the blank walls of my shelter and the too low ceiling.

Carlos had freaked out when I showed him how I'd found Ellison, and my reconstruction of the Merchant raid was far beyond that. A moment in time, modeled with such fidelity that you could walk through it.

He wouldn't understand that it was an illusion, that most of it was inference. That for all its realism, it wasn't really that impressive. VA's just crunching mountains of data from the drones and then coloring inside the lines. Creating something our monkey brains could understand.

I probably shouldn't have shared it with him.

But something about the sheer ignorance of it, how his world view lined up so neatly with the PRT's narrative, aggravated me. A self perpetuating cycle of political spin, tilting the way people viewed the world such that they were more likely to believe the next narrative.

If that was all, it wouldn't be so bad.

But they made plans and took action based on their perception of reality. And the self-propagating ignorance just shifted that perception further and further from the truth.

Carlos wasn't at fault— his understanding had been shaped by his environment. It wasn't even anything malicious, just the gears of bureaucracy grinding along.

An attempt to shield the Wards, even the 'team lead' from 'operational complexities' that might demoralize them. The standard procedure of minimizing public concern, announce everything in the most positive light possible. Casualties handled as proscribed by the operating manual, and mentioned as little as possible. Make a tragic spectacle out of heroes that fell in the line of duty, downplay officer casualties as much as possible. Even within the orginasition itself.

Where I saw a botched operation with too much death, Calvert announced an 'inspiring success by brave men and women, whom he was honored to work with.'

None of the known names, none of the capes, died. And the media didn't even know enough to care about any PRT officers that fell in the line of duty, faceless in their standard issue gear.

Much less a bunch of poor from the Doe family, tagged as collateral damage.

Narrative shaping at its finest, with everyone involved happy for the spin. And perception became reality, a reality far more readily believed than some inferred recreation by my VA's, even if it was further from the truth.

The DNet should have been, had been, a natural counter to that. Until I gave up control of it.

The glowing strip near the ceiling pulsed softly.

I picked my glasses up from where I'd thrown them and placed them on the induction charger, next to the other set. Took the extra few seconds to align the frames neatly with the lines of the wall. And then, finally, ducked into the utility unit and spread my filthy clothes across the floor as the shower started.

"Fifteen minutes, extra hot." I said, after my daily allotment of hot water ran out. Gladly paying the extra bits.

A reply from Carlos waited for me when I stepped back into my shelter, cleaner and a little calmer.

/ Charles Sakai - AEGIS ::: PRTG:SPHINCS4.3 /

: Shit. What do I even do with this?

: I'll… ask around. See if this is true, get back to you later.

/ /

It was about the best response I could hope for.

Gathering all the facts was supposed to make the correct action obvious, but lately it seemed like the more information I gathered the harder it was to decide what to do.

I reminded myself, again, that waiting and building benefitted me.

Once again, Prime read my intent.

The full microlaser array along the inside of my glasses came alive and fully occluded reality. Painted the illusion of shelter walls and ceiling folding away on my retina. Made it seem I was sitting on a hexagonal section of floor, exposed to the rain, mud, and exterior walls of neighboring shelters.

Mud paths and clusters of shelters dwindled to hairlines and blue-lined honeycomb as I seemed to rise into the sky. A quasi-organic hexagonal grid glowing softly in the rain, soon obscured by the wispy bottoms of the clouds.

I pushed down a surge of nausea as some part of my brain caught up with the illusion, convinced the motion was real despite the lack of inertia as I continued to rise. Faster and faster, such that I would have surely blacked out were the acceleration real, until the floor of my shelter came to rest at the upper boundary of the stratosphere.

The vac-drones couldn't go higher yet, not reliably at least. But it was already enough to feel like being at the edge of space, to see the gentle curve of the horizon. Rain clouds reduced to a low gray carpet, glowing with the lights of Boston and Brockton Bay.

Peaceful, in a way reality never was, the stars closer and more vast than I'd ever imagined they could be.

The old anxiety of wasting time snuck back up on me, shattering the moment, and I got back to work.

Virtual Agents were an interesting mix of programming, art, and what I imagined breeding animals would be like. Starting with a base template, training and tuning parameters, splicing in pre-tuned behaviors from mature VA's, then setting them free in a simulated environment. Observing, evaluating, and then iterating.

A squirrelly process, where small changes had hugely varying outcomes, but one that worked well with my power.

I wanted the DNet to exist. The original version, not the censored, locked down thing it had become.

When I'd started out more than a year ago, I was more concerned with getting the thing to work than long-term consequences. Creating a reliable mesh-network that automatically distributed and balanced compute and storage, while baking in incentives for people to contribute and expand the whole thing, had been just past my capabilities at the time.

Admin credentials, any kind of central authority, had been a crutch. Let me make changes to the network as it evolved, to shepherd it down the path I wanted. Allowed me to shut it down, if necessary.

But now Colin and the PRT had that power.

It'd be easiest to start fresh— leverage everything I'd learned to create a new network, one without any manner of centralized control. But tens of thousands of people relied on the current iteration, had wrapped their savings and livelihood up in a digital economy I'd accidentally created.

Abandoning it wasn't an option.

I needed to preserve everything— every comment, every video, every transaction and existing balance, the reputation of every account. On and on, the fiddly little bits of a dynamic system that had evolved semi-organically over the space of a year.

Thankfully I wouldn't need to do the work myself, or even consider all the edge cases.

VA's were squirrelly things, full of hard to predict emergent behavior, but they provided leverage. Let me do more, in less time. Focused effort leading to outsized results. And the very nature of the DNet— vast but operating on a fixed set of rules, constantly transmitting the information that made it back and forth in a way that could be observed and simulated— helped.

I glanced at the stars while working. Whenever something required a little bit of extra thought, or a test-cycle to run and complete. Each time, it surprised me how much they'd moved, as if the universe was slowly spinning around me. Until the curve of the horizon lit up with the light of morning.

The rain had passed during the night. The heavy clouds blown out to sea, leaving behind wisps of moisture that seemed to glow pink in the morning light.

Brockton Bay, by contrast, looked like a wound on the land far below. One that seeped brown pus out into the calm waters of the ocean.

Prime decided I wasn't working any more and let a flood of notifications through.

Updates, chat-flows, simple alarms— most of the updates already categorized as irrelevant. Nothing from Carlos, nothing from Colin. Another polite yet meaningless message from Calvert, patiently asking me to check in. Prime had authored an equally polite, equally meaningless reply that I sent back to the Director with a thought.

A behavioral alert on Ellison, which really should have been at the top of the pile.

I dismissed everything to focus on it. Ellison was erratic, so a behavioral alert could mean a bomb going off, someone trying to kill her, or her reading a newspaper.

Prime followed my focus, and the alert expanded. In addition to textual logs and the various weights that had tripped the alert— all informational but something that would take me minutes to parse and understand— a tiny spot of Brockton Bay, far below me, started glowing.

It expanded into a view portal as I glanced at it, showing Ellison on the roof of her primary lab. Watching the fucking sunrise, of all things.

My legs, rubbery from sitting for far too long, tingled as I climbed to my feet. The perspective of the portal shifted while I worked through some quick stretches, as if I were looking through to the rooftop from the same altitude instead of peering down at her.

Curious to see how far Prime would push the visualization, I 'stepped' through. Leaving the translucent hexagonal tile of my shelter floor, floating in the sky, for a rotting rooftop.

Ellison sat on an HVAC unit. No mask, a fat cigar-thing in her hand instead of her usual cigarette. Oddly relaxed, with none of her usual manic intensity. Around her pools of water had accumulated on the roof, tinted red by the sunrise and full of trash. Lumps of garbage and curled roofing almost peaceful in the early morning quiet.

Just another crumbling building, but one with a nice view of the bay and a Bomb Tinker's lab below.

Ellison took another drag from what Prime identified for me as a 'blunt' containing three to five grams of Marijuana. Then tilted her head back to exhale a cloud of bluish smoke in my face.

My throat tightened in the beginning of a cough, some sort of psychosomatic reflex, until I remembered that I wasn't actually there.

Prime informed me that Ellison's pupils were dilated. I didn't need the VA's help to notice the swollen purpling of a black eye, or matted hair pressed close to her skull where her mask would have sat.

Or the blistered pattern of burns on her neck and chin.

Instead of the scowl or sneer I expected, her face was blank. Weary, apathetic, exhausted.

The difference between what I expected to see, and what was actually there, jarred me. Reminded me of the similarities in our background.

I thought of how convinced Carlos was of his own interpretation of events. An intelligent, experienced Ward unwilling to even consider that 'his' version of events wasn't complete until I practically shoved a live-action recreation of the raid into his face.

In a way, I was doing the same thing.

I re-tasked the closest drone to drop its cargo in front of Ellison. Let the system automatically re-balance the 117 drones behind it so that no delivery was meaningfully delayed.

It was another step closer to the line, in my silent game of brinksmanship with the PRT. I hadn't reached out to L33t or even Parian for the simple reason that it'd be a provocation, however minor.

But Calvert had always stressed the importance of keeping 'lines of communication' open. Even if he'd never meant for me to do so directly.

For all my surveillance and research, for all the analysis of my VA's, I'd never actually talked to Ellison.

A delivery orb touched down on the roof, gently rippling the puddle of rust-red water at Ellison's feet.

She held what was left of the blunt sidewise in front of her and raised an eyebrow. The top half of the delivery orb disintegrated into ash leaving behind a tray of sorts, floating on the puddle.

A pair of smart-glasses at its center.

Ellison sort of grunted and squinted at the sky. Then she hopped off the rusted cooling unit and squatted. Reached out to the the glasses, took them with her free hand.

And put them on.

Spoiler: End NoteMy stomach dropped as Ellison put the glasses on. I… hadn't really thought this out, hadn't expected her to actually put the glasses on. I'd acted out of frustration— at myself and at the PRT.

Ellison waved her hands, casting long shadows across the rooftop in the early morning sun. She even went through the optional full calibration, hopping off the HVAC and carefully setting the blunt on a clean-ish portion of the metal before going through a calisthenics-like process.

She was a surprisingly small woman. Prime read my intent and confirmed that the rendered environment and my perspective were to scale, that everything matched what I'd see if I were actually physically present— though I wouldn't actually be standing on the water. I'd seen her height measured as 152cm, but still thought she'd be… taller.

