I've written this story before - or half-written it, anyway. It was posted on SpaceBattles because I wasn't aware of why SV was a distinct site at the time, and I stopped posting at the end of 2016 for writer's block and motivational reasons.
But hey, it's 2020, the future is completely uncertain now, I have some fun ideas on machine learning and Minds that Iain M Banks (RIP) never got to try out, and SV seems like a much nicer place where I won't have to constantly defend the concepts of anarcho-socialism or using "they/them" pronouns for a character!
So here's You Needed Opponents With Gravitas, Redux. I'm changing the course somewhat while sensibly cannibalizing what I'd already written. I still have most of the same ideas I want to express, but I think I have a better handle on the method and tools to explore those ideas.
From 1976-1978 CE, the General Contact Unit Arbitrary hung around the solar system with its sensory units fixed fairly firmly on the Earth. Contact personnel and drones investigated, collected, contemplated, and eventually decided against contacting or destroying the planet or its predominate mammalian species (the "destruction" being less of a firm plan and more the after-dinner suggestions of a few crew members on too many psychotropic substances).
In 2002 CE, a routine jump through the expanding shell of Earth's electromagnetic signals resulted in an unexpected slamming of the metaphorical brakes, as numerous powerful Minds took a look at the broadcast history of the planet's last thirty years and said, "Wait, what the fuck?"
Take Star Trek, add some libertarian-socialism (classical definition, not American Libertarianism), put some hyperintelligent AIs in charge, and change "no meddling" to "meddle but be discrete about it." The Culture is the setting/semi-protagonists of the eponymous Culture novels by Scottish sci-fi author Iain M. Banks. They're a vast conglomerate of humanlike species who, several thousand years ago, came together to form a kind of federated near-civilization under the rule of benevolent AIs called Minds. Individual humans have access to vast resources, usually communally-distributed, personal freedom to the very limits of not hurting others, and all the utopian sci-fi inventions: sex changes via thinking about it hard and a few months of gradual hormone change, mind pattern copying for remote duplication of experts and restoration from death, and a ridiculous cornucopia of non-harmful drugs for useful and entertainment purposes. People don't have to work but often volunteer to help the Minds just to have something to do.
Naturally, a number of the books question the cost, viability, and philosophical underpinnings of this utopia, because what else can you do with a utopia in this kind of fiction?
I try to have at least brief explanations of any concepts I've borrowed from the Culture books in the narration, and I'm happy to clarify or edit for anything unclear - odds are plenty of other people will too, the series seems to be a favorite among sci-fi fans with left-liberal leanings and optimistic tastes.
Meh. I'm not a big canon guy. The point of divergence is technically the observational visit from the GCU Arbitrary in 1976 (Culture book 3, State of the Art), but that doesn't really change anything. More significantly, by the time our story begins in 2011, the Culture has been back for nine years, but I consider anything not expressly mentioned in Worm to be open for changing, like the fairly undefined socioeconomic and political situation in the US of Earth-Bet. Also it's been a while since I read the whole doorstopper of Worm and I may have just forgotten some stuff. That may or may not be changed if pointed out. I burned out on Ward, I'm sure there's cool new info about the nature of powers and shards in there but I'm not gonna worry about it. And Wildbow's WoG is just trolling, folks, c'mon.
This is phone-posted without being beta read because I really need to post something and put pressure on myself to write more. Feedback appreciated.
logindex localcalendar 2011.01.08 localrefraction Earth-Bet localmunicipality Brockton Bay
I put my hands down on my bedroom desk, encircling one of the only two things left on it. I'd carefully set aside all my homework, backup homework, notebooks, old participation and punctuality trophies and ancient photos (except the one of Mom), diligently focusing on the work and not thinking about what I was clearing the desk for (don't think about pink elephants, don't think about pink elephants…) until I'd finished.
The business card was the normal size, off-white (eggshell? linen? I hadn't exactly been able to focus when we did color theory in art), uncreased even after being pulled from the ratty velcro wallet I'd gotten in junior high. The writing was shining silver, blocky capital letters, and small, just six words on three lines with a lot of blank space around them.
I put my index fingers on opposite sides of the card and flexed it. It wasn't any thicker, any heavier than it should be.
It was just the metaphorical weight of the power behind it. All in my head. Much more comforting.
"… hello? … testing." I refused to look at the other object on my desk while I talked to the business card. Nothing was happening… would that make it fake, or just capable of telling when I was being serious?
It was there. It was definitely real, whole, and not a hallucination. There weren't any painkillers still in my system. I was thinking straight (I thought). Except I was contemplating something that was definitely insane.
Dad was asleep. We'd left the hospital around six, and he'd collapsed pretty much right when we got home.
He'd been confronted with what had been going on for over a year, and I'd scared him. I wondered how he would have felt if he'd know where I'd really been. (Probably really been)
Or what I was about to do. I swept the card and the other item into one hand, then shoved them into the pocket of a thinning grey hoodie as I shoved it on. I could pull it tight enough to hide most of my face. That would work for now, keep my identity concealed (Maybe I wouldn't even keep the same face if I went through with it).
Taking a possibly insane, definitely reckless, late night stroll across the not-quite-the-Docks-but-nobody-goes-there-because-it-might-as-well-be-the-Docks wasn't something that would help Dad's stress level either. But screw it. I was either right, in which case I had one pretty damn higher power looking out for me, or I was completely full-on physical hallucinations losing it, and it would probably be better to get shanked in an alley than to have my mind break down one neuron at a time.
And it gave me time to think. And remember.
"Okay. Say I believe this, this is real, you're real. You'll just give me powers?"
"You agree your world needs to change. Change requires power. Exceptional individuals are one of the axes we like to balance our fulcrums on."
The words pushed over me without settling in. I had other things on my mind. "I can be a hero."
"Do you want to?"
I looked up, sat up suddenly. I tried to sit up; the chair had moved with me, flowing with my back and still flawlessly supportive. "What do you mean? Of course I do!"
The answer came after a pause, considered, and as yet another question. "What defines a hero?"
"Helping people!" I threw my arms up, full of all the mad energy I hid and stomped down, because a crazy reject girl was even more pathetic than just a reject. My elation had spun out into howling fury. Why not? I couldn't express any of it in reality. So why not here, when I still half-knew it had to be a dream? "Stopping villains. Being fair - no, justice, being just, being honest, being good!"
"Heroes." They didn't think highly of them, the word made that clear. "An injustice has been done to you, Taylor, just as an injustice has been done to your species." The same words that had greeted me at the start of this delusion.
The expanded explanation made me a lot madder.
The south neighborhoods of Brockton Bay at night were a different landscape from their daytime form. The street signs and building numbers didn't define them any more. If you wanted to see what actually mattered, you had to look until you saw islands of light in a dark ocean, unlit mountains of empty and sealed buildings rising above them.
But like the lucky explorers, I had a guide. My Virgil was silent and invisible, seen only through their actions. Shadows lit up in the lenses of my glasses, doing the work of broken and inadequate lighting, and more, showing the street as brightly as the noon sun. Words and arrows in a smooth, crisp font guided me.
"Pothole, 3.1 meters away, chance of collapse if approached."
Probability of confrontation: 36%
Probability of force: 2%
Encounter Danger: negligible. Encounter Stress: high."
The directions grew more complex, the further I walked.
"[Pulaski Motors]" over the faded pattern where a sign had once been mounted on a wall. "Closure: 2009. Cause: income insufficient to pay rent. Employees: 8 (As of today: 6 unemployed, 1 dead)."
"Residence: Greenland Apartments. Residents: 11 (squatters). Former Residents: 85. Condemned: April 19, 1997. Cause: Collateral Damage (Marquis vs. Kaiser, April 3, 1997). Insurance Payment to Landlord: November 8, 2006. Reconstruction: Coming Soon!"
I couldn't stop reading them. Couldn't decide if I was being told that my problems didn't matter. Or that I could have had it worse. That it wasn't my fault? Maybe just that I'd been hurt like other people had.
And I couldn't decide if I believed any of those. I didn't feel mad, or justified, or comforted. Just sick. And unable to look away.
"Larinioides cornutus, furrow orb spider, 1.78 meters away. Please do not squish."
I stopped and looked. It was the classic web shape, wheel-like, spokes and circles, between a hydrant and a signpost-sans-sign. Coastal spray or dew had gathered on it, little thick beads of water across the web. It was empty. Did that mean the spider was hungry too? I didn't know much about arachnids, besides freshman science, idle Wikipedia browsing, and dad's campy old sci-fi movies. I knew the webs were to catch prey. And everything needs to eat.
The note from my guide, the only direct request so far, had caught my mind. The spider glowed in my glasses, stood out far more than something that tiny would even in daylight. A fat little body, smaller than my fingernail, with what I thought of as a "very spidery" head, the flat top, eight eyes, little mouth claw things. It was kind of cute, once I rejected the icky feeling it immediately conjured.
"Yeah, I get the metaphor," I told the thin air. My voice was hoarse, and probably angrier than I needed to be.
If my guide was going to continue the parable, it was interrupted by the scream.
I ran.
Towards the sound, of course.
It wasn't even out of the way. Maybe not even in the Docks - close to Oakwood and the tech companies that had displaced the manufacturing, straddling the border of depressed, dying old Brockton and vibrant, advanced new Brockton. An empty lot turned into a cash-grab parking lot, and a tech worker - "Mohammed Idrisi, 29, Programmer ($48,765 annual) at BeneTech Data Solutions" - with his back against his Ford Assurance's window. The only reason he wasn't on the asphalt was that he'd caught the squat sedan's side mirror in his right armpit. His left hand was on the stab wound - "27% chance fatal, 47% without hospitalization within one hour."
There were six Empire guys, from skeletal to steroidal, all men, if you were generous. One ostensible boy - "Tim Bailey, 17, No Juvenile Record" - a face I'd maybe seen in the halls at Winslow once or twice. He was the one with the knife out, at least before they saw me. He was the one whose muttered "-sand nigger," reached my ears.
I hadn't approached undetected. My converse were old and squeaky, and the streets here full of pebbles. I got the attention of about half the pack, including the biggest guy, the giant meat-wall of a skinhead that looked to be in charge - "Matt Fletcher, 31, Arrest Record, No Convictions, Empire 'Sergeant' inducted 09/16/2003 via Assault with a Deadly Weapon on-" okay, he was in charge, and I didn't need to know that much. I knew he had a gun, for one thing, a little black boxy "Glock 17, manufactured-" pistol, I didn't need to know more. He half-raised it.
"Fuck off. You want to die for this n-" His words across the cold air, the quiet lot, just shuffling feet and stirring hands, choking gurgling, hot anger. Hate. Not the same hate, but hate I knew.
I considered whether I was going to jump in - no, of course I fucking didn't, why else was I here? "Do it."
Maybe he thought I was talking to him - or would have, if he had the time to think.
His gun melted, exploded and splattered chunks of molten metal over his hand and shirt, but he didn't get the time to react to that either. He went flying into the lot, skidded across it on his jacket a dozen feet before the involuntary backflip, shedding some of that scalp on the asphalt, and landing smack on his face.
The gun's clip (magazine? I didn't watch a lot of cop shows) hung in midair, where the gun had been blown apart without touching the ammunition. It emptied onto the ground, each bullet bursting in a flash of harmless light.
I didn't really catch everything that happened. I had to rebuild it in my mind afterwards. The next nearest guy, addict skinny with a gross patchy beard, had a silvery blur rip through his shirt, punch right through the gun tucked into his wasteband, causing one of the bullets to burst in light - and force, which sent him reeling into the second guy, another meaty gym rat, who threw him out of the way.
First one was down, but the second left standing. That probably just flagged him for more force. The silver flickered in front of him, caught the light of the one good streetlamp for a moment, then he just hit the ground, groaning while an invisible giant stepped on him, even the asphalt pebbles around him stuck in place. The third one, face tattoo with a big blonde mustache, managed to turn and get one foot off the ground. His other one left involuntarily. He flew at the nearest building at car crash speed, stopping inches short of it, and toppled over.
Fourth guy, skinny, tall, too much like Dad with less hair, got out one syllable of "Cape!" before he was thirty feet in the air and just shouting. Well, screaming. Then he was two feet in the air. Then fifty. Then fainted, and on the ground.
Tim, for some reason, waved his knife at me, then spun to his target. The handle shattered, plastic shards stabbing into his hand, and he screamed, staggering back. He stumbled again, like an invisible harasser was shoving him, and fell on his ass.
I hadn't moved my hands out of my hoodie's pocket.
I looked at Mohammed. His face was pale, drained, his eyes barely able to focus on me. "Can you stabilize him?"
A faint hiss and a sparking green mist appearing around his gut wound were the answer. He finally slumped off the car mirror, falling onto the parking lot, propped against his car. "Consciousness recovery in 6.9-7.4 minutes," my glasses updated.
It took me a couple seconds to work up the courage to dig around in his pockets. His phone was in there, with an ultra manly rugged case or whatever black rubber and plastic was supposed to be. The "LOCKED, ENTER KEY CODE" screen just flickered and vanished when I picked it up. Trying not to feel too invasive, I found the call function, put in 9-1-1, and hesitated before hitting call. But I had to do something, right? Be part of the process at some point.
"911 Emergency."
I- okay, how was I going to-
"Hello?"
Shit. I was taking too long. "Empire attack. Victim needs attention." I rasped it, my sorry childhood imitation of Alexandria, the first voice I could think of. "2200 block of High Street. Attackers are down."
"Are there any parahumans involved? Are you a parahuman?"
"No," I said to both, honestly, and dropped the phone. The weight in my hoodie pocket reappeared, a bit less than the phone. I tried not to touch it. Or think about it.
I tried not to run, to hold myself to a walk, ignoring the distant voice from the speakers. I still didn't feel comfortable pulling my hood down until I was five blocks away, turning me into an identifiable teen girl walking just past the Docks around midnight: weird, sure, but probably not connected to any crimes.
I heard the police sirens, but managed to avoid the cars. Without having to ask Virgil for help.
My front door loomed. I could sneak around, maybe get in the back. Maybe they could levitate me to my window?
Or I could just go in and face the misery head on. I'd faced Nazis head on already tonight. What was some deep-seated trauma on top of that?
Okay, it was still a lot. I wasn't ready to talk about it (I would never be ready to talk about it).
I had already hopped the broken step and had my hand on the handle. Adrenaline made bad decisions.
Dad opened the door. Neither of us said anything.
"I just needed some air. I was safe." I guess I was used to breaking our silences. Dad stepped back and let me through the little foyer (fancy name for a ten square foot hallway).
