Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  I exhaled slowly. I felt eerily calm, while my power roared at the periphery of my consciousness. It was as if my bugs were screaming at me to attack, to retaliate. To strip flesh from bone, sting and bite.

  I pushed my bugs back, told them to go still. It had been months since my power and I were this at odds. Months since I’d been in the bathroom of Winslow High, telling myself I didn’t want to fight, that I didn’t want to retaliate against the bullies.

  But now I was left to wonder if that was my subconscious or my passenger?

  “Villain!” the PRT officer bellowed as he trained his gun on me.

  The reaction was oddly delayed, as each one of the fifty or sixty people in the lobby turned to the PRT officer for a cue, for some indication of the danger or the direction of the threat. They saw the direction that he was facing and the direction his gun was pointing, and turned their attention to me.

  Only then did the civilians and unarmed staff scream, run, and seek cover. Only then did the PRT officers around me draw weapons and point them at me. A half-dozen PRT officers in full body armor, with their lethal and nonlethal weapons trained on me.

  “Get down!” one officer screamed.

  I slowly dropped to my knees, then folded my hands behind my head.

  There were sounds of footsteps. I could see Miss Militia and the Wards exiting a room behind the front desk. I tried to think of what my bugs had told me about the layout on past visits. It was a meeting room, if I was remembering right.

  Miss Militia, Clockblocker, Flechette, Vista, and Crucible stared, eyes wide. Miss Militia’s expression was one of concern, her eyebrows furrowed. She was still, compared to the PRT officers around me, who were shouting at me, asking questions I couldn’t answer. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, as if I could find the same kind of refuge Tattletale had been seeking, find a stillness by shutting out the chaos of the outside world.

  I’d said my goodbyes to my team, as much as I’d been able.

  I’d put my ducks in a row, again, as much as I could. I’d have to trust to Grue to see to Regent and Aisha, keep them on the right path. I’d have to trust Tattletale to look after Grue.

  I’d decided, in the course of talking to my mom, that I’d have to cross a line if I was going to follow Dinah’s instructions, if I was going to achieve everything I needed and wanted to achieve. To do it, I’d told her, I’d have to be heartless, and this was the most heartless, inhuman thing I could do. Leaving my people. Leaving Rachel. Leaving Brian.

  I thought of the paper, of the words from Dinah. ‘Cut ties’. I hope you know what you’re doing, Dinah. because this is as cut as I can get them.

  My eyes met Miss Militia’s.

  “I surrender.”

  21.x (Donation Interlude #1; Number Man)

  The Number Man swept one finger over the touchscreen display. Two point six billion dollars here, a hundred thousand dollars there.

  Money was the blood of civilized society, its currents running through everything and everyone. Where money was insufficient, things withered. People starved, sickened and died, constructions eroded, even ideas perished. Where funds were plentiful, the same things blossomed with new life.

  And money was, in the end, little more than the product of collective imagination. A slip of paper or a coin had no value beyond that of the material it was fashioned of. It only took on a life of its own when people as a whole collectively agreed that certain papers and coins were worth something.

  Only then did people bleed and die for it. For a fantasy, a faith given form in hard, concrete numbers.

  Then again, much of society was built on a series of shared delusions. Clothing was little more than scraps of particular materials with particular geometries, but people clung to the idea of fashion. Style. Good and bad fashion was another belief system, one which all members of a culture were indoctrinated into. Breaking certain conventions didn’t only challenge the aesthetic sensibilities of others, but it challenged their sense of self. It reminded them, subconsciously, of the very pretendings they clung to.

  Only those with power could stand against society’s tides, flaunt the collective’s ‘safe’ aesthetic. When one had enough power, others couldn’t rise against them and safely say something calculated to reduce their own dissonance and remind the offending party of the unspoken rules.

  When one had enough power to take a life with a twitch of a finger, a thought, they earned the right to wear skin-tight clothing and call themselves Hero, or Legend. To wear a mask and name themselves something inane like ‘the Cockatoo’ and still take themselves seriously.

  He armored himself in normalcy. He wore only a button-up shirt and thin-rimmed glasses, his blond hair cut into a short style that was easy to maintain. To anyone on the street, he wouldn’t appear to be anything but a bookish middle-aged man.

  He hadn’t always been this bland.

  The Number Man stepped away from the screen. His office was plain, white tile with white walls. The rear of it was a floor-to-ceiling window, looking out on a foreign landscape, a place far from Earth. Still an Earth, but not the one he’d been born to, not even the one he was in at this very moment. The Doormaker maintained a portal to that foreign landscape, just behind the Number Man’s office and changed it on request. Today, it was a mountaintop view of a wilderness with a crimson foliage and gray branches, the sky perpetually overcast.

  One of a number of Earths where humans had never been.

  The Number Man had gone to some lengths to spruce up this place. He’d never liked the eternal white of this complex, so he’d adorned his walls with other images. To his right, there was a large print of the Golden Mean, the Phi decimal as a fractal image in gold against black paper, with mathematical notation surrounding it.

