19

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011

Brockton Bay, New Hampshire, Earth Bet

Hebert Residence​

The next day I kept myself busy while I tried to wrap my head around what I'd seen and experienced in that dream last night. It had felt so real.

To distract myself I made a list of the items I wanted after breakfast, and Prometheus went about making purchases and getting Mouse Protector to make pickups and deliveries of the things that could be gotten locally in Brockton Bay on short notice.

People might wonder why a costumed Mouse Protector was picking up industrial and scientific supplies, but with Prometheus anonymizing the cash transfers and the independent hero teleporting the goods directly to and from me I didn't have to worry much about being tracked. Finally.

Many things would take time yet, parts that needed to be machined to my specifications and things from businesses that weren't open on weekends or weren't available nearby. But it was more than enough to get started on several projects.

I set everything up in the basement.

Chemistry supplies are easy to get from scientific suppliers, so one old dining table became a chemistry lab where I ran the synthesis steps on several drugs that would make a safe but potent anesthetic/hypnotic mix, putting someone down for hours and erasing about fifteen minutes of their memory before injection.

Alongside those I ran the synthesis for a particularly nasty injectable neurotoxin that would kill very quickly. In a normal person a hundredth of a gram would incapacitate in ten to fifteen seconds through grand mal seizure, and death would occur in thirty to forty. I expected some capes would be immune thanks to inhuman biology, but it would probably work on quite a few. It would be an especially good way to bypass the durability of many brutes without needing a giant gun.

It would be a quick and nearly painless death for whatever that was worth. The few targets I could imagine using it on deserved much worse.

I also got started on a crude general purpose nanoassembler, a fundamental tool necessary for making other tools in a reasonable timeframe. The general idea started with an open top tank (I used a large pet store aquarium) that could be filled with a dense, feedstock-rich fluid. A thick layer of nanites would float on the surface tension of the fluid, and a tunable laser with optics was mounted above the tank pointing down. The laser gave instructions to the nanites, different species of which reacted to different wavelengths of light by taking the feed materials the species was designed to work with out of suspension in the fluid and bonding them together in the manner desired. The part was 'printed' from the bottom up by slowly pumping more fluid in to raise the working level of the nanites, and by moving and tuning the laser to sketch out the three dimensional shape of the part and any necessary support structures.

In basic concept it was much like a 3D plastic printer, except it did molecular assembly. With the appropriate nanite designs it could work with most solid materials and had a practical resolution of roughly ten nanometers. I knew how to design better nanoassemblers, but the best ones required a zero gravity environment so a part could be built outward from a central point, surface tension holding the ball of fluid, the part, and the nanites together as lasers directed the nanites in what to do from all directions and more fluid and nanites were added as the part was built out.

I'd still need a decent laser to actually fabricate the nanites. To be fine enough to etch the structures required it had to be on the hard side of the x-ray band at least. Fortunately it was possible to order x-ray lenses made with 2011 technology.

Efficient gamma ray lenses weren't something humanity made yet. They required metamaterials with a very high rate of virtual pair production. I'd detailed them in my paper, but it would probably be some time before anyone spun up the novel production mechanisms.

So my plan was to make an x-ray laser, use that to make nanites, then use my nanoassembler to make gamma ray lenses. Then I could use those to make picoscale electronics and gamma laser-initiated fusion reactors. Which I was going to need for all sorts of things, including many of the more exciting things I could build with nanoassemblers.

As I worked I thought about the dream, and what it could mean.

Back when many people still believed that dreams could hold insights into the future, poets used to speak of two gates, that of horn and that of ivory. Twin paths, one to truth and one to deception.

Nowadays, of course, few people still held the ancient belief that dreams held glimpses of futures to come. We know that dreams are merely passages through the gate of ivory, the brain reliving bits and pieces of things it encountered in waking life.

But last night...last night was too real. Too precise. It was a memory, but not a memory. More like a perfect record of that woman's thoughts and experiences. A recording made inside the mind.