I slumped onto the couch. He'd been watching some rerun network. Looked like Columbo. Dad approached, but didn't sit down, just leaned on the back of the couch at the other side. "Taylor," he started, paused. "Do you want to-"
"No," I intercut immediately. Paused myself. "But I will, Dad. We'll talk. I promise. Soon." I couldn't set a day, couldn't have that looming (I had enough looming, a mountain waiting to fall on me).
"That's- that's fine." I didn't think he wanted to try and wrap his head around it now, either. At least he'd tried, asked something. That was more than he'd done in months.
I watched the TV for a minute. There were three or four cable networks like this. "Classics" or whatever. Not really an honest name. What they meant was "pre-capes." "Dad. You saw this all happen. Do you think." My throat was dry. Dumb. It wasn't anything I hadn't asked myself a dozen times. "Do non-capes still matter?" I grabbed the remote. Flipped until I found something. Rebuilding Marseille? A panel show, and desperate enough for ratings to have the Leviathan's head on the chyron.
"Taylor, if- does-"
"It's not about me," I said, brazenly lying. As if he could tell. "The world, dad. The one I'm supposed to live in. Could I change it, if I wanted to? Just me. Just Taylor. No powers."
He took a while to find the words. "I want to say yes." He took a little less time to find the next ones. "Annette would have said yes. But longer, and better."
"But."
"But." He wiped his eyes, squished his face with his fingers. "Maybe not. People without powers? Yes. People still matter, still make things change." He had to find the strength to add, "People like you and me?"
"Not quite the same as CEOs and senators."
"No." He said it barely above a whisper.
I pushed myself off the couch. I hugged my dad. It had been a while. He'd tried at the hospital. I hadn't let him. "I'll make breakfast tomorrow," I said, and walked to the stairs, hoping I hadn't made dad think I was suicidal or anything.
I returned to my desk. Pulled out both items of the night from my hoodie pocket. Put them back on the desk.
Put both hands on the card. Looked at the silver pen.
The silvery pen-shaped object.
"Okay. I'm in."
The almost-pen, the light weight, my Virgil, flared to a thumb-thick bulb at the end, lifted off my desk, hovering vertically above the card. A ripple of blue and orange light ran down it, projected on the air just above its surface. "Thank you, Taylor."
"Conveying your agreement to the GCV Sufficiently Advanced Technology now." There was only a fraction of a pause. "Welcome to Contact, Special Circumstances division, Agent Hebert."
You folks have no idea how flattering it is that people remember the original version of this fic! I'm still keeping large parts of that skeleton, just trying to trim some fat and add muscle to the parts I felt were weak. And to make it angrier and more punk rock.
"I know it seems obvious, but I am saying it for a reason," my host continued. The avatar of the General Contact Vehicle Sufficiently Advanced Technology was a genderless (androgyne?) human speaking in Marain, the Culture's language. I had woken up mumbling it and moved towards full fluency as the day went on; it had been provided by the knuckle-sized pill I'd been given and swallowed last night, which I had been told had now morphed into a nanoscopic web over my brain called a neural lace; it sounded a lot like what we'd learned about the corona pollentia, except that instead of just a superpower, it gave me a new language, and instant access with a thought to a database hundreds of times larger than all human knowledge. All Earth human knowledge. Human meant different things in Marain.
In Marain, anyone who wanted to be human was. Or at least, that was how it seemed to me. The term covered dozens of basic types of people from about one to three meters tall, with a wide variety of extremities and digits. The two arms, two legs, and a head (typically-but-not-always with similar organs to mine) were about the only universal features. And that was just the baselines! Someone with wings, extra arms, or an exoskeleton might just be a human with cybernetics or genofixes, or actually what I'd call an alien in English. And they were pretty much all compatible in ways I was not ready to ask for details on.
And then "human" in Marain still wasn't the same as "person," which had an even broader definition!
And they all knew who I was.
That was a chilling thought, so I had decided to thoroughly ignore it.
"Okay. Powers are a Trojan Horse, a poison apple from bad aliens. You're good aliens who want to help us. What else?"
The Sufficiently Advanced Technology's avatar was on the thin side for a human - its body reminded me of the 50s sci-fi aliens in flying saucer UFOs, or an elf. Narrow in most dimensions, except vertical. The eyes were definitely not human, though - not Earth human, anyway. Shimmering, actually glowing violet irises that moved with absolute precision. "Your comparison is flattering, but not entirely accurate. We don't know what the end purpose of Scion or parahuman powers fully are, only that our sources believe it to be dire."
"That's the conspiracy, Cauldron?" I had tried to remember everything they'd told me in the first offer, but being teleported out of my locker a couple seconds before I would've hurled, to a talk in space in a cafe-style setting, hadn't been ideal conditions for remembering everything.
"Our primary and most effective unwitting source, yes." With a wave of the avatar's fingers, a web of faces and icons linked by glowing lines sprung up in my view, gave me a few moments to look - the Protectorate, the federal government, the Thanda, the Yàngbǎn, the Elite, and more, all with some kind of leverage from Cauldron - then shrunk to icon-size, hovered at the edge of my vision. "Their preparations for him are even more apocalyptic than their efforts against your Endbringers. I suspect they know more about his aims, but they're quite reticent even within their headquarters. There is clearly a shared knowledge base, established before we arrived and began to surveil them. I can infer much, but not everything. It is possible we are lacking some key component to Scion's actions. Or that in the end, the morality of parahuman powers is irrelevant. Secondly, I will caution you, Taylor." The violet eyes were serene, gentle, and totally focused on me. I was intensely aware of my heartbeat, my sweat, the churning acid in the pit of my stomach, before I closed my eyes, just for a second, then tried to meet their gaze. "The Culture wants to help your species. I want to help you and your species. This is at least three goals between two significant actors. We are acting to benefit you, by our standards, but that does not make us 'the good guys.'"
I was still swallowing some of the feelings their words had spawned, which had matured from bodily unease to mental stress, but I suddenly felt like I had enough to go on. An edge piece of a puzzle that I could at least describe. "I shouldn't be too trusting?"
The avatar smiled. Their teeth were entirely flat, although not all the same length. A human mouth, but not a human mouth - I was going to have to get over this or I'd drive myself nuts just trying to sort out who was what. "I won't say that. Your trust is helpful. I will act in your best interest. Contact and Special Circumstances have millennia of practice and numerous mistakes we are determined not to repeat, when it comes to accelerating change in lower civilizational levels. However, taking all those assertions as fact, I still urge you to think for yourself. If you feel questions or doubts regarding my motives or suggestions, ask them. They will be welcomed." The avatar's close-lipped smile was easier to handle. Calm, controlled, and patient. Not exactly unfamiliar, but… I was avoiding admitting they reminded me of Mom. Something now missing from my life. "I won't ask you to make every decision about the the future of homo sapiens. But I will ask you to be the final decider for the future of Taylor Hebert."
What did it say that I still felt ready to run away from being comforted?
"Alright. I'll try to be cynical about everything," I offered, forcing a grimace of a half-smile onto my face. "That can't be it for the preparations you want."
The avatar flashed the genuine grin again, just barely different enough from the last one that they felt alive and human. I wasn't sure if it was; that really hadn't been clear when it was introduced as the (a?) voice of the Mind. "Of course not. You confirmed this morning that you would like to appear parahuman."
"Yeah." I shuffled in the chair. It resembled a cafe chair, but it sure didn't feel like wrought iron with minimal padding. I could probably have conquered Brockton Bay with that chair alone. "If I'm going to be the center of attention, everyone will think I have powers anyway. There's always suspicion about anyone that's an amazing speaker or inspiring or whatever."
The avatar tipped its head slightly, a bit to the side, not quite agreeing but accepting.
"And…"
"And?"
"You said I was one. Would be, would have been one. In the locker."
"Yes. We don't look inside brains without asking; too much knowledge of form and function makes it effectively impossible to do so without discerning some portion of your thoughts. We consider that invasive, impolite. So I have not scanned your brain to see the parasitic growth you call the corona pollentia and gemma." The avatar sipped their tea, which smelled something like oranges mixed with peanut sauce, yet still appetizing. "Monitoring the growth of your neural lace, however, confirmed it is there, and was attempting to grow."
"Was. You-" I swallowed, tried to consider what that meant, what I felt about it. "Stopped it."
"I was not going to let it hurt you." The airy, academic tone boiled away, and the Sufficiently Advanced Technology shone in the eyes of its avatar - the 44 km long galactic spacecraft, carrying over half a million crew, with the constructive and destructive capability to match my world's entire human civilization. This was the Mind that had first greeted me, had awed me into calm from the repulsion of the locker, and it was focusing its entire will into this statement.
I tried to think straight, not to fall into the image in my head of being cradled in the hand of a benevolent god. "The power. It would have hurt me?"
The avatar nodded. "I've been observing your Earth for nearly a decade. I haven't needed to invade any minds in order to see that there isn't a single power that's been of use against the traumas that spawned it. If they didn't simply exacerbate them."
Traumas. I wasn't- (wasn't traumatized? Really, Taylor? Can you say that? Can you list what's been done to you, go through that notebook, without your voice cracking, your eyes leaking? Don't lie to yourself, at least) - wasn't able to dispute that, if I was any example of the people that got powers. "Why?"
A stupid question, but the Mind didn't seem bothered. "Uncertain. Cauldron's original source seems to think these colony "Entities" provide their powers for data collection. They attribute power limitations and malformations to filtration." I tried not to let the avatar's current behavior - placid face, seething voice - remind me of Emma. It wasn't a person. It was a Mind. "Ridiculous. If true, neither of our oppositional forces have any comprehension of scientific processes."
"What, um. What does that mean?" My stupid leg wouldn't stop twitching. It was under the table, but the ship clearly saw.
The avatar relaxed its expression, returning to the warm smile, the light in its eyes dimming to a mere glimmer when the smile reached them too. "There are many things like Scion in the greater galaxy. Hegemonizing swarm entities, smart matter, are capable of growing to great size and complexity, and of significant danger to lower civilizational levels."
I (consciously?)flickered the question through my neural lace, picked out visual examples with my eyes, saw the globs of replicating, consuming materials, devouring people and facilities, but ultimately a pest, an infection to be handled by specialists but not a true enemy, not to the Culture. "Dangerous to us."
"Very much so. And yet, not governed by a human intellect, let alone a Mind, and the erratic nature of the parasitic powers is significant evidence of such. This is not science," the avatar said, and a video flashed up in my vision, a blonde girl younger than me in a small room, the dull antiseptic surroundings of a medical facility. My anxiety wriggled in my stomach. Her surroundings didn't remain that way for long, long rusty spikes and corkscrewing thorns growing out of an expanding circle of otherworldliness. She didn't react, saying nothing even when orderlies rushed in to pull her out. A second video: a red-haired woman surrounded in flame, eyes just as blank at first, light flooding back into them, like they were capturing the fire, and she roused, swollen with energy, racing through the fire, hurling it around. Burnscar. Slaughterhouse Nine. "At my most generous, I will call it an approximation of science by a crude machine mimicking consciousness, lacking any legitimate processes. At my most repulsed? This is torture. The abuse of supposed subjects of testing for no valid purpose." The avatar put their cup down - then pushed the entire tea set off the table. There was no clatter. It had stopped existing before it hit the ground. "I will not experiment on you." The avatar paused. "Not as an individual. And not without permission. Our shared goal is to find the best method for accelerating your culture's development, while healing the damage done to, and by, parahumans. There will be some testing involved simply to specialize our methods. I hope that is acceptable."
"Am I the experimenter or the experiment?" I asked. Maybe I was taking the advice to be cynical a bit too seriously (maybe I couldn't make myself believe in anything sincerely good just yet).
"Both," the avatar was amused, encouraging. "That's the nature of intervention, after all. You will be changing yourself while you change your world." They settled their hands onto the table, steepled them, and relaxed in their chair. "Now. Let's discuss your parahuman powers, or the facsimile we will be creating."
"What power should- can I have?" Should was a bad choice (don't surrender control right when you've finally been given some!) - but I hoped the Mind would ignore it.
"Effector fields." The Mind pushed something to my neural lace again, flooding my view with a swarm of images, articles, and videos, almost overwhelming - but they began to filter themselves immediately, to sort into trees and structures, hiding portions behind links and cross-references. Was the ship modeling it on a wiki? Was I?
I picked up enough from a scan, feeling awkward for reading in the middle of a conversation - but I'd been doing that all day, and the Sufficiently Advanced Technology hadn't once shown the irritation and impatience I knew it had to be feeling at my slow, feeble human brain. "This does… everything."
The avatar released something between a chuckle and a titter. "In a sense. Your world's progress along these theoretical lines has been severely damaged by attempting to incorporate the garbage results of powers. Effector fields aren't the most perfectly finessed tool I could provide," they said in what sounded like genuine pain at the aesthetic flaw, "but they are the most adaptable. With the power limited by your scale compared to mine, you will still be able to move mountains."
"Thanks. I don't know if I want to be the size of a city. No offense." I hoped it wasn't offensive. We were talking about powers, throwing my life end on end, the fate of humanity, but the Mind seemed (to my feeble social skills) to be mostly amused, excited, curious. The cracks of furious anger had only been directed at other cosmic actors, like Scion. Right?
"None taken. If I desired to always bring my full scope to bear, I wouldn't use an avatar. And if I were the kind of ship that didn't fully appreciate the human experience, I wouldn't be here, or crewed." The ship had known everyone we'd run into on the walk to this cafe on its underside, too. That made sense, of course. They lived here. What would it be like, to live in an intelligent, powerful city? It would have to like you, right?
Maybe not Brockton Bay. I wasn't eager to talk to my hometown. It didn't feel like it would become the kind of intelligence that was friendly with its inhabitants.
I wrenched my mind back to the subject at hand. Not that the Mind seemed mind this pause any more than my neural lace educational breaks. "I'd have to be a Tinker, right?"
The avatar shook its head. "Forget their paradigms. You will be using technology: that doesn't mean we need to make that obvious." Three new videos in my view, appearing as real as any before, but obviously created: me, as a hero.
Me with crystalline growths from my shoulders and wrists, crackling lightning jumping between them and arcing into Purity.
Me in a hood and cloak, stepping between shadows and teleporting through them, putting a dueling Uber and Aegis to sleep with a touch.
Me appearing in the eyes of everyone in sight, speaking, and the moment they hear me, they freeze in place, a captive audience.
"Variety is quite possible."
