Begin Transmission: Teraport 1.5
I sipped my tea, then took a deep breath.
I reached for the prepaid flip phone Lisa had left me, but I couldn't bring myself to pick it up. Nope. Not ready to make any calls yet.
I needed to take today as a lesson. Scary stuff happened in the foreground of the cape world. If the stuff that could be seen was scary, the hidden aspects of the cape world could only be terrifying beyond comprehension. I had to assume that there were enemies everywhere. That any and every action I take could and would be used against me. I needed to completely restructure my thought processes. Emma was a scheming, manipulative bitch, but Emma didn't have super powers.
Well. Maybe. I wasn't entirely convinced that she didn't.
I had other reasons to call the PRT, though. Lisa.
She knew everything about me. She was friendly. I liked her, in some ways. She scared the hell out of me, and she knew where I lived. Her 'backer' knew where I lived. She had made me an offer. Given me a phone number. Three phone numbers, actually. The first was so that I could call her backer. The second was so that I could call her. 'Never hesitate to call if you need anything.' The third was the number of the boy we met in that same parking lot. Lisa claimed he wasn't in on the whole cape business. That didn't mean that she couldn't use him to get information out of me. Still, he was friendly, and seemed sympathetic to my situation. I could call him if I needed to get to the library again. I doubted Sophia would try to push me around if I had someone walking with me, at the very least.
I felt the Itch suddenly creeping through my mind. I found myself wanting to destroy the phone before me for reasons other than trepidation and general anxiety. It was primitive. I could make it better. It felt almost as if no time at all passed between the moment when the phone was lying on the table as one piece and the moment it was many pieces, all across the table. There was so little I could improve, but so much that I should. It was primitive, and yet, it was the best that could be done.
Disgusting. I put the phone back together, though I made a few 'mistakes' when dealing with the microphone, so my voice would be at least partially disguised.
Taking the phone apart told me a lot about it, though. That someone couldn't effectively track me when I called from it. Sure, my call would be recorded, but I'd be calling the PRT. I had to expect that. The government was the only organization I could think of with their roots deep enough in the infrastructure that they'd be able to listen to my calls. I couldn't discount the possibility that some kind of power would let other entities listen in, too, though. I needed to maintain absolute paranoia. The information of a phone call covered massive distance. If there was any sort of Thinker-type power that could extrapolate it...
I wanted to discount it. I really, really did. I needed to remember today, though. If there are relatively benign powers who could seek me out for 'business offers' like that, then there were malign powers that would make more dangerous offers, if given the opportunity. That, perhaps, were already on their way to meet me. Or perhaps Lisa's 'backer' wouldn't be appeased by my silence.
I needed to prioritize. How could I keep my home the safest it can be?
The first priority was protecting my home as it is now. I wouldn't be able to convince my dad to move without revealing that I'm parahuman, and even then I doubt he'd spring for it. Plus, moving isn't stealthy. It's the antithesis of stealthy. So in order to protect my home, I needed to not be there. I needed to shift the target. Run away from home.
...Except that I couldn't do that. That would hurt my father, too much. And I didn't have anywhere to run to except places provided by Lisa's shadowy backer. Anywhere else, I would likely be found just as easily. So moving was out of the option. I needed some way to enforce my safety in my home, then. To ensure reprisal if anyone did anything untoward. I needed muscle.
Patterns of enforcement robots jumped about in my mind, but I knew I couldn't build them. I needed something else. What kind of muscle was available? I was confident that the backer would be willing to provide muscle. That he would be gleeful to do so, in fact. I wasn't keen on inviting any muscle a puppetmaster was willing to provide. Letting people near me would be a mistake. People with the power to defend me were also people with the power to defeat me, which would make that a doubly foolish move.
There: the critical point. To defend myself, I needed allies who were capable of defending me, but not of attacking me. I needed to have power over them that would persist despite, during, and after any attack made against me. I needed an information weapon. In a way, I did have leverage over the 'backer.' He was trying to be secret. Covert. If I could expose his presence, it would be very detrimental to him, in theory. It was too tenuous of a connection, though. I saw the strings being drawn up around me: if Lisa had done a better job pitching her 'backer' to me, I very likely would have been convinced that my blackmail there would be enough to keep me safe.
