39

Extension 2

"Eunoia, would you be alright if I invited someone else over to work with us?" Dragon asked. Her voice seemed quite cautious and guarded. I didn't really know why, because this was her workshop, even though it was parked in front of the combined New Wave's home.

"Sure, who is it?" I asked.

"You may know him as Armsmaster, although that name is being retired," Dragon said. "He's been... having a rough time after his dismissal from the Protectorate. I think some group Tinkering might be therapeutic for him."

I hadn't gotten along well with him the few times I met him. He had been one of my childhood heroes, but when he had let me down so hard with regards to Sophia, my opinion of him had crashed down further than if he had just been a nobody. But Dragon still thought well of him, and she had been a really nice person, and she knew him better than I did.

Maybe I had overreacted. He wasn't fully responsible for what had happened with Sophia, just a part of it. Blackwell and Sophia herself deserved most of the blame there. Not only that, he wasn't part of the Protectorate any more... at least he wouldn't be "taking me in" for questioning or whatever.

"Sure, why not," I said. First impressions lasted longer than they should.

"Thank you so much," Dragon said. "He'll be coming over soon."

Two hours later, a very different man to what I had expected arrived.

On a cheap scooter, for one thing. No iconic rumble of the blue super-bike. No crazy tinker modifications. Just a little vehicle barely capable of highway speeds.

No power armour, either. He just had a basic mask on, dressed in clothing that only went well together due to being utterly plain and loose-fitting. It wasn't even blue. His mask left his beard revealed, which wasn't trimmed to the iconic shape that was as iconic as his suit. The rest of his outfit was just as scraggly and unkempt as his beard, despite a clearly muscular and well-toned body underneath.

"Dragon?" He asked as he walked up to the parked workshop.

"Hello, Armsmaster. You should say hello to Eunoia and Lisa; this is the temporary home of New Wave," Dragon reminded him. "…have you decided on a new name yet?"

"What does it matter any more? Just call me Colin. I don't even have the rights to that name," he said. He sounded completely defeated. Not even bitter. I think he was past the bitterness phase and into hopelessness.

"Ar- Colin, please. I know you've got it in you. Now at least say hello to someone, you haven't had a proper conversation with anyone for a week," Dragon said, almost like a mother.

"Armsmaster was my life," he said. "It's not like Colin has even truly existed for the past decade. It's as much a secret identity as any. My true identity has been taken from me."

"Um. Hello, Colin," I said cautiously.

"Hello," he said listlessly. This was the complete opposite of what I had experienced and heard of him. Gruff and direct, bold to the point of being overconfident… I saw none of that here. Was all that confidence brought on from the power armour?

"Um. So, I'm working with Dragon on nanobots. I know that's not like your halberd or armour, but maybe we could incorporate them into a new one?" I pointed out hopefully.

He winced as I said that. "Property of the Protectorate. Built using their funding, so they have the rights to keep it all. I can't remake them."

I could relate. If I had suddenly lost all my bots, that would be depressing. Having to rebuild from nothing, starting from zero again. But for me, zero was only half a year ago. For Armsmaster... it had been a decade of work, or more. I don't really know when he started.

"I have most of your designs saved. If you modify them enough, you'll be able to get around the intellectual property and trademark laws," Dragon told him.

"Actually, what you'll really want to do is build the designs you always wanted but the Protectorate refused to approve," Lisa pointed out.

"I'm still not sure if I want to be a hero right now," he replied.

"Of course you still do. You're just still trying to wrap your head around the fact that there are heroes outside of the Protectorate. Wait, no... it's that you still don't think that there are villains within the Protectorate. You have a hard time believing corruption is a thing outside of Master/Stranger situations, especially to this extent," Lisa said, her eyes boring into his. Uh-oh, she was in full Thinker mode right now. "It's because of Hero, isn't it. You idolized him, and he was one of the founding members. You couldn't believe that his creation could turn into something so foul, and that you were a contributing factor. A pawn in their game."

