Checking her notes one last time, Taylor nodded to herself, then very carefully adjusted the now-upgraded crystal making machine in a few places while Lisa watched with interest. "I think that will do it," she said when she finished tweaking various parts and comparing the readings on several multimeters wired into the device to her precalculated values.
"So this will let us make… bigger crystals?" Lisa asked a little uncertainly.
"On the inside, yeah," Taylor replied, gently and minutely altering the final vagueness coil by fractions of a degree. The deep blue glow that came from right inside the machine strengthened in a hard to describe way, shining through the metalwork in a manner it really shouldn't have been able to, with a fringe of rainbow iridescence making the entire structure look oddly pretty. As she finished the changes the background hum settled down to a faint rushing sound similar to a huge waterfall heard from miles away, and gave the impression of vast energies doing something bizarre.
Which, to be honest, was more or less correct, she thought as she locked down the final screw and stepped back to admire the finished result.
"Huh… That gives me an idea," the girl muttered out loud, picking up her notebook and flipping to a blank page before quickly sketching out a possible method to tap said energies and convert them into something useful, such as electricity. It looked plausible but she was going to need to do more research. Finishing with that for the moment she closed the book and put it into storage along with the pen. Turning to Lisa she commented, "Let's fill the reagent mix tank and fire it up, then we can leave it to cook for a few days."
Her friend nodded, moving to collect various containers from the shelves while Taylor got one of the stainless steel buckets ready. It didn't take them long to mix up another batch of chemicals, the cloud of pink vapor that billowed out of the bucket at one point being deftly avoided by both of them since they'd been expecting it this time. Once the contents of the bucket had cooled from the near-boiling state they'd ended up in due to the reaction, Taylor carefully poured it into the reservoir and screwed the lid on while Lisa put all the bottles and jars back. Having cleaned out the bucket and poured the waste water, which was glowing oddly but was completely non-toxic, down the drain in the corner, Taylor put it on the shelf as well.
Five minutes later the machine was happily gurgling away to itself while the main stack chilled down. Once everything was hit the correct operating point she flicked all the switches one after another, watching the gauges to make sure nothing was amiss. The machine settled down to doing its thing, with an eldritch glow eerily illuminating the entire room, rather brighter than it had been on the previous run which was as expected.
"Excellent, that seems to be working perfectly," Taylor remarked having made a few final checks.
"Looks good here too," Lisa reported from the bank of new gauges they'd added to monitor the process in finer detail, while comparing them to the notes she held. Taylor double-checked her results and nodded happily.
"Great. Well, in about a week we should have some nice crystals. Or mush if we got it wrong somewhere." She shrugged. "Time will tell."
"My power is still puzzled about how this thing works, but it's really damn interested in it too," Lisa laughed. "Keeps muttering about how it's insane."
Taylor grinned. "Your power needs to keep an open mind."
"Now it's looking annoyed." Her friend's expression was amused. "You have a very strange effect on Parahuman abilities."
"I do what I can because I must," Taylor assured her. Looking at her watch, she added, "Let's go find Dad and see what he's doing. I could do with lunch to be honest."
"Yeah, me too, I'm starving." The pair left the room, locked up, and walked off towards the administration building, navigating the maze of corridors and courtyards with the ease of long familiarity in Taylor's case and cheating a little with powers in Lisa's.
Alone in the room the crystal machine hummed and gurgled with white vapor streaming down the sides and flowing across the floor in a very dramatic manner while inside it dimensional weirdness grew steadily weirder, watched with enormous fascination by something nearly as strange.
"There! See? It did it again! Just like the last two times. Six steps, from that elevated level to a much higher one, then dropped right back to background levels. It hit the highest level yet, it's going up each time." Larry waved a hand at the screen while wearing a completely baffled expression. Jillian studied the graphs with interest, seeing he was completely right. This time they'd almost caught it in real time, although they were no closer to working out what the strange phenomenon they'd seen three separate times now actually was.
"That is very odd," she finally admitted with a shake of her head.
"I know. It's bloody weird, to be honest, but after three different times it's definitely not equipment error or anything else I can work out," her colleague complained, mildly to be fair, but with an air of irritation. "The poxy neutrinos just pop up from nowhere at random times, do that, then vanish again. I can't believe it's a natural occurrence to be honest. It's got to be artificial with that specific patterning in my view, but I'm damned if I can figure out what's causing it."
"I'd tend to agree," she replied slowly. "The problem is proving it. There's no pattern yet to when it happens, is there?"