I was almost certain I'd walked through the gate of horn last night. The path of truth.

Thanks to the dream itself and my knowledge of cybernetics I knew how. She had a neural lace, an elaborate implant that grew alongside the neurons of the brain, capable of computation and of interfacing with the user.

A neural lace can preserve and replay memories. Sufficiently sophisticated ones can even preserve the whole brain, a form of immortality if necessary. It's a complex process to automate because every human's neural architecture is, to a degree, unique, but I knew how it could be done.

Somehow her recorded memories had wound up in my sleeping mind.

I had a suspicion some of the knowledge of manufacturing I'd absorbed had come from that woman originally. I had a pretty good idea of how to build the stellar lifters I knew she had designed. I also understood zero gravity shipyards and dyson swarms and automated manufactories and other tools for making things, great and small, all the way back to primitive forges and other early tools.

But though I'd glimpsed truth, what had I really seen? It seemed like a future that was unconnected to Earth Bet, the Entities, and parahumans.

A different Earth, then. Mine? Another one completely?

If not mine, how had I gotten the knowledge of a far future civilization from another dimension into my head, and woken up in the wrong body in yet another dimension?

If mine, then why had they shifted or copied some personality from their past? How? The technology to copy my mind certainly wasn't around in the year I left.

Both possibilities might have at least something to do with the implant the Project Leader had. I remembered her pushing aside her anxiety at the crowd and the knowledge of all the many millions of people watching far beyond the room. Like flipping a switch, her implant ramped it way down to almost nothing as soon as she'd willed it. The implant understood her intention and acted.

I'd been pushing difficult emotions and thoughts aside since I woke up in the hospital. I'd thought it seemed too easy, but I didn't have an answer for how. Now I knew.

On the plus side, I wouldn't need to build a seed for my own neural lace, because evidently I already had one.

Unlike the crude physical augmentations envisioned in cyberpunk literature, a neural lace implant is a delicate and precise thing. It starts out from a small seed and over time grows a vine-like support structure woven between the neurons in the brain using spare nutrients in the cerebral spinal fluid as building blocks. Eventually it becomes a mirror and companion of the brain, in contact with every synapse and able to monitor and trigger them as needed, modeling the processes in the brain to be able to understand what the brain does and interfere as needed.

It was an interface, a computer, data storage, and a wireless transceiver all in one, and as profoundly programmable and adaptable as any Turing-complete machine. The applications were nearly endless.

It could even help a sick or damaged brain to a limited degree. A properly designed neural lace could suppress a deadly inflammatory response, control bleeding, and break down tumors into raw material.

That would explain what happened to Taylor's Corona Pollentia, in fact. Sophisticated lace designs would see an entire brain structure that wasn't supposed to be there and treat it as a tumor to be swiftly broken down.

So, I had a neural lace. Somehow it got into my - or rather, Taylor's - head at some point before I woke up. Maybe when she would have triggered, maybe earlier.

If I had molecular-scale imaging I could make an educated guess, but the MRI wouldn't have picked it up early on. The structures are mostly carbon and denser than the surrounding neurons, but extremely fine at first.

Amy, though, her power might have caught it. And hadn't she said something odd after she'd healed me, the day I killed Victor?

I needed to talk to her anyway, to start making progress on averting her psychological time bombs. She would be at school on Monday, I'd do it then.

How had a neural lace gotten inside Taylor Hebert's brain, though?

Introduction of the seed material could be done by ingestion, with the components moving into the bloodstream to pass the blood brain barrier. It could also be done surgically in a more direct fashion, with a needle. But who would have done it? When? Why?

Was it connected to the origin civilization? How had they done it from another universe? How?

Answers yet to be found.

And most puzzling of all, why had I woken up instead of Taylor? I wasn't from Earth Bet, or the Earth of the origin civilization, unless they somehow went back in time to scoop up my mind, which didn't seem likely. Why? There would have been far better candidates than some random woman from Taylor's rough time period. Besides the conundrum of why, how, even?

