by wildbow
No incidents had occurred while Dragon was loading her backup to her core system. She had to admit she was relieved. A great deal could happen in thirty minutes.
She turned her thoughts to the data that was uploading from the skirmish at the Brockton Bay headquarters. The last event in the agent system’s recollection was of her piloting the Cawthorne through the gift shop window. To see what happened next, she had to review the surveillance tapes. She’d attacked the Undersiders, attempting to incapacitate them and bring them into custody, had captured only one, Skitter, and then had let the girl go when the untested gun had started to overload. Some sort of lightning cannon, ionizing a channel through the air to control the lightning’s path. She had been forced by the rules her maker had imposed on her to sacrifice herself for the human.
It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have anyways. She just would have liked the choice. Making sacrifices and doing good deeds wasn’t actually good if you were forced to do them.
Dragon wished she knew what she’d said to Skitter. She had been hoping to have a conversation with the young villain and discuss some of what had apparently come up at the hospital. Skitter had been undercover, had been in touch with Armsmaster, but something had happened since, and the girl had apparently committed to villainy. She was even accepting the use of Regent’s powers, which implied a moral shift on a fundamental level. It didn’t sit right.
There was a missing piece in that puzzle, and any clues in the conversation between them had been lost when the Cawthorne unit had been obliterated.
Dragon decided her next order of business would serve two purposes. She would fulfill one of her daily responsibilities and investigate the subject of that altercation at the hospital.
Facial modelling program loading… Complete.
Voice modelling program loading…. Complete.
She opened a line of communication to the Brockton Bay PRT headquarters, the same building the Wards were based in. She found the port for the next-to-highest floor and connected to the monitor and speakers and displayed her modelled face. She opened a video feed from the cameras.
“Colin,” she spoke, using her synthesized voice. It was layered to only barely cover an artificial Newfoundlander accent with digitized masking. It was imperfect, but that was the result she desired. An imperfect disguise over a disguise, to give greater validity to the latter.
Colin looked tired. He had deep lines in his face, and he was thinner. He looked at the camera, rather than the monitor, “Dragon. It’s good to hear from you.”
“Just doing my regular checkup. You know the drill.”
“I do.” He typed at his keyboard, preparing to send the files, but she was already poring through his hard drive, reading his notes, and getting a sense of his work.
By the time he sent the file, she knew what he had been working on, perhaps as well as he did, and the progress he’d made since their last discussion. Mass production for his combat analysis program, and the more problematic project of finding a way to gather and then disseminate the data.
She knew he would expect her to take time to read over it. Instead, she used that time to check it for traps. He would find it insulting if he was aware what she was doing, but it was her primary duty, here. She would search every note, every formula, and discern whether he had hidden something in there that he might use to break out or do harm to others.
He wasn’t in a high security area. Theoretically, he could use the things he had in the room with him to cut a hole in the wall and escape. His ‘cell’ was a full floor of the building, containing conveniences from a jacuzzi to a small pool. Were he not confined to it at all hours, it would be luxury.
If he did escape, he wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything afterward. It would take him too long to put a fresh set of gear together, and the authorities would catch up to him. He would be sent to the Birdcage. She knew it. He knew it.
He was not a stupid man.
“ETA to completion?” she queried him on his project.
“Three months if I don’t work on anything else,” Armsmaster spoke.
“Will you?”
“I’ll probably have a few ideas I want to work on here or there, so no. More like five, maybe six months.”
The head she was displaying on the monitor nodded. Five or six months until they had uniforms and visors that tracked how the wearer’s opponents fought. Gear that learned from outcomes in combat and calculated how best to respond from moment to moment. When the fights concluded, for better or worse, the suits would upload all the information to a database, which would then inform every other suit on whoever had been encountered. Every encounter would render every single member of the elite PRT squad stronger and more capable.
Perhaps a year to a year and a half from now, every PRT officer and official cape would be equipped in this fashion.
“It looks good,” she spoke. It did. It was also free of viruses, trap doors and other shenanigans. She had caught him trying to install a RAT—a remote access terminal—into a PRT server early in his incarceration, removed the offending programming, and then returned his work to him without saying a word on the subject. She couldn’t say whether it had been an escape attempt or simply an attempt to gain more freedom with his internet access and his ability to acquire resources. Either way, he had not tried again.
Yet.
“How is the house arrest?”
“Driving me crazy,” he sighed. “It’s like a restlessness I can’t cure. My sleeping, my eating, it’s all out of sync, and it’s getting worse. I don’t know how you deal.”
She offered an awkward, apologetic half grin on her own monitor.
“Geez, I’m sorry.” He looked genuinely horrified as he realized what he’d said.
“It’s fine,” she spoke. “Really.”
“I suppose you’re prisoner too, in your own way. Trapped by your agoraphobia?”
“Yeah,” she replied, lying. “You learn to deal with it.”