The curiosity on her face and the silly gestures of calibration messed with my perception of her. Clashed with the signs of violence, the purpled swelling along the right side of her face and the track of burns underneath her chin.

I'd built up an image in my mind of some… insane villain I guess. Something out of a comic.

But like this, with her exploring and playing with a new bit of tech, it was all too easy to think of our similarities. To wonder, again, how I would have fared if forced into the ABB. If Lung had captured me back in December. Or, even worse, shortly after… gaining my powers.

The WWII era gas mask sitting on the HVAC was enough of a reminder to bring the nausea back to my stomach though. I'd listened to her ranting enough to get at least an idea of how unstable she could be. How little she cared about the damage she caused.

I considered abandoning the whole idea. She'd likely dismiss the drop of smart-glasses as an error in my system, or some random guy in the ABB pranking her. No need to get involved.

That'd certainly be safer.

Any random comment I made might be enough to set her off. To upset her, to make her feel she had to prove something. To level a building or kill someone.

But I still wanted, needed, to check my own assumptions. Raw observation was one thing, but how much of what she said was performative, and how much was real, I wasn't sure. I wanted to try to get a better sense of how much of what she'd done was voluntary, and how much was forced upon her by Lung and the ABB. Maybe even help her get free, if that's what she wanted.

I stepped around Ellison and leaned down to get a closer look at her mask. You could learn a lot about a person, just by examining something they'd built.

Chris's tech had a wondrous sort of freedom to it. Playful and infinite, like a lego set begging to be used. Just the thought of his hoverboard, even with the headache it'd given me, made me smile. And that feeling, that aesthetic, suited him. Hopeful, earnest. Eager.

Everything Colin made embodied beautiful efficiency. Clean and precise, but without the soulless pragmatism of something stamped out in a factory.

My power didn't help with Ellison's mask— not looking at it through a drone's sensors from miles away, at data processed and extrapolated into a simulated environment by a virtual agent— but what she'd built was simple enough to understand anyways.

I'd expected something haphazard— the ominous gas mask to hide slipshod construction. What I found was a well crafted mask, with an almost loving attention to detail.

Far from the glue and tape I'd half expected, there weren't even any welds. It must have been heavy— she seemed to have machined a block of aluminum for the initial superstructure and then further ground and polished it down to form the frame. Mounted a micro-projector and stock TI SoC to drive the HUD and voice changer. Painstakingly covered the exterior with what Prime identified for me as a restored Imperial Japanese gas mask, the tube at the bottom replaced by braided red and green detcord.

It wasn't tinker-tech, just craftsmanship and effort. She must have incorporated something exotic to interface with her bombs— I'd examined the traditional spectrum for weeks with the assistance of multiple VA's and she certainly wasn't using anything conventional. I suspected some sort of quantum bullshit, but looking at the parts of the mask I could see there weren't any clues as to how she managed it. Perhaps something buried within the detcord.

Ellison puffed the blunt back to life and hopped back atop the HVAC.

I took a step back and sat, my motions sending a fresh cascade of ripples across the puddle. A puddle that felt like the floor of my shelter against my bare feet.

That disconnect, between what I saw and felt, shattered the illusion of being present.

I couldn't help but notice all the imperfections in the VA-generated environment. The oddities I'd subconsciously panned over— the too sharp shadows, the shapeless lumps mixed in among the cans and sodden fast food wrappers, the unnatural clarity of the puddle when logic told me there must have been bits of detritus floating in the water. All the little shortcuts Prime had taken in stitching together the virtual environment, the bad inferences it had made.

Something to keep in mind— no matter how lifelike, the simulations were not reality.

Ellison seemed happy, playing with the glasses, which gave me time. If I was going to talk to her, I may as well do it properly.

I pulled up the development space for the Telepresence app.

Windows bloomed around me— code, performance profiles, visualizations of how the application would actually run. Telepresence, as I called the app, was something of a hybrid. Parts of it ran in user-space on each participating device but, like anything computationally intensive, the bulk of it ran on the distributed compute substrate of the DNet itself.

Offloading compute cost points, of course. If Telepresence ever took off it'd become another little gear of the DNet's shadow economy, cycling points back into a communal pool of capital that could be used to fuel further growth and incentive behavior. Eventually, I'd need to add in UX elements so people could adjust their own settings, could turn down the point burn if they wanted, but for now I just needed the app to work.

I added privacy settings— though with Ellison on a rooftop and the drones in the air it wouldn't really make a difference. Enabled users to customize how they would appear in the shared virtual space of Telepresence. Integrated Sooth.

She'd probably turn off the fMRI and statistical model based truth telling app, but I'd leave it running on my side of the conversation. Maybe it'd put her a bit more at ease.

Ellison finished creating her public identity just as I pushed the first iteration of Telepresence public.

BAKUDA.

That… wasn't a word? Then again, both of my names had been assigned to me by the PRT, so I didn't really have room to talk. And Bakuda was a far better than 'Ohka'. I hoped that, maybe, it was a sign she wasn't the one pushing for the implantation of bombs, of turning people into suicide drones.

I sent a link to her new identity.

Ellison quirked an eyebrow, and took a long pull of the blunt. Her eyes lazily followed an interface hidden to me. Her smart glasses were no different than any other pair, and that meant they were secure, but the link was to a resource I controlled. A distributed server, of sorts, where my code and applications resided.

Her smart glasses were secure, but I could get an idea of what she was doing from access logs on the other end.

Instead of simply running the app, she was digging deeper. Ignoring the executable to access the source code behind it. Her eyes sharpening as they tracked left and right as if reading text.

She was reviewing the code.

Not just a surface scan either— my applications had become modular things, integrating libraries I'd built up over months working as a Ward. My own code, utility and UI frameworks developed by the DNet community, and unintelligible mashes of code and weights manifested by VA's.

She seemed to be going through all of it.

It wasn't remarkable, really. Millions of people around the world and across the portal to Aleph did the same. CS and Parahumans Studies grad students in both dimensions were thrilled to have such open access to a Tinker's work, even one as mundane as me.

Reading the code wasn't remarkable, but it also wasn't what I'd expected of Ellison. She seemed to be more than a crazy, incoherent maniac. Which was both hopeful and concerning.

I pulled up her behavioral log while she went over the code. Stepped back to the original alert that had caught my attention— something I should have done before dropping a delivery at her feet.

The raw logs didn't tell me anything— just an alarm that her emotional affect had deviated, followed by a physical altercation. Prime automatically expanded VA decision space for me, but it'd take hours to understand the raw weights and parameters.

There was an odd… gap in the data though.

"Raw feed, nearest vantage, ten minutes prior." I spoke clearly, having no need to subvocalize while alone in my shelter.

New windows spawned, one showing a feed of the rooftop ninety seven minutes prior, another showing which parts of the behavioral log corresponded to the current frame of video.

In the feed, a tiny Ayaka Ellison leaned against the HVAC. Mask on, staring at Brockton Bay's skyline. Quivering, as if fighting to hold something back.

I accelerated the video, Prime automatically slowing it back down for me at the first change— Ellison struggling with the clasps of her mask.

The portion around her neck was warped and discolored from intense heat, and she had to force the entire assembly past her face. It looked excruciating, but if she cried out it wasn't loud enough for the drones to pick up.

The mask shook as she set it down on the HVAC, and her hand hovered over one of her cargo pockets for a long time before finally going to one of the pockets on her vest instead. Pulling out a hand-rolled cigarette of some sort.

I looked up from the feed to where Ellison sat. This present version of her relaxed, despite the black eye. I had to remind myself that it was a rendered XR environment, no more real than the raw drone footage. Less, in fact. Simulation more intense, more lifelike, than plain reality.

The window housing the feed widened, covering more of my view, as Prime adjusted it to show the rooftop access door scraping open. Broadening the view portal without reducing zoom or panning Ellison out of frame.

A man in his late twenties stepped out. Slicked back hair, and a windbreaker white enough to glow in the pre-dawn light. Ellison ignored him, the end of her cigarette glowing red as she stared towards the bay.

The man took one step. Swore, loud enough to register on the drone's passive mics, as rainwater soaked his pristine sneakers.

Prime overlaid information on the man in response to my curiosity.

Ju Ji-hun: wanted for assault, child support, aggravated assault, armed robbery, and assault, mostly in California. Truly, Lung hired the best of the best.

"The fuck … doing?" Ji-hun stomped across the rooftop, no longer caring about his shoes.

I OK'd reconstruction of the voices, but kept the video feed un-enhanced. I'd set the drones to only observe Ellison's labs with passive sensors— so no laser mics sadly— but we had enough samples of both of their voices for a VA to extrapolate off.

Ellison rolled her shoulders back and sneered at the slick-looking man. "Fuck off Ju Ju."

"You crazy, dumb, bitch." The feed contracted again as Ji-hun stepped closer to Ellison. "You think they do not watch?"

Ellison leaned back, jerkily, and pulled in a slow lungful of smoke. "And?"

"And?" His voice rose, high pitched with outrage.

Prime's simulations improved every day. The more data it collected, the more feedback I gave it, the more complicated projects I assigned it.

A glance and an almost subconscious query showed the underlying speech reconstruction model in roughly human-readable format. How it tracked the contraction of muscles Ji-hun's mouth and neck, how it estimated the volume of air mixed with smoke exhaled when Ellison spoke. Mapping all of it to the context of the lip-read words.

"So get your worthless, psycho ass back inside!"

Ellison sneered, smoke escaping her mouth. "You don't tell me what to do."

He backhanded her. Hitting hard enough to crack her head to the side. With enough force to send her toppling onto the half flooded roof.

She jerked to her knees and frantically caught her mask before it fell in the water, its braid of detcord having caught on the rusted grill of the HVAC.

"Lung gave you a chance and it didn't work. Now we do it my way, and—"

Ellison ignored him, carefully disentangling the mask and cradling it to her chest as she stood. The whole time, heaving huge, wracking coughs that Prime struggled to simulate.

