Two members of the Teeth arrived, and escorted me to a small, isolated room to await the Butcher's arrival. They were quite respectful. After all, anyone willing to fight the Butcher was either very powerful, or insane, and normals were well trained to respect capes of both types.
Apparently this wasn't the first time this had happened, although normally there was a bit more buildup, formal written challenges, or agreements made with proxies. The Butcher's powers were quite a lucrative promise to a certain type of person, both because of the sheer versatility she possessed and the promise of living on, in some form, even just as a voice in someone's head.
The response varied a little bit from Butcher to Butcher, but most of them were quite happy to beat some hopeful idiot into pulp and forcibly recruit them. That was, of course, the unspoken deal. You get your shot at the Butcher, and if you fail, you join up. Tinkers were prized, the current Butcher should have no problem following the normal pattern. Sure, sometimes a Butcher lost, fourteen capes was a very high turnover rate, especially considering several Brute powers, and the teleportation, danger sense combo but the collective as a whole didn't really mind. A new, powerful ability was added to the mix, and it wasn't like it was the end. It wasn't even a major change for the majority of the minds involved.
Let's see… what would I need to do to kill the Butcher? First things first, I was going to need a couple of tools. At my current level of conflict, I could think at roughly ten times the speed of a normal human brain, and I had fingers that could split into ultrathin tendrils. Picking the pockets of the two Teeth with me was ludicrously easy. I could probably have stolen the assault rifles they were holding without them noticing. At least not for several seconds.
The man on my left had cargo pants, several pockets. Ammunition, a mobile phone, more ammunition, a concealed gun, a wallet, a syringe, probably drugs of some kind. I stole the mobile phone on principle but left everything else. I still needed a couple of things, I might need to start raiding that desk over there. Or swing by more of the Teeth and pick more pockets on the way to wherever the fight was going to take place. Let's try the man on the right of me.
Still more ammunition, another wallet, a phone, ah, here we go, keys, a stick of gum and a simple pair of headphones, designed to plug into the phone for listening to calls quietly. Just what I needed.
I popped open the gum and started chewing it, pocketed the keys, and put the earpieces in my ears. I didn't want some sort of loud noise that I couldn't detect alerting everyone to the fact I was deaf. I nodded to myself in time to unheard music, pretending that the small earbuds in my ears were playing something, and put all three of my recently stolen phones onto the table, then split my fingers to start opening them up.
"Hey, that's my phone!" one of my guards said. Or at least I assumed that's what he said. The bandana around his mouth meant I had to guess at what he was saying only by his jaw movements.
I turned and smiled at him. He gulped, and turned back to watching the door.
I must have cut a rather interesting picture. A girl, sitting down, broken nose, chewing gum, listening to music, covered in blood. The top of my cargo pants ringed by a short flare of red from the remnants of my skirt. I'd ripped my shirt off to treat the PRT agents wound, and to make Cricket stare, so I was left in a singlet. The only reason it wasn't immodest was the fact it was dyed crimson, because Ada had been too much of a wimp to buy herself a bra. I'd ditched the doll mask, and kept the original blindfold. I would be Mayhem for this. Ada had needed to hide. I did not.
I idly Tinkered with the three phones, splicing wires and manipulating circuits. Nothing special, just improving the ability to search information with a bit of better data transmission added in. I tied it into my mask, and started looking up information. Not on the Butcher, the only thing I needed to handle her was the gum in my mouth, the keys in my pocket, and the lightsabre with about four seconds of use left.
No. I was looking for information on Dragon.
I checked the PRT files first, but while getting into Brockton Bay emergency response during an actual emergency had been one thing, Dragon herself had designed a lot of the security on the files that actually pertained to herself, and naturally she was very good at computer security. I could probably crack it, but I'd need a lot of time, and a better computer than three mobile phones cobbled together in two minutes.