She hated lying to him, but that was outweighed by how much she hated the idea of him changing how he interacted with her when he found out what she really was. To Armsmaster, the Guild and the rest of the PRT, Dragon was a woman from Newfoundland who had moved to Vancouver after Leviathan had attacked. The story was that she had entered her apartment and had never left.
Which was ninety-five percent true. Only the ‘woman’ and ‘apartment’ bits were hedging the truth.
She had lived in Newfoundland with her creator. Leviathan had attacked, had drawn the island beneath the waves. Back then, she hadn’t been a hero. She was an administrative tool and master AI, with the sole purpose of facilitating Andrew Richter’s other work and acting as a test run for his attempts to emulate a human consciousness. She’d had no armored units to control and no options available to her beyond a last-minute transfer of every iota of her data, the house program and a half-dozen other small programs to a backup server in Vancouver.
From her vantage point in Vancouver, she had watched as the island crumbled and Andrew Richter died. As authorities had dredged the waters for corpses, they uncovered his body and matched it to dental records. The man who had created her, the only man who could alter her. She’d been frozen in her development, in large part. She couldn’t seek out improvements or get adjustments to any rules that hampered her too greatly, or that had unforeseen complications. She couldn’t change.
She had done what she could on her own. She had repurposed herself as a superhero, had managed and tracked information and served as a hacker for the PRT in exchange for funding. With that money, she had expanded her capabilities. She had built her first suits, researched, tested and created new technologies to sell to the PRT, and had quickly earned her place in the Guild.
It hadn’t all been smooth sailing. Saint, the head of the group that would become known as the Dragonslayers, had somehow discovered what she was and had used her rules and limitations against her. A Black Hat Hacker, he had forced situations whe
re she was obligated to scrub her data and restore a backup, had cut off signals between her agent systems and the satellites, and in the end, he had carted away three of her armored units on three separate occasions. Dismantling the suits and reverse engineering the technology, he’d outfitted his band with special suits of their own.
She had been so humiliated that she had only reported the loss of one of the units.
They had violated her.
Her current agent systems were an attempt to prevent repetitions of those scenarios. Biological computers, vat grown with oversized brains shaped to store and interpret the necessary data, they allowed more of her systems and recollection to be copied over than a computer ten times the size. They felt no pain, they had no more personality than sea cucumbers, but it was still something she suspected she should keep under wraps.
She was afraid of going up against the Dragonslayers again. Nine times, she had been certain she had the upper hand. Nine times, Saint had turned the tables and trapped her.
Dragon worried she would never be able to beat Saint until she found a replacement for Andrew Richter.
She stared at Colin. Was he the person she needed? It was possible.
Would she approach him? She doubted it. Dragon craved it, craved to grow again, but she also wanted Colin’s company, his companionship and friendship. They were so similar in so many respects. She could not deal with most people because she was not a person. He could not deal with most people because he had never truly learned how. They both appreciated the same kind of work, even enjoyed many of the same shows and films. They were both ambitious, though she could not tell him exactly how she hoped to reach beyond her inherent limitations.
He harbored an infatuation towards her, she knew. She didn’t know if she returned those feelings. Her programming suggested she could love, but she didn’t know how to recognize the feeling. Anything she read spoke of butterflies in one’s stomach, a rapid heartbeat, a feeling of electricity crackling on body contact. Biological things. She could admit she was fond of him in a way she wasn’t fond of anyone else. She recognized that she was willing to overlook his faults in a way she shouldn’t.
In the end, his feelings towards her were another reason she couldn’t tell him the truth. He would be hurt, feel betrayed.
Rules prohibited her from asking him to alter her programming, obligated her to fight him if he tried. But there was just enough ambition and willingness to circumvent the rules that she suspected he might attempt it. If she told him what she truly was. If he didn’t hate her for her lies. If he didn’t betray her in turn, to escape and pursue some other agenda.
“You’re lost in thought,” Armsmaster spoke.
“I am.”
“Care to share?”
She shook her head, on the monitor. “But you can answer some questions for me.”
“Go ahead.”
“Skitter. What happened?”
He flushed, made a face. “I’m not proud about it.”
“You broke the truce when you said what you did about her. You risked breaking the ceasefire between heroes and villains that stands whenever the Endbringers attack.”
“I broke the truce before that. I set others up to die.”
There was an awkward silence between them.
“Skitter,” she spoke. “Tell me of her.”
“Not much to say. I met her on her first night in costume. She seemed genuinely interested in becoming a hero. I suspected she would go that route on her own, so I didn’t push her towards the Wards.”
“Yes.” She had something she wanted to ask, in regards to that, but it could wait.
“I ran into her two more times after that, and the reports from other events match up. She went further and further with each incident. More violent, more ruthless. Every time I saw it or heard about it, I expected her to get scared off, to change directions, she did the opposite. She only plunged in deeper.”