"Lisa, that's enough," Dragon said.

"Aren't you interested in fixing it?" Lisa said slyly.

Colin gave her a calculating look, but said nothing.

"Colin, take your time. We've been working on the Nanothorn project and the Protectorate doesn't have any rights over that. We've made great strides already. Just focus on one thing at a time."

There was a huge flurry of development between the two of us as we focused on how to make different modifications and variants of nanobots. While Colin didn't participate as much at the beginning, I think Dragon was acting extra-Tinkery in hopes to break him out of his funk. Lisa mostly stayed out of the way, continuing to use Dragon's computer to do more research on Coil/Calvert, the Empire, the criminal elements in the city of Concord, among other things.

While I had originally used my diamond-edged bots like a nano-chainsaw to slice through things, the goal was to have so many of them that we could use them like a continuous stream while expending all of their energy and cutting capacity with first contact. What Dragon wanted was something even more powerful – a harder-than-diamond boron nitride variant, combined with a small plasma arc to further soften whatever the target was made of. Endbringers were tough and the fights didn't last long, so a high-powered burst was the primary strategy.

Dragon had been teaching me to make these new bots of her design, because I could get them actually working faster then she could. She had the theoretical models, but she still hadn't figured out the control and coordination systems. With my Master ability, I helped her test the functional parts of the bots. I just attached a blocky "blank spot" to each bot that Dragon would fill in later with an antenna or something. She was still working on it, and being hopefully optimistic about its size.

That said, we still made many variants. There were many different variables to understand, like the largest possible size of control module that wouldn't interfere with function. Or, the maximum output capacity given certain energy storage systems. And varying shapes, shifting the ratio of energy that went to physical impact versus plasma arcs.

For me, I doubted I would put this particular bot to much use. While it was clearly a powerful cutting tool, it was also hyper-specialized. At most, I would incorporate secondary elements of it into my own designs. I liked the convenience of my bots, which could be repurposed as Abyssal, surgery tools, armour, clothing, surveillance, manufacturing more bots, among other things. Sometimes it was good to have a few specialty tools around, but it would be easier to manufacture them on-site when I needed them. Even so, all the experimentation and innovation that Dragon brought certainly inspired further improvements for my own bots.

When Colin finally joined in with some of his own ideas, he proposed many ways of increasing functionality; more specialized systems integrated into an already-tiny bot. It reminded me of his iconic halberd, which integrated a blade, a stun gun, grappling hook, teleportation system, tranquilizer dispenser, and probably a dozen other functions all integrated into the handle. I guess that was just his style of Tinkering.

At the same time, Dragon kept testing simple bots, but kept the blueprints for every single one of them. Instead of having everything integrated, her strategy would rely on having enough of each type. The line of thinking was that if we needed to construct bots faster, she could produce them en masse at her factories. Short-term, it would be faster, and possibly quicker to tailor to whichever Endbringer was attacking on short notice. If Behemoth was attacking, a radiation-hardened bot would be used. Simurgh, a high-speed version with a micro-rocket. Leviathan, ones with cilia-like fins for navigating through water. And so on.

It was way more complicated than I liked. I wanted to go simpler. The simpler they were, the easier they were to make, and the better I could control them. I didn't need every bot to have powerful functionality, I could reconfigure them differently. Then again, I was designing this for Dragon, and I only needed to adapt the parts that I wanted to keep for myself.

For a few days, I stopped working with Dragon in-person as often. Mainly because New Wave was starting to get into a patrol schedule, while Amy and I had gotten approved positions at hospitals. The work itself was actually kind of boring – despite the glowing recommendations and references from Brockton Bay General, Concord Hospital's administration was cautious and only allowed me and Panacea the most basic of procedures for now.

