14

Thursday Morning, January 20th, 2011

Brockton Bay, New Hampshire, Earth Bet

Hebert Residence​

I woke up the next morning feeling anxious.

Psychology was there and provided insight, but the problem was that it couldn't truly predict people. Only tendencies.

How would Piggot react to my letter? Had I revealed too much? Would she take offense at my advice on how to handle her own department? Would she listen to my plea to get her kidneys fixed?

Would she pass the hardcopy onto the Chief Director?

If she did, I could have Prometheus delay it for a while. That said, having Prometheus intercept messages or pretend to be the Chief Director on a phone call might be pushing it too far for anything more than a short term strategy. The ruse wouldn't last forever, and it would be understandably difficult to work with them if they figured it out.

If Piggot passed the letter on and I didn't stop it, how would Cauldron react?

If they swung by, I'd have to play certain cards sooner than I would have preferred. But I could manage them. Probably. Unless they were exceptionally unreasonable, I think I had a strategy that would work.

Prometheus' voice broke through the haze of self-conscious thoughts I'd fallen into. "Good morning, Miss. I have an audio recording of Director Piggot's reaction to your letter. Would you like to listen to it now?"

No. No, I needed to wake up and eat first and then deal with it with a clear head.

"Hold on to it, I'll watch it after breakfast. I need to wake up."

"Of course, Miss. Enjoy."

I sighed in relief. He may only be a virtual intelligence, but talking to him did help calm my nerves a bit. "I'll try."

Quickly getting dressed I made my way down the stairs and paused at the bottom to admire the new door. Danny had painted it a nice shade of red.

He was sitting at the table when I entered the kitchen, nursing a steaming mug of coffee.

"Morning," he said when he noticed me in the doorway. "Coffee's still fresh if you want some."

"Thanks, that might be a good idea. Have you eaten yet?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I was waiting on you. How are you feeling, Taylor, about yesterday?"

I blew out a breath, and went over to the counter to make my own mug of coffee to give me time to order my thoughts.

Danny waited patiently while I did this, which I appreciated.

How did I feel about Sophia joining up with Coil and getting him to send the Undersiders after me at home? How did I feel about Coil having Taylor Hebert on his radar now?

Lisa was hopefully safely out of town and in hiding until I reached out. Sophia was injured and either with Coil or on the run. Bitch and Grue were in PRT custody, likely still injured, and might be recruited if Piggot followed my advice. Alec probably ran the moment they didn't make it back to base. All of that would definitely anger Coil.

Him learning about me so soon was not a part of the original plan.

Sipping my drink, I sat down at the kitchen table opposite Danny. "Well, we always knew there was a chance Sophia would come for me here. Her teaming up with the Undersiders - that's the name of the team of capes she brought with her, I should have explained that yesterday. I'm sorry I didn't."

He nodded. "That's alright. There was a lot going on, I get it."

I smiled. "Thanks. Anyway, that brings up a whole new problem. They work for a supervillain named Coil. Now that he knows about me I had to accelerate some of my plans, and that's why I holed myself up all day. I was working on Prometheus and drafting a letter to send anonymously to the PRT."

Danny looked at me warily. "Taylor, we talked about this…"

"Not as me, of course," I added hastily. "I'm not endangering myself deliberately. That's still the plan. It's a way to work at a remove, through a cape name and anonymous computer connections. The letter mostly tells the PRT what they need to know to go after Coil, and some other things to prove that the information is credible."

"Are you sure they won't connect it to you, Taylor? The timing..." he trailed off.

I sighed. "Not ideal, I know. I've done my best to give the impression of it being a third party with wider interests and a very adult view of the world. I don't expect the figurative mask to last forever, though. It doesn't have to. Just long enough for me to give us options. I would have preferred to wait longer to do anything, but I can't wait to have Coil's operation shut down, now. He would be far too interested in how a whole villain team failed to attack one girl."

"What's he going to do?" Danny asked darkly.

"He's...the mastermind sort," I began. "He'd try sweet words and bribery, then kidnapping or coercion. I'm too smart to join a villain, and I had Mouse Protector tag us so the latter won't work. The PRT escort will help too. All of that should buy time. Hopefully enough to get the PRT to move and he'll have much bigger problems than solving the mystery I represent."