  Opposite it, Dali’s Crucifixion, Corpus Hypercubus. The painting was blown up to one-and-a-half times the size. Jesus crucified on a fourth dimensional cross.

  No chairs. He’d worked out the dangers of sitting against the convenience and decided it wasn’t worth falling into that trap. When he did enter his office, he walked, paced, tapped his foot while pondering deeper problems, stood and stared out the window at whatever landscape he had outside his window in a given week.

  He crossed his room and touched a screen. It lit up, filled with data fed to his computers from a doorway to Earth Bet. The pulse of society, right under his thumb.

  The Elite, a villain group expanding a subtle control over the eastern seaboard of America, putting pressure on rogues to bring them under their thumb as performers, thinkers, designers and innovators. He could see the numbers, extrapolate from the data to gauge their rate of growth. They were developing too slowly to be useful, not developing fast enough to outpace the predicted end of the world. They’d reach Brockton Bay in about a year. There would be time to decide if countermeasures were needed in the meantime.

  Gesellschaft, a nationalistic organization half a planet away from the Elite, was moving large funds in anticipation of a small war. Money was being laundered through cover operations and businesses, almost impossible to track, unless one was able to take in the bigger picture, to see the intent, the beginnings and endings of it. They were investing in transportation, and their fundings seemed to decline at the same time some notable arms dealers in Southern Europe found themselves richer by an equal amount. The Number Man flicked his way past a series of windows detailing the transaction amounts. Arms dealers who specialized in nuclear materials. This was pointing towards terrorism, and not on a small scale. Troubling, but the system would address them. The major hero group in Germany, the Meisters, would attend to the problem. It didn’t warrant an expenditure of Cauldron’s full resources, not when things were already on shaky ground.

  Still, it wouldn’t do to have a disaster at this crucial juncture. The Protectorate was required for just a little longer. If they were going to make it through this, there couldn’t be any substantial distractions.

  Gesellschaft hadn’t elec
ted to seek out the Number Man and make use of his services, as so many supervillains around the world did. He had no compunctions, as a consequence, about interfering with them. He tapped into a series of bank accounts he hadn’t touched in some time, then scheduled a large number of transfers to the personal Gesellschaft accounts. Ten or twenty thousand Euros at a time.

  Where funds weren’t likely to be held for moderation, he scheduled more transfers and disputed the charges. The transfer amounts were large enough to raise flags, to draw attention to the accounts in question. The banks were on the lookout for suspicious activity, and a total of five hundred thousand Euros appearing in six checking accounts with typical balances of under a thousand Euros would be suspicious enough to merit a serious look.

  That was only to slow them down. They would want to investigate, to be careful and find out where the money came from. Later, if the situation was resolved and they somehow managed to hold on to the money, they would want to know where the money disappeared to, as he reclaimed it with a severe interest rate. They would suspect interference, would wonder if this outside agent had connected their civilian identities to their personas within Gesellschaft.

  Which he had.

  The transfers took him less than thirty seconds to arrange, and it would occupy them for one or two days.

  Freezing the larger business accounts would take only a little more time. One or two minutes. The meetings with the arms dealers had fit a vague schedule. The arms dealers always took a different route, but they traveled enough that they needed to buy gas at one point on the way. There was always a large transfer of funds.

  He laid a trap, calculated to start falling into place when the gas was bought in the time window. The main accounts that the Gesellschaft used to manage their funds would be frozen by the time the meeting was underway. They’d likely find themselves at the meeting, the product delivered, but with no funds to pay for it.

  He swept his fingertips along the window, dismissing the task. Who else? Where were the priorities?

  The C.U.I. had bought a parahuman. Not so unusual. Higher rates, as of late, but then, the C.U.I. faced a slight chance of an Endbringer attack in coming weeks. They would want to bolster their forces, add parahumans to their peculiar team.

  Tattletale had been actively separating herself from the Number Man, issuing new accounts to the Undersiders and her organization. Not so surprising. Eidolon had outed him, announcing the Number Man as a Cauldron-involved cape to a crowd.

  Irritating. At least it had been manageable. He didn’t exactly have a great deal of traction with the hero community. Tattletale was one loss, and he was hands-off with the Undersiders, regardless.

  The King’s Men were in debt. Easy enough to manage an anonymous donation, keep them afloat for another two months.

  Child’s play, all of it. The money, with its imaginary value, it was something he breathed. Setting up the tools to manipulate it had taken a little time, but that was it. Numbers were the fundament of the universe, as much a fabrication as money in some ways, more real than anything else in others.

  He understood numbers, and through them, he understood everything.

  A soft beep marked the arrival of somebody at his door. He turned. “Enter.”

  There was only one person it could logically be. The Doctor only sent her personal bodyguard and right-hand woman to him, the others didn’t have access to this building.

  Except it wasn’t a person. The door swung open, but there was nobody on the other side.

  “You can’t handle it yourself?” he asked.

  No reply, of course.

  He broke into a quick stride, hurrying through the door. “Contessa is busy, I take it?”

  Again, no reply.

  He reached an intersection and felt his hair stir imperceptibly, little more than what one might excuse as the exhaust from an air conditioning vent thirty feet away. He took that as his cue to change direction.