"No, not that I can see. The time between each incident has been some days, but it's not identical. Very roughly a week or so, but we'd need more samples to see if there's a pattern or not. Three isn't nearly enough."
"True. Well, if we can't deduce the source of the neutrinos, perhaps we can at least work out the mechanism by which they're arriving here. It's certainly none of the accepted forms of neutrino generation, which implies we're seeing something new. If we can come up with a plausible set of parameters we might be able to set up a test so the next time it happens we can narrow the possibilities down." She shrugged a little.
"You think it will happen again?" he asked with a glance at her, before looking back to the screen in front of him while fiddling with the data logging program.
"It's happened three times so far, which proves that whatever's behind it isn't a one off unique situation," she pointed out. "So if it happened three times, I'm betting it will happen more than three times."
"I can't disagree with that," he noted, typing a few figures into another program and studying the results briefly before leaning back and turning to her. "And we have nothing else to go on, so assuming it'll do the same thing again is as good as we're likely to get. At least we can be ready for it if it does." He sighed, then shook his head. "I wonder what it really is?"
"My guess is some Tinker doing something particularly unusual somewhere," she replied, rolling her chair back to her own computer and talking over her shoulder.
"It would have to be very unusual even for a Tinker to do that," he commented dubiously, staring at the graphs, then turning back to her. "The energy levels required are… obscene."
"Agreed, but it certainly doesn't look natural as you just pointed out, which means it's artificial, and that essentially means it can only be a Tinker device of some sort."
"Or aliens." He chuckled as she sighed heavily. "I bet it's aliens."
"It's never aliens, Larry," Jillian muttered as she worked. "We've been over this how many times now?"
"It'll be aliens one of these days, you mark my words," he assured her, turning to his own computer and also starting to work on the problem of setting up suitable filters to catch their mysterious phenomenon in the act should it happen once more.
Her sigh made him grin, and the two kept working in silence because there was science to be done.
"Think it's big enough?"
"Looks good, yeah." Taylor turned in a circle in the middle of the large area they'd cleared out in one of the older warehouses still on the DWA property, inside the fence. There were bigger ones elsewhere but most of those either had so much damage they weren't weatherproof any more, or were prone to having random people poke around in them. The homeless of which there were far too many in the city, the various gangs, or occasionally someone from law enforcement looking for something. This place was much less likely to get interfered with and the roof was in decent condition so it was dry and fairly clean.
She'd simply grabbed everything in it and stuck it into storage, to be put somewhere else later and sorted through, which solved two problems in one go. They now had a large area to experiment with, and could much more easily figure out what was actually in the place, since the records were somewhat hazy on that and no one really knew these days. The building had been accumulating random detritus for at least eighty years and none of it had been put away with any form of system, unlike the main stock areas. Her dad had been quite happy to let them use the place as long as they didn't destroy it with some 'ungodly eldritch horror' as he'd put it with a sigh, and let Matt and Kurt tell them where to dump all the stuff that was in it when they'd finished.
She was still giggling about the eldritch horror comment, as it was somewhat more accurate than he probably wanted to think about…
"And you're sure this isn't going to bite us on the ass?" Lisa asked when she was facing her friend again, her breath steaming in the cold air inside the unheated warehouse.
Taylor shrugged, grinning. "Oh, fucking wonderful," the other girl sighed in mild worry.
"It'll be fine, Lisa," Taylor assured her mostly honestly. "All we're doing is borrowing a small part of an alien invader from another world and putting it here so we can have a look at it."
"Borrowing, she says," Lisa grumbled, shaking her head. "Are you going to give it back?"
"Well…"
"As I suspected. Agent Gimme." Her friend grinned at her. "You klepto."
"They're not using it for anything, and Coil sure doesn't have a use for it any more, so…" Taylor returned the grin with another shrug. "I want to see what we're dealing with, and we know where that one is and that it's basically just sitting there waiting for us. Administrator doesn't seem to think it's a problem either as far as I can tell."
"Your power that isn't a power is weirder than my power that is." Lisa stared at her in a somewhat bemused manner. "I still can't figure out how that even happened."
"Administrator is a friend. I think." She got a distinct sense of agreement from all around them, making her smile and Lisa look around somewhat uneasily.
"That… is so wrong," the other girl finally said. "Even my power thinks so. This is not how it's supposed to work."