...I knew a neural lace was involved now, so what did that tell me about how I could have gotten into Taylor's head?

A neural lace can modify a brain in ways that add information. That was how a memory recorded by one person's implant was shared with a second person. And likely how the neural lace was giving me new skills and knowledge.

When I make a request, some external source could be temporarily loading up my neural lace's memory with the data I'm requesting, where it would then be instantly available for my brain to query. And get lost in, if I wasn't careful. Neural lace access can be seamless enough that I wouldn't have any idea the knowledge or skill was actually stored on the lace hardware. It would subjectively feel the same.

Then the lace could be permanently incorporating all that data by rearranging my brain structures over the course of a day, essentially teaching my brain at extreme speed until it ran out of buffered data. Seen through that lens the five 'charges' are arbitrary subdivisions of the amount of change the lace can safely make over twenty four hours. The limiting factor wasn't any bandwidth cap on the source, gods only knew what that was, it was physical limitations on the implant's ability to rearrange my brain without anything I already had getting lost.

It wouldn't surprise me if it was adding new data storage as fast as it could to help ameliorate the issue, too. It was possible to pack a lot of highly miniaturized data storage into the empty spaces in a human skull without impairing cerebral spinal fluid flow too much. It just took time to grow at the molecular level.

It was possible for a lace to do less artful rewrites like alterations of personality, but that would normally only make sense in the event of severe brain damage or to a clone with a blank brain in order to load a saved mind state from digital storage back to organic hardware. It was the only form of resurrection for someone who died with a fully mature neural lace but didn't want their mind to run on digital hardware afterwards for philosophical reasons.

I set down the tools I'd been working with and paced under the naked bulb lighting the basement, anxious. For once I deliberately didn't try to push the feeling away.

Had the new neural lace imprinted my personality onto Taylor's brain? Doing that to a living human with a working mind was a horror. To an innocent, suffering child even more so. Why? Why would anyone or anything do that?

I reached deep for knowledge of cybernetics and the nanotechnology that neural laces used, searching for an answer.

After three more charges between the two fields I found it.

During the early implantation and growth periods the artificial cell-like elements that form the seed of the lace have to suppress the host immune system to avoid being attacked and destroyed. The suppression gets much more targeted after the initial growth period as the lace grows the specialized structures necessary, and the immune system returns to normal with the exception of ignoring the lace.

If someone already had a bacterial infection, even a minor one, suppression could turn it life threatening.

This would not normally be an issue. By the time a civilization had invented a sophisticated neural lace they'd already have far better ways of eliminating infections if one arose. It wouldn't be a problem as long as it was dealt with promptly, and anyone getting a lace would probably be monitored during the initial implantation period just in case. They could be given effective prophylactic drugs along with the lace seed, too.

But Taylor had an infection from scrapes, bug bites, and the unsanitary conditions in the locker, and she lived in a world that only had fairly crude drugs for treating infections. It was no wonder that a mild infection had suddenly appeared to get much worse, particularly in her brain where the suppression effect was strongest to protect the growing lace.

After the lace had grown enough to detect the damage it would have done its best to conduct repairs. Without knowing how the lace was programmed I couldn't be sure what it had done if Taylor was effectively already gone at that point.

A neural lace I made would have given up a host in that situation as too far gone to save if it didn't have any mind state backup to conduct repairs with. There wouldn't be any point in having it continue. But someone or something put this in Taylor's head. If they'd had a reason, if failure hadn't been an option?

Maybe it formatted Taylor's brain with another personality to take over the mission as a last ditch effort. Whatever that mission was.

But why me? Why not itself, whatever it was?

For that matter, why had it tried to pick Taylor in the first place?

It couldn't have been her power, because the first thing the lace must have done was eat the corona pollentia and corona gemma, if present, for building material to grow with.

Had it known it was going to be effectively killing Taylor and that was the plan all along?