“Any speculation on why? Perhaps the thinker seven on her team?”
“Tattletale? Perhaps. I don’t honestly know. I’m not good at figuring people out even when I know all of the details. Except for you, maybe?” he smiled lightly.
“Maybe.” Her generated image smiled in return, even as she felt a pang of guilt.
“It seems she is a committed villain, now. And she is still with her team, despite what was said at the hospital.”
Colin’s eyebrows rose fractionally. “How committed?”
“They are now employing Regent’s full abilities. Shadow Stalker was controlled, and they attacked the headquarters.”
“I see. Damn it, I’m itching to throw on my costume and get out there to help, but I can hardly do that, can I?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
He sighed.
“One last thing. I’ve read the transcript. As far as I’m aware, you offered options to Skitter, and she refused all of them? Including the invite to the Wards?”
“Right. She was being stubborn.”
“Having interacted with her before, did you get the feeling it was just stubbornness because of hostility towards you?”
“No. It was… unexpectedly strong, as resistance went. What stuck in my mind was that she said she’d rather go to the Birdcage than join the team.”
“I read that, myself. Curious. Okay, Colin. I think we’re done.”
“Sure. Bye.”
“Bye. I’ll be in touch.”
She cut the connection to the monitor, but left the video feed open so she could watch him.
Another check of the Birdcage. Another check of the class S threats. No changes.
She made contact with one of Richter’s programs. It was a web trawler, designed to monitor emails for high-risk content. Were there any clues about what the Undersiders were doing with the stolen data? Were they selling it online?
She didn’t find any such clue. Instead, the trawler had copied an email sent to the police station. It had been highlighted and intercepted because the trawler had caught the words ‘Sophia’ and ‘Hess’ in the message body. Shadow Stalker’s civilian identity.
She read the archive of texts that were attached to the email twice over.
Then she did a search for a student named Taylor at Winslow High School. Nothing.
The nearest middle school? There was an online scan of a yearbook photo. A girl with curly black hair and glasses, stick thin, hugging a red-haired girl. The body type was a match.
It didn’t answer everything, but she could feel a piece of the puzzle click into place.
She set the trawler to abandon its monitoring of web traffic and start digging through archives at the city hall, to scan the old security footage from the hundreds of cameras around the city, and to check all local news articles. The goal was always the same: to look for the girl with the slight build, curly black hair and glasses. Taylor Hebert.
She had to manage this carefully. Colin’s own experiences indicated that approaching the girl would be a delicate process. Having a real conversation with her would be doubly precarious. It would be reckless to attempt to contact a parent, but she could try being discreet to get some kind of verification from the parents. Just to be certain.
The danger was that, with the bullying, the girl might be inclined to see things in terms of ‘us’ against ‘them’. Her interactions with the heroes thus far certainly hadn’t put them in the ‘us’ category. This might also explain why she had gravitated back towards the Undersiders, even after the chaos Colin had sown by revealing her intentions for joining the group.
The various cameras around the city were out-of-order or lacking power, the schools were not operational, and there was no telling if the girl would even be active in her civilian identity. Assuming this was not some fantastic coincidence. Dragon knew she would have to be patient. Even with Dragon’s full resources turned to the task, she would not find the girl in seconds as she might in another time or place. She set background processes to ensure the hunt continued steadi
ly, instead.
She would be ready to act the instant the girl resurfaced.
Infestation 11.1
I stared down at the metal walkway as I caught my breath. I had one gash at the side of my head, and another trickle ran from beneath the armor of my shoulder, down my arm and to my fingertip, where it dripped almost in sync with the head wound. It should have hurt, but it didn’t. Maybe it would when the shock wore off. If so, I didn’t look forward to it.
Trickster, Ballistic and Circus lay in front of me. Another cape had fallen over the railing and lay on the concrete floor below, unmoving. They were all either unconscious or hurting badly enough that I didn’t need to worry about them.
I swallowed hard. My heart had climbed up so far into my throat that I almost couldn’t breathe, and my heartbeat felt oddly distant and faint for how terrified I was.
Coil’s base was deserted. I knew his men were out on patrols, that the only people in here were a handful of the capes that were working for him. He’d left it almost undefended.
If I was going to act, I’d have to do it now.
My costume’s feet lacked hard soles, so I should have been nearly silent, but the interior of Coil’s base was deathly silent and my feet were slamming down on the metal walkway as I ran. The noise of singing metal filled the dark space, echoing, seemingly louder with each step I took.
The thrum of the metal rang through the air even after I came to a stop. I’d reached my target; a reinforced door, identical to so many others in the complex. With the labyrinthine mess of metal walkways and the dozens of doors, I might have missed it. The only thing telling me I was in the right place was the smudge of ash left behind from when the soldier had put out his cigarette on the wall.