"— there's no bomb in me, bitch. You're mine." Ji-hun grabbed a fistful of her from behind and yanked her head back, forcing her back to arc. "First thing we're gonna fix is your fucking attitude. You stupid lit—"

Face twisted with pain, I suspected more from the burn wound than her hair, Ellison's right hand tapped her thigh. Fingers moving in a precise sequence over one of her bulging cargo-pockets.

A static-flash sphere of digital noise obscured the rooftop. Dense enough to overwhelm the drone's passive sensors and cameras. Prime rapidly cycled through the recorded spectrum trying to find some kind of meaning to abstract from the noise, and I halted the VA before it spun up additional compute for analysis.

When coverage returned, all that remained of Ji-hun were yellowed tatters of his tracksuit and bizarre ripples in the water.

Ellison hyper-ventilated, breaths interspersed with wracking coughs that bent her whole body over. She ran one shaking hand through her hair, disentangling five fingers connected by what remained of Ji-hun's knuckles. She bent halfway over, as if clenching every muscle in her body, her mask curled in protectively, and screamed.

Wordless, shockingly high pitched. She took a breath, coughed, and screamed again. And again. Loud enough for the drones to pick up.

The sound cut off as I closed the virtual display with a lingering sense of guilt over watching something private.

The rooftop was mostly unchanged— the sun a little higher, the gulls a little wider. Ellison still sat on the HVAC, relaxed despite the swollen bruise covering the right side of her face. She seemed to have finished reviewing the code, and, as I watched, she initiated a Telepresence connection at my Cobble identity.

I almost accepted, but then remembered that the PRT could do the same thing I just did. Look through the drones and observe the conversation. Even if I wasn't physically present, they'd be able to reconstruct whatever Ellison said. And Colin had been more liberal about using Admin credentials lately. It'd be easy for them to figure out who she was talking to, and that'd probably make things harder for me in the future.

Deleting the footage or blocking access would be suspicious, but there was an easier solution.

I smiled as something that would have once taken me hours or days to code came together in six minutes with a handful of instructions, VA's once again showing their worth as force multipliers.

Prime generated a simulated feed, something like the looped CCTV security feeds from old action movies, but dynamic instead of repeating stale footage.

"This even work?" Ellison spoke, voice hoarse.

I reviewed the two feeds— reality, and Prime's simulation.

"What is this trash," Ellison waved her hands about.

In the true feed, in reality, Ellison voice and movements came through clear.

She terminated and restarted Telepresence. "Fucking sellout. Can't even make video call software…"

In Prime's falsified simulation, she leaned back and smoked. Waved her hand and occasionally muttered something. Her behavior eerily similar to how people in line at Mehmet's food truck had moved when watching videos and scrolling social media.

It was so… easy.

But it felt awful.

I wanted to be a Hero.

Maybe not the badass, punch-bad-guys-in–the-face kind, the sort of Hero you saw in comics and movies. But I still wanted my actions to be… good. Wanted everything I did to hold up to public scrutiny. My actions defensible, even if not everyone agreed with them.

Legend must live like that. A paragon, I guess— everything he did true to his ideals. Just. Consistent.

Hiding my location was one thing— it kept me safe, and free. Stealth, for a good reason, rather than subterfuge. Falsifying records to hide my actions felt different though.

There was nothing wrong about talking to Ellison— if it might help make the city safer in some way then it was worth doing.

But already most people in positions of power seemed to be opposed to what I was trying to do. What I was already doing for Brockton Bay, and hoped to do for the rest of the worlds. When I started out, I'd thought that most people would welcome free phones and internet. By the time I became a Ward, I wasn't surprised that so many people were opposed to the shelters.

Politicians in Washington, bureaucrats at thumper levels of the PRT, and alphabet soup agencies I was only vaguely aware of— had and would continue use whatever excuses they could to slow or shut me down.

Hiding my conversation with a super villain terrorist bomber would simply be… prudent.

But, stupid or not, that wasn't who I wanted to be. Maybe because it was convenient, more than necessary.

I dismissed the manipulated version of reality, and let drones record true data. If the PRT found out, I'd deal with it then.

My hand reached out and physically acknowledged the incoming Telepresence session.

The simulated roof of Ellison's lab shimmered, my shelter walls briefly flickering through the illusion as Prime ceded control of my virtual space to Telepresence.

Ellison had taken away most of the app's access to her glasses— blocked it from most of her sensors, hid all biometrics, and disabled the Sooth integration.

The simulated environment wasn't as crisp as what Prime had put together. Not as accurate. Despite that, it looked real enough. Generic VA's running on the DNet doing a passable job.

My default settings— set weeks ago when I created the first version of Telepresence— overrode my appearance. Clothed me in the most recent Tenjin costume, its blue and orange glow reflecting of the surface of the water around me.

Ellison's appearance shifted as well, dictated by whatever changes she'd made in the app.

Her mask was off, still sitting next to her on the HVAC, but she had directed Telepresence to hide the bruising and burns. She'd also given her skin an airbrushed appearance, with touches of almost-goth makeup, and her hair now had a glossy sheen to it instead of being matted with sweat where the straps of her mask had rested.

It likely would have meant something to a thinker, how she chose to represent herself. Even someone like Calvert or Glenn could have discovered a lot about her from the changes she chose to make. I had no idea what to make of it though— other than that she was hiding her weaknesses. Though, she had to know I could directly observe her through the drones.

Prime wasn't any help either. I shrugged, and let the connection establish.

"Ms. Ellison?"

She startled, slightly. Looked down to where, from her perspective, I sat on the surface of the puddle. A stupid little bit of social-fu that even I could understand, putting myself 'lower' than her and sitting crosslegged at a comfortable distance. About as non-threatening as I could be, after dropping a piece of tech twenty centimeters in front of her.

I'd read up on such gestures once, while waiting outside Calvert's office.

Ellison recovered quickly, her face shifting to bored disinterest.

"Sakai." Her lips twisted into a dead smile as she called me by my last name. "Or do you prefer Cobble— since you're not allowed to use Tenjin anymore."

It was always a surprise when people immediately recognized me, even now. Which was silly of me— there was a reason I wore the light-veil when outside my shelter and rationally I understood that my face was all over the news and other media.

But it still didn't seem real. The sense of celebrity still seeming fake, belonging to someone else. Something I kept expecting to evaporate overnight.

"Charles is fine— I never really bought into the secret identities thing."

I stopped myself from getting into the complexities of the Tenjin name— the legalities, how it belonged to me but the account was locked. How I could use it, but felt that it'd be provoking the PRT for no real gain.

"No shit." She raised an eyebrow. "Call me Ayaka then. Yoro."

A shortened, bastardized version of yoroshiku. Slang that had gone out of fashion… decades ago? Or so I thought, at least. Weird, and she spoke it with just a bit of hesitation. Maybe she'd break out something like 'baiyonara' next.

"… likewise. Sorry, I understand Japanese well enough but am not the greatest at speaking it."

"Oh?" She smirked, as if she'd won something. "I picked it up as a hobby, neither of my parents really used it at home. Passed the highest level test when I was twelve."

She took a long drag on the blunt, her expression back to boredom. The way she spoke, the way she acted, all stilted and unnatural. Especially compared to the raw emotion she'd shown earlier.

If I were talking to Dennis or Sophia, I might have said something like 'weird flex, but OK.'. Instead I took a page out of Calvert's book and simply remained silent.

It didn't take long for her to speak again.

"I was wondering when you'd try to contact me. Surprised it took you this long."

"I'm surprised you put the glasses on."

It was too bad she'd turned off Sooth— I would have loved to see what the app made of her mannerisms and speech. Perhaps something orthogonal to truth and falsehood, another dimension to add to the assessment.

Ellison exhaled a small plume of smoke before speaking. "Eh, you're too much of a pussy for it to be a trap. If you had the balls for something like that, you'd have just KKV'd me with one of your little planes."

"Not a big fan of assassination," I said.

"Stupid, but works out well for me." She rolled her eyes. "So what is this all about then? You trying to figure out how I work? Copying from your betters? It won't work, you know— if boosting off Kid Win's shit gives you trouble you don't have a chance with me."

I smiled, honestly trying not to laugh. She sat on a busted HVAC unit, long defunct fan squealing in the light morning breeze, as if the rusted metal was a throne. Talking like anything she'd built could hold a candle to what Chris could do.

But even if I didn't find bombs as compelling or useful as hover boards and hard-light guns, her tech was powerful. Part of why, if I was being honest with myself, we were talking.

Something about the formless lump of trash in front of me, just beneath the surface of the water, caught my eye.

I ignored it and turned back to Ellison — she didn't really seem like an Ayaka to me.

"I'm just trying to understand you better."

"Yeah, nah." She brought one leg up to lay on the HVAC, rugged cargo pants scraping against rusted metal. "You fucks are all the same— you want something, or you wouldn't even talk to me."

"No, really— that's it. Just curious. Check the feed from Sooth." I spawned a shared virtual display, showing Sooth's transcript and validation. Green all the way. I'd never liked lies. "There's more context to it, I guess, but ultimately I'm trying to understand."

"Then what's the context?" Her eyes narrowed. "People don't try to 'understand' unless its to find an edge. So what is it you want, huh?"

The lump of trash continued to bother me. A low-resolution texture in the middle of the realistically rendered environment. Like a loose tooth I couldn't stop poking with my tongue, wondering where the software had failed. Likely something that hadn't matched a prior sample in the shared consciousness of the DNet— even Prime made mistakes like that sometimes, rendering something as a stuffed animal because it shared the characteristics of a child's toy when in reality it was a dead squirrel.

"I'm trying to make Brockton Bay a little bit better than it would be. Look at what I've done— give phones and housing to people." I shook my head. "But you could destroy it all in an instant with one bomb. I hope that, by talking, we might make that outcome less likely."

She watched the feedback from Sooth as I spoke, and leaned back when the app caught up. Every word, assessed as truth. Subjective truth, but that was good enough for this. If she trusted the App, and it seemed that her review of the code was complete enough that she did.

"I watched the streams but you really are just a fucking kid." She giggled, and then took another drag from the blunt. "How the fuck did you manage to maneuver the PRT into letting you establish a beach head with your tech? For all your fame, you're nothing more than a naive kid who wants his happy ending."

"What? Because I want to make the world better?"