Otherwise, the rest of my days were mostly filled up with covering more of Concord with my bots, spreading more through Brockton Bay, and filling the space in between as well. I was monitoring Director Calvert, while searching for a child matching the description of Dinah Alcott. So far, I still hadn't found anything particularly incriminating. Lisa was doing similar, searching the internet and news for clues, but with Dragon's constraints on hacking, she was getting limited results as well.

Amy was bored too, and frustrated. She saw tons of patients she could heal, but for now, the hospital didn't even allow her to. She came home with few people to rant to. The rest of her family couldn't relate very well, because the police and local PRT station were glad to have help. So she tended to drop in on us. Lisa was happy to chat, given how little progress she was making, while Dragon didn't mind the interruption to Tinkering.

Since I still didn't want to reveal Abyssal to Colin just yet, he was only invited to come work while I was there in-person as well. He probably would have preferred to just live there inside Dragon's workshop, but I think Dragon was making him come and go to make sure he got a little more social interaction. I actually looked forward to these meetings. Not so much because of Colin, but because the rest of my days were so boring. I think Amy felt the same.

Despite the roomy house that we were parked next to, everyone had ended up gathering here within Dragon's workshop. Four people inside this thing was definitely cramped; and I was glad for once that Dragon wasn't physically here.

"Perhaps it's because of my condition," Dragon was saying to Amy while I worked on the next batch of bots.

"What do you mean?" Amy said.

"Well, because I can't go and meet people in person, I have to perform my heroism another way. The constraints I have actually led to some more creative solutions."

"But it's not like it's slowed you down. I've seen what you do at helping at Endbringer battles."

"Oddly enough, if you count by the number of lives saved, my Endbringer participation is pretty far down the list," Dragon admitted.

"Oh? What would you rank above it?"

"Food bank statistical reallocation software."

"What?" Amy hadn't heard of it. Neither had I.

"People need food to live. Food distribution is inadequate, not just after a major disaster, but systemically. On the other hand, some forms of food are unsellable primarily because they are nearing the sell-by date. Food banks rarely have healthy, fresh food because they are unable to store things long-term and ensure they are distributed. So, I created some software that can re-allocate unsold produce to food banks, sort them by each food bank's usage and distance, and predict the needs with ninety percent accuracy. Less waste, more people fed. I believe that system has saved the lives of more than ten times the number I've saved using the Endbringer communication system."

"Huh."

"It's not flashy. Most people who depend on the food banks don't know about it, and it doesn't matter. A life saved is a life saved," Dragon said.

"I see."

"Self-driving software would be higher on the list, but cars themselves are expensive and it hasn't been adopted widely yet. Though I still estimate it's saved a few thousand people per year already," Dragon said. "Really, working with large, statistical problems isn't glamorous but the fact is, if you want to maximize lives saved… you have to do some math."

"God, that makes healing a single person at a time sound pointless," Amy said glumly.

"Don't look at it that way. You've definitely had a profound effect on thousands of people that my own systems could never match," Dragon said. "We each have our own specialties. I'm more inclined to solve the 'wide' problems while you seem to be extremely effective at 'narrow' issues. I just have to look at the math to figure out which problem to tackle next."

"So, according to math, what's the leading killer worldwide?" Amy asked.

"Age," Dragon said. "Well, only partly joking there. But I believe cardiovascular disease and cancer are up there, even higher than communicable disease. Then there's nutritional deficiencies. Psychological and neurological issues is next. Even including Endbringers, injury and trauma is actually pretty far down the list, though it's hard to separate out confounding issues."

"Confounding issues?"

Lisa was the one that answered for Dragon. "A lot of things affect each other. For example, poor nutrition leads to poor health. Poor health leads to poor performance. Poor performance leads to loss of job. Loss of job leads to desperation. Desperation leads to crime, which leads to injury, psychological issues, drug abuse… so what's the real cause of death? The numbers don't lie, but they don't tell you the whole truth either."

"So basically, we shouldn't all switch to fixing heart disease," I said, partly as a joke. I mean, I could, with a little more study. But Amy could do that herself. Where should I really have put my efforts? Farming? I'd picked a brain specialty only out of interest.