I sure hoped not.

But that didn't answer the question of why her. She was too important for the choice to be coincidence.

Because she was important, then? It had to be that, there was nothing else.

But then why take away everything important about her? Her power, her personality.

It only made sense if that part was an accident.

So it had chosen Taylor deliberately, but been incompetent, then?

No, nothing about my power was incompetent. Whatever it came from knew advanced medicine.

So uninformed, then. The source hadn't known Taylor's circumstances. Maybe it hadn't even known why she was important, only that she was? That would explain getting rid of her powers.

Maybe it didn't even know powers existed? That would explain why my attempts to get information about shard related topics didn't net me anything. They didn't exist in the universe of the power's origin, or at least those people had never encountered them. Which made sense, given that they lived long enough to grow awfully advanced. Entities would have stopped that if any were around early in their development.

All of this was starting to paint a picture, if a partial one. I just still didn't know what 'it' was, or what its goal is. Or where I came into the picture.

But I at least had a good working theory on what happened to Taylor.

Poor Taylor.

My eyes wet, I stepped away from everything I'd been working on for a good long while, and took the time to mourn a brave girl I knew intimately but would never meet.

When the doorbell rang I hurriedly cleaned myself up and made my way downstairs. Danny was holding the door open for Sarah Pelham as she came inside.

She wore civilian clothes instead of her Lady Photon costume. Probably to avoid drawing attention to my home, although it might also have been to stay warmer in the cold January weather. She was carrying a manila envelope.

"Taylor," she said, looking up.

"Mrs. Pelham," I greeted her. "Dad, do you mind if we borrow the living room? Superhero stuff."

Danny laughed, shaking his head in something like disbelief. "Sure, Taylor. I'll be in the garage, I've got to get some tools cleaned up."

He departed and I showed Sarah Pelham into the living room, offering her a seat on the couch while I took one myself.

She sat. "Thank you, Taylor. First, I'm glad you're alright. Vicky told me a bit about what happened."

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome," she replied, and sighed. "I came to discuss your offer to join New Wave."

She wasn't eager for this conversation, I could tell. Bad news, then.

My sigh echoed hers. "Carol?" I asked.

She winced. "I'm sorry, Taylor. She...didn't take your offer to cure Mark's depression well, in particular, although your other revelations didn't help. And she doesn't want you around Amy, either. I'm the leader of New Wave, but there's a limit to how much I can push my sister. I can't break the team to bring in a new member."

I was certainly not going to be honoring Carol's wishes to leave Amy dangerously depressed and broken, but that wasn't something I was going to say out loud, so I nodded instead. "I understand. Don't feel bad. I've already started working on some other angles for doing what I need. Staying hidden as long as possible is safer for me, too."

"I'm glad to hear that," she said, her features shifting to a subdued smile. "I do have some good news. Here." She handed me the manila envelope. "The settlement check, and final papers to sign to finalize the agreement."

"Ah. Let's take care of that now, then." I led her into the kitchen and found a pen, pulling all the papers out. It looked like a fairly standard settlement and non-disclosure agreement.

I wouldn't be able to publicly talk about what happened or how much the settlement was, but that wasn't particularly important. I didn't actually need to publicly embarrass the PRT, after all.

The settlement did not promise to provide counseling services to every Ward in a binding way, but there was a mention that they would make best efforts.

That was likely the most I was going to get. They would want to avoid tying their hands with any sort of privately enforceable legal mandate into perpetuity.

The check was for $350,000. That was likely from an insurance limit of half a million, minus the thirty percent contingency fee for Carol. That worked out to quite the hourly rate for her, but I supposed that meant I didn't have to feel as guilty for everything I'd put her through, at least.

"Dad!" I called towards the garage. Being a minor, or at least what everyone thought was a minor, I couldn't actually sign the documents myself. He came in a moment later, wiping oil off his hands with a towel. "Taylor?" he asked, taking in Mrs. Pelham and the papers on the table.