"If not?" he asked.

I let out a breath. "If it looks like we're in danger at any point, I can get whatever skills we need to disappear for a while."

Danny offered me a long look. "This whole business is dangerous, isn't it?"

I carded my hands through my hair. "Yeah. I'm doing my best to minimize it, but yeah. You ever feel like the universe hates you?" I asked, idly.

He snorted. "Pretty often, Taylor. But I've got you, and I help people with the work I do, so it's not all bad."

The reminder of the lie I was living for his sake hurt, but I tried not to let it show.

I'd taken his daughter away from him already, even if it wasn't my fault as far as I knew, and even though he didn't know she was gone. If I had to get him to safety somewhere I'd be taking his job on top of it.

Did fate just hate everyone on Earth Bet?

"I had an idea last night," he said.

"Oh?" I asked, moving to get the cereal out of the cupboard.

"One of the guys who used to be with the Union started a home security business. I got him a fair amount of work back in the day, back when he was doing electrical work. I was thinking I could give him a call, have him install some cameras and whatever else he can think of. Could your VI make use of that?"

"I could, Mr. Hebert," Prometheus spoke from my phone, and I couldn't suppress a half smile as Danny visibly twitched.

"Won't ever get used to that," he said, shaking his head.

"That sounds like a great idea, Dad. Thanks."

"I'm happy to help. Let me know if there's anything else I can do," he said. "Your old man knows quite a few people."

"Got any machine shops hiding at the Union?" I asked.

He thought about it and shook his head. "Those sorts of machines are too expensive to keep around if they aren't used. If there was anything like that it would have been sold a long time ago. I might be able to make an arrangement with one of the companies in the area who have that sort of thing, but they'd all have employees. People would expect you to be supervised and ask questions if you did anything...odd."

I nodded. "Not surprising, but I'll find a workaround."

I finished getting cereal ready while Danny made oatmeal for himself. After we'd both started to eat I caught him looking uncertain.

"Dad?" I asked.

He set down his spoon and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. "Taylor, I was watching through the window as you fought those capes."

"Oh," I said. He'd seen me being brutally violent in a way that many soldiers likely would have hesitated at.

"You protected yourself and I'm proud of you. At the same time, no one your age should have to go through that. If you want to talk to someone..." he trailed off, a sad look on his face.

The sense of relief I felt at that moment caught me by surprise. He wasn't afraid of me. He was concerned for me. That was...wow. I didn't even know until now that I had been worried about that.

I took a breath, then I stood up and went around the table to give him a hug.

"If I notice I'm thinking about it a lot or having trouble, I might take you up on that," I said into his ear.

He held on for maybe a second longer than necessary, and when I pulled away, he smiled. "That's all I ask."

After that unexpected heartfelt moment I sat back down and we finished our breakfast in companionable silence. When he finished his oatmeal a few minutes later he collected my empty bowl and went to the sink.

As he was washing up the dishes I thought about what I had just done and why. My knowledge of psychology told me that I was desperate for positive human touch. I was alone in a new world and my, as sad as it was to think, best friend was a virtual intelligence.

I only had Prometheus and Danny at the moment. I was pretty sure Vicky liked me, or I hoped so at least, but I wasn't sure about the rest of her family. I still had to talk to Amy. It was optimistic to think she would react well to what I had to say, and she was a huge part of Vicky's life. If Amy was ignoring me, then Vicky might too.

That decided it. I needed to involve Danny to whatever degree I could, and I'd eaten now. No time like the present.

I coughed into my hand to get his attention. "Er, Dad. Piggot has read the letter I sent her."

He turned the tap off and grabbed a towel to dry his hands, then sat back down at the table to give me his full attention. "Really? That quickly?"

"Director Piggot read it last night, Mr. Hebert. She had a clandestine meeting about it this morning, however Miss thought it best to eat something before viewing the footage." Prometheus interjected.

Cheeky. "Yes, thank you for the reminder, Prometheus," I said sarcastically and looked at Danny.

"I watched the last meeting Piggot had by myself, but I think I want to watch this one with you, Dad." I explained.

He smiled knowingly. "I'd be glad to."

"If you will, Prometheus." I requested.

"Of course, Miss." he replied and audio, a recording Prometheus made from the microphone of Piggot's cell, played on my phone.