"Well, the world isn't linear," Dragon pointed out. "We can't just focus on one issue at a time. If everyone simply devoted all their efforts on the number one problem, all the other problems would quickly get worse. We need everyone to work on different things simultaneously, even if they aren't the number one problem."

That was a bit of a relief to me, hearing that from Dragon.

"Ugh. I'm going to take a nap," Amy said. "See you at dinner."

Each day, we tested several designs, none of which seemed to be the breakthrough we needed. I certainly learned a lot more with Dragon doing some hands-on guidance; I could make my bots smaller, stronger, and more efficient, but they were just slightly improved versions of what I already had. There were no remarkably game-changing alterations.

Amy, surprisingly, was the key despite not being a Tinker herself. While she couldn't figure out the minutiae of Tinkertech, her alternate perspective was the major shift we needed. Score one for thinking outside the box. To her the solution was obvious.

Proteins.

Just a simple suggestion like that. Proteins performed millions of functions within the human body. Billions more if you looked to all of life on Earth. Nature's own version of nanomachines. And yet they all were manufactured the same way; they all had the same general backbone. Their differences came from little attachments and their different shapes, folding in on themselves in various ways. To someone with a healing power who understood all this intuitively, the answer for her was obvious.

I realized this was probably the key to a revolutionary jump I had been searching for. My bots had more or less stagnated at the size of small cells; this would allow me to jump all the way down to molecular sizes.

Dragon had shown me how to create carbon nanotubes reliably. We needed some further modifications on top of that, but If I forced them to fold one way, I could get them to do one thing, and if I told them to fold a different way I could get them to do another function. I could see it happening. A single bot with an even simpler body but with even more possibilities.

Dragon, on the other hand, wasn't overly concerned with having multi-purpose bots. She preferred specialization over flexibility. After all, she owned multiple factories around all of North America. If she needed a different design, she could just create a whole new assembly line. But the Nanothorn still had multiple functions it needed to actually do its job – basically, cutting, moving, and coordinating. So the development was still useful to her.

Dragon was nice enough to dedicate multiple servers to protein folding simulations, re-adapted to nanotube-folding simulators. Apparently this was something that had already been researched ages ago for medical science, although it had been dropped as more bio-tinkers were discovered, able to instinctively invent highly specialized medicines or other drugs. Still, some people who were attempting to mass-manufacture those bio-tinker products had kept at it; Dragon and the Guild definitely had some resources dedicated to finding some kind of mass-producible universal medical salve.

With Dragon running simulations, I was able to easily build and configure the bots to what seemed like promising candidates. And whenever I created and tested a successful configuration, Dragon would borrow the essential elements, minus the versatility, and make a version that could withstand the extreme power and pressures of an Endbringer battle.

Even though I wasn't purely a Tinker, I think I understood what people called a Tinker Frenzy. Same with Lisa. All of us bouncing ideas off each other drove us to work even harder, sparking even more creativity and determination to see the job done. We were actually ahead of schedule in optimizing the Nanothorn design, all while replacing my own bots with an improved version as well.

Dragon was right though; it was amazing to be able to bounce designs off each other in-person, crafting and designing things together. Even Lisa had taken to throwing an idea at us once in a while, while Amy still hung out occasionally.

What I was allowed to do at the hospital was still limited. So was Amy, but it affected me less. That was because hospital work was only one of many things I was doing.

Like in Brockton Bay, I was still fighting crime. Honestly, there wasn't all that much for me to do. Abyssal patrolled around to prevent crime occasionally, but even while I searched for my bots, there wasn't much. Cape-wise, at least. There were still the usual drunken brawls, robberies, vandalism, and stuff like that. Those hadn't changed. But the Merchants had been driven underground, and possibly chased out of the city. I didn't hear a peep from Squealer's monster trucks, so either she had an extremely advanced stealth system, or it wasn't anywhere within a five-mile radius.