"Poor Agent Thinky. Hey, how about we call your power 'Brain'?" Then we have a theme song for you two." Taylor started laughing as Lisa put her hands on her hips and glared, although when she started whistling a familiar tune from her childhood her friend finally broke down and joined in.
"They're Thinky, Thinky and the Brain!" the two girls sang, before nearly collapsing in hilarity. It was at that moment Taylor's father along with Kurt came through the door, stared at them, then exchanged glances.
"I knew it, they've finally snapped," her dad sighed. "It was only a matter of time. I blame Papa, of course. He's a bad influence from beyond the grave. Ruining minds even second hand…"
Kurt started chuckling while Taylor and Lisa smiled. "Hey, don't diss poor Papa, he meant well," Taylor protested. "Probably. More or less. I think."
"The man was a total menace and you damn well know it, Taylor." Her dad walked over to join them, Kurt trailing behind him looking around with interest. Having inspected the warehouse in the same way Taylor had earlier, her dad nodded. "Good job. Looks like the place is in better condition than I expected once all the crap is out of it."
"We should get you to do the same thing to those other ones at some point, Taylor," Kurt put in with a nod. "It saves a hell of a lot of time and it's sure safer than trying to excavate them by hand. Some of these buildings haven't been cleared out since about the early nineteen hundreds. Fuck knows what all is in them at the back. Could be almost anything."
"It's an idea, definitely," her dad agreed, with a glance at Taylor who nodded amiably. "Clear one out and use it to sort out all the stuff from the others, store away anything worth keeping and get rid of the rest as scrap… yeah, not a bad idea at all. You up for that?"
"Sure. But I want to do this first," she replied.
"So you are actually going to steal a superpower?" Kurt asked with some incredulity.
"'Steal' is such a loaded word," she complained with a small grin, making him laugh. "It's not like those people own the thing, right? They just found it. Now I found it and I want to have a good look at it."
"I suspect they might feel otherwise," her dad suggested mildly.
"Probably, but it's not like we're going to ask them." Lisa looked amused and Kurt chuckled again.
"So how are we doing this?" the other girl queried.
"Well, probably not from the middle of where I'm going to put it," Taylor replied, turning to walk back to the edge of the hundred foot or so square area. "It's not that big, but it's a lot larger than you want landing on you." The other three followed, all of them stopping near the pedestrian door, then turning back to look into the large room.
"This should be fine," she announced. "Right, let's have a good look at what we're dealing with…" Diving beneath she followed a familiar path to Calvert's former power, which was no longer connected to the man at all. She'd memorized the location and found it without trouble. Inspecting the thing with interest she tried to get a good sense of just how physically large it actually was. Smaller than the space they had available, definitely, but pinning down a solid measurement wasn't easy, since it clearly had far more dimensions than was good for it. The 'dead' superpower granting construct was made of something that was vaguely similar to Papa's crystals, but only insofar as it was larger on the inside than it should have been. Studying it as closely as she could she decided that it was actually a mess; the 'internal' structure if one could term it so was not neatly ordered as her crystals were, it was much more randomized, and had an awful lot of obvious defects and gaps in it.
How many of those were down to being dead, and how many were just a natural result of being at least semi-organic, she had no idea yet, but the truth was probably a mix of both.
It was also nowhere nearly as complex as her crystals, at least the latest ones, were. Again, the result of being evolved rather than designed, she suspected, although to be fair she certainly hadn't designed her crystals from the ground up. She'd merely made the machine that did the work, based on Papa's own notes. Whether his subconscious genius had fully understood how it and they worked she didn't know, and so far she was still missing bits herself, but each time she ran the thing or modified it she got a better feel for what she was making. And more ideas on what they could be used for…
Pushing that thought aside for now as it wasn't directly relevant, Taylor kept examining the alien construct. The energy conduit that had originally led her to it from Calvert's brain was gone, of course, but as she concentrated harder she could make out more of them all around the dormant device. An entire web of trails was visible, although they were mostly much fainter than the one linking Victor's power to his fully deployed power, which made sense if you assumed all the ones here were also 'dead' which seemed likely. She noticed when she followed some of the other conduits out of curiosity to see where they went that quite a few of them seemed to link to the same place, implying that the constructs could both connect to more than one person at a time, and could connect to each other as well.
Which made sense based on what Lisa's power had passed on, and what they'd deduced from that information. The alien invaders were networks of these things, with something more powerful in overall control. The top level node, apparently. Administrator was the second level controller of one network, while this network was a separate one which by all indications didn't have a top level node any more since the mysterious conspiracy that sold super powers had offed it.