"Because you think that it matters." She rested her elbow on her knee and somewhat gingerly cradled the left side of her face. I had to remind myself that she'd be avoiding the burns and bruises, wondering again at the stilted calculation of such mannerisms. "That any of this matters."

"Well—" My eyes wandered to the bit of trash again.

She talked over me. "It's all gonna end— in one year, five, or ten. It's all meaningless, senseless bullshit."

"The optimistic projections—"

"Are lies." She leaned closer, over the edge of the HVAC. "You ever bother to run the figures yourself? Play around with the parameters for Endbringer attacks and disruptive triggers?"

"… I haven't."

"Then do it. Use the Kensington model, or better yet do your own research, I don't really care." The end of her blunt trailed smoke as she waved her hand, no longer cradling her face. More animated, more natural, even as she started to seem more unhinged. "Everything they told us is false— there is no bright future, there is no happy end. This whole shitshow is grinding to a halt."

Prime followed the context, but couldn't quite parse the academic paper she referenced, or translate that into action. I'd have to guide it later.

"Maybe." I spoke calmly, slower than would be my own natural inclination. Something I'd gotten used to while streaming. "But we—"

"No, not maybe. Run the numbers and you'll see." She shook her head. "And what in the fuck are you staring at?"

"Sorry, some sort of bug. Telepresence isn't generating an accurate virtual environment." I gestured at the formless lump.

She rolled her eyes, but smiled. A sharper thing this time. "Then take a closer look."

I raised an eyebrow, but with an invitation like that— Prime followed my thoughts and put together a quick routine. I absently ack'd the request to re-task five nearby drones, ack'd the override of the default passive-only and min altitude policies.

Prime guided the drones on a tighter flight pattern, closer to what we'd used on that last ABB raid I was involved in over a month ago than their standard high altitude loiter.

Close enough that Ellison could likely make out the shimmer of adaptive camo or the shadow cast by each flying-wing. Active sensors went hot, the drones burning through a day's worth of energy budget to hit the rooftop with LIDAR and Hyper-spectral, and my own dynamic version of SAR— the five drones operating as a sort of phased array to pick up the scattered pulses of Radar across multiple bands.

"Oh my," Ellison glanced down as her mask beeped and flashed something at her. "How naughty."

The XR environment jolted as Prime superseded Telepresence. Recalculated everything with far, far more data.

Wispy hair hung suspended in the pool of water. The textureless lump that had been bothering me now rendered as the upper right quadrant of a human skull, aged and cured as if it'd been left in the sun for weeks.

Prime took the extra data and the closer camera shots and reassessed all of its earlier assumptions.

Much of the random pieces of trash were actually bits of Ji-hun, which shouldn't have been a surprise. A swoosh on what might have been a sneaker, dry-rotted and then submerged underwater. Bits of tarnished metal that might have been jewelry, glittering under the surface.

Ellison laughed as the realization hit me. I hardly noticed that her appearance was back to normal— bruised and burned instead of the airbrushed version she presented to Telepresence.

Ellison sighed, exhaling bluish smoke. "Alas, poor Ju Ju! I knew him well."

"Um."

I'd seen death before. Had caused it even— Daisuke, the boy whose legs I'd shredded with the bolo pistol, and the ABB members who had attempted to breach my old lab. I'd watched Diego and the other officers die over and over again in what felt like senseless, stupid deaths against the Merchants.

Ji-hun was nothing, probably deserved to die. I hadn't really thought much of it when Ellison set off whatever device and killed him. I'd just assumed he'd been mostly vaporized, other than the few tattered bits of clothing that had appeared in the simulated environment.

But there was something disturbing about talking to someone who was so… flippant. About a death that she had caused. How casual she was. It was enough for me to make a decision.

"Well, now that you've had your peek—" Ellison caressed the stem of her smart glasses.

"Look, this was a mistake." I shook my head. "I thought it'd be worth getting your side of the story, that's all. I won't bother you again."

"What's the rush?" She raised an eyebrow and smiled, but her demanding tone was at odds with the expression. "Stay a while."

She pushed a visualization to the shared XR space of Telepresence. It shouldn't have registered— Prime had once again taken over the rendering of my personal environment— but my the VA I relied on for so much of my tech pulled the viz over from Telepresence in a display of autonomy that would have had me intrigued at any other time.

A slowly spinning 3d wireframe, the latest iteration of smart glasses pulled directly from the store. Specifications neatly arrayed around it.

"Is this where you threaten to turn a piece of consumer tech into a bomb?" I forced a casual disinterest into my voice. "Because I think Samsung's already done that."

She laughed, but continued to peer at the slowly spinning model. "Energy density isn't enough to pop a person's skull… not reliably at least. Ooo, I know— override your initiation routine on a fresh pair of glasses. Over-pump these little lasers you use for imaging and focus them all on the same point. Leave a couple sets on a park bench outside a school somewhere— what's the name of that K through 6 Arcadia feeder school again?"

She grinned. "Think about it. Some bright eyed kiddie, all excited to find a new toy. Puts them on and BZAAP. Fucking overheated gray matter spilling out of their eye holes. Now that would be a headline."

So much for the benefit of the doubt.

The threat would have been ridiculous from anyone else— the glasses had nowhere near enough energy, even fully charged, to do anything like what she described. The way she pretended to look at the specs just made her threat more confusing.

But that didn't matter— she had stopped time, her capabilities fully into the bullshit realm of Tinkers, stuff that didn't need to make sense. From her it was a plausible threat.

I had tried to think about what it must be like— to be a tinker captured by and forced to work for Lung. To make whatever the petty warlord demanded, to be at his mercy.

I would have wanted help, would have taken any opportunity to get away.

But Ellison was clearly different, not that I really understood what she actually wanted.

Talking to her felt like poking unexploded munitions that had washed up on the beach.

It was all a game to her, masked by some half assed nihilistic justification. I couldn't tell if she was joking about sprinkling sabotaged versions of my tech outside a school or not, or even if the eerie parallel to how I'd originally distributed my phones close to a year ago was an intentional signal of how much research she'd done on me, or just a stupid coincidence.

It was enough that she could, and would, do something like she'd described.

Another advantage of the Wards that I'd taken for granted. My actions had been curtailed, but there was also a sense that any mistakes I made were more… tolerable. Or at least, responsibility for those mistakes was more distributed.

If I did something dumb, I'd be punished. But no one would have really blamed me if I'd just shut up and did what I was told. Even if something went utterly to shit, Colin and Calvert would be held responsible.

As a Ward, whatever happened, there was an understanding of sorts that it wouldn't have really been my fault. So long as I played by the rules. Obeyed.

Here, if Ellison killed some kids in some petulant fit because she didn't like the way I talked to her, I would feel responsible.

Rationally, any act she took like that would be on her. She could have easily acquired a pair of glasses or one of my phones without me having ever contacted her. Hell, she could just wake up angry one day and lob one of her bombs, mortar style, into one of the camps.

That didn't make me feel any better though.

At least she seemed more… eager to talk than anything else. Another thing I weirdly sympathized with, or would have if she'd just dealt with isolation in a sane matter.

I pushed down the nervous anxiety and surge of anger. Raised an eyebrow, as if her threat didn't concern me.

"Does Lung even let you out without a minder?"

"Touché." She pointed at me with the blunt and smiled. "So we done with the meaningless platitudes? You gonna tell me what you really want to know?"

I stood, causing a cascade of ripples across the puddle. The simulated effect hit the brick crenelation at the edge of the flooded portion of the roof and bounced back. Tiny waves, shimmering with the morning light and the glow of my costume. A crosshatch of light and shadow.

Ellison tracked the ripples as they split around a desiccated chunk of flesh. Tipped her glasses down and stared, for a moment, at naked reality without any of the XR elements.

The illusion would be close to perfect for her. The generic VA driving Telepresence wasn't as capable as Prime, but on her end of the 'call' all it needed to do was overlay the illusion of myself and my effects on the environment.

I shrugged. "I'm a little confused, is all."

"You must be used to it by now," She said, but without any real bite, her eyes still tracking the moving water.

"You're capable of so much, but what are you doing with it? Bombs in people's heads? Destroying some buildings that should have been demolished ages ago? There's nothing special about that."

She returned her attention to me and raised an eyebrow. "And I suppose here's where some high school kid— wait no, you're a dropout— is gonna tell me what I should do with my life?"

"You can stop time. Transmute matter. Shatter the barrier between dimensions." I walked as I spoke, careful not to approach her. Each step setting off new ripples until I reached the dry portion of the roof. "You claim you can EMP the eastern seaboard, and I believe you! All that with what, a few weeks of ramp time in a poorly equipped lab?"

It had taken me half a year to get off the ground. To painfully claw my way up with broken phones and a lucky break— a piece of tinker-tech that keyed me in to a novel manner of fabrication. Ellison tore apart the fabric of time with shit tools a few weeks.

"But you use that power to… put bombs in the heads of grandmas? You could cleanse Ellisburg or kill the Ash Beast! Eliminate the Machine Army. If the PRT doesn't shut me down, I'll find the 9 for you and you could end them. Do what the whole world has failed to do for more than a decade and make yourself rich in the process.

"You could do so much more than—" I waved at the half-flooded rooftop. "—whatever this is."

She rolled her eyes. "What is this, some sort of white knight shit? Turn a bad girl good? Rescue me from the Dragon?" One end of her mouth twitched up in something between a smile and a sneer. "Fucking pathetic. And then what, once you whisk me away? We team up and save the day? You tell me who to kill, instead of Lung?"

"No, I don't know." I shook my head. "Anything has to be better than this. You could join Toybox, or go to the PRT—"

"Why the fuck would I do that?" She stared at me incredulously. "Even you, the… consumer tech guy, stepped over their line all the fucking time until they finally booted you." She threw her hands up. "I make bombs, motherfucker."

She… had a point. And it was another casual reference to things that… I hadn't really expected her to know.

Again, nothing remarkable, or even surprising. Just another bit of behavior that didn't really match the insane bomber image I had in my head.

"The PRT would be better than Lung," I pointed out, doggedly even to my own ears.

I walked towards the door Ji-Hung had emerged from, only to step backwards as a wireframe of my shelter walls intruded on the illusion. Warning me, before I walked into something. I could have shifted my anchor point, but was close enough.