Early Thursday Morning, January 20th, 2011

Brockton Bay, New Hampshire, Earth Bet

Piggot Residence​

"Come in, have a seat in the kitchen," Piggot said.

"Director. Why are we meeting here, and so early?" Armsmaster asked.

"I got a message last night. Read this," Piggot replied.

A chair creaked, protesting under the weight of power armor. For a time there was only the sound of paper turning.

"This is alarming," Armsmaster said.

Piggot's voice turned scathing. "It sure as hell is. I don't know what's scarier, the idea that there's a completely unknown cape out there that knows this much, or the idea that everything in that letter is accurate. Or the fact that the original showed up on my secure phone and deleted itself after I read it, while two copies were delivered to my home printer. What do you think?" she asked, the question punctuated by the tap of a mug being placed on a table.

There was a pause.

"The PRT database has no information on a cape named Scientia. If the information can be confirmed, they sound like a precognitive thinker operating far above the precision of any previously encountered precognitive. They also sound like they have advanced skill at penetrating computer systems. Precognitively or postcognitively seeing passwords, perhaps," Armsmaster mused, and paused again for a moment. "The name itself means knowledge or knowing. That seems to fit with a thinker or precognitive's theme."

"Do you think this is a trap?" Piggot asked warily.

Papers rustled.

"Someone with inside information could have made up everything unknown to us, but I don't see what they have to gain. Scientia must know that we'll try to confirm information before acting, so it's likely not a ploy to make us act against one of our own personnel. Nor to waste resources, or create paranoia. The potential reward for an enemy doesn't match the amount of effort that would be required to assemble this. And it is too easy for us to confirm some of this as right or wrong. The information on the captured Undersiders we can likely confirm today.

"I think it's more likely that Scientia is a real precognitive trying to help us, even if he or she doesn't have much respect for our computer systems, and this is simply the first time they've reached out to the PRT," Armsmaster concluded. "Or if they have before, it is highly classified. Which would not be surprising, under the circumstances."

"Hmph. And the civilian IDs?" she asked.

"Unsettling," Armsmaster said. "As are their insights into each of us, as...difficult as it is to admit. But they clearly did not have to reveal that they knew any of that. The letter does not seem to be an attempt at blackmail or to clearly gain anything, so it is either a plot too indirect to perceive, or the author is trying to be forthright."

"You think they'd drop classified information like that just to be honest?" she scoffed.

"Imagine how we might react later if we discovered that they concealed that knowledge from us now," Armsmaster explained. "If this cape is a precognitive, that might be a scenario they are trying to avoid. This could be an attempt to build trust, even though it is concerning to us to be informed of an unknown cape with so much information."

Piggot made a noncommittal noise.

"It also ensures that we will take them and this letter very seriously. Perhaps the author knew it was necessary," Armsmaster speculated. "Without the same level of concern our actions might have differed in some critical way."

"The first rule of precogs-" Piggot began.

"-is that not everything is a precognitive plot, yes. Still, it seems a plausible scenario that nothing about this letter was an accident," Armsmaster finished.

"We shouldn't chase our tails wondering about what a precog might or might not have foreseen. We're not like those obsessives on PHO who think everything is a Simurgh plot. Have you gotten anything out of the prisoners, yet?" Piggot asked, changing the topic.

"Grue has been quiet, and Hellhound is violent when she isn't sedated. If this information is correct we should be able to leverage it. Or we could continue with the previous plan, offering them healing from Panacea for information," Armsmaster reasoned.

"Switch tactics, then. I'd like to see if there's a chance the rest of this is true. If Calvert really is a traitor we'll need to deal with him," Piggot ordered. "Start with their real names. That should provoke a reaction. If it does, move on to offering them what our mysterious precog suggested if they agree to probationary Ward status in other cities. I'll tell the legal department to look into Hellhound's circumstances."

"Understood. Is there anything else?" Armsmaster asked.

"I want you to do a quiet security review. Check our systems for anything suspicious. If you find anything, don't fix it, just let me know. If the HQ or Rig are under enemy surveillance I want to know about it," Piggot said.

"That will take a great deal of time away from my other duties," Armsmaster said, then sighed. "But I agree with the necessity."