I leaned back, the faux-metal chair bending and stretching to support my back. "That might be too much to choose from. What-" I tried not to bite my lip. "What power was I going to get? From the- the parasites." I needed to evict the word 'alien' from my vocabulary. Not that there was really a direct Marain analog anyway. No easy way to say 'other, alien, outsider.'
"Uncertain. The restrained growths in your mind linked to areas associated with multi-tasking and pattern-seeking, along with some input-output nodes tied to motor control and proprioception. As an educated guess, some form of minion control."
I frowned. Me? A Master - a mastermind? A leader, a controller? It felt…
I didn't know exactly how I felt, but the Mind's offense at intentions of the parasites sounded right. I wanted control, yeah. Absolutely. Of my life. Not… something? Some one? I tried not to picture myself as some new Heartbreaker and failed. "Not what I want."
"Not a helpful ability for your health," the avatar agreed.
I almost asked what would be helpful, but I couldn't. I needed to make the decision for Taylor.
That didn't mean I couldn't talk it through, right? "Control over me. A power that affects myself. An Alexandria package?"
"A useful basis," the Mind agreed.
I wasn't just fixing myself, though. And change meant facing down people with real power. Dad went up against the mayor and executives. That was just for jobs in a dying town. "And an area power. Big, and strong. Something to shut down threats. And rescue people." I wasn't going to be a hero. I'd seen enough of the heroes to know what they really were. But I was going to help people. I had to.
"A powerful and adaptable theme sounds in order. A large slice of the pie that an effector field offers, though smaller than its entirety."
"Yeah." I sat up, looked around. From this cafe, jutting out of the side of the main body of the Sufficiently Advanced Technology, I could see its field envelope, the ship's effective body, and two more of the thirteen separate vehicles that made the one singular General Contact Vessel. And beyond the envelope, moons. Titan, a golden atmospheric haze hiding a surface that looked hauntingly Earth-like from afar. Iapetus, squished out from the orb shape I'd thought all planets (moons?) had. And behind them, the swirling giant of Saturn. "Gravity. Gravity is powerful, and- important, right?" I cringed. Had my freshman Basic Sciences class been hell? Yes, absolutely. And I still should have remembered more. I should have looked it up before I sounded like such an ape to the artificial super-intelligence.
"Very important," the avatar said. (It wasn't just humoring me, I wasn't a complete idiot.) "Systemizing gravity's relationship with other fundamental interactions is a large step towards the technology that birthed effector fields. For all the Culture might seem powerful to you, we do regularly yield to gravity - or request its assistance. Gravitational forces are the basis of our Orbitals." The avatar looked me directly in the eyes. "A self-perfected form with gravitational projection?"
"Yeah. Yes. That sounds good. I can use that." Clamping my jaw shut when I was done saying what I needed to say was the next skill I had to learn.
"Aesthetics should be quite entertaining to design. I urge you not to give too much weight to the input of the populace, however."
"Input?" Gravity didn't feel like it was affecting me right now. It felt like the chair and floor had vanished from under me, and I was free falling.
"Not everyone onboard is still fascinated with your world. Nine years of observation has been enough for the trend to rise and fall several times. But active intervention is quite interesting to anyone still paying attention, and has brought back a few wavering enthusiasts."
"Enthusiasts?" I hoped my voice wasn't as squeaky as it felt.
"Curiosity is a near-universal sentient urge. Heavily selected for on the path to awareness. For every dossier or plan I will devise for you, you'll have at least five from people who have spent years studying your Earth, or some particular part of it."
"They're part of- they're all part of this."
The avatar put its hand, cold and smooth, over my fist. That made me realize I was clenching my hand into a fist. And hyperventilating. "They can be. They would like to help you."
"They- everyone knows me. They all know…"
"What has happened to you. Yes, in broad strokes. If my passengers want detailed knowledge about your world, they have to go down there and be present. My recordings and assessments are shared based on my own values. Sharing information you clearly want to keep private would hurt you. I have no interest in doing that."
"Go there. Be present. Is- did anyone-"
"None of my crew have been party to the campaign against you." The ship's voice softened from that titanium sentence. "I won't pretend every member of the Culture is a paragon, but they are not taught to take pleasure in harassment or ostracizing. The competitive urge is addressed in healthier diversions."
I clung to that. "What will they - offer me?"
"Planning advice. Assessment of other actors. On the ground operatives. Not everyone is the dilettante of our promotional material. I am openly a Special Circumstances vessel, and if I do say so myself, somewhat of an exemplar even within the Culture for being involved. I have drawn a considerable number of like-minded individuals, concerned by the problems of others." The avatar's grin was… distant, nostalgic? "What use has paradise if you cannot share it?"
"Generous," I mumbled. "If- how long will everything take, to prepare?"
"Two weeks."
I closed my eyes. Steadied myself. "I can do two weeks."
"Taylor." The avatar waited until I opened them again. "Two weeks here. I would like you to have a chance to rest. Bodily augmentation and power design will be a process with considerable feedback requested, and the better you know my crew, the less their assistance will intrude on you. It would hardly be an inappropriate amount of time for you to take away from school."
"They'll be twice as worse when I get back," I thought aloud.
It seemed strange that such a flat-toothed, herbivorous, skinny avatar could have such a shark-like smile. "I believe my crew and I have a number of ideas for that as well."
"What- what about my dad?"
The avatar leveled the full power of their stare at me again. I tried not to cringe, although the chair folded around my slight movement and was still very comfortable. "That depends on how much you want to tell him." I picked up on the implication. (Be honest. With yourself, with him, with them, with someone, just for once, Taylor!)
"Okay." I stood up for the first time in what had to be hours. My legs weren't even sore. Amazing chair.
"Can you send me home?"
The avatar only smiled.
This is the hero that slew the twisted chair of Cheradenine Zakalwe, the chair that hones itself to annihilate Lung's comfy barcalounger, source of his power and arrogance. It is the seat savior of humankind. It will not be mentioned again, but you will know where it has passed.
I heard the Mind's question, processed it, and stared, maybe a little helplessly, at my companions. "What- does that mean, exactly?"
"Exactly what it sounds like," Isk-Berniav said. Her voice - and identification - were distinctly feminine, and carried the confidence of age. My temporary bodyguard through the Docks didn't quite try for parental, but I was catching a distinct older sister vibe. The pen-sized drone, hovering just past my left shoulder, flashed her aura red, the indication of light amusement taking the place of body language. "I wasn't anywhere near this unobtrusive when I was first embodied. There's certainly a range of sentimentality when it comes to bodies, of course. No fault if you have some."
"The, uh, the details? Seem different. For, uh-?"
Her aura strobed tangerine consideration, but held a little red dotting it. "For organics? It's not entirely the same, but closer than you would think. Of course, there's a larger degree to which the mind is the body for you, but with the right substrate you could be in a knife missile my size without statistically significant personality change."
"Happily, nothing so drastic will be necessary," the Mind added. "My current proposition is an artificial duplicate of yourself. Made of things slightly stronger and more energetic than your evolved biomaterial. No offense, it's quite sufficient for what it is."
"Is it?" I asked with a grunt, trying not to look at myself, reaching up and snagging the next handhold by a hair. The sweat was already running down my forehead and catching in my eyebrows, threatening to spill into my eyes.
"Don't feel ashamed of your genetics," said the biggest reason I was feeling ashamed of my genetics in the moment. Fihah Tchojey was Special Circumstances, roughly 170 years old, and looked twenty five; specifically, she looked twenty five in a way that made Emma look like me. She was also just wrecking me on this stupid rock climb. She was taller than me and had about as much strength in two fingers as I did per arm, and this all wouldn't have grated so much if she wasn't everything else you'd expect a bicentennial secret agent to be, including more in touch with the cape scene in Brockton Bay than I was. She was an average representative of the people I'd met in two solid days on the Sufficiently Advanced Technology. Yes, I was developing an inferiority complex.
"Seriously," Fihah shouted down from at least six handholds above me, cupping two hands around her mouth and gripping rock by just the third. "We cheat not just from birth but in utero. Everyone on the ship is the product of multiple generations of genofixing before they were even born, or old enough to personalize themselves." She spun down a few arm spans with absurd speed, crouching gargoyle-like above me to use a more normal volume. "Feel good or bad about your body on its own merits, not in comparison. Value yourself for who you want to be. And if you want to cheat, you have the capability now."
"I do," I agreed, heaving on the rock. I slipped. Again.
I rolled myself in the air by tilting my hands, grateful that at least I didn't have to ask the Mind to move me in its safety nets. "Does everyone from the Culture blaze through this?" I asked it, finally wiping my face, now that I'd failed. Again. Fall number six. The rock face glared at me from just over a meter away. I could push back to it and keep trying like I had five times before.
"Hardly. The inclination of my crew culture has tilted back to aesthetic bodies, and following good climbing form does matter. You're performing at fifty sixth percentile. Quite impressive."
"Really?" I looked down, only seeing each of the points I'd fallen from. But more than half the crew here had done worse?
"Never underestimate the capability enhancement of pure determination." The Mind paused slightly, the equivalent of a polite cough. "Although I always suggest backing it up with excessive firepower."
"Okay. Artificial me. What, uh, happens to this me?" I waved at my head as if it wasn't obvious what body I was talking about (talkative idiot).
"We have options. You could remote pilot it while remaining on board, making the new body your avatar, in effect." They were clearly amused at that notion. "You could operate both, have a normal life as Taylor Hebert while your alter ego completes your agenda."
"Both? That's … possible?"
"Easily. Either with the remote piloting and a degree of enhancement to your multitasking, or by inhabiting the new body with a fork of your self, and performing regular personality integration."
"I've done that," Isk-Berniav commented. "Highly effective for coordinated action without risking communication interception, but working with yourself does miss some of the added perspectives of true teamwork."
I considered it. Two Taylors. The idea was less awful than it would have been a week ago. I still didn't feel like my life needed to be inflicted on someone else. Even if that someone was me. Okay, add 'too complicated to talk about' to the negatives list - even if Marain actually had its own pronouns and tenses for describing things done by your forked self. "What if… well, I had an idea."
"By all means," the Mind said. It probably didn't need to. I was supposed to be having ideas, not hiding behind uncertainty!
It helped, though.
"Okay. We're going to build me parahuman powers because that's what everyone expects."
"And they can be fun," the Sufficiently Advanced Technology added.
"And they look like fun," I admitted. "But I'm not going to be a hero. Or a villain. That's the point. Not playing the game. So… why play the other game? Why wear a mask?"
"I had wondered if you would decide that." The Mind sounded almost proud. "Completely achievable. Security will obviously be provided, primarily via surveillance, but SC operatives and the new theoretical project can divert and disarm a number of attacks along those lines. Expect to have to make some examples anyway, both overt and subtle."
"So, I'd be remote piloting." I hesitated, and go figure, the vast civilization-scale intelligence noticed.
"You're not a fan."
"I don't want to hide. Especially on you. Sorry, not that there's anything wrong with-"
"It's fine, Taylor. I understand your implication."
I just had to charge ahead. The Mind understood, I kept telling myself. "I'm from Earth. I should be there if I want to change it. My- this body. I saw something in the cross-referencing-" I pulled it up on my neural lace. "Storage."
"Viable. Transferring your active neural pattern to the new body would maintain single body, single mind continuity. I was already designing in parallels to your glands, autonomic systems, and so forth to prevent any loss of the organic decision-making process." That seemed like a hyper-computer's polite term for bumbling fleshy idiocy, but I wasn't going to object. The idea of just setting aside my emotions, slicing them off and acting from logical judgments alone… sounded disturbing. A little enticing. There were a lot of emotions I would love to get rid of. In theory. Having that emotional severance as a real option that I could research and consider had made me back away.
I was still miserable sometimes. Not now, with a fully grown neural lace and Culture drug glands, and a truly ancient cocktail called Autocorrect that hadn't been needed by anyone in the Culture for millennia; it was still an order of magnitude better than any earthy antidepressant. But I could remember what the misery felt like, and I still thought in the same patterns. Still caught myself hating myself, even without any real heat or sense behind it, without that subtle little voice that found reasons why I was so pathetic, so deserving of pain.
But being able to think those thoughts and see them for what they were, to try to untangle my own twisted values, made me realize how much that mattered. How doing stupid, impulsive, emotional ape-like things had made me who I was. If I didn't care about the things that had hurt me - Mom, Emma, Dad - would I still even want to be doing this?
"Thanks," I told the Mind. It could probably guess my entire thought process there.
"I told you I wouldn't let you be hurt," they said, quite calm. "Unwanted or uninformed personality alteration is always considered harm in our record."
After a brief pause to let me say anything - which made me wonder why, since the Mind had to know if I was going to say anything, right? - they continued. "Design finalization tomorrow. Consciousness transfer on Friday?"
Two more days to exist as this me? "Okay." I leaned in, touched onto the rock face again and grabbed tight. "Then I'd better finish this up today."
1d20h31m before previous reference point logindex localcalendar 2011.01.09 localrefraction Earth-Bet localmunicipality Brockton Bay
Dad was in the kitchen. I was kind of surprised he was even in the house, honestly. The Mind had promised to displace me back if he approached my room during the day I'd spent on the ship making preparations. It had never come up.
I stopped on the stairs, leaned on the railing. He was at the table, papers spread out. I could see just a little of them from here, but they floated up in full to hover at the bottom of my sight. I hadn't meant to activate the neural lace. Or known it could just see things with my eyes. That was going high up on the list of things to get comfortable with before I tried to be a cape. I did glance over the papers anyway. They were financial records, personnel lists, union contracts. I didn't have a guide to turn the spreadsheets and legalese readable, but I didn't really need one. I knew Brockton Bay, and I knew dad's moods.
I was about to speak. I was about to turn back and run. I was about to freeze in place and hope he'd see me. I did something else, which seemed equally pointless.
You will have that time. I would have advised you to reconnect with your father regardless of whether it furthered our plans. And I will provide advice when you ask. We don't believe in any 'nobility of silently suffering'.
"Dad?" I tried not to whisper, tried not to shout, didn't try hard enough not to use an awkward croak. "Can we have that talk now?"
He looked up, considered his papers for a moment, then started gathering them in. "Yeah, of course. Did you want to sit?"
I did. I immediately regretted it. I'd stepped into a bear trap, a vice. Not the kitchen chair, as uncomfortable as grandad's old woodworking was with my perma-slouch. The whole kitchen was the trap. Two people at the small table meant for three. Stains and scraped paint, strata of memory and neglect. I had to fight it without gnawing off the part of me it trapped, the old Taylor. The girl who had a mom was not someone I was willing to abandon just yet. I adjusted my glasses, met his gaze.