In short, I felt like I didn't have a whole lot left to do. Even without New Wave, and the loss of Armsmaster and Browbeat, it seemed like the PRT hadn't slowed down. In fact, they seemed to be doing better than ever. I mean, aside from the fact that a villain was the director, but the Empire hadn't been able to rebound, but the ABB didn't seem to be expanding rapidly either.

Of course, I was messing around with their operations plenty. Destroying their drug and weapon stocks was easy. Their resources were going down the drain; even among other criminals their reputations were being tarnished. Selling cocaine that was completely ineffective, as if they had been cut with powdered sugar, even made the drug dealers mad at their suppliers. Weapons that were brought to fights were little more than hunks of metal, causing them to lose fights embarrassingly to people who brought knives to gun fights. The remaining tatters of the gangs were withering away.

Except for the ABB. They had not been overly reliant on the drug trade, but still had decent cash flow through prostitution and extortion. That was harder to influence, though I could stop the violence. Sure, revenue was down, but not nearly as severe as the Merchants. Lung was an ever-present threat that even I still couldn't stop.

Coil seemed to be planning something to deal with him – and as much as I wanted to drag him out of the office and make him "disappear" mysteriously, I had to admit he was actually doing his job for some reason, and he had the resources to take down Lung after all. Besides, it would be better to actually pin him with a crime so he wouldn't be remembered as a hero.

Meanwhile in Concord, I was still spreading through the city. New Wave was beginning its patrols, and the police gave them crime-maps to show them which areas of the city were hotspots. I followed the same maps to know where to spread my bots to first, while also looking for local sources of raw material to make more bots.

I also didn't want to actually use Abyssal here, either. It would be a little too obvious if Abyssal just happened to follow me to a different city. So while I used my bots here in this city, I had to only give some subtle help to the police. Make criminals trip, or slip randomly. Make guns malfunction. For violent ones, I had to use the knock-them-unconscious-via-bloodstream trick, but often that left them with a lesser charge, or no arrest at all. It was hard to charge a criminal with assault when they mysteriously fell asleep before actually hitting anyone.

Those that I stopped with witnesses around, though, led to easier arrests. Nobody investigated too much as to why a criminal "accidentally" slipped or tripped conveniently. New Wave's first patrols were actually very successful – partly because some criminals hadn't heard the news that New Wave was here, and partly because I made the captures easier. Mainly, Brandish was just happy that Glory Girl hadn't caused thousands in collateral damage on their first night out. The whole family was in good spirits.

That is, except for Amy. It seemed to cause her to distance herself even more. Right now, she was sulking somewhat in the backyard. She wasn't reading or listening to music, but instead… playing with some weeds? No, wait, she seemed to be messing around with some plants.

I didn't know she could do that.

As much as I wanted to ask her about it, I decided to give her time. I'd kept my "other" abilities secret from them for so long, it was only fair to wait for her to come out when she was ready to tell me herself.

I wasn't sure what took longer, me getting used to Colin visiting, or him getting used to working with us. It was clear that Dragon was his one island of stability, he latched on to her like a drowning man to a life preserver. He was at his most agreeable when he was working, and by most agreeable I meant that he was laser-focused on his work and only spoke to discuss further designs. Otherwise he was fairly irritable, especially when he left for the day.

I was surprised that Colin actually put down his tools. He had just finished a rudimentary power armour frame, a new halberd, and a helmet with sensors and displays. I thought he would work twenty-four hours a day if he had the chance. Technically I didn't need to sleep, but Lisa and Dad did; so we closed up shop at night. He was looking straight at me, looking as uncomfortable as I was from his stare.

"Eunoia. Taylor. I would like to... discuss a few past events," he said.

"Uh... what about?" I asked.

"Shadow Stalker," he said. "After Browbeat's death, I have been thinking of her a lot. I am starting to consider that Browbeat is not the first Ward death under my command, even though she was no longer a Ward at the time, I feel some responsibility for her."