"You have permission to recruit Dragon if you need to and she can spare the time. Just do it in such a way that if we do have a mole he won't notice," Piggot clarified.

"My lab systems are separated. I will begin with a review of those, and work from there," Armsmaster replied.

"Good. Get it done. If anyone asks I called you here because I got a suspicious package, but it turned out to be nothing. If you need an excuse to meet here again, I asked you to upgrade my security system," Piggot explained.

"Yes, Director. Are you going to be reporting this?"

Piggot sounded pensive. "...Not yet. I think we'll see if there's anything to it, first. A report now wouldn't be much more than speculation anyway. And I know what Costa-Brown will say."

"'Recruit them', ma'am?" Armsmaster asked, sounding almost sardonic.

Piggot sighed. "Yes. Recruit the cape I have no means of communicating with, and who might know everything we're doing before we do it. Sounds like a pain in the ass. So no, no report until we have enough that I can't justify not doing it."

"Shall I try suggesting the specialization in the letter to Kid Win, ma'am?" Armsmaster asked.

An exhale. "Yes," Piggot said. "Either way it will tell us something. If this Scientia has a power that tells them things about powers...well. We'll cross that bridge if we come to it."

I set down my phone as the recording ended. It sounded like the two of them were taking the information seriously, and it also sounded like the Director had shown Armsmaster the uncensored copy.

An interesting choice. I would have expected her to be more private.

"Thank you, Prometheus," I said, and glanced across at Danny to see his reaction. He had a pensive look on his face.

"My pleasure, Miss," Prometheus replied.

Still looking at Danny, I was about to speak up when he beat me to it.

"That went well. I think. They didn't mention your name in connection to this Scientia, at least."

I nodded with a slight wince. It would be harder to make the connection than one might think, given the way I'd portrayed Scientia, but it had been a real risk. It still might happen eventually. But I didn't need secrecy forever. A few weeks might be enough. "Yeah. That's good news."

"It sounds like I should give Roger a call right away. We can't always trust the PRT to be around, based on yesterday's events," Danny said, and patted me on the shoulder as he passed me by.

I turned around and followed him out. As I passed through the living room I told Danny that I'd be up in my room again today, and he nodded distractedly as he picked up the phone.

Still not a fan of cell phones then.

For the rest of the morning I wrote, wrote, and wrote some more. After lunch Danny's security contractor friend, Roger McCallan, came by and installed cameras, detectors on the windows and doors, and a central alarm. It was a nice system by Earth Bet standards, with cameras that could be accessed remotely.

Other than ensuring that Prometheus could patch in I didn't pay too much attention.

Prometheus worked on freelance coding projects available over the internet to raise funds. He occasionally checked on forks monitoring the Brockton Bay PRT, Lisa, and New Wave.

I felt somewhat badly about spying on New Wave, but in the unlikely event one of them did anything, accidentally or intentionally, to compromise my identity I really needed to know about it. I had Prometheus disregard anything else.

While I wrote I debated the next decision with myself. Prometheus could use social media and local cell phone networks to build an index of devices that belonged to suspected Brockton Bay gang members. Over time texts, calls, and the movements of phones should eventually give me a picture of what the gangs were up to and where the members were. If I was lucky it would also enable me to identify (and track) most of the villainous capes whose civilian identities I didn't know.

In theory I - or really Prometheus - would be able to use the gang intercepts to alert police to crimes, or act as a guide to arresting most of a gang all at once. I could even send texts, location data, and recorded calls to police as evidence of crimes. It was unauthorized wiretapping and wouldn't be admissible if the police had done it, but because I was a third party it was all admissible evidence even though it was all illegal. A result of the 4th Amendment's protections against unlawful search explicitly protecting people from the government.

The only problem is that doing any of that would be tipping my hand. And it was seriously illegal. I couldn't even imagine the number of felonies Prometheus would commit every second. Sure, the hacking modules he and I had coded up meant that there would be no digital evidence, but digital evidence wasn't the only kind of evidence.

As amusing as it would be to try the argument 'But your Honor, it was the autonomous virtual intelligence that committed those crimes, not me!', somehow I didn't think that would fly. Especially since I was the one giving the orders. And created him in the first place.

No, the only real option there was not getting caught, which was going to make using any of it tricky. Scientia was a separate persona, true enough, but I couldn't rely on that veil never being pierced.