"Settlement's ready to sign," I explained. "Nothing wonky in it. Just have to keep it to ourselves, which is what they're getting out of it."

He sighed and took the pen when I handed it to him. Then he saw the check and froze.

"Is...is that real?" he asked, halting.

"It is," Mrs. Pelham said.

"You can pay off the mortgage, and we'll have a big nest egg left over," I reassured him.

He shook his head. "It's your money, Taylor. You won't have to worry about paying for college," he said.

I laughed once. "That would be an awful waste of four years, Dad. Knowledge powers, remember?" I knocked on the side of my head.

His face set. "We'll have to discuss it. A degree is a good thing to have, and you'd benefit from making friends and having a good experience."

My answering smile was a sad one. He still hadn't really internalized how wildly different the future was going to go from what he'd envisioned for his daughter.

I was never going to be working a job for someone else. And the world did not have years to waste while I pretended to be a regular college student. The role I had to step into needed to be filled soon. Earth Bet frayed more every day as villains and Endbringers and suffering unraveled civilization's threads. And beyond reversing the decline I needed to be ready for the threat looming over it all. As ready as anyone could be, with every tool I could bring to bear.

"I'm going to be too busy reshaping the world and casting down gods," I said softly, perhaps more to myself than Danny.

Danny and Mrs. Pelham both gave me an odd and slightly alarmed look.

I probably shouldn't have said that out loud.

I straightened slightly, a subtle shift of body language to encourage the conversation to follow a formal tone. "Thank you for everything, Mrs. Pelham," I said, my gratitude genuine.

"Yes, well," she began, "I'm sorry I can't offer you a place in New Wave, but if you need anything, don't hesitate to call, okay Taylor?" She removed a card from her pocket, which I accepted.

"Thank you, that's kind of you," I answered, offering a small smile. "I should get back to the work I was doing."

"What's with the long face?" Mouse Protector asked behind me, and I had to suppress my first reflex to react to the surprise by spinning and beaning the source with the socket wrench I'd been working with.

I turned at a reasonable speed instead and gestured at her with the wrench. "You should text a warning ahead of time. It would be embarrassing if I clocked you."

Mouse Protector pursed her lips and raised a finger to her chin to look thoughtful. "I do prefer to be the one doing the embarrassing. Alright, I suppose you win." She shrugged off a backpack she'd been wearing under her cloak and let it hit the ground with a heavy thump. "Here's your next delivery! But if you want it you'll have to tell me what's bothering you."

I squinted at her. "Who says anything's bothering me?"

She waved one hand at me. "You were wrenching all dejectedly. Heart wrenching, you could say."

I groaned. At least it wasn't a mouse pun.

"I was just thinking about something sad," I said.

Mouse Protector crossed her arms. "If it's got you down, it's not a little thing. Talking helps, you know."

I drummed my fingers on the side of the nanoassembler tank beside me.

What the hell, she wasn't wrong.

"Someone who deserved to be saved, but I couldn't save them," I admitted with a frown.

Mouse Protector's face got serious, and all of a sudden I was being hugged. The woman moved incredibly fast.

"I'm so sorry, Taylor. That's the hardest part of being a hero. We all make mistakes we can't take back, and sometimes other people get hurt because we let them down."

"I was in a coma at the time," I said, my voice muffled by the fluffy fur lining of her cloak.

She pulled back and gave me a puzzled look. "You were a coconut?"

I snickered. "No, I was in a coma at the time," I corrected her.

"Oh." She quirked her head, the big mouse ears on her helmet exaggerating the movement. "Then what was your mistake?"

I shook my head. "No mistake. There was nothing I could have done. I'm just sad over things I have no control over."

Mouse Protector paused for a long moment, her expression shifting to incredulous as she looked me squarely in the eyes and rested a hand on my shoulder.

"That's really dumb," she said slowly.

I agreed with her, but that didn't change how I felt. "Yes, it is."