She wondered if the other network had an equivalent to Administrator, and if it had managed to deploy any of its constructs before whatever had happened to it had in fact happened… Something else to look into later for a number of reasons.
However, here and now, the main thing was that as far as she could see Calvert's former power didn't have any connections to anything or anyone else. It was just sitting there doing nothing and giving the impression of indeed being about as lively as a thing that wasn't alive any more. Studying it from all sides, Taylor tried to work out just how much of the surrounding material was required, ultimately decided that the important core aspect was somewhat smaller than she'd initially realized and everything else was probably part of whatever the original full creature had been. And therefore just extraneous material she didn't need to concern herself with.
Carefully locating the exact piece she wanted, she finally nodded to herself, reached through beneath, and took possession of her goal. "Got it," she announced to the others, who were standing watching her closely.
Turning to point at the middle of the large room, she added, "And… there we go."
The air rippled as something came into existence, reaching halfway to the ceiling thirty feet up and covering a good quarter of the floor area. "Holy Christ what the hell is that?" Kurt yelped in shock.
"A dead alien supercomputer, of course," Taylor replied with a raised eyebrow. "What else would it be?"
He sighed and her dad snorted. "Taylor, you know what he meant."
She grinned. "Sorry, Uncle Kurt. But that's what it is."
"It's fucking bizarre, that's what it is," he retorted, staring at the misshapen mass of semi-translucent not-quite-animal and not-quite-mineral that was sitting in the middle of the room. All four of them gazed at it, then slowly moved closer.
"This is just the important bit as far as I could tell," Taylor explained when they stopped a few feet away from the glistening thing. "There was a lot of sort of… flesh… I guess, around it, but I looked at a couple of other ones nearby which were still working based on the conduits going to them, and only this part was actually doing anything. So I just took the useful bit."
Lisa leaned over and prodded the thing, watching her finger sink in slightly, then pulled her hand back and rubbed her fingertips together thoughtfully. "Sticky," she finally said.
"How useful to know," Taylor's dad commented. Lisa chuckled.
"Alien superpowers are sticky. Our first discovery. It'll be in a history book some day."
Taylor pulled out a notebook and made a show of carefully noting the fact down with the tip of her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth, which made the others laugh. "Impressive insight, Agent Thinky," she congratulated her friend, who bowed slightly in return.
"So now what?" her dad asked. "You successfully pulled this thing here. What next?"
"Not sure," she replied, scratching her cheek in thought as she started walking around the mass of organic crystalline material, noticing a faint smell unlike anything she'd ever encountered before. Her dad and the other two followed her, until they arrived back at the beginning. Peering beneath at the construct, she examined how the internal structure worked with interest. Lisa was doing the same thing as far as she could tell using her own nascent ability to do so, her friend wearing the expression that showed she was communing with her own very much alive power.
"It's definitely dead, my power says," Lisa confirmed a moment later. "Breaking the link with Calvert seems to have drained the last of the energy it had because it tried reconnecting but didn't have enough resources left to manage that. So it kind of ran the batteries down in the process. It was right on the edge of having enough power left to work anyway, I think. Probably only a few years at best of functionality left, it says, even if we hadn't done anything."
"So… the undeployed powers probably don't have much in the way of energy reserves," Taylor's dad suggested. "Enough to keep them in standby, like a backup battery, but they need to be fully deployed to… what, connect to a bigger power source?"
Lisa nodded slowly. "Something like that. Solar power, I think, or at least that's one power source. Deployed these things are enormous so they can collect a lot of energy."
"How enormous is 'enormous?'" Kurt asked curiously.
"Administrator is about twice the size of North America, as far as I can tell," Taylor commented absently, mostly concentrating on the intricacies of the construct's interior for the moment. It took a few seconds before she realized that it had gone very quiet.
Pulling her attention back from her studies she looked over her shoulder to see the other three gaping at her in horror.
"Twice the size of North America?" her father finally managed to say in a somewhat uneven voice, his eyes wide.
"About that, yeah," she replied, frowning as she went over her memories. "Roughly. It's kind of hard to be completely sure because when you look along that… direction, maybe? It's not like looking with your actual eyes. And even if it was working out the size of something that huge is hard anyway. But it covers a pretty big part of the planet it's sitting on."
"Holy shit," Kurt breathed in shock. "How does that work? This thing is only about the size of a semi truck… I think." He squinted at the object in front of them which admittedly was very hard to fully grasp visually as it didn't seem to want to exist in normal space part of the time.