I had another organization I could trust to protect me without harming me, though. In the moment of their attack against me, the Protectorate would be harming their own position, their reputation as a champion of the people. Phones were easy to tweak, and as disposable as my burner phone was, I could still take video with it. I would rig a system in my burner phone to record any interactions with the Protectorate, and set it to send the recordings to important PRT directors, media personalities, and the like if I didn't cancel it in time. The threat of that would probably be enough to keep me safe. Probably. Maybe.
Which meant that my real first priority was contacting the Protectorate safely. For the time being, I'd also want to be untraceable. If I wanted to infiltrate a cape organization for information gathering purposes, my first and last stop would be the PRT, and by extension, the Protectorate. I needed to be sufficiently certain that the PRT applied enough Thinker support to their communication to keep their data secure, or make certain that they were going to apply sufficient caution and data exclusion to keep my location secret. The general reputation of Protectorate heroes not being murdered in their beds was promising, but I wouldn't be trying to get in the Wards, which meant I'd be given less preference.
Calling the Protectorate offices wouldn't give away my position on its own, but it was still plenty possible that the signal from my phone could be triangulated back to my home. If someone knew what they were looking for, it would be easy to pinpoint my location to within a few houses' radius. This phone was given to me by Lisa: I couldn't trust it at all. I had to act with the assumption that whenever I used it, my location would be known, and that all things I said would be forwarded to Lisa and the whoever was funding her. If someone even was backing her: it could easily just be a ploy on her part to seem more menacing than she was. Or, perhaps, that it was someone else who was menacing, as opposed to her.
So I'd have to be vague on my call. If Lisa had a power that let her 'notice' things, I couldn't hide much, but I could try to make my conversations as general as possible, and reveal as little as possible. I'd also have to consider calling from somewhere else. I could just walk down the street, but then I'd have to worry about Emma. Was it correct to just take the risk of my position being noticed? It might be—the chances anyone else would know what they were looking for was negligible, and Lisa already knew where I lived. Calling from the library, or with a payphone, those would be the more comfortable options, but leaving home wasn't something I was interested in. That would make me more vulnerable than was really necessary. I could call the boy Lisa walked me home with to get a ride or an escort to various places, but there was no chance that she wasn't getting information from him. I'd not be hiding my location from Lisa, so there wasn't too much point in that yet. I'd keep it in mind, though. That could be useful if I was heading to a public location, but didn't want Emma to be as much of a pain. Possibly. I didn't want to write him down as an asset, yet. He would remain categorized as a near-emergency measure.
I decided to put his number in the contacts of the burner I got. Being able to reach an emergency measure quickly was important. I didn't put Lisa's backer in the phone, as I didn't want to make any impulsive decisions, but Lisa's number went in the phone as another emergency number. Several different PRT hotlines went in the phone, too. The cape-emergency hotline, but also the general cape activity hoteline, their Master/Stranger activity hotline, and a general call number. I debated putting my house phone in the contacts, but that was something I had memorized, and the possible convenience of more quickly calling my father in an emergency was outweighed by the danger of someone getting a hold of the phone and getting to him.
Delaying. I was delaying the call. I checked the clock: my dad could come home soon. If my dad walked in on the call... No. I couldn't use that as an excuse. If my dad walked in, I could hang up or call back later. Plus, I could make the call from my room. He wouldn't notice I had a phone that way. I forced myself out of my chair and up to my room.
"Thank you for calling PRT East-Northeast, how can I help you today?" A woman pleasantly answered the call.
"I... have a lot of things I need help with. How should I start?" My voice grated out of my mangled microphone. "Actually, wait. No. I know where to start. To what degree is information I share with the PRT secure?"
There was a pause before the response came through. "I assure you that anything you share with the PRT will be secured to our utmost abilities."
I grit my teeth. That wasn't useful at all! "I have good reason to believe that I am being tracked everywhere I go, and that this call may even be in the process of being monitored by a third party. To what degree can I trust the security of this call?"
"I apologize, this is not an emergency number. If you have an emergency, I can transfer you. Can you hold?"
"No!" I take a deep breath. "No, this is not an emergency. Yet. But I'm worried about being attacked in my own home."
"I'm sorry, but you might have more success contacting the police. If this has nothing to do with parahuman activity, the PRT can't help you."
"No, no. It's... Last night." I paused. If anyone was monitoring the call, chances are they already knew I was a parahuman. The PRT would know eventually, if I associated with them. This was the most vulnerable time to be revealing my parahuman nature, but at the same time I didn't think I could make much progress if I didn't say what happened.