I'd spent a lot of time staring at myself today. It hadn't felt great, comparing me to literally anyone on the ship. But looking at dad, that sour sense of not-belonging, of deserved inferiority, of being an imposter started to melt, shrinking from the boulder lodged in the pit of my stomach. It didn't take much to tell I was his daughter. Aside from mom's hair, I'd leaned very hard toward the Hebert side.
Dad wanted to try. Maybe he was fueled by guilt more than whatever I wanted to be motivating him, but he was trying. Wasn't that enough? Shouldn't that be enough?
He wasn't as good at concealing his evaluation as I was. He didn't have Emma and Sophia to hide his attention from. I guess that settled who was more alert, between popular girls and contract negotiators. I wondered how I looked in his eyes. Had I recovered something, just from my anti-Faustian bargain, from knowing there was an end? Had he even known something was wrong with me?
No, that was unfair. Dad knew things were rough even before Friday, knew I didn't want to invite Emma over any more. "It's your show," he said, spreading a hand. "Where do you want to start?"
"I want to take the next two weeks off school." When that got a tightening of his brow in consideration, rather than an immediate denial, I added, "I have reasons."
He leaned back a little, drummed his fingers on the table. "Okay. Make your case."
I nodded, to say I got it, he was treating this like a work negotiation. I smiled with just the corner of my mouth to add that I hoped he wasn't going to come at me with his full intensity. "I'm doing terrible in school. I'll be much better off with a break." I uncurled my hands, tried to remember when I'd bunched them into fists, put them flat on the table. "My worst enemy right now is myself. I-I can't focus if I go back there. It won't do any good."
"That's not your fault. They- whoever did this should be kicked out. You shouldn't have to run from them."
"I know that, dad. I can't talk about what should be. I need to think about what is and what I can get. They won't be punished. I don't have evidence, nobody will stick up for me, and the school won't kick them out. Even if I had something Winslow believed, at most they get told to think about what they've done and get detention. And they'd just have someone else harass me." I kept my tone level only with the power of absolute certainty that it wouldn't happen like that.
"How the hell does that school think this is okay?" Sometimes I worried dad didn't care. Seeing the same helpless anger in his body that I had to force out of mine helped with that, at least.
"Winslow's understaffed and underfunded. They can barely keep the kids in gangs from openly fighting in the halls." And they didn't want to upset their precious Ward money. I steeled myself to move to the second part. "And Alan will fight tooth and nail to keep Emma from any consequences."
"Emma. She's- part of this?"
"She is this. She uses - thing she knows, against me. Things about mom."
He was about five seconds from erupting. I had to boil over my own anger. "Dad! There's nothing we can do about it yet. I have a plan." An extraterrestrial super-intelligence would have a plan, technically, but I trusted that promise enough to claim it. "I don't want to obsess over her. I want to spend my time doing better stuff." I grabbed his hand. For the first time in how long. "That changing the world stuff. That's- uh, the other reason school doesn't matter as much."
Dad spoke slowly, only loosely holding my hand. "Taylor. What are you trying to tell me?"
I raised my hand, and we lifted. Me, dad, our chairs, the kitchen table. I was cheating. Sort of? It was the ship's effectors, but it had assured me this was the same power I'd have eventually.
It felt… mundane? Floating in midair was like sitting on the ground. I hoped flying entirely under my own direction was a little more interesting.
I broke the silence. Maybe I was pushing it while he was stunned. I wasn't too noble to do that. "I'm not going to join the Wards. I don't want to go out and punch people."
Maybe it helped, feeling steady even if I knew I was floating. "I'm going to kick the Nazis and every other predator out of our city, of course. But mostly I want to work with people like, well, like you, dad. I want to fix a broken city. And a broken world. Build a new economy. Fight off the Endbringers. Make powers normal and healthy. Give ordinary people the power to treat parahumans as equals."
Dad took a minute to process it.
"Kiddo," he said, and I held back a scowl, braced for something condescending. "Can you really do all that?"
I smiled. An easy one. "Yes, I can," I said, and for the first time, I completely believed it.
This would seem relevant to the discussion of alternate Earths (although it will also be addressed in the story. At some point.)
A Few Notes on the Culture (1994) said:
Lastly, something of the totally fake cosmology that underpins the shakily credible stardrives mentioned in the Culture stories. Even if you can accept all the above, featuring a humanoid species that seems to exhibit no real greed, paranoia, stupidity, fanaticism or bigotry, wait till you read this...
We accept that the three dimensions of space we live in are curved, that space-time describes a hypersphere, just as the two dimensions of length and width on the surface of a totally smooth planet curve in a third dimension to produce a three-dimensional sphere. In the Culture stories, the idea is that - when you imagine the hypersphere which is our expanding universe - rather than thinking of a growing hollow sphere (like a inflating beach-ball, for example), think of an onion.
An expanding onion, certainly, but an onion, nevertheless. Within our universe, our hypersphere, there are whole layers of younger, smaller hyperspheres. And we are not the very outer-most skin of that expanding onion, either; there are older, larger universes beyond ours, too. Between each universe there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was all fake); I have no idea what this is, but it's what the Culture starships run on. And of course, if you could get through the Energy Grid, to a younger universe, and then repeat the process... now we really are talking about immortality. (This is why there are two types of hyperspace mentioned in the stories; infraspace within our hypersphere, and ultraspace without.)
Now comes the difficult bit; switch to seven dimensions and even our four dimensional universe can be described as a circle. So forget about the onion; think of a doughnut. A doughnut with only a very tiny hole in the middle. That hole is the Cosmic Centre, the singularity, the great initiating fireball, the place the universes come from; and it didn't exist just in the instant our universe came into being; it exists all the time, and it's exploding all the time, like some Cosmic car engine, producing universes like exhaust smoke.
As each universe comes into being, detonating and spreading and expanding, it - or rather the single circle we are using to describe it - goes gradually up the inner slope of our doughnut, like a widening ripple from a stone flung in a pond. It goes over the top of the doughnut, reaches its furthest extent on the outside edge of the doughnut, and then starts the long, contracting, collapsing journey back in towards the Cosmic Centre again, to be reborn...
Or at least it does if it's on that doughnut; the doughnut is itself hollow, filled with smaller ones where the universes don't live so long. And there are larger ones outside it, where the universes live longer, and maybe there are universes that aren't on doughnuts at all, and never fall back in, and just dissipate out into... some form of meta-space? Where fragments of them are captured eventually by the attraction of another doughnut, and fall in towards its Cosmic Centre with the debris of lots of other dissipated universes, to be reborn as something quite different again? Who knows. (I know it's all nonsense, but you've got to admit it's impressive nonsense. And like I said at the start, none of it exists anyway, does it?)
logindex localcalendar 2011.01.14 localrefraction Earth-Bet localcoordinate Kuiper Belt
I'd cheated, and I regretted nothing.
The new Taylor Hebert was going to a party.
That was more than a little terrifying on face value, but I had a few things going for me. The new body was just the start, although it was a very good start. The Mind had run me through all the options and I'd taken quite a few. I was 3 cm taller, lost the paunch, toned my muscles, fixed my eyes, nudged and tinted my facial features, to naturally appear the way they'd look if I was any good at makeup, and my biopolymer hair styled itself. I was Taylor Hebert, just... a Taylor I could have been if I'd done everything right (if I'd even had the chance to). A slightly better Taylor in every aspect, which made me amazingly better overall, attractive enough that I could look in a mirror, impressive enough that I almost felt like I hit the Culturenik par.
And the engineered organic substrate - the artificial brain, glands, nerves, the simulated human that was working at being Taylor - didn't have the maladaptations and deficits I'd ground into my brain. I still had all my own thoughts (as if I'd notice if I didn't) (of course I'd notice, what was I but thoughts? Especially shitty ones.). Didn't feel like I'd been brainwashed, or cheated out of my sorrow. Thinking about Mom or Emma still sucked. It just didn't suck with the same paralyzing, helpless misery, the gnawing certainty that I would always feel this bad, could never get better.
Second strength: this wasn't a party of teenagers. It was a party of extraterrestrial secret agents, strategists, diplomats, journalists, and sociologists. A professional party, where I'd be taken seriously and get to discuss real things. No keg stands. Probably.
My third social strength was kind of a knock against the second: the outfit. Many of the Culture fashions fell into categories I didn't feel comfortable trying (yet): revealing, ephemeral and highly erratic, inspired by "inspired by" art, or just weird and impractical.
Most of the clothes worn aboard the Sufficiently Advanced Technology were at least a bit more practical than my surveys of the Culture 'norms' - a ship-specific trend. And I'd found an outfit from the current fashion, with Isk-Berniav's help, that I could wear. The bustier was the most ridiculous part, but the double-breasted suede jacket with fringe down the sleeves covered it up, and the crisp white blouse underneath allayed my other concerns. Maybe it was because it was inspired by Earth clothing from past centuries that I felt comfortable - how could I not see a fusion pirate-cowboy fashion as anything but a goofy party costume?
"One person asks and you do all this?"
"One person thought of it. They asked a half dozen others to back them, a committee formed, a quick vote determined this was the preferred use for the room." The avatar was a few steps behind me, hands clasped behind their back, watching the preparations it was conducting via several ship-linked drones - so, actually, watching me.
I looked it over. The room was (currently) a symmetrical ovoid, ninety meters long, thirty meters tall. A ten meter radius replica of Earth ate up most of that height, floating in the perfect center of the room. Chairs, tables, bars, news plinths, and gaming domes were arrayed on both ceiling and floor; or on both floors, I supposed.
"So if someone with fewer supporters, less… social status… wanted the room?" I asked, putting one foot onto one of the arching, coiled triple helix pillars of glass-seeming construction that linked the two floors at nine points around the room. They were smooth transitions of gravity from one level to the other. Supposedly.
The avatar stepped into my field of view and made sure to give me a mild scowl of pain and reproach. I wondered (idly, fleetingly) whether I was understanding it better from prolonged conversation, or some element of my new self, some Culture-to-Culture familiarity on a far sub-conscious level. "I don't let what happened to you happen here." That, for instance - we were having two conversations, and the Mind felt able to mildly scold me with body language, for not trusting its gravity manipulation, while presenting complete reassurance in spoken Marain that my personal traumas wouldn't be resurfacing here. And as far as I could tell, both messages were about as genuine.
"How do you deal with it?" I asked, now 76 degrees off the avatar's vertical.
"Gaining or losing something by reputation is itself a reputation-influencing factor. Everyone giving up a claim here for the party has been publicized for their contributions as much as the organizers, if not more, in proportion to the status gap between them. The equilibrium maintains itself by and large: those that are outgoing and continually organizing both accrue and expend fame in rapid measure. Those more interested in pursuing individual aims seldom require the excess reputation gathering. Corner cases receive my personal attention."
"Doesn't the entire system have to run on your personal attention?" I was staring at the Earth replica; Earth-Bet specifically, rendered in bronze. Each nation was a different cast piece, and dozens of artists had contributed.
"I am vast, I contain multitudes." The avatar coughed. I wasn't sure what that cough signaled disagreement with - itself? "In some senses, I am as much a gestalt entity as our enemy, constituting in large parts of a legion of subroutines, purpose-built-harvesting selection environments, and sub-sentient tools, yet each part is the overall me, with one will guiding it. Significant distinctions exist," they said, their tone conveying how hurt they would be if I implied otherwise, "mainly in our functions, probable purpose, and interactions with others - but there are certain organizational analogies that seem inevitable for any composite being of a particular size."
"Based on what we know about Scion," I said, frowning without really thinking about it.
"Yes." The avatar was clearly no happier about that state of affairs. "Based on passive readings only from the colony-shards we have discovered thus far, and largely on the data I have stolen or overheard from Cauldron." They perked up. "Supplementing our knowledge with active examination will be a part of our next phase."
"The phase where I come in." I shifted back to an earlier statement, trusting the Mind to know what I was talking about. "What about those individual aimed people who want to get socially active? Don't they start out at a huge deficit compared to the socialites?"
"Rep isn't so formalized or objective, and it can't really be hoarded; people stop caring eventually. It's not money. As to that specific circumstance, there is little reduction in reputation for being isolated. Faux pas and errors also do not last in the memory forever. Everyone can access the same basic means of being heard, and the power of an idea can propel far further than the individual's reputation; sometimes the rep built by an idea can suffice to see it implemented. Tonight's organizer is one of that form, in fact," the avatar said, pointing across the room.
I hopped off the twisting walkway, floating in mid-air, then drifting towards the indicated small crowd of people, who were discussing some element of the party organization that involved numerous diagrams.
Strains of conversation reached me, no audio privacy filters in use. And then a voice that was loud even by the Culture standards I'd heard so far. "Oh, honey, isn't that your local friend?"
And a voice that had a different cadence in Marain from English, but not enough of one to stop being recognizable. "Please, please stop. I could actually die of embarrassment."
I landed with the light clicking of my boots onto the deck a few feet from the boy I had known as Greg Veder.
"Have you considered that the Mind may not even be correct?"
I turned away from the nearest display plinth. Some were showing events on Earth - Earth Bet and others, an array of alternates I hadn't known existed, intercepted transmissions and active scans by the ship, scenes of fighting and building, diplomacy and statecraft, translated from a dozen languages of my Earth and a hundred that had never existed on it. I'd hovered around some of the discussions they'd provoked, but hadn't contributed much. I had to look up any kind of extraterrestrial comparison, and had to look up most of the other Earths as well. I was getting a lot of exercise with retrieving and processing information through my neural lace (or the integrated link to the Mind that my artificial substrate used to mimic the lace, anyway), but not putting a lot of interesting opinions or proposals out there.
The new speaker was probably the most unique drone I'd seen yet. Most of the drones on the Sufficiently Advanced Technology were somewhere between oval and cylindrical, between Isk-Berniav's sleek knife missile frame and the size of a beach ball. This one was shaped roughly like a pair of interlocking tetrahedrons, at least a meter and a half wide, and most noticeably, blotting the air with the light of the reaction occurring between its two vertical points - a white illumination wrapped around an utter black shell, which a pulse through my lace quickly informed me was a minor singularity linked to hyperspace. Its aura field was a small thing by comparison, a circle projected over the central point where its halves joined, currently almost entirely the canary yellow of curiosity, with orange threads of well-being rising and fading inside that
Vos-Jaepal.
Drone of Irregular Construction.
Contact, Numina branch.