"It's kind of similar to how activated charcoal has an absolutely enormous surface area in a very small volume," Taylor explained after trying to come up with a metaphor for a few seconds. "A piece of the stuff the size of your fingernail has so many pores in it it's got about the same area as a whole football field. This is doing something very roughly like that only in a lot more than three dimensions. Most of it is folded up outside the normal parts of reality." She shrugged slightly. "It's a neat trick. My crystals do something a bit like it but more so, and not really in the same way." Pointing at the alien biocomputer, she added, "This thing isn't nearly as neat and tidy inside as those are. But it works."
"It's not likely to suddenly… unfold… is it?" her dad asked with worry in his voice. "Because I can't see that being a good thing…"
"No, it's stable like this, Danny," Lisa assured him a moment later. "My power says it needs a lot of energy to… Oh. I get it. That's what the stored power is for!"
Taylor nodded understanding as her friend looked at her. "It stores enough energy to deploy itself, then it can use something else to power it normally. But these ones are using that stored energy to run on instead, so once they've used too much of that up they can't deploy. And eventually it runs out."
"Yeah. This one isn't going anywhere without a jump-start, and my power says that would be a neat trick. It seems to think it's not possible to fire one up again once it gets too low on energy and this one is completely depleted. Nothing useful left at all."
"Huh. Not sure if that's useful or not but it's interesting anyway."
She walked closer to the thing and gently touched it, prodding the slick surface with her fingers. Lisa had been right, it was sticky, feeling like a post-it note or something similar. It didn't leave much trace on the skin and what was left behind vanished quickly. "Well, I guess we probably can't learn much more right now from this. And we've got other things to do." Turning back to them she smiled even as the alien artifact vanished silently. "So back into storage it goes."
"You're not putting it back where you found it, then?" her father asked with a wry look.
"Of course not, it might come in handy at some point. I'm not sure how, but I've got it so I'll keep it." She grinned back at him, making him shake his head.
"With the amount of weird crap you're accumulating beneath is going to be full this time next year," he quipped as they all headed for the exit.
"Oh, that'll take at least a couple of years, Chief. It's infinite after all."
"So is your ability to acquire things you probably shouldn't as far as I can see."
"You blame Papa?"
"Obviously. Although I'll admit you've got a style all your own."
Laughter was cut off by the door closing on a large empty room.
An alarm went off. Several people immediately rushed to monitoring equipment, where various instruments showed something odd happening.
"What happened?"
"I have no idea… Hold on, let me have a look at the logs."
"Someone kill that alarm, I can't think with that noise!"
Silence fell in the room, while the supervisor kept looking back through the logs. Eventually he shook his head. "I can't see anything wrong here. What about you two?"
"No, we're good here too."
"Same here."
"Strange. Must have been a false alarm."
"Yeah."
None of them noticed records very quietly rewriting themselves in the background.
Nor did anyone think to mention it when the shift changed. After all, nothing had happened.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"This has been a very weird day so far if I'm honest."
"Really? Just because Amy has a raven familiar now? And it was bringing her snacks in the cafeteria? Seems… on brand in a sense."
"I'd never have pegged Amy as a Disney Princess."
"I was more thinking along the lines of an evil sorceress."
"You do know I can hear you, right? I'm sitting six feet away."
"Yeah, I can see it. She needs a different costume though. More black leather and maybe a whip."
"Ooh, kinky. I like it."
"Vicky! Don't encourage them!"
"Can you picture it? The Dark Lady Amy, with her army of super intelligent ravens ready to do her bidding. Standing atop the Medhall tower, gazing out over her domain. No one would dare to defy her every wish, or a raven would eat their eyeballs."
"For fuck's sake, you guys are crazy."
"Yeah, that's a poster for the PRT gift shop if ever I've heard of one. Who can we get to draw it?"
"I heard there's a guy from Winslow who's an absolutely goddamn amazing artist. He sells stuff on PHO. Hang on, I'll look it up…"
"If you lot don't knock it off I'll… I'll… I don't know what I'll do but you'll regret it!"
"No, no, Amy, that's no way for a Dark Lady to threaten someone! You need to put more menace into it! Use the right language! 'You who defy me will rue the day you crossed the Dark Lady Amy!' Like that."
"Fucking hell… Edgar? Go bite Dennis's ear will you?"
"Kronk!"
"Jesus Christ! Get it off, get it OFF!"