Mildew-y steps descended into darkness. Prime traced my focus, and the crumbling outbuilding that housed the doorway along with the roof itself faded away into a translucent render of the entire building.

Everything from the vermin infesting what remained of the walls to the structural weaknesses of a building that hadn't seen proper maintenance in over two decades. An estimate of how much copper wiring had been torn out— either by junkies or by Ellison.

The whole thing should have been demolished ages ago.

"Working for Lung just seems stupid." I mused. "Sure, he's—"

It was like a switch flipped. Arrogance and intensity ripping through her mask of bored contempt.

"Listen, you pathetic excuse for a cape. No one forced me to be here. And no one— " She waved the blunt towards a large chunk of Ji-hun. "— not the PRT, not Lung, and certainly not you, gets to tell me what to do. I'm here because I want to be."

I turned away from the stairs and gave her an unimpressed look.

Her lips twisted into a snarl. She dropped her leg off the HVAC and rested her hand on the cargo-pocket for a long moment.

"You want to be choked? By a brute that's on fire?" My natural tendency was to apologize, to appease— but fuck it. I might respect her power, but that didn't mean I respected her. "You enjoy getting smacked in the face?"

Her free hand twitched towards the bubbled flesh at her neck but diverted to adjust the bang on the bruised side of her face forward instead.

The tension seemed to drain from her frame, and her face went blank. She shrugged. Exhaled another plume of smoke that, thankfully, I didn't have to breathe or smell.

"Fuck you," she said, voice tired. Dead.

So frustrating. She'd produced amazing effects— dimensional shear, geo synced time lock, transmutation— in an ill-equipped workshop with a week of prep. In packages small enough to implant.

All that ability, in the hands of… her. All that power, turned towards preventing a bunch of thugs from skipping town or turning on Lung. Forcing people who just wanted to live their own lives into serving as unwilling minions for a gang that called themselves the 'Azn Bad Boys'. The whole thing was so stupid it made my head hurt.

It was like someone out there wanted humanity to fail.

I walked across the rooftop, following the ghostly outlines of my shelter, until I found a spot where I could look down to the street below in the simulation. Ellison's gaze tracked me as I moved despite her bored expression.

"OK, maybe I'm the dumb one." I tried again. She'd managed not to set off a bomb when I provoked her, and seemed more resigned than outright hostile. "Help me to understand then— why Lung? What has he ever done? What has he ever accomplished?"

She snorted. "Fought off Leviathan, embarrassed the entire Protectorate, and held off a team Nazi's, practically by himself."

I shook my head. "He's built nothing, created nothing, made no contribution to the world that will last beyond his death." I waved at the city surrounding her lab— at the concrete and rusted rebar skeleton of a large tenement purity had partially flattened, at the smaller buildings with boarded windows and crumbling brick facades. All of it festooned with ABB tags and incomprehensible graffiti."Is this what you want? What you went to Cornell for?

"It won't get better. Lung doesn't progress, does not improve. Everything he has he took from someone else, only to slowly piss it all away. Even the ABB is just a bunch of squabbling, vaguely Asian gangs he forced to pay tribute. He's a worthless thug."

"See, you keep on talking about building and creating, about something that will last past our deaths. Let me say it slowly so you can understand: There. Is. No. point. It's all going to zero. End of the world, all that shit." She shrugged. "You're operating on a long time horizon when we're already circling the drain."

"Two years of university and you're so confident everything's going to end?" I challenged. "Even if our current systems are crumbling, that just means we need to build new ones. Better ones."

She laughed, and rolled her eyes at that. "Says the high school dropout. You probably have some idealistic bullshit utopia vision where everyone can be happy. It won't work." She gestured out at the urban decay surrounding us. "This is what it's all going to because most of the fucking morons on this planet can't manage any better. New systems? Help all these fucktards? Nah, I'm gonna get mine."

So frustrating. But even if she didn't care to make something that lasted, to make things better, she must want more than this. I'd looked into her past as well, and knew how hard she'd worked, how hard she'd studied. There's no way she respected Lung.

There must be something she wanted, beyond being an enforcer and making bombs for a petty thug.

I pulled up a 3d render of the lab I had shared with Chris up until a month ago. Pushed the floating window into the shared XR space of the telepresence app.

"This is what a Wards Tinker gets, tailored to their specialty. Armsmaster has multiple labs all far more sophisticated than this. The PRT would—"

"God, can you shut up about the PRT already?"

"Fine— Toybox, the Elite, it doesn't matter. You made time stop. With a bomb."

I nodded in the direction of where the bomb in question had detonated. Prime manifested an artifact in our shared virtual space—

A young boy hanging unnaturally in the air. His head and the extremities of his arms oddly distorted from the wavefront of time-stop-bullshit passing through his flesh at different rates before locking in place.

Eleven years old. More of a hanger-on than actual ABB. Just a stupid kid that thought the ABB were 'cool', and felt something new— either powerful or safe— when he started dressing like a member because all the harassment and the stupid comments went away.

Just one of the ways in which she broke physics, bundled up in a package that anyone could use.

Wasted on something gross and horrifying.

I carefully controlled my expression, trying to keep the distaste and contempt hidden, but I needn't have bothered. Ellison stared at the life-size model of the boy locked in time, mesmerized. A sort of gleeful fascination on her bruised face that made me sick.

"If anyone has a chance of hurting an Endbringer, it's you. Imagine that— Behemoth driven off or even stopped by you.

"But instead, Lung has you arming Pimps. Implanting something like that—" Another gesture at the boy frozen in time. "— in a no-name kid. For what? To make people work for him?

"What a fucking waste."

She grimaced, and took another drag on the dwindling blunt. For the first time, her eyes held a spark of something other than detached amusement or contempt.

I've never been the best at working with people. At negotiating or motivating.

The PRT had run me through Wards-standard 'Leadership' training, but that had all been geared towards crisis response. Handling crowds of people. How to project confidence and calm, how to allow someone on the verge of panicking believe that you would make everything alright, even when you yourself were panicking.

Calvert had tried to teach me a different sort of… well, he'd called it leadership, even if that had never really made sense to me.

I had asked for advice, back when I was struggling to make payments on that initial loan. When no one— not private companies, not local business, not even the PRT— would give me the time of day. No one wanted to even try my tech out, let alone pay for it.

Calvert had told me that, usually, it was best to avoid conflict. To never criticize, and to strive keep your interactions with others positive and friendly. That it was all too easy for someone to see you as an enemy, or nurse a grudge, if you went against them in a visible manner.

In the case of trying to get people to use my tech, to keep my company afloat, it just meant persistence. Smiling in the face of rejection and asking them to consider me in the future. Making the next phone call, again and again.

It hadn't worked. My tech, emergent properties of what I'd built, had saved me then. The DNet Exchange had evolved to the point where I could swap points for cash, and Glenn woke me up to the fact that other solutions existed. That I could abandon a task I set myself and achieve the same goals a different way.

The bland, inoffensive way hadn't worked for me then. I doubted— intensely— that it'd work with Ellison now.

Calvert had also mentioned, offhand, that sometimes working with people just meant showing them how to get what they wanted in a way that advanced your own goals at the same time.

Ellison had to want more than whatever she had going on with Lung and the ABB.

She didn't have any sense of morality. She seemed… outright cruel. Malicious. And justified it with some fucked up nihilistic rational.

But she also, clearly, wanted attention. Acknowledgment. Recognition.

I didn't need her to be a good person. But there were far better ways of showing off how much 'better' she was than everyone else than putting bombs in the heads of people.

Ellison shrugged. "Giving phones and shacks to a bunch of hobos is even more of a waste."

"Maybe." I smiled— for all her claims of superiority she still didn't see the bigger picture. "But you're capable of more than this, aren't you? Why aren't you doing it? There's better ways of getting resources than working for Lung."

Ellison's face sagged back into disdain. "Let me put it in simple terms you can understand. You don't just 'stop' working for Lung."

Prime began replaying a clip of her saying 'I'm here because I want to be'. Ellison was still staring at the boy she'd frozen in time though, and I killed the new display before she noticed.

I didn't need Calvert's advice to know that throwing a recording of her own words back in her face would be counter productive. A thought and a gesture penalized Prime's initiative, and I scheduled a reminder to dig into it later, wondering where it had even gotten the idea that something like that would be helpful. Probably from my conversation with Dennis. Or Sophia.

Maybe I should stop trolling Sophia.

"I don't see Lung regenerating from something like that." I gestured at the frozen boy.

She laughed again, this time with a bitter note that seemed… off. She put up a front, of sorts, but I'd seen her pacing on the roof. Angry, enraged. Manic. Slowly increasing the amount and variety of drugs she used.

Ellison was… not well. I doubt she really had any sort of coherent goal or plan. But some part of her seemed to want to be free of Lung.

The remains of Ji-hun scattered around the roof like bits of cured meat, and the hanging picture of a fifth-grade boy locked in time— his distorted skull still clear enough to show confused terror on his face— were reminders of who I was talking to. Lung may have coerced her, may have kept her under control the same way he did the rest of the gang— through force and fear— but she'd be just as much of a threat on her own.

Fuck, maybe Lung was a moderating influence. That was a horrifying thought.

I started to see why the PRT so often seemed stuck, like they weren't doing anything. It was so much safer, so much easier, to keep searching for the optimal path. Hoping to find a way to act which had no downside, no potential for harm.

The bureaucracy, the sheer size of the organization, only compounded the issue. Any failure, if attributed to you, would be used to tear you down. Every decision away from the status quo, anything new, carried with it greater risk than reward. Succeed, and you're merely doing your job. Fail, and you're a reckless incompetent who got people killed.

I'd certainly experienced that aspect of the organization. Calvert himself spent more time and effort maintaining his position on the org chart than he did trying to improve the city. Even Colin played the game— maximizing status gained from whatever successes he eked out of Brockton Bay while minimizing the impact of failures.

Playing it safe made sense, in a way. Minimize risk, shield yourself from blame, and slowly climb a ladder while telling yourself that, some day, when you made it to the top, you'd make things right. Only to just propagate the same ass-covering bullshit yourself along the way. Creating a cycle of half-measures and performative theatre that only pretended to make things better.

Operating like that would only ever lead to a local maxima, at best. Stagnation and a slow death were far more likely.