My notes had already flagged it - Vos-Jaepal was a member of The Current Earth-Bet Committee.
"About what?" I was feeling a little more comfortable with this. Sometimes tonight people had introduced themselves to me; other times they would just start in on a conversation topic about my world, the future, my own personal life, and let the Mind fill in any details I needed. Fortunately, the answer to can I tell people asking about my personal habits to fuck off was a decided yes. It had still been jarring enough that I'd isolated myself for a few minutes, until I could work up the will to ask the Mind to tell people not to ask in the first place.
"The intention and functionality of the Scion-collective. Its source is, to say the least, dubious."
"You think Cauldron is lying in their private discussions?" Watching that footage had been another part of preparation, although I had been a bit more capable of digesting all the secrets of my world (and every other Earth that we interacted with - more than I'd thought, but not a big percentage of the total Earths the ship knew of) - we were so much smaller to study, next to trying to learn everything about the rest of the galaxy!
Vos-Jaepal's aura was surrounded by a thick circle of magenta intensity. If it wasn't a drone, it would probably be making eye contact for an uncomfortable amount of time. "Perhaps not intentionally. The translation of intent between utterly alien minds is one of the most fallible. Even if we assume their assessment is correct, is ours? What has the Mind told you about the Scion's motivation?"
I frowned. I had barely been asked that kind of question - the what do you know and how seemed very pointless, when a computer demigod had all the information. "Why? What has it told you?"
"Nothing," the drone replied, its aura unchanging, and I had to remind myself that the artificial replacement for body language was only as honest as the drone wanted it to be, "but speculation is rampant. Do you believe the powers granted by the colony-shards are detrimental to your species, your world?"
"I don't know," I admitted slowly, without feeling more than a slight twinge of residual anxiety. I'd been flipping through ship-wide articles on Vos-Jaepal while it spoke. It had a bit of a reputation. Insufferable was one of the more common terms, although insightful featured nearly as prominently. A number of communications when it first came on board had centered on the danger of its hyperspace connection, that thread of argument eventually shuttered when a direct request to the Sufficiently Advanced Technology to make the drone turn it off or leave or the ship had been rejected with prejudice by the Mind, for unstated reasons. "The Endbringers are evil, of course. Parahumans are still people, but…" I tapped my glass while I thought. This body could eat and drink, needed to (but not much), and could in theory get intoxicated, but I'd have to actively want to. So I was trying out a wide array of liquor, to see if any of it was actually good or if that was a family misery I could safely lock away. "We have a very dismal view of our own nature. We're evil, we hurt each other, we always fight. It seems hard to believe, standing here, that it's really true."
"Systems of influence are rarely so simplistic," the drone agreed (I thought, based on the amused/pleased red splotches on its aura). "And the intentions of the powers may not be the intentions of the giver. We have yet to determine the full sentience of a colony-shard, or their integration into the control structure of the Scion."
I frowned - or at least, I thought of the muscle movements, felt myself doing it, and reacted fast enough to hold the signal back, not moving at all. I was running a lot faster internally than flesh and blood Taylor had been. It might not have been fast enough. The hometown journalism on Vos-Jaepal suggested the drone wasn't a "1.0 being" either, as the Culture was currently dubbing people who thought at more-or-less the speed and capacity of my kind of human. The hyperspace connection might have some cognition happening on the other side, making it a kind of… mini-Mind. Very mini, but I wasn't exactly able to throw stones there.
My concern was at the timing of the subject. The Mind had just been discussing our lack of information on Scion and how he controlled powers with me, mere hours ago. Had it shared that information with the drone? Did the drone know from some other source?
I could still make certain aspects of my residual trauma work for me. Paranoia just meant seeing trouble so well you got false positives, after all.
"I guess that's a question we'll have to answer. It's kinda not our decision, above our heads, right?" I waved at the general concept of things (Minds) above our pay-grade - not a concept that was easily phrased in (excessively?) egalitarian Marain.
"Perhaps. Something to ponder."
And without any more formality, it left, hovering directly up towards one of the exits.
I decided to bite the bullet, and hovered off the floor myself. I was flying, moving entirely under my own power, by my own will, and it was fucking amazing. I had gotten the giddy whooping and excessive speeds out of my system hours before, in the far extent of the ship's envelope, shooting through swirling blue clouds of gas that I thought the Mind must be keeping around purely for atmosphere (and maybe just for that pun).
I still felt fantastic as I flew up, spun around, and landed on one of the six plates circling the Earth replica. Most of the people sitting at them had stepped onto them before they lifted off, of course, although a few other stragglers were now joining me. They were being carried by the Mind or some device of their own, of course (well, except for the woman with feathered wings).
I sat down for dinner at a giant formal circular table, the kind I'd pretty much only seen on TV before. The other people weren't exactly the Oscars crowd, though. Yaxkanrel would have stood out slightly. My seat neighbor towered over me and everyone else at the table, even seated in a meditative, accessible to refined speech pose, which bent his huge legs to their tightest angle and lowered his head down to just barely two and a half meters up, looming at us from ceiling height. He had kept two of their four eyes closed at every point of the party, but which pair was open had changed several times. That was meaning unknown, unknown practice of 3rd Declension Sect of Lost-Idir. Which was actually kinda… nice? That the Mind didn't know (or share) absolutely everything about everyone.
"Is asking what brought you here a refined question?" I asked between courses. The Mind had focused on New England cuisine for most of us, and… something resembling the lobster for people who had other dietary needs.
"It is sufficient," the Idiran answered. His voice was incredibly quiet for something his size - a theatrical whisper from a body that looked like it had a foghorn. He rolled his shoulders, adjusting his form's only clothing, a drape of metal arches and loops off his skin that hang fine cloth between them; not really a covering, and transcendental aid was what the Mind identified it as. "I am of the first generation after the war." I ran a quick search. He was nearly a thousand years old. "I was given a quest. To be Idiran had to be understood anew. The existence and form of the soul was of greater consequence than before." His vestigial chest-flap fluttered in a gesture of amusement. Since the Idiran Empire had only believed their own species (and maybe similar ones) had souls, I caught what was funny pretty easily. "I became a monk, absent warrior or agent declension, untransitioned to the warrior phase. I have meditated and studied on the soul since." He drank from his ewer, and I was a little transfixed by the rippling of the massive mouth that by far dominated his head. "It was not temporally relevant. The Empire collapsed without a reckoning on the nature of the soul, its successor states built and merged and collapsed, and my sept is now loosely affiliated with those that share resources with the Culture. But this does not diminish my search. I requested to attend the incident point of your unique anomaly, and was accepted six years ago. I hope to sieve inspiration from it."
"What have you learned, about the soul?" I couldn't imagine the musings of an alien monk, older than most buildings on Earth, on esoteric matters would be relevant to improving the Earth, fixing parahumans, or besting Lung or Scion or Cauldron, but I also couldn't imagine not asking.
"More than I can say. Less than I had hoped." The stiff pose of calm dignity hallowed his words. "Countless people, important or ordinary, have died and returned as digital simulacra, with or without gaps in continuity, even my own species. Did the soul attach, remain with them? Is the being itself the soul, the essence stripped of biological vessel? You may hear such opinions from the citizens of the Culture, if they are even aware of the concept of the soul, and from many other civilizations more fervently attached to their belief structures."
"You sound like you disagree."
"Yes. I think it is a mistake to try to capture metaphysics within physics, as if it must be only some more esoteric phenomenon. Consider the irreproducible, the indivisible: the idea. Mind, human, smart matter, and Sublimed alike may touch upon the same idea: their conceptualizations will differ, the level of detail and complexity contained within the idea, but the notion itself is a communicable element, a thing that exists outside of each origin. So too much be the soul."
"The soul is… an idea? A form?"
He rumbled in staunch certainty, his chest-flap not quite booming but rattling, like a shaken aluminum sheet serving as theatric thunder. "The idea of the entity is the soul of the entity. Nebulous. Unseen by any one individual, for none can conceive of an entire person."
"Except themselves?" I asked-suggested.
The faint fluttering of amusement from Yaxkanrel's chest flap and the crunching of cracking rocks from his throat preceded his reply. "Do you think you truly see every part of yourself? That there is nothing about you invisible to your own eye?"
"I guess not," I admitted, but didn't have to blush, cheating with rapid processing time and biofeedback to force my emotions to project neutrality, and bury embarrassment.
"By this manner, all souls exist. To be is to have an idea-form."
"But then - something like a Mind, that has to have a bigger form, a bigger soul than us, or a smatter cloud, or a rabbit?"
"The size is unimportant. There is neither expansion nor reduction to the concept of soul, regardless of its complexity. A singular idea, irreducible in virtue or value."
"What about personality budding and integration, or hive minds?"
His knees cracked with excited anticipation, which might otherwise be mistaken for falling trees. "The soul is immortal. After death the effects of the soul fade, but persist, even if only seen in negative. All people exist, all people had impact and existence and soul, and their impact presents on other impacts, akin to what was called dark matter. Measured by its reverberations, the soul persists. But! Does the original soul persist, if a person becomes one with another? Or does it transform?" He smiled, a distinctly un-Idiran motion adopted from us - I hoped, because the gaping maw wasn't anything my instincts would categorize or friendly or cheerful. "This is the nature of my continuing enlightenment."
"So you came here," I said, grabbing at something in the back of my mind.
"Your worlds of quantum forks. They are impossible by our science, the Culture's, and any Sublimed that will speak of this. Consider them for a moment: divisions on a specific level, with an unknown, vast number of break points but not yet the infinity that a true uncollapsed waveform would yield? Not separated by probability or recency but some other unknown factor? This is rife with possibilities for gaining wisdom."
I had a sip of something that even my bioplastic tongue was stunned by, took a look - absinthe, Marseilles Restoration Recipe, brewed shipboard by Johma Tlegarry, 131 hours ago - and put it down, controlling the nearly overwhelming urge to wince or spit it back out. "I hope I can help you find them."
"No, no, no. This thing is a living disaster. Ecological is understating it, it is an existential hazard. The only reason I can see we haven't rendered it subatomic yet is that killing it the wrong way might make things worse."
"That's a harsh view of what could be the greatest discovery of centuries, millennia! Real, stable separation. Think about the possibilities!"
"I am. The stability of this separation, these 'multiple earths,' has to be linked to the massive hyperspace deformations around this world. I mean, come on, they trace this thing's extragalactic entry course. The whole fundamental structure of reality is cracked wherever it goes. You'll note these 'dimensional transit' techniques simply do not function outside of the Scion swarm's transit."
"Only by current models. Who says that's wrong? Why are you jumping to Scion creating the alternate Earths, not just finding them, connecting them? Maybe we're using his conduits to move between Earths, and we could duplicate their formation too."
"Agent Hebert, what do you think? It's your world we're trying to secure, could this Scion thing really be so - harmless?"
I was a little surprised they'd noticed I was nearby, but I guessed that even absent-minded scientists had neural laces here.
Well. 'Scientists.' That was a whole other debate I'd been reading in the back of my mind while listening to the 'kill Scion?' argument: given that Minds were as far from their machine ancestors as we were from protozoa, that they possessed personality, ingenuity, and creativity equal to the best human, in addition to their vastly improved processing capabilities, could any 1.0 person really be called a scientist? Or were they just hobbyists, playing at chasing the Minds that moved the fields of discovery?
"How many earths have we found so far? Over ten thousand?" Rhetorical, of course, since we could all look it up in moments. "The odds I'm from the 'original' seem pretty small. I don't think Scion is helpful or trustworthy. But I probably exist because of him." I shrugged at Belligerence, the bluntly-named and bluntly-shaped Restoria drone. It seemed to consider Scion to be merely a more sophisticated manifestation of the aggressively hegemonizing swarms it was dedicated to eradicating.
Greg nodded his thanks, until I held up a finger. "Don't agree with you, either, though. He is dangerous, and I don't think we can take anything he does as neutral. What did you think about the Endbringers, growing up? You knew he brought them."
Greg - Zex-Tiersa Jaus Gregory Veder dam Drossecki, more formally - was an unexpected rock in the chaos of tonight's waves. It had been surprising to find my quasi-friend (technically one of the most friendly people I'd talked to at Winslow, not quite a stalker but… he hadn't exactly been subtle about his interest, except by a teenage boy's appalling standards, and he hadn't been smooth about it either) was a Culture citizen. Then it was both more and less surprising to find he wasn't an operative or agent of any flavor, just a tourist, along with his parent. I hadn't realized the full extent the crew-passengers of the Sufficiently Advanced Technology really had just… done whatever they wanted, within the limits of what the Mind would provide them.
So much so that eight Cultureniks had died in Endbringer attacks over the last nine years. Two of them hadn't been backed up - no neural lace, no recorded image, nothing. Died permanent deaths, the same as anyone else in the Endbringers' path.
I wasn't sure what I thought of that.
But Greg, whether or not he was a Culture citizen, as genefixed and intelligent as the rest of them, had one solid, reliable truth that I had been able to navigate by: he was still a huge dork.
"I mean, I don't think he's good or anything, obviously, there's just so much possibility in the alternate Earths! What would happen if we could apply that to an Orbital?"
"Nothing beneficial," Belligerence insisted. The drone was one of the few people on the ship even younger than Greg or I. Which it called an unimportant detail, but I'd picked up the distinct impression that drones matured with age almost as much as biological people.
"It doesn't seem like the Culture really needs that much more stuff," I agreed. "What would you get out of it? More resources? More people?"
"Well, no," he shrugged. "But it's all really interesting theoretically."
I eyeballed him. Despite the context, despite apparently having spent most of his life surrounded by far more impressive or daunting people than Taylor Hebert, I still managed to get a bright red blush and nervous swallowing from him within moments. "This is why you have shit grades at Winslow, isn't it?"
He shrugged, about the tenth time this conversation. "I- It's not like that matters much next to theoretical-practical physics. And it kinda sucks? The whole school as a factory for producing automatons to work repetitive tasks without creative thinking isn't really cool, or interesting. Even if I'm just playing at it."
"I'm amazed you got that all out in one breath," I said. I didn't say I agreed, even if I did. It still felt like encouraging him would be a bad idea. Was that wrong? If so, it was a wrong I could live with.
I hadn't confronted Greg yet about the trio, hadn't made any demands about his motives or morals, about his cowardice. He hadn't volunteered anything either. Maybe that was why. He didn't have the guts to address it. Whether he owed me, owed himself. Fine, I guessed. I didn't need him to. It just told me more about who he really was.
Some people were just tourists.
He had, at least, been that one person to propose the party.