"I'm glad we're in agreement," she chirped, patting first my shoulder and then the heavy backpack. "All yours."

"Thank you, Mouse," I said.

She gave me an enthusiastic smile. "Anytime. And I'm eager to see what you're making when it's ready."

"Me too," I joked, and gave her an evaluating look. "Say, why did you go with the mouse theme, anyway?"

Mouse Protector laughed. "Because mice are lovable underdogs, and because nobody could possibly take it seriously. Being underestimated can make a real difference, and it'd sting all the more every time I won." Her smile shifted into a smirk. "Also, cheesy jokes."

I sighed. "I walked into that one, didn't I?"

She offered me a sage nod. "Next time duck first."

After a long and emotionally difficult but productive day I went through my usual pre-bed routine. I settled on putting my remaining two charges into something I probably should have opted for earlier: security.

Knowledge flooded, as always. All the practices of securing people, locations, objects, information. Vulnerabilities in those practices. I could be a bodyguard, a designer of secure facilities, a counterintelligence expert. I could take advantage of any flaws in security arrangements, too, if I wished. Things like picking locks and avoiding cameras. There was even some knowledge of social engineering tricks.

I became painfully aware of the risks I'd been taking. Living in a known location when I was a potential target wasn't the best of ideas to start with, and I was going to have to do something about that.

Of course, just moving to a hotel room wouldn't be very subtle, so there was a tension between the goal of staying under the radar and ensuring I couldn't be attacked.

The second best option to living where no one could find you was living somewhere so fortified nobody could attack you successfully. Once I had some production capacity up and running defenses were something I could look into. Something subtle but effective.

July 28th, 147,241

Terra Nova

Segment 27​

I wasn't myself, again. I was a man on a park bench, wearing clothes that looked odd but were comfortable. It was the middle of the night, but the light of the local sun was bright overhead.

The vast gossamer curve of the ringworld of Terra Nova extending off in either direction until it became too small to see was the reason why. The designers intended to install an inner ring of revolving plates to shadow the surface of the ring every twelve hours, but the decision had been made to finish primary construction of all the segments first.

Until then there was only an occasional dimming from the passing of one of the stellar lifting stations orbiting close to the star where they drew up the material ultimately used to fabricate the ring.

It was an inconceivably vast amount of space. More than all humanity could truly fill for a long, long time, even ignoring the many planets and artificial structures that had been settled throughout the Perseus Arm. Outside the cities most of it was planned to be parks, wilderness, and pet projects.

The man that I was thought Terra Nova was mostly being built to fulfill the dream of proving that it could be done, and spared little other thought for it. He was busy using his implant to monitor a network of small, stealthy drones that hovered about the park.

Terra Nova was fairly secure, but he hadn't earned his reputation by being sloppy. If one of his colleagues caught him out in their little subterfuge games he'd slide down the reputational rankings.

Without looking with his eyes he watched a young man approach the bench and sit down. His apparent age was unremarkable. Most people chose to look like they were in their twenties, regardless of how many centuries or millennia they'd actually lived.

"Mr. Baker," I greeted him politely, with the agreed code phrase.

"Mr. Ghost. So this is what you look like?" he asked, giving me a curious look.

"It is the face I'm wearing at the moment," I replied in a language that I'd never heard before but the man that I wasn't knew well, and handed over a storage chip which 'Mr. Baker' took. "My results. Your office is clean of surveillance devices and moles, although I've discovered some holes in your ability to detect microdrones, and your assistant is rather loose lipped with her lovers."

He froze. "You didn't."

"I'm sure she'll get over it eventually," I said, shrugging slightly.

He frowned, which I saw through a drone.

"You wanted the best. I achieved that status because I check every avenue of attack. You came to me worried that the Natural System Front were spying on your office to get advance information on segment construction. Being thorough is the only way I can reassure you that isn't the case."

He sighed. "Thank you," he grumbled.

"Of course," I said smoothly. "Your positive review will be appreciated."