"Lung is a creature of habit. He isn't going to suddenly appear like the boogeyman he pretends to be." I squatted against the wall of my shelter— Prime shifting my anchor point in telepresence so that it looked like I had my back to the knee-high brick wall surrounding the rooftop. Ellison blinked at what must have looked like teleportation. "And there are only three men in this building, all asleep. You could walk away now— no one would stop you. I can give you a safe path to wherever you want to go in the state."

It would have been nice to talk to Calvert, or Colin, and ask them what their plans were. Ask why they were so hands off with the ABB. It still hurt that Colin wouldn't even talk to me. Worse that I didn't even know why, but I pushed that aside.

I considered calling Dennis— he'd tell me if he knew. But they probably didn't even share that sort of information with Carlos, let alone Chris. The entire org, aside from some of the Protectorate and the Wards, treated Clockblocker like a pariah. And Calvert, for all his talk of avoiding conflict and making enemies, never hesitated to make an example of Dennis.

Ellison raised an eyebrow as she pressed her lips to the blunt and inhaled. Staring at me the whole time, face blank. "You don't know shit about Lung. I wouldn't dream of challenging him."

I glanced at the chunks of Ji-hun spread across the rooftop. "Really."

"Eh," She sounded disinterested, but her free hand flipped about as she manipulated something in AR. "He expects some attrition. But you can't fight the Dragon."

She'd gotten a handle on using the glasses faster than most people. A new request came through before she finished talking.

/ BAKUDA - cobble ::: DSPHINCS 0.3/

Accept Connection?

/ /

The secure connection bloomed into another window.

'Lung has enhanced hearing, you simpleminded fool. You think I haven't considered that? That I haven't considered every scenario you could possibly conceive of, and hundreds more?

You telling me it's safe doesn't cut it. I'm the one taking the risks, asshole.

Do you have any idea what having your flesh cooked feels like? He picked some fat fuck up by their neck and slowly turned up the heat until the skin peeled off his face and the whole fucking warehouse smelled like bacon. And then he grabbed me in the same fucking way.'

And what happens after, even if I get away? You think he'll just let it slide? He put a half a million dollar bounty on you— imagine what he'd offer for me.

It was my turn to raise an eyebrow— she had to be aware of my surveillance and information gathering capabilities. If Lung had been in the area, I would have warned her.

Was she underestimating me, or just thought I was too stupid to consider him overhearing?

Or... she didn't think anyone else would show that level of concern for her.

'Lung isn't in the city.'

She looked at me skeptically. 'And I'm supposed to take your word on that? And it still doesn't address what comes after.'

Definitely baiting me. Trying to get more datapoints on my surveillance capabilities.

Not that it mattered. Tracking Lung was… trivial. I was pretty sure the PRT or even the BBPD could do it if they worked a little harder at it, with or without my drones.

Besides, she'd registered my active scan a few minutes ago. That revealed far more of my capabilities than simply tracking someone.

Or, maybe, all her little digs were getting to me.

The time-stopped boy disappeared. In his place, a VA enhanced drone feed. Again, the effect more like peering through a portal in reality than observing a video in a window.

It showed Lung climbing into the back of a Toyota Crown, the sedan rocking as he transferred his weight to the frame.

The feed accelerated, the effect strange with the fidelity of the view. Lung's car skirted North of Brockton Bay, blacked out windows meaning nothing against the periodic active scans of the drones outside Ellison's area.

A timestamp appearing, showing it all had happened before Ellison even stepped onto the roof.

Prime alerted me to another vehicle— a panel van resting low on its shocks and the logo of linens company its sides. Leaving Ellison's secondary lab at about the same time.

I dismissed the second feed before Prime pushed it to the shared XR space.

It wasn't anything new— Lung had been selling bombs somewhere to the south for weeks now. Calvert didn't seem to be doing anything about that either, for whatever unfathomable reason.

I'd almost reached out to Armstrong, the director of Boston's PRT branch, but didn't for a variety of reasons. PRT Dept. 24 had been the one to arrest Dad. Aside from that, going around the 'chain of command' was frowned upon, and even worse, would have felt like playing politics.

"Huh," Ellison said, as she narrowed her eyes at the feed.

Lung could have made it more difficult. He could have made sure to his phone off, ensured that the various sycophants surrounding him did so as well. He'd done that after Oni Lee was captured. The discipline had lapsed within a couple of months though.

There were any number of other things he could have done as well— staying in heavier concrete or brick buildings, using shielded cars to travel. That posed other problems though— ones more intractable than poor discipline.

Lung wouldn't, couldn't, be perceived as hiding.

While picking apart the web of relationships that held the ABB together, I'd come to realize that Lung needed to be seen, needed his presence to be felt.

Not one person was loyal to him. Not in any way that mattered.

Some of the ABB respected him, sure, but that wasn't what held the loose collection of gangs together.

Lung ruled through fear.

Things were different when Oni Lee was still around. To hear some of the OG ABB talk, losing Lee— a fanatically loyal, mobile, stealthy enforcer— had changed things.

Lee, for all that he had the personality and initiative of twisted rebar, had shored up Lung's weaknesses.

Without Oni Lee, facing the PRT steadily chipping away at ABB profit and reputation, Lung needed to remind people why the worked for him. Reminders that, again by necessity, were not subtle.

"He's surprisingly consistent," I pulled up a subset of my analysis on the ABB. How Lung worked— time spent in versus out of Brockton Bay, actions typically taken upon returning to the city. The patterns he fell into. "You're not in any real danger if you leave now. And I'll let you know if he's—"

"That there," Ellison stabbed what remained of her blunt at the display. "That's where they break the new girls!"

Human trafficking. It made the ABB reviled in a city with literal Nazis.

"They threatened to send me there—" Ellison continued, almost idly. "I threatened to turn Brockton Bay into a molten crater. Now they won't even let me know where it is."

She stared at the building— a dormitory of some long dead shipping company, built when Brockton Bay still had a part capable of serving container ships— with a wild look in her eyes.

"You're alright, phone boy." She took another hit, the blunt small enough that she risked burning her fingers.

Not that something like that would matter, compared to the blisters across her neck.

"It's perfect." She grinned, blueish smoke escaping her lips. "Get him right when he's balls deep in some crying little bitch from Cambodia or Vietnam or wherever. If we're lucky, we'll get Yamaguchi at the same time. Maybe a handful of the other fucks that keep the whole thing running."

Wards Indoc had covered a lot of topics. Parahuman related material of course, but also mundane crime and gangs. Even if it wasn't the jurisdiction of the PRT, there tended to be overlap.

They very conspicuously hadn't covered Human Trafficking.

Even though anyone who's spent any time in Brockton Bay knew it happened. That it was happening even as we sat in a neat little conference room on the 2nd floor of PRT HQ watching bland training videos.

It was utterly fucked, and I hadn't been able to understand why we let it continue. Still couldn't understand it.

Most Agents wouldn't even talk to me about it— wouldn't discuss the subject with any Ward, despite the messed up situations we dealt with on Console. The Officers tended to be a little more casual about sharing information, but they didn't have a satisfying answer as to why we hadn't shut it down either.

The most plausible thing I'd heard, from Doughty— who often seemed to forget I was a Ward— was that it fell into a sort of jurisdictional gray area. That the actual 'business' crossed so many state and international lines, the PRT simply wasn't properly set up to tackle it.

That, when conducted by what had been designated as a 'Parahuman Gang', other authorities wouldn't even touch it. Out of spite, or trying to secure funding— though that might have been Doughty's biases talking.

The result was that most people tried to pretend it didn't exist. Or that it wasn't so… rampant.

They didn't want to think about it, didn't want to talk about it— especially with a had flat out told me when pressed that if I wanted to do something about it I could— when I made 'Protectorate'.

"I'm helping you get away, not to go on a bombing spree."

She rolled her eyes. "Too late, I know where they are now."

"You should be trying to help those women!"

"Nice clean bomb would be help," she muttered.

"What the hell is wrong with you? You can't be this insane bomber you pretend to be."

"And how the fuck would you know? What does it even matter, I've killed how many people now? Which you went and broadcasted all over the fucking internet?"

"So stop! Get away, publicly apologize, blame it all on Lung and do better!"

Even if it was bullshit. It was the first sign of anything resembling remorse I'd seen— even if it seemed she was more concerned about the inconvenience than the actual killing.

"It was me! Not Lung." She said. "I did it, me. I'll own it."

I sighed, and waved the visualization showing Lung's habits away. "This was a mistake."

"Maybe for you." She smirked.

"No."

"No?" Her grin came back. "What are you going to do about it? You gonna make some phone calls, do another 'livestream'? What the fuck can you do if I just decide to flatten the whole building?"

Prime read my intent, and I gestured. Where Lung's activities and predicted actions had hung in the shared XR space of Telepresence, a new visualization appeared. Ellison, on her roof. How often she shifted between labs. The men who provided most of her drugs. A clip of her amped up on what a VA tagged as Modafinil, ranting about Lung. Calling him a 'spineless cunt', among other things.

"Information isn't as direct as a bomb," I said, quietly. As neutrally as possible. "What would Lung do, with knowledge of what you intend? If everyone in the ABB sees you disparaging him? Disrespecting him?"

Another gesture, and a gallery of vigilantes and villains known to operate in North Eastern US and Canada unfolded. A four by eight grid, slowly rotating through a list of people that would potentially come after her— if someone made it 'easy' for them.

She laughed, bitter. "Not a fan of assassination, but nothing against blackmail?"

I sighed.

"I… sympathize with your situation. We have similar backgrounds, and I don't think I'd have coped as well as you have, if Lung had captured me." Again, with the calm, neutral voice. "But this is very simple line for me. No innocents."

"You're such a fucking kid." She flicked her fingers, sending the remainder of her blunt spinning through the air to plop into a puddle. "No innocents? No problem because there's no such fucking thing. Certainly not a bunch of bimbos who chose to get on a boat. They either knew what was waiting for them on the other side, or are so stupid they deserve whatever they get."

I almost brought the collection of portraits up— an updated version of the visualization I shared with Dean back in my lab. Faces of people we'd rescued from ABB sites back when we were still conducting raids. Back before Ellison came to town.