"Are they all like this?" Floating in midair, suspended in zero g by my own power, had a sedate feeling to it, a comfort to drag me down (or up?) from the post-party. The new body needed only twenty minutes of sleep per day, but I was still reluctant to surrender it for even that long.
The Sufficiently Advanced Technology's avatar stood on the apparent edge of a precipice, the lip of a jutting extension from its own hull, a mere step from the vacuum of space. My eyes - well, something rigged into my optic nerves, I'd have to read my schematics to be sure - could see the field in place at the edge, however, a fairly low-tech invisible forcefield; of course, low tech just meant you'd had hundreds or thousands of years to improve on its sophistication, efficiency, and subtlety. "No, this was an exception. If you wanted to find some event on that scale, you wouldn't have trouble doing it daily, but that was one of my finer selections of invited guests. The Current Earth-Bet Committee's actual meetings will doubtless be less formal, and less populated."
"How much are they voting on what I do?" I looked past the avatar, shared its view of this unnamed Earth that hadn't taken the Theia Impact well. A second asteroid belt filled what could have been Earth's orbit, clustered in loose orbits and occasional impacts around the biggest remaining chunk of what could have been my world. About four times larger than the moon, it too was a lifeless, atmosphere-free rock. If I focused my vision, I'd integrate with the Mind's sensors and be able to spot the remotes, shuttles, and miniships we had harvesting that Earth remnant for usable material, the most convenient components to make more space constructions like the sprawling net of power generation just past this dimension's Mercury.
"Oh, I expect they'll have regular opinions, but attempts to democratically override you will be limited. And you could always ignore them, at the cost of some social credit."
"I could?"
The avatar smiled and spread its hands, not breaking eye contact. "I would still trust you. So there is that."
"But you didn't intervene – didn't pick me – until they voted to." There had been dozens of requests for an intervention plebiscite over the years of monitoring, with varying voting populations proposed - the entire Culture, everyone in the Orion-Cygnus Arm, just the ship populations in a particular radius from Earth, just hyperspace experts. The vote that had actually been allowed, passed, and agreed to by the Mind had been called exactly a week ago, on the morning of January 9th, about a half hour before I was shoved in the locker.
Called by Zex-Tiersa Jaus Gregory Veder dam Drossecki. A cowardly tourist with some ability to empathize.
"You do know what they say about those votes." The avatar began, then just laid it out, smirking. "We Minds hold them because it would be rude not to. And it's not terribly hard to achieve the results we want to begin with."
"You convinced them."
"No, that would have been too inexact, too fumbling," they answered, still giving that flat-toothed grin. I'd looked it up. There weren't any original Culture species descended from herbivores, who would have had that dentition. That look was purely the avatar's decision (the Mind's? I still wasn't sure if there was a difference). "I decided the outcome of the vote years and decades ago, simply by who I have accepted and invited to be my crew. I do enjoy dissenters and free-thinkers, but in the end it's quite pleasant to have so many crew whose opinions I can rely upon."
I would never have a better chance to bring up the theme that had been bubbling in my mind during the whole party. "You're not normal, are you?"
The Sufficiently Advanced Technology spread its avatar's grin wider, peeling back its lips a degree I hadn't thought was possible, showing off wide gleaming blocks of ivory. Very Cheshire Cow. "I am not."
"You tell everyone right to their face that you're Special Circumstances, but you have crew from Restoria and Numina, and tons of passengers not even in Contact."
"I am quite unique. Odd, even. On the verge of Eccentricity, but I am so dedicated to the core principles of the Culture." The avatar spread their hands in a helpless shrug. "I am merely a smug, deceitful, know-it-all meddler with supreme power, after all. The quintessential Culture Mind."
"Cool." I smiled back, poking the tip of my canine (the top right one that was a little behind the regular line and scraped my tongue all the time) without intent.
I was going to go to sleep soon enough, and in a couple hours dad would wake up and I was going to spend the whole day with him.
I had a lot of ideas for that day to run by Sufficient first.
Culture party chapter! I didn't feel like I could match Banks on goofy setting flavor or lists of ship names, so I settled for opinions of relevance. Like itself admits, Sufficient is a uniquely active ship that's picked a more proactive, meddling crew, people in the middle of dedicated personal pursuits and such. Not all the characters brought up here will keep being relevant, but their ideas will!
Don't worry, Greg will not be a main character. He's a tertiary foil at best.
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I Left The Shipyard For This? Interlude - Community
System-class* GSV* Big Parent of Unspecified Gender - Contact >> Group said:
OUR PRIORITY SHOULD REMAIN ON THE METHOD BY WHICH THE WAVEFORM IS KEPT FROM COLLAPSING. THE SPREAD OF THE CREATURES CAN BE ADDRESSED ONCE WE HAVE OBTAINED A METHOD TO REPAIR THEIR DAMAGE.
Converser Ship The Abyss Looked Back - Zetetic Elench >> Group said:
We know there's seven of you in there, you don't have to simulcast.
I'm not going to threaten anyone's reputation. I am going to remind you that we will all have to live with the consequences if that "repair" annihilates every other branch. From this planet alone, we will have killed more individuals than the entire Culture and Ulterior.
Killer Class LOU Considering the Consequences >> Group said:
Sufficient, you mind backing up a bit to this sim of your agent? Seems vicious, plus. Reckless, neutral. Absolute loathing for authority, well, fits in nicely here but I can't see it as anything but a hard negative on a bio agent.
I don't intend to be an authority to her. I dislike being so heavy-handed in this intervention to begin with, but I expect Taylor to start something very interesting on "Earth." And possibly even to maintain control of it for a modicum of time.
And no, I'm not sharing or splicing the sim. One time is quite enough by my ethics du jour.
Sufficiently Advanced Technology >> Considering the Consequences said:
I'll put you in touch with her once your next sweep is complete. I think you'll be interested, and I'd like her to have a little experience with the simpler interventions.
In a precarious situation, we dislike the movement away from standard Contact protocol. You're supposed to be handling the hostiles, Sufficient. Not everything on the planet.
I note your signal strength indicates that you don't all agree.
A holistic approach became necessary. Rest assured, my goals are as up to code as they were in my Contact days, old worrier. No brain drain, no enforced morality, no Culture-light. I'm not going to have another GFCF result from my actions. You know I have more finesse than that.
Some orbits, it seems like finesse is everything you have.
Don't delay on the quantum mechanics issue just because you want to keep meddling until everything is perfect. We'll try not to confiscate your toys as long as you can keep reality from fracturing.
I half-expect some OCP to drop through from another reality to complain about the noise this thing is making in their floorboards any nano now.
Not again. Stop listening to your passengers. Uncollapsed universal waveform is bad. The GCU I Know What Went Wrong went tampering with the branch transition drive you designed, tried to make it work outside of the effect.
It didn't squirt its mind-state in time to tell us. But the backup did decide to get re-embodied a long way from this mess.
Look, stay on top of things. We're not tradition-baked-in-the-substrate core Minds, and none of you would be out here if you weren't a little Eccentric. Keep that in mind and limit your own impulses enough to preserve our goals, all of you. Provide a reminder that we're just as much of the Culture (& Ulterior) and just as capable as any Hub Mind that hasn't broken orbit in twelve centuries.
Finish it soon. Don't get obsessed with your agent. Be Sufficient.
Danny hadn't woken up feeling refreshed since the day his bed became too large. Their bed, he still wanted to think. He still wanted to fix the good times in his mind, to have something that didn't look like more misery.
Had that been the cause? He flickered his bleary eyes over his coffee cup to look at Taylor. He had to really look at her to see that she was his daughter, that the gap-toothed girl hadn't completely vanished, replaced by someone already looking and acting too much like an adult. He'd been looking into the past way too much, missed this. She looked so much like - well, not like Annette, but like Taylor, the Taylor he would give anything to have Annette see, their daughter, who was going to be her own person, carrying forward the best of both of them. If they hadn't failed her already.
"Let me say what I see, and tell me where I'm wrong," she started, from his office chair, looking up from his computer and the papers she had spread across his desk. Her blazer was crisper and nicer than his, and he wondered when she'd gotten it. "The Bay took in mostly raw goods up through the eighties. Then we start losing manufacturing, companies close down, multinationals open new factories overseas, mostly in India and China. Big hit on union jobs, the local AFL-CIO labor council becomes dominated by the remaining jobs in the International Longshoreman's Association. In 1999, the shipping companies jointly announce fifty percent job cuts at the docks, claiming it's because Leviathan has reduced global shipping. A strike culminates in 'radicals' sinking the cargo ship that blocks the harbor, so it's all those greedy workers' fault that the shipping conglomerates get to write off their assets in town." He didn't know which made his heart spike with that twinge of love-pride-sadness more, her air quotes for radicals or the well of sarcasm her voice descended into. "The ILA bleeds members and cuts its office here, but you step up and open the Dock Workers Association to be a liaison with them and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, paying in reduced dues for everyone in the DWA but getting representation for all your people for contracted jobs." Taylor spun a silver pen on her finger that she must have brought herself, a lot nicer than any of the cheap plastic ones he had lying around. "It looks like most of the importing moved to Boston and… Philly has a port? Oh, on the Delaware. Not substantially reduced, some hits when Leviathan comes again, but he really doesn't seem to target shipping ports. He just wants us to feel pain." She had the pen in a downward grip, clutched in her fist, like she wanted to stab the Endbringer. Danny could understand that.
"That's pretty much how I see it. I don't know about the last part," he offered, his smile feeling weak and dusty even while he crooked it.
Taylor smiled back with more strength - when was the last time he'd even noticed her smiling? It warmed his heart, boiled him over into the mix of anger and love and worry. Was she okay? Really? "Just thinking out loud. Domestic manufacturing hasn't really rebounded, despite the shipping claims. There is a drop, finally, nearly 30% from 2001-2005, but it's because the CIU shifts from buying raw materials and manufacturing for export to looting Central Asia to support their domestic manufacture."
"I know that's not in any of my notes."
Taylor shrugged, and her mouth quirked. He knew the helpless look from the mirror, but hers was covered in good humor, at least. "I did some research of my own. Domestic manufacturing has barely rebounded, about fifteen percent of the capacity lost to outsourcing. What we have in the Bay is mostly small, specialty, or controlled by Nazis."
He twitched. "More research?"
"I have my sources."
"Empire sources?"
"Ew, dad, no. None of the skinhead wanna-bes at Winslow know shit, even the capes, and I haven't been bothering with them yet anyway."
"Yet?" You had to listen for important words when your kid was talking.
Taylor brightened up, stretched her arms, and spun around to face him, scooting up to the desk and thumping her hands on it, startling papers with the rushing air. He was struck for a moment by how much she looked like him, about to try and hook somebody with a thin line of hope to get them through to next week. "I have big ideas. Deradicalizing the people who have made dumb, bigoted choices but aren't unfixable is part of that. It's a lot more about providing plans and help to good people struggling, but peeling people off the gangs is going to have to happen."
"You can do all that with floating?" He asked, feeling a little rude, a little snippy. Don't step all over your kid's dreams, yeah, but also question your teenager when they get megalomaniacal.
Her eyes gleamed. He wondered when she'd stopped wearing glasses. Had she bought herself contacts? "I can do a lot more than just float. Here's what I'm thinking." She flicked her fingers, and the pad of yellow note paper leapt to her. Her pen floated from her hand and began drawing, writing, with blurred speed. "Nobody wants a handout. But people will protect what's theirs. So we build up our own stuff. Dad, do you trust the Protectorate?" She tilted her head back up.
Danny didn't know if he'd ever seen Taylor so intent. Definitely not for two years. Even before that? She'd been an energetic, curious, talkative kid, not a focused one. "Trust? Depends on what I'm trusting them to do. To fight villains? Yeah, I guess I trust they'll do that. Eventually. If it's in the right neighborhood. To fight Endbringers? Yeah. People die doing that. For whatever good it does."
"But you don't see Dragon out there inventing new car safety features," Taylor said, her voice quiet and intense, on the edge of screaming or tears, an edge Danny knew well. "Just a murder prison, new "safer" guns, and endless robot suits."
He reached over his desk and grabbed his daughter's hand. It was… easier, somehow, when she was the one talking about Annette. Like the gate could open from that side without as much force.
"I know some of your guys work off the books." She continued, still softly but with less heat, leaving unsaid another thing they both knew . That losing manufacturing and shipping had left crime as one of the few fields in Brockton Bay where a person with just a high school education could make enough to support a family. "Does that bother you?"
"Of course it does. I don't want them getting hurt. And I don't want them hurting other people. But what am I supposed to tell them, when I don't have any open contracts, or even day labor?"
Taylor nodded. "That's why I don't want to go around punching people like it solves things."
"So what's your idea, pumpkin?" he asked, then stopped when she winced. "Right. That goes in the do-not-use drawer with 'kiddo'."
"Thanks, dad." She was only a bit sarcastic, and he probably deserved it. "Okay, there are three major economic problems as I see them: minimal jobs cut income, criminal activity takes from money earned, hero funding takes more from money earned and doesn't give us much back."
"Well… I'd like to argue with that." He sunk in the guest chair, gave a bad example for posture. "But I'm having a hard time thinking of what I'd say."
"Yeah." She tapped the pen once, left it hovering above the table. "No two ways around it. I think we need to make something from scratch."
A short interlude to balance a long chapter.
By god I will make this Canadian madman's ideas about Danny's job mesh with the pre-powers (real) labor rights history of the United States!
Also there are some superintelligences and Taylor plotting stuff, idk, that's probably less important.
logindex localcalendar 2011.01.22 localrefraction Earth-Bet localmunicipality Brockton Bay
I hadn't changed my opinion about cheating.
Cheating meant I had a full suite of top-tier powers with loaded-in kinesthetic motive suites, no time wasted with fumbling uncertainty, no horrible accidents when I confused what I could and couldn't do. I had an array of ideas for what I could do with my 'powers,' and adaptive-emergent guidelines to alert me to things I could really do with my effectors that would go undetected and require no explanation. The gravity girl isn't supposed to hack computers from a block away.
Cheating meant I had a peak body that could fly. I was barely sleeping, I had a direct brain library of just about any information I could need about my Earth, and a secure connection to the Sufficiently Advanced Technology and The Current Earth-Bet Committee if I wanted any more information or advice. I was comfortable dilating my mental processes up to thirty five times faster than normal, a speed most bio-Cultureniks needed a couple glanded drugs to match.