So for now I would probably be limited to using the network to gather intelligence, warn me if someone being tracked got close, and ensure my identity remained clear.

That would still be very worthwhile. It might be the difference between life and death if it kept me from being ambushed or something. If someone made plans to attack me again I'd have a good chance of finding out ahead of time.

But aside from the legal considerations, what about the ethical ones?

Was it wrong for an unaccountable private individual with vast technical knowledge to use that knowledge to secretly track criminals?

...It might be too dangerous a precedent for a government to set. Too easy to abuse. But I was not a government. And I was currently the only one with the ability. Even Dragon couldn't manage it like I could; her shackles limited her focus while Prometheus could fork and fork as needed to cover massively parallel jobs like this. His only real limitations were the fundamental limitations of a VI and the need to stay hidden.

In the final consideration I was likely the only hope for the continued survival of every Earth, and this would keep me safe.

Not that there wasn't a twinge of selfishness to that too, because I wanted to live, but that didn't make the selfless half of the argument untrue.

So I gave the order to Prometheus. He had permission to invade the privacy of killers, drug dealers, slavers, and other criminals as needed. He couldn't cover remotely everything without sacrificing stealth, but he'd be free to do what made sense and track threats.

He would not be tracking heroes or innocent people without an order, though. I had to have a line somewhere.

Carol called in the afternoon to tell me that I was set to start at Arcadia tomorrow, and that the PRT weren't happy about me refusing to come in.

She did not mention anything about my offer to New Wave. That probably meant they were still discussing it, which meant there was dissent in the ranks.

That would work out or it wouldn't.

I needed a distraction from all of those thoughts, and Carol's phone call had given me one. After the call I made my way downstairs to talk to Danny.

"That's great, Taylor," he said when I told him. "Do you need any new school stuff?"

I shook my head. "No, it will just be an introduction day tomorrow, and I still have some of my things from Winslow."

"Okay. Let me know after if you do need anything. I want things to be different at this school. You'll tell me if any trouble starts up, won't you?" he asked, expectant.

I nodded. "I will. I promise."

After that I went back up to my room and sat on my bed to think about what I wanted to learn.

Studying up on the fundamentals - physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics - was teaching me a great deal of broad, theoretical use, and I got the vague impression that those wells were both wide and deep.

Then there were the more practical but still broad disciplines I'd dipped into so far, electrical and mechanical engineering. If anything those felt even bigger than the fundamentals. It made sense that they would teach me how to go about building a vast array of technology, eventually.

Then there were the more specific fields I'd been investing in, which seemed to offer practical knowledge faster at the cost of being less all-encompassing.

Nanotechnology offered precision molecular assembly and manipulation with self-replicating nanobots, although unlike the nanotechnology depicted in some science fiction it was a slow process. Besides time it was limited by temperature range, cooling, and the availability of energy and the right elements. There was no universal nanobot design, either; there were thousands of them, each specialized for dealing with particular molecules and tasks.

So there was no risk of a grey goo scenario where self-replicating nanobots turned the Earth into ravenous sludge. Industrial nanites could at best spread a few feet an hour and could be safely destroyed with a flamethrower.

Still, it would be invaluable for manufacturing, repairing things, and it had a host of medical applications.

I'd been pushing cybernetics in the hopes of a convenient mind/machine interface, and with help from medicine and nanotechnology I'd finally gotten it. Once I'd put together a lab that I could make and program nanobots with I could create the seed for a neural lace, a structure capable of computation that would grow alongside neurons in the brain and be able to monitor and interact with them. It could receive and transmit signals and communicate to and from the brain directly through stimulating the portions of the brain that interpret sensory experiences.

It could also make a mindstate backup that could be used to make a copy in software of someone's mind, useful in the event of their death. Compressed, the data was only a few terabytes in size.

The philosophical question of 'was that the original or a copy?' aside, that was a backup plan I very much wanted. I'd gotten lucky so far, running into problems I could handle with a teenage girl's body and enough luck and skill. There were many, many things out there that I had no answer for in a fight, or that could take me by surprise.

Not for the first time I promised myself that I would be setting up a lab soon, one way or another. Prometheus was accumulating money selling software, so whether New Wave said yes or no and however long it took the PRT to send me a settlement check I would not be waiting long.