Ages and origins. Literacy rates. The availability of information or schooling in their home countries. Photos of villages flattened because some middling warlord didn't do the sensible thing and rollover for the CUI. Where, maybe, climbing into a shipping container was the rational choice. Not that it mattered if the choice was well informed or not.

None of that would help convince Ellison.

I shook my head, slowly. The various shared XR displays winked out, leaving us on a wet roof with the cry of seagulls in the distance. "I guess we're done here."

"Hah, hold up. I'm just fucking with you." She giggled, the change abrupt and unnatural. All of her intense aggression gone as she leaned back with a smile. "I'm not that crazy. Besides, blow-up all the leadership and it all falls apart. Better to just hit Lung. And Yamaguchi— fuck that guy."

She hopped off the HVAC and picked up her mask. I paused, about to terminate the connection anyways.

I tried to think of how Colin would have handled it, her flip flopping between mad bomber and peppy college girl. How she threatened to bomb innocents, then shamelessly blew it off as a joke when I challenged her on it. Nihilistic and murderous one moment, bright eyed and positive the next.

But Colin, I'm sure, wouldn't let himself get stuck in such a situation in the first place.

"This isn't some joke. I'll stop you, if you keep on putting bombs in innocent people's heads."

"So gang bangers are ok?" She smiled.

"No—"

"Eh, don't worry about it. Waste of time anyways." She held her mask a foot from her face and slowly rotated it.

In addition to cameras, the glasses occasionally their surroundings with pulses of LiDAR— standard stuff. But Prime picked up on a variance. Visual for me the scattering of light from Ellison's glasses hitting the mask as she turned it.

"A waste of time," I prompted, as she became more involved scanning her mask.

"Yeah. Dumb idea anyways."

"You think?"

"Ah ah ah— you say that like you understand anything, when you clearly don't."

"I understand just fine."

I almost pulled up a list of the dead, and of those waiting to die. More than half of them were ABB but the rest were just people that had lived in the area. Dragged in by fucking cowards too scared risk their own bombs going off.

She wouldn't care.

"Calm down kid—" She met my eyes for a moment, a slight smile on her lips. "You're what, fifteen?"

"Sixteen in—"

"Yeah, never say that. Makes you sound like a little kid." She returned her attention to her mask, carefully working the detcord free from the WWI gas mask facade. "No surprise you don't get yet, really. I did at your age, but most people don't.

"You've been brainwashed for years. First by that poser pre-Ivy League boarding school— Exeter, right? They tried to recruit me, you know. I turned them down— well those people are all full of shit.

"All that 'service to society' rhetoric they go on about? May as well be the most recent spin on 'noblesse oblige'. Every time some generational wealth fuck blathers on about being of service to this great nation or whatever, they may as well be saying 'let them eat cake.' The sentiment sure as fuck is the same."

I eyed the charred stub of her blunt where it floated in the puddle. Had Prime gotten the contents wrong? Blasto didn't deal with the ABB, but he operated out of North-Western Boston, only a few hours away. She could have gotten some of his stuff through secondary channels.

"What are you—" I started.

"Perceptions." She cut in, voice sharp. "And why you think you understand even though you clearly don't. Try to keep up."

"What does the school I went to have to do with you putting bombs in people's heads?"

"Don't be obtuse— it has nothing to do with cranial implants, and everything to do with how the fuckwits that run the system keep the plates spinning. Your education— your indoctrination— is why you can't see what's right in front of your face.

"Why you think cranial implants are a 'bad idea' because it hurts people or some other moralistic bullshit, when really the only reason its a bad idea is that it didn't accomplish anything meaningful."

She started pacing, and I… had no idea what to say.

"Your whole life has shaped you to believe that this fucked up caricature of life we've created matters. Why you and no one else can't seem to see that when literal fucking Kaiju blow up a city four times a year the whole game of late stage capitalism they pretend to play is even more meaningless than it otherwise would be.

"All the awards and the grades and the scholarships and the fucking 'make something of yourself' and 'live up to your potential' lectures— nothing more than a conceptual placebo meant to keep people like you and me thinking that we can actually make something of ourselves on the basis of ability and hard work and prevent us from tearing the whole rotten edifice down."

Her chest heaved, mask forgotten, hands waving in a way that had nothing to do with her interface."

"When in reality, it's all set up so the status quo can keep grinding on. On and on, until it all fucking ends. So that the people born into 'positions of privilege' can keep that power while the whole thing burns to the fucking ground."

OK. Ellison was just crazy.

I watched her, keeping my face as neutral as possible. It felt like staring at a time bomb, where instead of counting down, the timer jumped to random numbers or glitched out symbols.

"And you, your indoctrination didn't really end with school, did it? The PRT doubled down, made you feel like one of the chosen few after pulling you from the hell of inner city 'education'. Fluffed you up with promises of your potential and power while telling you all that capability came with a duty and obligation. To fucking serve. To keep that burning apple cart rolling along. A duty and obligation you should be downright happy to fulfill.

"To do what they fucking tell you."

She took a deep breath, visibly collecting herself. Then she went right back to her mask, working to disconnect the red-green braided detcord with surprising agility.

Quietly, I spoke. "I wanted to help people even before—"

"It's no wonder that you don't get it." She talked over me, not looking up from her work. "Running yourself ragged, desperate for approval. Trying so fucking hard to appease everyone. To do everything right. For everyone to like you.

"But even if any of that shit worked— and take it from me, it doesn't— it wouldn't fucking matter."

"So? I want to help people and I am. It matters to them, it matters to me, and that's enough."

"Is this where you tell me the story about the boy on the beach, helping baby turtles or whatever get to the sea?" She mocked.

I just shook my head. When she saw I wasn't really going to dispute any of her… crazy ass rant, she went back to work. As if she'd forgotten whatever point she was eventually going to make.

Probably something about none of it mattering.

Alerts had bloomed into existence while she ranted. A handful of screens in my private XR space showed new orders. Another display visualized the continuing expansion of the DNET north along the coast and west further inland. A solid line where expansion halted, on the southern border of New Hampshire.

A video feed of Rune, aviator goggles on her face as she rode a shipping container through the air. Another shipment of precisely manufactured narcotics, propping up Nazi land while fucking over someone else.

Ellison was still lost in her own interface when I caught up on everything.

Looking at her access log, she'd downloaded more of my software. The design suite and base modeling package. My build files— the trickier part that coaxed my fabrication chambers into reliably producing an end product— were private, but the schematics and models of my consumer tech were all open source. The shelters, the phones, the glasses— anything people used.

As well as most of my own software.

Lots of people played around with it. I suspected Uber and L33t had made a serious effort at working with it, but nothing really had come of it.

Chris had hated every iteration. Colin just gave me a knowing smile when I had showed him and said he didn't have time to learn a new tool suite.

"Are you using my design tools?"

"Yes. Piece of shit. Ugly. Hard to use. Over engineered. But its not as bad as AutoCAD." She didn't stop working, but glanced at me as if surprised I was still there. I probably should have killed the connection when I had the chance. "Anyways. You starting to understand?"

"About the bombs?"

"Yes."

"Not at all."

"Jesus Christ." She gave me a look of sincere disappointment.

She shared a set of search results with me— DNet and legacy internet. News articles. Anything within the past two weeks relating to the ABB, or her bombs. A bare handful of articles, a few clips that looked like updates.

Most of the world had already moved on, in less than three weeks. There were more tangential results on 'Tenjin's Shelter Program' because of the exodus from ABB territory than there were on the bombs themselves.

"See? No one cares!" She waved at the display, disgusted. "You're hung up on this naive concept of good and evil which simply does not fucking map to the real world of outcomes and utility."

She leaned back. Sighed, tiredly, and waved her hands at some project behind her glasses. Sweat beaded and ran down the side of her face and neck— between the morning sun in a clear sky and the smart-glasses she must have been uncomfortably warm. Even offloading most of the processing, the rev 5's still radiated an unfortunate amount of heat.

I was working on implementing my version of Colin's heat reclamation tech for the next version of smart glasses, but was again finding myself with too much to do.

"I was a Ward for five months," I said, not sure why I was still talking to her. "It might seem like they don't care, but believe me it's not that bleak. They do. The PRT, the Protectorate, they're trying. Sure, part of it is to keep modern society, or whatever 'the system' means to you— but most of them want to do good. To help people."

Seagulls made a squawking ruckus in the background, but other than that the rooftop was eerily quiet. No traffic, no metal shutters rolling up. No one calling out to each other as they started their day.

"Low level canon fodder, stuck in their maze, indoctrinated just as hard as you were? Yeah, maybe. That's what the bullshit is there for, keep all the little ducks in a row. The people that matter though, the decision makers? The ones at the top of the hierarchy? They don't care." She waved out towards the cracked tenements and graffiti strewn buildings, as if they were still full of people. "They'd be happy to see a bunch of economic deadweight die. Nothing I've done, yet, really matters. Not when you get down to it."

Well, she was right about one thing— the neighborhood was dead.

Ellison's lab wasn't far from the building Tanaka had used as storage for all his random shit. The one he'd ceded to me for my lab. Over summer, I'd jogged through the neighborhood almost every day, heading back to the group home to shower, eat, and sleep for a few hours before returning.

It was a shit part of town, even back then, but one with a sense of community. Alive with people— parents dropping their kids off with some old lady before going to work. Students starting the long trek to school. Shutters of small businesses opening.

All gone now.

Sometimes I worried that making the shelters permanently available did more long term harm than good. I was proud of what we'd accomplished, glad that the people living here had alternatives and were able to flee. But seeing the empty streets I wondered, if not for my stream and the shelters, if the people who had lived here would have found a way to make it work. It was another network effect, almost like a bank run— once a big enough portion of the community left, everyone else followed.

Better than dead, or living in fear, but they'd had to leave something behind.

"You killed 17 people, at least. Implanted dozens more. That mattered."

She laughed, mirthless, not looking away from her interface os she did. "That's a rounding error. Send one of your little spy planes over to Africa. Fuck, send one down to Arkansas and take a good look a Fallen compound. You will lose your shit.

"The powers that be don't care." She shook her head slightly, with an ironic smile. "They're probably more worried about you than me."

I snorted. "Me."

"They broke doors down, back when your shit made it to Boston. I was there! Fucking troopers in swat gear up and down the streets. No-nock warrants issued faster for phones than they ever were for drugs.