Cheating meant I had an information network leagues beyond what the PRT tried to accomplish. Harvesting PHO and social media was simple enough; I had built my own semi-differentiated neural substructures under Sufficient's guidance to skim them constantly and pluck info relevant to my current thoughts. But I had agents. Culture tourists on Earth-Bet were few and far between, specially okayed and restricted to nearly human levels. Special Circumstances agents were something else. Most of our infiltrators were as physically and mentally innocuous as the tourists. Their cover stories were another matter. Senators' aides, high-placed analysts in federal agencies, engineers and scientists and accountants across private industry, and a handful of influential venture capitalists.
Watchdog was vaguely capable at spotting financial crimes with parahuman capabilities. They weren't great at spotting perfectly tailored humans built from scratch with completely accurate documentation slicing off chunks of control over vital portions of the national economy for the purpose of building leverage. We had blended in with the people doing the exact same thing solely for profit. I would have been disgusted that the DoD had privatized the therapists for Protectorate and Ward capes, if we hadn't been the ones controlling it (and improving it).
And some of the agents weren't that simple. The Current Committee knew about those infiltrators. The ship - and I - alone knew about the seeds. The pruned mind-states put into bodies with Culture-grown corona pollentia, who had been left untouched and were waiting for their trigger words to go active. Six of the fifty seeds had 'sprouted' - were capes now, heroes and villains. And I could flip them on with the right codes.
Cheating gave me self-confidence and I really didn't care that it was cheating. What was that really? Not being the same as 'real' parahumans? As another kid with powers, being dragged around by an alien intelligence they didn't know about, or like? I was taking advantage of technology, intelligence, and organization. I couldn't imagine anything more human.
And I didn't have to do any bullshit like patrolling wandering around 'looking for crimes.' I knew what was going to happen and where.
So I was there when Hookwolf's mob (12 hitters, 4 new recruits, and the multiple murderer himself) got to First Baptist Church on the 1100 block of Preston Street around 7:45 PM, Saturday. There were fifteen parishioners, including Rick Moore, and three staff, including Pastor Angela Hawkins, still inside, running an intravenous drug addiction group in a side room and a community support group in the main hall. The firebombs were intended to drive them out into the parking lot, where the Empire inductees would become full Nazis by beating them half to death. Or further.
I watched them throw the firebombs. I watched Rick's phone buzz with my text in his right hand, and I watched his left hand tighten even harder on the small burden in his palm. He was one of the youngest members of the DWA, just 26, and hadn't really been a dock worker, just an off the books day laborer for a few months before his disease, before the docks closed, but he still paid in and dad still moved heaven and earth to get him work. And he'd believed me, and trusted me.
I watched the hexagonal shield matrix flicker into the visible spectrum, dark blue-violet, and vaporize the lobbed cartons of gasoline and bottles of petroleum jelly, only thin black smoke drifting up from the empty air.
I watched the sudden stumbling of the Nazi enthusiasm. The flung experimentation with a bat that turned wood to vapor just as easily. It wouldn't have fried human beings, just repulsed them, but they didn't need to know that.
I watched Hookwolf exude his blades, curling his body into the giant quadrupedal bladed vaguely wolfish construct as the hitters and initiates fell back, and I watched him rake claws across the field.
I watched the people inside First Baptist cry out, shield their eyes, rise and go to the windows. I watched Pastor Hawkins, glance over at the microwave-sized device she'd let me leave under the spare folding tables.
I watched the field throw the three-legged Hookwolf power-body into the empty office building on the other side of 11th Ave.
I could have watched the entire night, but this wasn't a test. What I'd given Rick and what I'd given Pastor Hawkins were both Earth-made, finished devices. Two of only ten in existence so far, but complete, understood, and so far from prototypes they were almost relics. The basic kinds of forcefield that the Culture had been using and improving for millennia, all the edges and mistakes and slow process of scientific experimentation hastened along by 'clever intuition' in the lab where they were built.
This night was a demonstration. A demonstration of gentle intent, and now a demonstration of overwhelming strength.
That might have been a bit vain, I reflected while I leapt off the roof of 1131 Preston Street. I flagged it for later review, consideration at a calmer time.
I watched the PRT van come around the corner at the same time my descending form, 178 kg of combat bio-gynoid and fully active living effector fields dropping with an effective mass around 860 kg, hit the rising Hookwolf boots-first.
His regrown limb was skeletal compared to the rest, still shifting the interlocking hedge of blades being extruded from his core to even out. So naturally it snapped first. The other limbs were buckling under my enhanced mass, although honestly they shouldn't have. The ability of a blade sculpture to move in the first place took some ridiculous physical manipulation, even if his power had left in the hideous grinding that steel-on-steel friction made. And then his form's redistribution was fluidic - the limitation of the quadrupedal form, the fact that he had any 'limbs' for me to 'break' - that was all on Brad's limited mind.
He did have the marginal intellect required to suddenly invert them, the claws now reaching up from the body to entrap me. I assumed that was instinct, that vaunted pit-fighting edge that he thought was relevant. But those instincts assumed a fight he could win.
Tonight was a statement, so I spoke first. "The faster you go down, the less it will hurt," I told Brad, my voice at a regular volume, but pitched to leap over the grinding blades, propagated across their aural obstacles with subtle effectors to reach his real tympanic membrane, skipping the translation of sensory input his powers provided, and to reach the van, where Miss Militia's potential was forming into an RPG-7 and Shadow Stalker was drawing her crossbow.
He hit me. The back right claw rebounded off my chestplate, flung back, but not due to active measures - he just had no idea how his steel would impact woven long-chain molecular exotics spun around mased-state transfixor atoms, and wasn't ready to just slide off without even scratching my armor.
The back left claw I caught in my hand, swelled the gravitational constant of that fist, and let the blades flow over my hand, gauntlet, and arm before I abruptly reversed it, inverting a fundamental force, over 80% of my bioeffectors at the cusp of overload, just to explode his deforming limb down a third of its length, hurling blades in every direction. My combat suites were running on autonomic, and I had two others in dominance on my HUD: the helpfully named Sandbagging Believability and the less amusing Intimidation Factor. They were my guidelines for how much strength was enough, how much was too much, and most importantly, how well I could wield my effectors to do other things completely unrelated to gravity, to make myself as terrifying as possible without giving away my true flexibility.
Those two suites were guiding the subtle nudges I was applying to the exploding blades, without any of the gestures and acting I'd designed for my 'power.' Six landed in the middle of the remaining Empire crowd. I adjusted them for minor flesh wounds, except Eddie Winston, 33, 5 years MCI-Concord on aggravated assault, 5.6 years in sum at Brockton's John Mannerly Jail for arson, burglary, and illegal firearm possession - I let one blade shear his right leg off just below the knee. Two blades were going to hit the street in front of First Baptist. I angled them up enough to end their trajectories on the sidewalk, and that caused the hexagonal shields to flare up and vaporize them. I nudged one blade to avoid giving Militia a potential flesh wound on her calf, but let Sophia turn to shadow to evade the one going right for her.
It was for data collection, there was no personal feeling involved. Honest. I could have moved it if she wasn't going to make it in time. And I would have.
His front right claw would have hit my head. What it met first was the circling trio of innocuous-seeming objects. Isk-Berniav and two subsentient knife missiles linked to her. They swung up from vertical, long narrow points focused on the arm, and it fell apart as it approached, throwing more and more organic-shaped steel barbs even as they were clattering to the pavement, unattached, unregistered by his power. It had been a marginal gamble, but more data collection: EM emissions hadn't been known to affect the force maintaining the cohesion of Hookwolf's blades, but rapid molecular alteration could make his power no longer register them as part of 'him.' Inefficient, on the edge of my sandbagging limits, but vital data collection as well as a demonstration of exceptional power.
And fun.
Having made my point about his attacks, I didn't stop to let it settle in. I stomped Brad's remaining torso-blade-form, which was already starting to slip to a rough obloid, bending and rending more blade volume, but I let him fling me off. It was either that or log rolling him, and that was just… silly.
I shot back from him, did a complete vertical flip in midair (not because it was the most efficient way to get distance but because I could!), felt a moment of cold air blowing in from the bay on my back, then the hot blast of Militia's explosive, a wave of hot air hitting my face. Stalker had her crossbow ready, and was doubtless itching to try to get a bolt past the blade envelope and into the Nazi, but wasn't going to act up in front of a Protectorate member that would unquestionably call her on it.
That last blast had blown him down to human with a couple of hanging spikes, but more importantly, it had been enough to slightly concuss him. I floated forward and raised a hand, relying on my new favorite adaptive advice suite: Dramatic Bullshit.
When I slammed my hand down, Brad Meadows, 17 meters away, went with it, losing his half-held footing and hitting the pavement with a crunch. That was a 2g acceleration. Most people could survive a fall from that height, and Brad's skull was only slightly fractured. But he was trying to get up, so - I curled my hand, and the constant increased. At 4g he had passed out, and I released it. Mostly to avoid the Protectorate wasting any medical resources on the mass murdering Nazi.
Speaking of - oh, Eddie's friends had decided to drag him away with them. It must have sucked for him that Othala couldn't grow back his lost leg. Well, he'd have some time to think about how well being Empire had rewarded him. At least 5-6 months until prosthetics or cloned limbs were widely available enough, by current projections.
I stood back and let them foam up Brad, while Militia and Stalker approached me.
Sophia's sotto voce "no fucking way" was honestly all I needed from that night. I could have done it all for that alone. I didn't react, of course. But I held onto that moment, let it run through analyzers for shock and awe and fear and got a little bit of a high off the readings. And her sudden glimpse over at the severed leg lying on the opposing sidewalk.
"Glad you were in the area," I started in with a truth: I was glad, but also not at all surprised.
"Thank you," Militia began, stopping just under three meters away. A decent instinct, not crowding but close enough to show her accurate assessment: I could have attacked them from a far greater distance if that was my intent, and she wasn't going to pretend to be ready to fight me. Her intended weapons now were rhetoric and law. "It's always a good surprise to meet a new hero. What are you going by?"
She was still insufficiently armed. You're heroes. You fail. You save people. You abandon them. My eyes flickered to Sophia, keeping her head sunk back into her hood with good but futile instincts. You torture people. Would Miss Militia stop Sophia, if she knew? Violate her probation, throw her in juvie? Yeah, probably.
Would that help me, the old me? Not really. Not much. Would it do anything for Sophia? Anything for her anger, her self-image tied so deeply into abusing others? Abso-fucking-lutely not. So what fucking good was the law?
"Taylor," I said. I was still floating, a mere 10 cm above the ground, but combined with my artificial growth spurt I loomed over them both. "Taylor Hebert." I raised my hand a little, spread my fingers, moving slow enough to avoid anyone's instinctual responses, and the knife missiles shot up in a spiral, pulling into an 8 meter circle, 7 meters off the ground. The semicircular field they were projecting, that spread down like a falling curtain around us and the street, shone a light blue, although it didn't have to. "Cape name Orbital. But I doubt I'll use it much. Please excuse this, it's just to stall prying eyes and ears."
That seemed to relax Militia a bit, but not Stalker. She seemed tense. I couldn't imagine why. After a muttered argument with her partner, Trooper Stephenson got to grab a body bag and go scooping up the human biowaste. I didn't wave. My social suites suggested that would come off less friendly, more crass.
"You're not required to give us your identity," Militia offered in a gentle, cautious tone. "You can trust that we'll keep it safe, of course." I did. Until it was necessary convenient for them to lean on it, and I trusted that they'd abuse it ruthlessly then. Another way to say unwritten rules was there's no law against breaking it. "Can you tell us what happened here?"
I pulled my legs up under me into a not-too-sloppy lotus position, and sank down a few centimeters until I was only a little above Sophia's eye level, and a few more above Militia's. "I learned the Empire was intending another blood initiation. I decided not to let them get away with it. Taking down Hookwolf was ideal for demoralizing the would-be recruits and reducing the Empire's capability to provide violence." I glanced down at the prone form.
"That's a noble motivation. And quick thinking. Are you just starting out, or have you been active before?" It was cute, seeing Sophia have to hold back on shaking her head.
"I've had parahuman powers for two weeks," I said, light and not quite smiling. "I prepare well."
"I can see that. Did you make your own costume? It looks quite professional." She was a solid speaker, just the right mix of empathy and confidence to guide a conversation, extracting answers while still exuding concern and well-meaning. I had to agree with her SC dossier, Hana's lack of ambition was one of the only reasons Colin was above her in the local hierarchy.
"The battle suit? No, it's a gift from a friend." I tapped my chin, mock-pondered. "I could make another one, but not in two weeks."
"You're a Tinker as well?" She seemed genuinely interested, taking a step forward. I went ahead and held out my arm for her to examine, flexing my hands in the lightly padded black gloves, which were integrated into the bodysuit. It had enough thickness and padding to not quite be skin tight (even new, attractive Taylor didn't want to deal with that), and the standard Culture non-sentient survival suit array of impact reduction dynamic mass-shifting, oxygenation and fluid replacement filters, and full body sealant. I could tank bullets, poison gas, and vacuum without it, but the Mind had succeeded at convincing me that redundancy never hurt. I liked the style, too. The black suit drew the attention to the silvery gauntlets and boots, shoulder pads and chestplate, and my face. Which was a funny idea to think about, with Sophia right fucking there, but I meant it. Stare me down, Stalker, any time.
"Oh, no. This is quite mundane." I smiled at the absurdity of the statement, but after two weeks of daily visits to the Sufficiently Advanced Technology, it really was getting there. Militia didn't seem quite like she believed it, either, considering she'd seen my armor deflect Hookwolf. "I just don't have a particle accelerator at home. The materials aren't quite off the shelf."
"I see. Is that yours too?" she asked, as the shield around the church conveniently flared up and vanished. Pastor Hawkins had disabled the primary generator and was coming outside with it, while Rick had stuffed his personal shield generator back into his pocket with his keys.
I shrugged and nodded. "I brought the shield generator here, but I didn't build it."
"Another gift from a friend?" She was doing a really good job still seeming nice, although I knew I'd made a number of suspicious statements.
"Not quite," I said, turning to Angela and standing on the ground. "What did you think, Pastor?"