  He knew where he was going, now. He was relieved that it wasn’t the worst case scenario, if one could call it that. A mercenary calling herself Faultline had been leading a team that was opening portals for exorbitant amounts, traveling the world. It was a matter of time before someone contacted her to ask her to open a portal to here, or her own curiosity about Cauldron happened to lead her down that same road.

  If and when that happened, the young woman and her team… perhaps organization was more fitting now that their numbers had grown, would get a visit from Contessa. They would be removed from consideration, the portal would be sealed, and Cauldron would be safe again.

  In the meantime, they’d let things carry on like they were. Faultline would make contacts, she’d find like-minded individuals, and through her, Cauldron would uncover enemies, to be eliminated in one fell swoop.

  At the very least, right here and right now, the threat wasn’t an invader. Given the layout of the complex, and the fact that whole wings of the structure were on separate continents, linked only by the Doormaker, there were only a few possibilities for why an invader would be here. Not that it really mattered, it would be near impossible for someone to find their way here, now.

  No, this was a threat from within.

  Double doors unlocked and slid open. The Number Man wrinkled his nose as he entered the basement areas of the building.

  When the Simurgh had attacked Madison, she’d copied Haywire’s technology to open a gate to a building much like this one. A research facility. The portal had dumped the buildings, soil, plant life and all the residents into the city on Earth Bet, costing Cauldron a horrific amount. Even a stockpile of formulae had been lost.

  Perhaps most frustrating was the knowledge, the near certainty, that they’d been near a breakthrough. She’d sensed, somehow, had known, and had dashed it to pieces with the ease that a person might tear down a painstakingly made sandcastle.

  They’d rebuilt, and this facility was somewhat different. More reinforced, connected to the surrounding terrain.

  Silly, to think she’d do the same thing twice, but they’d felt it necessary, after feeling the losses of that last attack.

  The architecture here wasn’t white, and he was somewhat relieved at that. The tile was dark gray, lit by fluorescent bulbs and the light from windows at the end of the hallway. At regular intervals down the hallway, there were cells. Only some had windows to keep the occupants within. Others had only three walls and a white line that marked the division between the cell and the hallway.

  In each cell was an occupant. Large metal plates engraved with numbers helped track who they were, matched to the numbers hidden in the right ‘arm’ of the tattoo that each subject received; a series of white dots that looked like nothing more than areas where the tattoo hadn’t taken.

  The cells on the right were new test subjects, lost and angry. He didn’t hesitate as he walked past them. The angry words they spat in alien languages were nothing to him. Their glares and hatred less than that.

  Their powers were only a small consideration. It was a rare parahuman that didn’t try to move beyond the boundary of their cell. There was no forcefield to stop them. They inevitably ignored the warnings and gestures from those in neighboring cells, stepping free, or they used their power, teleporting free or lashing out at one of the staff. The Doctor, the Number Man, Contessa.

  They learned after the first time.

  Several staff members were housed in the cells to the Number Man’s left. Those cells didn’t open directly into the hallway. There were short paths that led around to the back of the room. It helped mask the noise, gave them some privacy. The cells were bigger too.

  Zero-twenty-three, with a placard beneath. ‘Doormaker’.

  Two-six-five. No name. The Number Man knew him well enough, regardless. He’d been too young a subject when he’d taken the formula, his brain too malleable for the required changes, too slow to form natural immunities and defenses. Not a problem with regular trigger events, as it was. The boy’s eyes had
burned out of his sockets as he’d tried to process the vast amount of information he was capable of perceiving. Even now as he was reaching his late teens, the boy’s mind had never developed beyond the mental age of eight, and his eyes remained like twin ashtrays.

  A partner to the Doormaker, capable of granting clairvoyance, seeing whole other worlds at once. It left most subjects incapacitated for a week after use, and it overrode any other perception powers.

  No use to the Number Man, but essential for Cauldron in vetting universes and finding individuals. Most individuals. There were some, like the Dealer, and triple-seven, who’d escaped.

  Two-nine-three. Incapable of talking, barely able to move. Limbless, obese. Another key member of the staff.

  No sign of interference. The odds of the threat being an assassin dropped.

  He quickened his pace, reaching the stairwell at the end of the corridor.

  Second floor basement. He stepped out of the stairwell and progressed down the main hallway. There were rows of cells to either side of him. Two thousand and forty-eight parahumans, each with a number, both on the wall of their cell and in their tattoo.

  “You need to narrow it down,” the Number Man said. “Help me find the trouble.”

  His voice resulted in an outcry, the people in the cells nearest him realizing he was there, shouting, swearing, insulting him in twenty-nine different languages.

  He ignored the shouting, instead extending his right hand. “Is it this floor? Yes…”

  He extended his left hand, “Or no?”

  The faintest brush of air touched his left hand, so faint he might not have felt it while he was walking.

  He turned back for the staircase, made his way down.

  The third floor basement. Here, the special case studies could be found. Seven-seven-seven had been one. They got a name, more space, some quiet.