I froze. I suddenly felt trapped. I knew Dragon was good friends with him, definitely far closer to him than to me. Dragon had complete control over the workshop we were sitting inside. I needed to gather my bots in case he tried something, Abyssal could break me out if they tried to trap me. The compact workshop suddenly felt cramped, claustrophobic. I'd killed one of his former Wards and everyone knew how prideful he had been of being their leader and guardian. Maybe he'd been attempting to find the right opportunity to strike, now that he had a working weapon -

I was instinctively forming Abyssal behind me but I didn't have enough bots inside of the vehicle.

"Taylor... we're allies now," Dragon reminded me over the room's speakers. "I believe it would be better for cohesiveness if we just understood each other's pasts better. Don't let any hidden bitterness hold us back. We're all on the same side. I know the two of you haven't had the best working relationship prior to this."

"We never really worked together," I admitted. "I avoided the Protectorate."

"You did initially come to the Protectorate though, correct?" Colin said. "I remember reviewing the camera footage after someone didn't show up for their appointment. You were there for a few minutes, and changed your mind."

I nodded. "Yeah. I was going to join the Wards, but when I realized Sophia was there, I knew I'd just be bullied there and at school."

Colin sighed and sat down, resting his elbows on the workbench. He didn't look at me was he spoke, staring at his tools instead. "I would like to say that I watched over all my Wards, but that would be a lie. I have difficulty telling the difference between friendly teasing and bullying. Two of my own Wards were feeling bullied by Shadow Stalker, and I didn't even realize. As hard as it is to admit... I think you made the right choice."

Even Lisa turned to look at him curiously. Was it so out of character for Armsmaster – no, Colin – to admit that? I didn't know him well enough.

"There are merely a few things I want to know, to settle my conscience," he said. "On the day of Shadow Stalker's death… how did you find her?"

"She found me. She was trying to kill Lisa," I said defensively, pointing at my friend sitting on the other side of the workshop.

"She's telling the truth," Dragon assured him. I wondered if she had some lie-detection capability, and how accurate it was. Then again, she may have had access to the data at the time it happened.

"I understand. So she had time to find you herself, before we could even find her," Colin said with frustration. "I should have been able to track her down, diverted more manpower after her escape."

Lisa answered him. "Coil. He hired the Travellers to break her out, in order to make the PRT look incompetent. Using her to kill me was just using two loose ends to get rid of each other. Ugh, my power makes everything make so much sense after it's useful."

"Yeah, it certainly swayed the lawsuit when that happened," I said. I tried to avoid thinking about actually killing Sophia. As much as I had hated her, the memory of it still felt uncomfortably gruesome.

"But if he's now the Director of the PRT, why would he want the PRT's reputation ruined?" Colin thought aloud.

"To make himself look better," Dragon said. "If he can successfully foist all the failings on Piggot and yourself, remove both of you, then make himself look far better - nobody would question his decisions or authority. It's a common political tactic, especially right before elections."

Colin rubbed his hands through his hair. "I've played right into his hands. Am I really that predictable, Dragon? I've failed Shadow Stalker, I've failed Browbeat, I've failed the Protectorate. Perhaps… I was never meant to be a leader."

"Not everyone is, Colin. But that simply means you still need to find your specialty," Dragon said. "Know where you need to focus your energies. Maybe it's like what I was discussing with Panacea - perhaps you are better at wide-scale problems instead of narrow-scale, specific issues."

"But that's a pretty sweet halberd and power armour. Aren't there specific problems you still want to solve? Like, maybe, justice for Browbeat? You know the real criminal behind his death is walking free right now," Lisa goaded him.

Colin didn't answer her, but when he turned back to his workbench, he looked more determined than ever.

Author's Note:

I don't know how/when my spellchecker auto-changed Colin to Collin, but thanks to people who pointed it out. Had to edit my dictionary settings for some reason.