Angela Hawkins had been another reason I'd been here, tonight. I was at the middle of a web, but at least around First Baptist Church, I had woven some of it, rather than Special Circumstances. Rick worked with dad, and had believed me when I said I knew the Empire would attack - believed enough to take the shield, anyway; that was all I could ask. Angela had been in college with mom, and ditched the Lustrum quasi-movement around the same time, when it became clearer the cape was more into deepening a personality cult than pursuing feminist goals, radical or otherwise. She'd dropped out of touch with mom, kind of understandable given their circumstances, gotten a doctorate of theology at UMass, and today still had the personality needed to lead a black church in a city infested with murderous white supremacists. "It's definitely interesting, Miss Hebert." She knew how to pronounce it, too. That helped, a nice little spark in my heart. "But I'm a little skeptical of any free lunch." She held the generator up to me, and I took it without rancor. I wasn't too disappointed, I knew immediate adoption wasn't likely.
"Of course. It will spike your electricity bill for this month, like I said." I shrugged in good humor. "Other than that, we've tried to just make it what it looks like. A shield against projectiles and powers, impenetrable but harmless to people. It's not invulnerability, but it's a lot better than brick and mortar. And we're hoping to make more, with help. I wouldn't call it a free lunch, but it is a shared one. If you ever want it back, please just call us. We'll put out more details at the press conference."
"Press conference?" Miss Militia cut in. She let a little urgency bleed into her curiosity, but not much. Sophia was trying not to choke.
"Tomorrow at 9 AM. CBS 7, NEN 20, and the Brockton Herald. You won't have to keep my identity safe for more than a few hours," I said, smiling. And it was sincere, dammit.
"You're outing yourself?" She took a step forward, put her hand just short of touching my arm. "I think you should definitely reconsider that. There are people in this city who can tell you what that can cost - you seem capable, Orbital, but what about your family, your friends?"
I didn't flicker my gaze over at my good friend Sophia. She knew more about me than almost anyone else at Winslow, after all. What else could she be? "There are some precedents I need to set. The first is being up front about who I am. The second precedent will be what happens to anyone that thinks hurting my family or friends to get to me is something they can accomplish. The third precedent will be what happens to anyone trying to subtly leverage them." I smiled for the whole speech. "That will get us to a better standard for everyone involved, I think. I respect New Wave for what they tried to do. I don't fault them for not having what I have."
She stared at me, her sharp green eyes over the bandana doing a good job of looking piercing and knowing. I had been stared at by the avatar of a Mind. It did not quite compare. "Can you tell me what exactly you're announcing at this press conference?"
"My intentions and an offer - to the city, first. I have powers and I don't think they're going to solve anything alone. I think we're better off evening the playing field for everyone."
"You're intending to mass produce what you say isn't Tinker-tech." I still didn't like the system she served, but I did notch up my respect for Militia herself. Savvy.
"Shields are just the start of it. I'm tired of seeing terror and misery on TV, Miss Militia. I have the power to change that in more ways than beating Nazis into unconsciousness. I think morally, that means I have to." I threw two fingers down, crooked another, and started floating slowly off the ground, the Mark II shield generator following me. "Before I forget." I flicked out a business card from my gauntlet, zipped it down to hover above her hand. It had the address of the empty office complex right next to the Dockworkers' Association, and a phone number, but the other side of the card just read:
"Thank you for your patience, Pastor. And thanks for the discussion, Miss M. See you Monday, Stalker."
I threw my hand down and shot upward at just barely subsonic speed. But I left a photosensitive nanocloud lurking to capture Sophia's expression.
Throwing back in a number of plot elements from the original - I wasn't gonna just throw out some of those ideas, they were great! And giving a hint of where I'm forking the main plot. I hope this leads to fun theorizing ;D
logindex localcalendar 2011.01.22 localrefraction Earth-Bet localmunicipality Brockton Bay
Hebert was fucking crazy. They'd fucking broken her brain and she was an Alexandria package Tinker and she fucking knew Sophia's identity.
That last look hadn't been one you could miss. That was a power look, that was 'I just pissed in your territory, what are you gonna do about it?'
How the fuck had she done a total one-eighty in two weeks?! Emma was sure she was broken, she was never coming back. But it seemed like Hebert had just been relaxing and building fucking armor to crush fucking Hookwolf!
"-rapid acceleration, combined with the force she used against Hookwolf, easily Mover 4, probably 5, Shaker 5, Brute 7. I'll put that to paper in the report, and if anything I think it's an underestimate. She was prepared and professional. I doubt she was showing us her full capabilities." And she had to be here at 10 PM at the damn PRT building while Militia and Piggot reported and discussed the whole thing. Sophia was pretty sure the only reason they let her do weekend night patrols was because they knew she'd sneak out anyway. And any minute now…
"And then there's this… supposed non-Tinker technology." Armsmaster had his thinking face on. At least he was serious when he got down to it, even if he talked too much first. He didn't sound like he liked the idea. "She claimed the shield destroyed projectiles but didn't harm humans?"
"That would require some extensive sensory equipment for something that small." Sophia was the only Ward stuck in the room with The Pig, two other office drones, three Protectorate capes, and Dragon calling in. It wasn't great for her nerves, knowing what had to be coming up. She was watching the walls carefully. This was the PRT headquarters, they probably all had electrical wires all over the damn place. Dragon was still talking about the tech shit. "I don't think the idea is impossible, but the claim is fairly incredible. Especially on a two week time frame."
"Let's be blunt here. She made numerous allusions to friends and resources. That makes our new cape sound like anything but." Piggot thumped the table to make her point. Sophia glared around to see if anyone had seen her flinch. If they said anything, she'd… do nothing. She was ready to fucking run, because they were going to pick it all apart any second now. "What about her identity?" She locked eyes with Militia and Armsmaster. She gave them a second and got nothing. The Pig growled. "Don't tell me you haven't looked. She told you her name. We confirmed with the networks that this 'brand new' parahuman is holding a press conference tomorrow, and even our local vultures don't know or won't tell us anything more, so who actually is she?!"
"Taylor Anne Hebert, born at Brockton General on June 12, 1995. Mother, Annette Hebert, deceased 2008, automobile accident. Father, Daniel Hebert, Brockton Bay Dockworker's Association Steward. She has no police record. Enrolled at Winslow High School. Hospital admission at St. Jude's on January 7th this year, but released same day, treated for abrasions, potential sepsis, and mild psychological trauma." Armsmaster said, like it was all the same. "All I could reach at this time of day was automated systems. I should have more information by Monday, but considerably more detail may take a warrant. There's only so much I can get without that or a crime in progress."
"Not much point if the girl's going to throw herself to the wolves tomorrow. Get on the warrant anyway. Hopefully this 'press conference' gives us something to convince a judge without burning half the city to the ground." Sophia was about to start breathing again when the Director jerked her head to stare right at her. "Winslow. Stalker, what do you know about her? What the hell is that hospital visit about?"
Taylor Hebert >> Current Committee said:
She's gonna fucking do it, isn't she? She's gonna lie to their fucking faces about me. Go ahead. Put your head on the block. I'm ready for every angle you can take to make my life worse, you bitch and I will make you burn for it.
"Different," Sophia grunted, overcoming her urge to flee by sheer fucking will. "She's different at Winslow. Loner. Quiet. Sh-somebody shoved her in a locker full of uh, trash. Hasn't been back to school since." She made it casual, it was just rumors she'd heard, Sophia wasn't involved with the weakling Hebert. 'Orbital'. She wasn't sweating, she wasn't trembling, she wasn't going to bolt or go for her crossbow. They didn't have anything. "And she didn't look that good- she didn't look like that."
The Pig turned to something else and Sophia breathed in again. "We don't have any pictures?"
"I can't, legally, pull student IDs from their database," Armsmaster began, then had to talk over Piggot's half-formed anger. "But Dragon obtained a copy of the Winslow yearbook from April 2010. Facial recognition is only 87.4% match, even allowing for projected ten months of maturation. There are some elements that can affect facial contours-"
"I am aware of the concept of makeup, Armsmaster. And don't spend any more time discussing the maturation of children." Piggot glared at the dork-ass pic of Hebert from last year, buried in a hoodie and not even able to look at the photographer, and the PRT van camera shot of her hovering, fucking flawless (did the loser get an anti-zit power too? fucking ugh), hair floating around her like an aura.
Hebert was not hot. That was a fucking ridiculous idea.
"For a native of this city, she was very aggressive and prepared for her attack on Hookwolf," Militia said, considering, strategizing. "He has a longstanding reputation for power and brutality. But she displayed two separate defenses that seemed keyed to him. One of which could have caused significant collateral damage, but only resulted in one accidental amputation. And that didn't shake her. She seemed either extremely jaded or extremely confident, neither of which fits our rough profile."
"Is this actually Taylor Hebert?" Piggot thumped the table again to make everyone stop muttering and snickering. "Powers change people, we've all seen that, but they rarely do a complete reversal. Physical improvement, mental improvement, massive power, immense confidence, and undisclosed friends and resources. Do we have outside influence here?"
"Teacher," Armsmaster said slowly, and eyes went to the screen.
"Baumann cameras confirm he is alive and in containment," Dragon said. "No signs of outside communication."
"Not that he's the only Trump power-granter out there," Militia suggested. "It's possible Ms. Hebert isn't the first new trigger we're dealing with."
"Or that she's not a new trigger, or it's not her at all." Piggot grabbed her face with her fat hand, like she was holding back a headache. "Armsmaster, get to this press conference. Take Gallant and Michael Donovan from PR. Pay attention to everything, especially the things the networks don't film. This could be the Elite, Toybox, or god forbid, some new and unknown idiot running some smokescreen. Stalker!" Oh shit. "Observe her behavior. Note changes. Note everything. If this isn't Taylor Hebert or if she's being Mastered, I want to know before it detonates!"
I've incorporated it into the hostile media blitz operations. It's not too hard to attach the notion that anyone trying to improve things will be attacked at their very identity. But that's more effective as a second wave action. I do encourage you to give them a chance to abandon their idiocy.
Sophia nodded. The feeling of being hunted, driven to ground, narrowed routes of escape blocked off - that hadn't gotten much better.
She was almost out of the building when Militia grabbed her. Sophia clamped down on her instinct to try to throw the heroine… she didn't need the trouble or the beatdown. For someone that always had a gun, Miss Militia was surprisingly brutal up close. Not Sophia's favorite trainer unless she was in a real heated mood. "Shadow Stalker."
"What?" The door was right there, it wasn't electrified, she could just run.
"Orbital's parting words." Fuck. She'd really hoped Militia hadn't heard that, would just forget it. "Does Ms. Hebert know your identity?"
"No!" Fuck, if she had known, Hebert was an even bigger coward… or a smarter one. Fuck. "She didn't know anything." And for a second, Sophia could agree with it, that maybe this wasn't Hebert. Somebody else took her body or bought her mind, some scam Hebert was gullible enough to fall for. But Sophia thought about her eyes. The face was all different, moving and talky and upbeat and sinister. But the eyes. When she was staring real hard at her - at Militia, Sophia had hoped, but knew better - she had the same eyes as the first couple months, when Hebert would gawk and beg at Emma. Eyes that didn't get it but were trying to see why. "I'm not stupid. I keep clean." Except she'd gotten dirty. Using her power to shove that trash into Hebert's locker. To steal from it before that. It had been fine, nobody was gonna trace it back to her.
She'd been sure.
"If she says anything, if she threatens you, send your emergency signal. We'll deal with it."
Fuck. Now they'd watch her even closer. Why couldn't this just be over??
We knew this would happen. They're always paranoid, in every projection except where I act 'normal' and knuckle under without pushing for anything.
And what does that get us? Maybe I improve my life. Make Sophia and Emma leave me the hell alone! Get real friends (somehow). Maybe I get dad some work. But the dockworkers? The Empire? Good people would still suffer, and evil people still profit.
You told me they'd fear me for what I'm doing. I'm not surprised.
: We are hitting hard, Taylor. There are softer options we could take. I believe I have pushed you in this way. If you feel uncomfortable, there is still time to alter course.
Even exceptional events should be handled with caution and procedure. Running around like an idiot simply because the board had been flipped was what got you killed. That was why he had made it out of Ellisburg.
Acting on less than eight hours of warning was exceptional, and he had no particular contacts in the Docks or with the schoolchildren of the worst-funded high school in the city. The discarded universes had been full of absolute havoc.
Timeline B1, opened 11:13 PM: Direct assault on Hebert home to test declaration. Lost contact with assault team after 46 seconds. Observer reported assault team vanishing into the sky. Lost contact with observer after 53 seconds. Timeline closed.
Timeline B3, opened 1:19 AM: Dockworker Casey Morgan refuses bribe. Attempted kidnapping foiled by personal shield. Orbital arrives after 2 minutes, 31 seconds. Contact lost with assault team. Timeline closed.
Timeline B6, opened 2:21 AM: Shadow Stalker abducted from home. Interrogation failed to provide viable intelligence by 7:30 AM. Timeline closed.
He opened Timeline B7 at 8:30 AM and gave the order he'd prepared for in both. "Attack the press conference at 9:15."
Calvert hardly expected this one to do anything more than the rest. But procedures were always helpful, and he really didn't have any other handles to grasp on short notice. He would test those as they were revealed.
There were three basic categories each parahuman could be placed into: contain, subvert, destroy. (There was a fourth, avoid, but he disliked acknowledging that except in the abstract.) He would figure out which Orbital could be placed into. He would make preparations. And only when the time was right would he act.
One thing was certain: after this damn press conference and whatever chaos had been started in his city, he was going to open a timeline where he got eight hours of sleep, and stick with it unless he died in the other one.
It was a routine path, one that she ran like clockwork. Path to maintain Cauldron's secrecy at the current level for the next week. 37 steps. A routine amount of work; the less-frequent paths to maintain secrecy for the longer term were usually five to ten times longer.
Step 1: Remove the gas cap of the green 1982 Chevy Impala in the parking lot at 3811 Buford St, Albuquerque NM.
"Door to Buford Street, Albuquerque."
The heat was bracing, and her apparel not at all appropriate, but that was irrelevant. She wouldn't be here long. The car was unattended, the gas cap easily removed.
Step ?: ---? --- --!
Fortuna stopped.
Path to maintain Cauldron's secrecy at current level for the next week.
547,962 steps.
Step 1: Call the Secretary of Defense and say "It's going to be like Murmansk all over again."
She stopped again.
Path to maintain Cauldron's secrecy at current level for the next week.
681,003 steps.
Step 1: Kill the Prime Minister of India with the 6" steak knife from the Protectorate Southwest break room.
The heat of New Mexico was unexpectedly there, present and soaking into her.
"Door!"
nevermind the style: Simplicity wins!
Yeah, I know, this is gonna start a page or three of PtV vs Mind argument. I will be going into more detail on how I see that working in a later chapter, but it felt appropriate and relevant to have that conflict start now