I decided that if I was going to make progress, I'd have to trust that the PRT was effective because of competency, and not luck. I had to trust that I was safe with them. I hated it. But I was desperate. I still might end up joining the Protectorate at some point, and I had no plans to commit any crime. It made sense to go forward with it.
"Yesterday afternoon, something happened, and I passed out. When I woke up, something was different. I know how to build things, now. I went to the library today, to figure out what to do next. To see if I could figure out more about what happened to me last night. There was a girl who found me, and helped me get away from some bullies. She offered me money and protection. She knew that I could Tinker. I'm worried that other people might find me, or that the girl I met will decide not to leave me alone. I want to feel safe, but I don't. I decided that the PRT are the best people to talk to for that."
"I... see. I'm sorry, but can you hold? I may need to transfer you to someone higher up."
"Tha—" A flourish of hold music cut me off.
I stewed in my anger for a few minutes, and eventually put the phone on speaker so that I could listen for my dad coming home. At this rate, though, it seemed like he was having a late night. Eventually, a man with a fairly deep voice picked up the line.
"I'm sorry, I have a few questions for you. First, how would you like us to refer to you?"
"I... think I'd like to remain anonymous."
"I see. Can you tell me more about what happened last night?"
"I have a couple of bullies. They follow me home... most nights. Almost every night. Yesterday, they didn't follow me home, but there were these notes absolutely everywhere, taunting me. Each one had the time that I reached the note on it. The notes were there even when I tried to avoid them, and take random paths back. They follow me everywhere."
"Have you ever tried going to the police?" The man's voice was simultaneously calming and infuriating in its neutrality.
"Of course I have. It's pointless, though. Em— one of them has friends that she says will back her up if I try to accuse her. And they follow me
everywhere. Even when I tried going to the police station. One of them is very strong. I've never made it to the police station."
There was a moment of silence. Some clicking on his end of the phone. "Can you tell me more about what you said happened today?"
One of my hands was shaking. Stupid. I needed to be more careful. I was telling him things he could use against me. The words kept coming, though.
"I went to the library in the afternoon. Research some cape stuff. Figure out if they might've used some kind of powers to get to me. Figure out what it would cost for me to get off the ground. There was a girl there, she called herself Lisa. She pulled me away from one of my bullies and drove me away in a car. We changed cars once. She took me near the ocean, an empty lot. Fairly empty. She said she had a backer, who wanted to fund me. She was a supervillain. Said her backer was funding the less bad villains, independent heroes. Wanted me in on the thing. She was kind of scary, though. I don't know how she found me out so quickly. She knew lots of things."
Another moment or two of silence from the other side of the line. "I think you're doing a very good job. It was a good idea to come to the Protectorate and the PRT on this matter. I'd like to meet you in person to help work out a solution. Both for your bullies, and for what happened today."
My heart spiked. "In person? Why in person?"
"Due to various safety protocols, we can't necessarily condone a stakeout on a location on an anonymous phone call. Plus, you may find that a stakeout might not be the solution you were looking for, and meeting in person will do a great amount of good in assuring each other we are who we say we are. If you'd like, I can send an unmarked PRT car to your home, and pick you up early tomorrow morning. Would that work for you?"
"No." My voice was dry. "No, that won't work. My... my family doesn't know I'm parahuman. I can't leave until I'm alone in the house. I also can't leave in a car headed to Protectorate headquarters when my bullies are watching."
"...Do you really think that they could follow you like that?"
"I'm not sure. I couldn't dodge them on the bus. I don't want to take the chance."
"I can understand your concern. If you'd prefer, I can arrange for a private meeting at a different public location. The library comes to mind, if you aren't opposed."
I was opposed. I trusted the PRT more than anyone else I could think of, though. I gave him my address, asked to be picked up at one, and hung up before dozing around in my bed for a little while. I didn't like the PRT. I didn't like the bureaucracy that came with it. I trusted it not to murder me, though, and I didn't think that joining them would be a requirement for me to receive 'protection from maybe murder.'
It was sometime when I was having dinner with my dad that I realized the man on the phone had a voice I recognized. It was when I heard a snippet of him talking on the television that I knew who it was.
Armsmaster had taken my call. Tomorrow, I was meeting
Armsmaster.
I threw up before showering that night. Giddiness and utter terror didn't mix well.
End Transmission