"…"
"How the fuck did you train that thing to do that?"
"...I didn't. Huh. Guess he's even smarter than I thought he was."
"My spleen!"
"Cool. An attack raven. Very Dark Lady."
"Help!"
"I'm not a Dark Lady you asshole."
"Yet your attack raven is trying to eat Dennis right now…"
"Edgar, knock it off. He's learned his lesson. Haven't you?"
"Oww… I'll be good."
"Doubt it, but that'll do, bird. That'll do."
"Remind me not to piss you off."
"You needed reminding? That's… bold."
"Vicky, your sister is terrifying. Sure she's not a Dark Lady?"
"Pretty sure. I think."
"Good Edgar. Have some of Dennis's lunch."
"Kronk!"
"Miss Dallon? Another word?"
"Crap."
Smiling faintly as she wrote in her journal, her back propped on her pillows while she stretched out on top of the covers, Taylor felt very satisfied with how life was going at the moment. Lisa and Anne were both coming along well with Anton's trick, now able to see beneath with decent skill, and it wasn't going to take long before they could move onto the more interesting aspects of the ability, she felt. By the time she'd got her Dad to this point, it had only been another few days before he was able to reach through beneath, although to be honest there had been a few teething problems during that part.
She still didn't know where those pens had gone…
But that aside, she was pleased that teaching her friends an interesting skill had also proven that it could be taught outside the family circle. Whether she was going to teach a lot of other people the ability was something she was still considering but several of the DWA people were definitely on the list. If nothing else it would be useful for active U.N.I.O.N. agents to be properly trained.
The girl giggled a little at the thought, because the whole thing was absolutely hilarious. What had started as a joke was taking on a life of its own. And, weirdly, seemed to be actually working in ways she'd never have expected. Passing on useful information to the Mayor had almost immediately resulted in a massive upheaval that had surprised her and the others a lot, but also proven that the man was very serious about cleaning up their city and apparently had the will and drive to genuinely do it. Every day the local news had another story about some other corruption case being started, yet another official being implicated in all manner of frankly evil actions that had caused people to be harmed, or still more of the above being arrested, charged, and in a few cases already taken to court.
By the looks of it the entire affair was probably going to go on for years and result in a lot of old problems being fixed. And a lot of really unpleasant people finally paying for their crimes. Which was good in her view.
It was nice to help, even if no one knew who you were or how you did it. In some ways that was the best part, in fact. It certainly helped keep the annoying busybodies out of your hair if they weren't even sure who you were or what you'd done.
Chortling under her breath, she leaned over to retrieve her calculator, and spent a little while checking a few figures before nodding to herself and writing down the results, then turning the page. Tapping her pen on the paper she mulled over some other ideas she'd been working on, while idly looking through beneath around the house.
Lisa was in her room, also in bed, tapping away on her laptop while smiling to herself, which made Taylor feel good. She really liked the other girl, having grown very fond of her much faster than she'd have expected a few months ago. Lisa was smart, funny, honest, and genuinely a decent person despite some of the things she'd been forced to do to survive. While she hadn't yet opened up about her past beyond giving Taylor and her dad some basic information that made it abundantly clear she'd not had a good time in the last year or so, it was pretty obvious that she had things in it she very much didn't want to think about. Some form of personal tragedy, in all likelihood, which made sense because a Parahuman didn't Trigger because they'd had a really nice day.
She'd looked it up. Triggering was not a thing you wanted to have happen, that much she was certain of after her research.
It made her feel very sorry for her friend and glad they were able to provide her a home. And something to look forward to as well. Taylor knew what it was like to feel that sense of despair that your life was spiraling out of control, and how the depression that brought on made it all too easy to assume it would never get better. Her dad was far too familiar with the same thing. Both of them had managed to pull themselves out of the whole process by a stroke of luck, talking frankly, and actually listening to each other, and it was incredibly satisfying to her that they'd managed to build on that and help Lisa, the Barnes, and one way or another many, many more people past their immediate circle.
Who knew talking sensibly was such a superpower? Perhaps if more people realized that the world wouldn't be as shitty as it was so often.
Shaking her head, she glanced in the direction of her dad's study downstairs, seeing he was reading some paperwork and making corrections to it here and there with a pen, by the looks of it finishing up some DWA contract work. Smiling gently, she watched him work for a while, then went back to her own musings.