While I did intend to keep improving my fundamentals, there were some specific things I was curious about.

Why not?

I pushed for faster than light travel until I hit a wall at three charges.

"Are you alright, Miss?" Prometheus asked.

I jerked out of the daze I'd fallen into. "What?"

"You were unmoving for sixty minutes, Miss. Are you alright?" he repeated.

"Yeah," I said, and grimaced as I wiped away some drool that had leaked out of the corner of my mouth while I was dazed.

"Just, ah, I just found out that whatever civilization or source my power came from figured out how to break physics over their collective knees," I explained. "And I'm still trying to work through it all."

"What did they do?" Prometheus asked.

I took a breath and let it out slowly. "I think it all started with figuring out how to make their own matter, and later their own fields, with really weird properties. The first form of faster than light travel they figured out were wormholes that used frameworks of matter with negative energy and pressure to hold both sides open. The exotic matter needed to make the frameworks goes up exponentially as they get bigger, though, so they're only really useful for sending information or a few molecules faster than light, so they kept working on it until they figured out something else," I said, rubbing my face.

"And what was that, Miss?"

"Brilliant madness," I groaned. "I think maybe an AI or someone with an augmented brain came up with it, because even with it all jammed in my head it's hard to get a grip on. It sort of wraps a bottle of warped space around the ship so that there's a tiny opening, makes the ship massless with respect to the rest of the universe so it moves at the speed of light, and then warps space to move it even faster. They had to go with the bottle to get the energy requirements down to something sane, and to keep it from scattering radiation everywhere when it reached where it was going. But to make the bottle in an efficient way and to keep it from collapsing into a singularity, they had to figure out ways to warp space without creating gravity."

"Aren't they the same thing?" Prometheus asked.

If this was confusing an advanced VI then no wonder I was out of it for a while. At least I wasn't the only one who was confused.

"Yes," I moaned. "Yes they are. So they made their own rules. They one upped the wormhole frameworks and made stuff with imaginary mass and used it to keep the Higgs field from propagating along a boundary layer and the spacial warp of the bottle can get the whole thing moving superluminally even though tachyonic fields are limited to subluminal and the universe preserves causality in a weird way and...ugh. I can't decide whether it's beautiful or an awful mess. There are so many problems with faster than light travel and whoever came up with this just slapped patches over them one at a time until they got something that worked. It must have been a huge project."

"How does it work in practice, Miss?" he queried.

Was it me, or was he imitating excitement?

I chuckled. "I'll show you when I build one."

"I shall look forward to it, Miss." Yep. Some excitement there. Huh. His conversational emulation kept improving. He was still diverting processing time to improving the model, then.

It would make him better at posing as a real human if needed. That could be useful enough that it might be worth the resources to him.

In any event, I had two charges left. I was tempted to push for weapons of mass destruction to see if there was anything that could hurt Scion or the Endbringers without destroying the planet Earth in the process. I knew I'd have to try for that eventually, it was a stone I couldn't afford to leave unturned. Even if it scared me.

But I had a good reason to put it off. There was something else that I would certainly need to defeat Scion, and that would prove utterly invaluable in a multitude of ways. For travel, for gathering resources and allies, for safety and escape.

I pushed for what Worm referred to as dimensional travel, even if what the Entities were actually doing was traveling between branching timelines or similar independent universes somehow.

And with a sense of mounting dread I waited as nothing happened.

The sense of dread deepened as I tried every variation I could think of. Dimensional physics. Dimensional communication. Dimensional mechanics. Dimensional manipulation. Pocket dimensions. Dimensional locking.

My head vaguely ached by the end of it, but I needed this, so I pushed harder, and finally my two remaining charges flared and knowledge flooded, but it wasn't a guide to practical dimensional travel.

It was a deluge of theoretical physics that explained how observing other branes and traveling to them was possible - and the traveler could even choose what time they wanted to arrive in the destination universe, too - but sending even small amounts of mass had energy requirements that could be measured in the mass energy of universes, or substantial fractions.

What?

There had to be better solutions because the shards were obviously pulling it off with lower energy requirements somehow. But my unspeakably vast database of knowledge that was probably from an advanced civilization had no idea how.

What was I going to do?