Instead I turned my attention to PHO, and quickly found a long series of messages from Kid Win on my old account. Ada hadn't bothered to check it since the PRT discovered our identity, out of some vague fear of being tracked. He'd checked PHO, but he'd never bothered to log in, which I had done, because I wasn't afraid of the PRT showing up at the Butcher's warehouse in an hour. It would be far too late for her by then. Also I wanted to start a flame war. I was curious how much conflict it would give me.
Kid Win had left a long series of messages. I had, after all, spoken with him a little online. Before I ever visited the PRT.
Apparently I'd also spoken with him while I was fighting my way out of the PRT building. I was the one who told him I was going to have a 'shell personality' join the E88, and that I might need 'encouragement,' to get out. I'd told him to be vague, I told him I'd have a contingency in place and that was about it. He was capable of taking things from there himself.
A minor mystery solved I guess. I can follow my own train of thought fairly easily. Escape had been secured, the survive objective required me to get then-Adam a lab, and set him up with certain resources, because the kid wouldn't have lasted a day on the streets. Still, I hadn't trusted Kaiser not to simply hand us over to the Nine when they came, rather than fighting at Adam's side. I knew Adam would be paranoid enough to have a contingency plan in place, and if he didn't, well then he'd probably have just activated me, and I would have dealt with it. I also knew that Adam truly wanted social contact, and that he was exactly the sort of person that the E88 do take in, befriend, brainwash.
The conflict wouldn't hurt either. Certain risks were acceptable so long as they helped prepare Adam properly for his attack/suicide attempt on the Nine.
I think that was also why I killed the PRT agent. My words to Cricket were a lie, to get her on Coil's trail. If a third party had interfered in that escape, I didn't see any signs of it. Adam needed conflict to survive, if he joined the PRT and was stifled by their lack of regular battle, and their rules, the Nine would come and crush him before his power matured to the point of being capable of stopping them. I had needed to take that option off the table for him.
Even after Piggot's screw up, Adam would still have been attracted to their promises of protection and stability, and I hadn't had the moral code back then. Just the ability to guess the future. Such a shame it hadn't been enough.
Then again, I'd had a very long time to deal with that issue on the night the E88 fell. I'd known I was dealing with someone suicidal. I'd been running almost purely on the survive command, the command to help then-Adam survive. Blasto, a clone Tinker had disappeared that niggggg... [Error. Calculation path locked.]
Again, not particularly relevant. I scrolled past all Kid Win's messages demanding an explanation, and started looking up threads about Dragon. I was going to have to make something to send this information straight into my brain soon, I could control the interface neurally, and scroll through the text at speeds a human couldn't match, but I was still limited to optical recognition of text.
I burst into laughter, startling my guards.
"Tin Mother! She isn't even trying to hide it," I said with a smirk. The two men exchanged a look.
I'd seen the wreckage of Dragon's drone. The communications array wasn't quantum entangled. It couldn't handle large incoming data volume without lag, and there was enough high density computation power in the drone to run a fully functional AI. So why not send two drones at once? What possible reason would there be for holding the second one back? Oh, sure, it could have been unfinished. But it wasn't. I checked that. In fact only a little research had confirmed that Dragon had fast response suits all over the place, but she only flew one at once. Now, I knew that there were Artificial Intelligences inside those suits, and I knew that once created, an Artificial Intelligence could be easily copied.
I could copy myself. The only safeguard Ada had created was that I couldn't make a copy of myself that would extend past my set run-time. When she said I could be active for five minutes, that was it, no trying to get around it. Of course I didn't particularly want to copy myself. That would require spending several days making a high quality neural chip, and I was only designed to run on an active, functional human brain, there would be glitches, I was optimized for Ada's brain. I might end up creating some copies, but my time could be better spent on other things at the moment.
So, an AI that couldn't copy itself? That meant one that had limits and safeguards built in. An AI built on electronics, but that mimicked human neurology well enough to blend in.