"But I blow up a few buildings, kill a few poors? Oh look— they leave me the fuck alone."

I… didn't have a response to that, and the disparity in responses had often bothered me. I'd always focused more on the parallels to how my father was handled- on how the PRT sometimes seemed to seize the 'safe' cases while leaving the dangerous ones alone. It'd always felt like minimal real world impact to me, nothing that really made the people we were supposed to protect safer. A bit of theatre, more than anything else.

Ellison seemed to think it was more about how… disruptive to some shadowy status quo something was that determined the response. Not how much outright danger it presented.

Which wasn't something I wanted to believe, even if sometimes it fit the PRT's actions.

Ellison muttered to herself and went back to whatever she was playing with.

An alert came up on one of my simulations, Prime visualizing it for me as soon as I focused on it.

My DNet clone… successor really— built to operate without centralized control— had failed. Again.

A simple mistake, just an edge case that would send the successor into consuming more and more resources as it tried to suck down information from the original. Something I wouldn't have to worry about, if not for the scale the DNet and its successor would operate at.

With a large enough sample size, even an incredibly unlikely edge case became an inevitability.

I corrected the behavior, and spotted a few other potential problems. Leaned more on consuming Colin's own policies to direct the successor to prioritize content that would be purged anyways, and having it take a passive approach on the 'evergreen' content.

Launched another simulation.

"People die every day, every minute, and it doesn't matter." Ellison resumed speaking, as if no time had passed. "But you start changing the game? Give away toys that are better than what the corporations charge for? Take away the need to upgrade and spend year after year to keep the wheels spinning? Give people a place to live without paying rent?

"Give people a way to opt out of the whole fucking system?" She nodded at me, in a way that might be respectful if her tone wasn't so mocking. "Well, that might actually upset someone in charge. Or at the very least, it's far more disturbing than a handful of implanted bombs."

It bothered me, how much what she said paralleled my own thoughts. My own paranoid, victim-minded musings that I tried not to indulge in. The thoughts I'd had, staring at a too low ceiling, that I'd pushed down as unrealistic and unproductive.

Unhelpful.

Talking to Ellison was, in some ways, seeing a distorted reflection of my own doubts. She was insane, and likely on a ridiculous amount of mind altering substances.

Like seeing a distorted reflection of my own doubts and worries.

She was insane. Or on so many drugs it was hard to tell the difference. She ranted on about a shadowy 'they', some powerful group that controlled 'the system'. Ensured that the status quo never changed too much.

Simple logic showed that wasn't the case though. People just weren't competent enough to run something like that. There couldn't be a secret cabal, or illuminati, because people would just fuck it up anyways and we'd all know about it.

It was just a bunch of misaligned incentives, followed by shortsighted, greedy people looking after themselves first.

Ellison brushed her left bang back, leaving the other to obscure her black eye. "You think the Triumvirate couldn't do something about the Butcher?"

"Well, yeah, but it's too much of a risk—"

"Yeah yeah yeah, I know the party line too. They taught us it in tenth grade. But really, some pet PRT tinker couldn't induce a coma? Couldn't find a way to head-in-a-box her or him or whatever the fuck the butcher is at this moment?"

"Her…"

"Bold of you to assume their pronouns. But really, the Protectorate has hundreds of capes, entire think tanks dedicated to threat analysis, and the PRT has divisions of analysts that do nothing but come up with contingency plans."

She pushed a few graphics, direct from the DNet, to the shared XR space. Simple articles from the DNet and the traditional web. Static artifacts with none of the flair of a VA augmented visualization.

The teeth, active in some form for 17 years. Longer than I'd been alive. The fucking Nine, even older. Nilbog almost looked benign, constrained to Ellisburg as he was, until you considered the sheer manpower dedicated to keeping him there. And that he'd already killed more people than the every member of the Teeth combined when he massacred a small city.

"You think they couldn't do something about that?" Ellison gestured at the display. "As you said earlier, I could. You think the Triumvirate, the PRT and Protectorate, couldn't do more? And lets not even talk about the irrelevant fucks, like Uber and L33t.

"They don't do anything because it doesn't matter. Not when you look at the big picture."

"So, what," I said, skeptically. "The implanted bombs were dumb because in the end, it didn't really matter?"

It was dumb but I could, sort of, follow her logic. Working from a warped set of priors that assumed the institutions that kept society running weren't filled with actual humans with their own feelings. Didn't mean that she was right though.

It was a waste of time, but at least she wasn't threatening to bomb an entire brothel any more.

"Exactly." She snapped her fingers and smiled at me. "Waste of effort, as you yourself pointed out. Hell, the media and politicians both still talk more about you than me. Some Youtuber in fucking anime armor gets more screen time than the human-trafficking ABB, or the Nazi quasi-state thing to the south. How's that for fucked up?"

"So bombs in the heads of seventy some people and we just move on? Pretend it didn't happen?"

"Hey, it was your idea, remember? Blame it on Lung. Which, the more I think about the more I like. Hell, once we deal with him, I'll even offer to remove the bombs." She smiled, as if she knew no one would willingly let her operate on them.

It wasn't remorse, but maybe it was progress?

Talking to her hadn't been a waste of time— my perception of her, formed through observation and listening in on her conversations with others, had been wrong. Dangerously so. And whatever justifications she spouted, she wasn't happy with the ABB, with working under Lung.

Maybe I could convince her to work towards something not good, but at least better.

It was something the PRT did that I had come to see the sense of. I'd been shocked, when I figured out Assault used to be Madcap. A villain that specialized in hitting Birdcage transports. He'd killed, killed good people, while freeing the worst sort of villains to go on and cause more death and destruction. There was also something really weird about the dynamic between him and Battery.

I'd asked Colin about it, and he'd taken me seriously. Sat me down and said he understood my sense of betrayal, of outrage. Felt the same distaste at the man's clowning about and antics.

But, ultimately, Assault did more good on Protectorate Patrols than he would have in prison. Had participated in three Endbringer fights, had fought alongside the rest of the Protectorate dozens of times.

If someone with power could put it to use making things better, wasn't that an improvement? Wasn't it worth letting them have a second chance? Ultimately, I'd agreed. In an ideal world, people like Assault and Ellison would face justice. But no one would ever say we lived in an ideal world.

Prime scanned through hundreds of hours of recorded or reconstructed phone calls and conversations in a matter of seconds. "It does look like Lung was the one that pushed for it…"

"He wanted bomb collars." Ellison shook her head with a snort. "The meathead probably saw it in a movie or something."

"Collars. To go with the sex trafficking," I said.

She laughed. "Utterly retarded, right?. Would have let the world know who we have under control, ruined the sense of surprise and uncertainty. And on top of that, anyone collared would have far more hope. Hope that would have made it much easier to fight back.

"Especially since Clockblocker and Vista would counter it so easily."

"Yeah, those two are ridiculous on their own. Paired, it's ridiculous."

"And you still think the PRT couldn't clean up the trash if they actually wanted to?"

"They do at least try to keep Wards from active situations."

"Dumb, but not as dumb as 'bomb collars'." She rolled her eyes. "So, of course I wasn't going to waste time on that shit. I told him look, small bombs— implanted. Obviously superior. Told him we should skip the small fry and put em in the fucks that actually run the gang.

"A subtle bit of business no one else would even need to know about. Keep the sub-bosses incentivized and make desertion their problem. If they can't meet quota for recruits? Pop! Didn't kick up enough this month? Boom! Mouth off to me? Bazaap!

"But noooo, Lung wanted bombs in nobodies. And so we get that shitshow you broadcast to the world."

"Convenient that it would have also given you control over—"

She dropped her mask on a sturdier portion of the roof. Stomped on it with sudden, vicious energy. All the detached rambling of the past few minutes gone as the mask— the mask she'd frantically saved from falling into the water, the mask she'd cradled to her chest as she cried, the mask that she must have spent countless hours creating— deformed under her heel.

Customized system-in-chips and waveguides, painstakingly aligned without the aid of proper equipment, popped free of the frame and landed in the water with a plop, and she stomped that next. Uncaring of the water that splashed up on to her. Then back to the body of the mask. Again and again, driving the heel of her combat boot into the meticulously crafted tool.

"… what?" I asked, bewildered.

"Hmm?" She looked at me, panting somewhat.

"You must have spent a hundred hours on that!"

"More like seventy. But it's inferior." She gestured towards the glasses on her face, chest heaving. "These are… not bad. Not that I'm impressed, mind you. If I had a year, and the resources you've had, I'd have something that make these look like something made by Fisher Price. But I've got more important things to do, and you were dumb enough to open source everything."

She spoke like it was the most logical thing in the world. Maybe there was some… rational to it. The chip-assembly could have provided clues as to how she was signaling her bombs so destroying it might have been the safest option.

But still…

"Don't you dare fucking look at me like that," Ellison said, still getting her breath under control.

"Just surprised you're willing to use my tech— a conversation like this is one thing, but for your mask? Your workflow?"

"I've gone over your OS. I'll need to fix some of it, of course, but for now it's… adequate." The cold anger on her face vanished, switching to another bright smile. "So cheer up. This is the start of a beautiful relationship."

I raised an eyebrow, and guided Prime to prep a route for her. It was well into morning and even in the wasteland of the north there were starting to be signs of life. Anyone who remained in the area was almost certainly connected to the ABB.

Still, Prime created a route she could follow to avoid any eyes. Something I wished I would have had last December.

I pushed it to the shared visual space. "This will get you to more populated areas of the city without risk. I can drop you some overalls, they're common enough even outside the camps that you won't stand out, and you can put up the hood or turn on the veil if you're still wearing the glasses—"

"Hah, what? No no no, Charles, you have it all wrong." She shook her head, patronizing. "I'm not leaving the ABB."

"Really." Prime's projected safe path winked out, leaving the shared space bare of any XR elements. "So, what. You're just going to keep on being Lung's tool?"

Ellison stood and stretched, wincing as the motion pulled at the burns around her neck but smiling anyways. Glass from one of the waveguides crunched under her foot as she took a step, not towards the door but towards the edge of the roof. To look down at what had become the shittiest part of Brockton Bay.

"Nah, fuck that. I'm taking over."