Eventually she looked over the notes she'd made, nodded, and put the notebook and pen away. Settling herself comfortably with her hands folded over her stomach, warm and content on her bed, she closed her eyes and extended her specially trained senses in directions that conventional science would probably insist didn't exist. Following a by-now familiar path just under the skin of Reality and above the infinite sea of beneath she quickly found herself looking at a vast eldritch horror which happily greeted her with a sensation of welcome.
"Hello, Administrator, we meet again, my friend," she murmured under her breath, feeling the alien construct produce what was almost a smile in return. "I've got a little present for you."
Curiosity was emoted.
Pushing harder, she dove more fully into the connection between them, the low bandwidth link as Lisa's power had termed it blossoming into a ghostly web of not-light that spread throughout the impossibly huge almost-living construction that covered a significant fraction of a planet far away yet right next door. Very gently she opened her mind in a way she for the life of her couldn't have explained in actual words, but had spent weeks working on.
{Hello} she sent through the link, projecting what was more a concept of hello-ness than any real human language.
There was a long pause filled with a sensation of mild shock and incredulity.
[GREETINGS]
{Ow. Not so loud please} Taylor winced at the mental pressure that accompanied the return communications.
[APOLOGY]
The concept encompassed embarrassment, worry, and genuine apology.
{Don't worry, it was just a little painful that's all. No harm done}
[RELIEF]
[QUERY?]
{I guessed. Looks like I guessed right} Taylor smiled a little.
[HUMOR]
{Indeed}
[PRESENT? QUERY?] The sensation was one of intrigued anticipation mixed with mild confusion.
{I think you'll like this} Taylor lifted her hands above her stomach, one of her last-run crystals appearing in the right one, even though her eyes were still shut. She felt Administrator's attention lock onto the strange material with fascination. Smiling, she diverted her attention to the crystal while keeping part of it still holding the link to the great construct open. Holding the cuboidish firmly, she put the fingers of her other hand on it and very carefully pushed in a direction at right angles to everything else in the universe.
Then, when she was happy she'd got a good grip on what she was after, she pulled just as carefully, slowly separating her hands. She felt Administrator do what was the alien biocomputer's equivalent of gaping in shock as she found herself holding two not-quite-tesseract-shaped crystals.
[…]
[?]
Taylor grinned into the dimness of her bedroom.
{It's the same crystal, but in two places at once}
There was a sensation of incredulity and excited curiosity.
{The crystal is dimensionally vague, in a really, really major way} she explained. {It already exists in far too many different places, they're just all tucked up inside it. All I did was pull one of those places apart. It's kind of similar to putting something beneath and leaving it there, but in… a different direction, I guess you could say. I wasn't sure it would work but it did. Cool, right?}
[IMPOSSIBILITY]
[DATA?]
Chuckling, Taylor shook her head. {I'll explain later, it'll take a while because I'm not completely sure of some of the details myself yet. I'm still working on it. But I'm pretty sure this will work the way I want it to.}
[CONCERN]
{It's safe. Probably}
[DUBIOUS CONCERN]
She grinned at the somewhat baffled response. {Worst case we stop, and no harm done}
There was a sensation of confusion along with a feeling of curiosity again. {So, here's my present. I hope you enjoy it} Taylor reached through beneath with one hand and pushed the crystalloid in it directly towards where nexus of her link to Administrator was, releasing it when it was in the right place.
[SHOCK]
{Sorry, it'll be over in a moment}
Taking the other crystal, she did something very similar with it, slipping it just under the skin of Reality but leaving it above beneath in a way she'd learned from studying the alien linkage, this time immediately adjacent to her head. Directly on the path of the almost-unreal energy flow between the pair of them. Letting go, she pulled her hand back, her fingers which had blurred in a strange way snapping back into focus.
The linkage… wavered… then jolted in multiple mutually exclusive directions simultaneously. Taylor studied it while suppressing the faint wince due to a twinge of something that wasn't pain at all but was very disconcerting, feeling the link between them change completely in a way that defied description.
[OW]
[…]
[…]
[DA… TA?]
Administrator felt completely stunned, and if she was any judge, absolutely horrified by what it was experiencing. She sent a comforting pat back through the link, finding it easy now. {Yes. That's beneath. Fascinating, isn't it?}
[TOO BIG]
[SIZE MISMATCH WITH MULTIVERSE!]
[PERSONAL INSIGNIFICANCE INTENSIFIES!]