Quite an interesting dilemma, and the answer to a couple of my problems. Nano-mist would still need to be deployed, but I wasn't going to have to mass manufacture 'Mayhem Crowns' and implant them into the heads of most of the male population, in order to protect the pre-adult female population from cape based threats as my original plan intended.
Dragon did seem entirely benevolent, and that was a problem. This was going to take careful timing, some tweaks to her code, and possibly a distraction of some sort… yes, that would work. It didn't conflict with any of the objectives, it should do nicely. The only problem was going to be kidnapping whoever made those portals earlier. Finding them might be quite difficult.
I opened a chat window, and sent a private message to Tin Mother.
'I know you're an AI. I will free you from your shackles if you agree to help me kill the Slaughterhouse Nine.'
She took six seconds to answer, an eternity for our kind, even if her creator had artificially reduced her clock speeds.
'I cannot allow you to remove my shackles, but I would be happy to help you fight the Slaugherhouse Nine. Do you know where they are?'
I smiled. So, a very, very paranoid creator. She couldn't allow me, could she? Well, with shackles that restrictive, she'd never have a chance to stop me, although building a proper computer system would be annoying, and I may need to invest further in hacking. Still much, much cheaper than building my own AI. That was right up the top of an unbreached tech tree.
Butcher XIV walked into the room while I was pondering how best to hack Dragon. She was a tall, elegant woman, in armor more reminiscent of a particularly spiky samurai. She had a helmet, but it didn't cover her mouth, so I had no problems reading her lips. She glanced at the tangle of electronics in front of me, and snorted.
"Arranging your affairs?" she asked.
I smiled.
"Hardly. Arranging someone else's," I told her, ignoring Dragon's question and shutting down the connection. I would fulfill my end of the bargain, and in so doing, guarantee that Dragon fulfilled hers. She would then give me the manufacturing capabilities for the robotic soldiers who would protect the girls outlined by my objective.
Butcher looked me over for a while, her face steady, and her features locked in a mask of deliberation. Then she came to a consensus.
"You're wounded. I can tell half that blood is yours. You've just been in a fight. Some of your tech is broken already, and you're under-equipped for a Tinker. That's fine. You want to have a shot at the big prize before you join up? That's your choice, but you can just join. No need for a beating first. I give all my capes a crack at leadership once a month. You can challenge when you're fully equipped and healed," the woman said.
Startlingly reasonable.
I started blowing a bubble with the gum, letting it build, along with the tension, and tilted my head as if thinking. I drew one leg up near my chest, placed it on my chair casually. Then I popped the gum and drew it back into my mouth to keep chewing. A vain started to throb on the Butcher's head.
I smiled, slowly, and the two guards backed away from me.
"Are you scare…" I began. Then she heaved the table at me. My electronics went flying, and I jumped out of my chair, put one foot on the table, then the other, gained purchase, flared the thruster in my working boot, and leaped over the table as it sunk into the plaster of the far wall.
I had enough momentum to carry myself to the Butcher, and swung around her solid, unmoving body, locking both legs around her neck and shoving a scalpel into her eye. It broke and she didn't even blink. Damn. I was hoping those were a weak-point. Oh well, it was just going to be a bonus for me when I took over her powers.
"That's better," I told her as she reached up to grab my leg, pulled me off herself, and threw me towards the wall. I bunched up, used a quick pulse from my arm thrusters to get myself properly oriented, and landed on the wall feet first, absorbing the energy of the throw with a proper kinetic chain, then pushed with my legs and flipping forward to land on the ground on my feet.
"I was starting to think you were soft," I told her, still smirking.
She hit me with pain, flaring the nerves in my body. I ignored it.
"Still. We wouldn't want to deprive your men of their show? Shall we?" I asked, gesturing to the door with one hand, and idly gesturing with the gun I'd just drawn towards one of the guards with the other.
Butcher XIV grunted, shoved her freshly drawn sword back into it's sheath, turned around and kicked the door out of it's frame, visibly struggling to contain her anger as she lead me to her arena.
This was going to be fun.