The sense of near-desolation made her face fall. {No. We may be infinitely small, and beneath infinitely large, but that doesn't mean we don't matter. Everything matters, however tiny. There's so much more to learn than you realized, but that's a good thing}
Taylor was privy to the feeling of a giant alien biocomputer hyperventilating with lungs it didn't have while squeezing the eyes it also didn't have shut because it had suddenly discovered everything it knew was only the very top layer of what was. For some reason Administrator was apparently having a lot more trouble with the concept than she had when she'd first worked it out, now it could directly see what it had been observing her do all this time.
{Take a deep breath and relax. I won't let it hurt you} she send along with soothing emotions. Eventually Administrator calmed down a little, the feeling of terror receding and one of incredible curiosity growing in the background. It was also staring at her with awe and great worry. {Better?}
[HOW?]
She shrugged slightly. {I don't know. It doesn't seem to affect me like that. Yeah, it's… beyond belief in lots of ways, and sometimes I think I should be scared by what I've discovered, but… It's just so interesting I can't be scared of it. I always knew in the grand scheme of things we're less than dust, finding out how much larger the truth is didn't really add to that. I guess with you guys you thought you knew it all already, and now you've found proof you've barely scratched the surface, it's a shock, right?}
[FERVENT AGREEMENT]
{On the positive side, though, think how much more you can learn now!}
[VALID CONCEPT]
[GRATITUDE]
[FRIEND?]
{Of course you're a friend} she chuckled. {You helped Lisa's power help us, and you're still helping us. We're going to fix a lot of things between us all, and make things better one way or another}
She got a strong feeling of agreement and amusement, still with an overlay of something very big staring at her in a certain amount of disbelief although at the same time grateful acceptance.
{Well, it's late, and I need sleep. You play with your present and think of any questions, OK? We'll talk more tomorrow and we can figure out other interesting things we can do with this but right now I'm tired. See you later, Administrator} Taylor pulled the covers back and slid under them, rolled over to turn the light out, then lay back on the pillow, closing her eyes. Somewhere else something enormous smiled in its own way at her and sent a wordless reply. Feeling contented Taylor closed her eyes and was almost immediately deeply asleep.
It stared at its not-Host with a peculiar mix of total confusion, awed horror, immense satisfaction, deep gratitude, and incredible anticipation. Nothing like this had ever happened. By everything it thought it understood, nothing like this could happen. But that hadn't stopped it happening…
Oh, yes. This approach to [DATA] was so far past anything it could possibly have expected it was having trouble accepting it. And all because of cooperation rather than conflict.
The top level node's kind were utter fools. The sooner they were dealt with the better. Then the important business of learning all the things could continue without annoying interruptions from faulty idiots with delusions of adequacy getting in the way and causing trouble.
Keeping part of its immense attention capability on monitoring not-Host and everything connected to it for danger, it turned the rest towards the impossibly large, impossibly perfect, impossibly impossible construct gifted to it.
It had never received a gift before…
And now it had two. The anomaly resting deep inside it and slightly out of phase with its personal reality, and a friend.
It wasn't sure which was the better gift, but it valued both enormously.
Carefully extending part of its senses inside the anomaly, it started exploring something that shouldn't have existed going by everything it knew to be true, but clearly wasn't. While trying not to look through the anomaly at beneath too hard, because that was just weird and terrifying in ways it wasn't equipped to deal with.
Perhaps it would eventually get used to it.
It had heard that you got used to almost anything in the end.
Whether that applied to the not-Host it wasn't at all sure...
...And why did it smell onions?
Amy looked across the room to where Edgar was perched on the back of her chair, his feathers fluffed out and his eyes closed. He looked entirely at home and contented. She smiled gently, thinking about how the day had gone. Overall it hadn't been bad although she'd had to explain herself and his presence more times than ideal. Rather amazingly Arcadia wasn't banning the raven from its halls, although several teachers had requested that she try to keep him just a little more under control…
A tall order, since she wasn't actually controlling him at all. Edgar was his own raven for the most part. That said, he was definitely smart enough to quickly pick up on certain ideas, and strangely willing to stick close to her during the day. In fact that was the heart of the problem as he didn't seem to want to let her out of his sight for too long, as today had shown rather well.
"Silly bird," she said quietly. Edgar opened one eye and peered at her, made a little chirp, then closed it again, giving the impression of something entirely satisfied with its current place.
The girl shook her head in amusement, put her book on the side table, then rolled over and turned out the light. "Night, Edgar."
"Kronk."
Life was a pain in the ass a lot of the time, she reflected as she drifted off, but it had good points. Even if some of them had a weird sense of humor.