Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  It lacked flow, as the writing went. More of a technical manual, in the end. I could tell from the structure that things had been done by computer, so that information specific to the employee and the employee’s role could be injected at the appropriate spots.

  I flipped through the book, continuing to scout with my bugs and use them to check our surroundings for possible danger. Only endless hallways.

  “You reading over my shoulder, Tattletale?” I asked. I had the camera on my mask.

  “I am.”

  “Thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Accord was two-timing us,” Tattletale said. “Doubling up so he had enough of a power base to enact his plans, whatever happened.”

  “Except for, you know, the whole dying thing,” Imp added.

  “Are you getting the gist of this, Tattletale?” I asked.

  “Picking up pieces of it. I’d ask you to scan the thing and let me have access to all of it, but that’s not exactly reasonable, is it?“

  “Just give me the byline.”

  “A plan for if the Endbringers win. A plan for if Scion wins. A plan if we come out ahead and beat both of them. Recurring themes in all of the plans.“

  “No plan survives contact with the enemy,” Lung rumbled. “Foolish.”

  “Accord makes pretty fucking good plans,” Tattletale said.

  “I do not know this Accord, and I only trust what I experience myself, so this is only prattle to me.”

  “How does this turn out?” I asked. “Cauldron ruling the world?”

  “Honestly? I don’t think so. Cauldron’s primary interest seems to be humanity. Keeping us going, minimizing chances of war and conflict. All of this seems to be geared around that. Setting things up so we aren’t fucked, however things go down.”

  “Right,” I said. “Where do the powers come in?”

  “I think… well, I don’t have enough to say anything for sure. But the underlying assumption seems to be that parahumans are going to take charge, one way or the other, so they wanted to set things up so that happened naturally. They’ve been vetting clients, finding the ones who’d work best. They don’t identify them by anything except number, but… I think Coil was a test case.”

  I nodded.

  “So were we.”

  “We had an idea,” I said.

  “Yeah. But there’s more… I don’t know how much more. Yet. Can you flip ahead? Maybe about three quarters of the way through, there should be a bit about the Overseers and the Terminus. Flip through… slower… show more of the pages… I’ll go back through the video feed to view each page on my own and figure the rest out myself.“

  Further down the hallway, Shadow Stalker stepped out of a room. I looked, keeping my head at the same general angle, so the camera would continue to have a view of the book, still flipping.

  Shadow Stalker was pointing.

  My swarm caught up with her, flowing into the room.

  I glanced into the room as we passed. Two more bodies. Two men, large, both bristling with horns. One with curling horns like a ram, the other with horns like a bull.

  “Satyr,” Tattletale confirmed. “Again.“

  “Hmm,” Shadow Stalker murmured. She was leaning against the doorframe, her arms folded. “He’s efficient.”

  Did she just sound like she was approving? I lowered the booklet, raising my head to give Shadow Stalker a serious look.

  She only made a small, smug sound, like she was pleased, or pleased with herself, and then turned around, her cloak flaring out before she disappeared through the wall.

  “This long-delayed revenge thing is getting easier all the time,” Imp commented.

  “No revenge,” I said. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’re sounding a lot less like Imp and a whole lot like… well…”

  “Regent,” she said.

  I nodded. The desire for revenge, the way the wisecracking was veering off course, to uncomfortable or dangerous levels…

  “Be nice if he was here,” was all she said.

  I nodded again.

  The hallway reached a t-junction at the end, with a path going off to the left, and a stairwell to the right that led down, deeper into the building. I could sense just how thick the floor was. Most buildings had only a few feet separating each story, but here, there was solid matter nearly as thick as the open spaces.

  A fortress? A fortress has soldiers.

  A shelter? It doesn’t make sense that they’d try to take shelter in a place like this.

  It also made the descent to the next floor down take just long enough that it felt like something was wrong. Winding our way down.

  “There are backup plans if the whole parahumans-as-leaders thing didn’t work out. Brainwashing leaders like they brainwashed the case fifty-threes. So the leaders were absolute and could be trusted. Um. Distribution and organization for getting things going again, depending on how many threats remain after we make it through this. They didn’t know what the end would be like, what we’d be up against, so they could only ballpark here. The reason for these offices? Cauldron’s going to staff this place. It’s going to be a hub, police, a whole lot more, up until humanity’s got the ball rolling again.“

  “No way that doesn’t fall apart,” Golem said.

  I nodded a little.

  “Power fucks everything up, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  “Speaking of fucked up. You should know, Scion just hit Dalet. It’s ugly. Getting worse with every attack. A little more ruthless, toying with specific people, breaking them before he obliterates their friends. He’s going to hit our settlement again if the pattern holds. Within the next half an hour to an hour.”

  I sighed. Nothing we could do but hope the defenders could hold their own. I looked at Lung.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You wanted to come with us. Odd choice.”

  “I tried, I did nothing in the end. I do not like being…”

  “Impotent?” Imp offered.

  Lung growled his response, “A mere bystander.”

  We reached a set of double doors. A foot thick, solid, they overlapped rather than meet, effectively doubling the thickness, allowing for their structure to reinforce one another. They’d been destroyed, pried apart. An impressive feat, considering they looked like they were meant to withstand charging elephants.

  Or parahumans.

  It’s a prison, the thought struck me, as we passed through, getting a glimpse of the floor below.

  Rows and columns of cells, connected in strings of ten or so. Most cells were occupied.

  Not case fifty-threes, going by what my bugs told me. The case fifty-threes were the outliers, here. These were people who I might have seen on the street in Brockton Bay, all in matching outfits. Men, women, children. All young, twenty-five or younger. All more or less in good health, if a touch thin. My swarm touched each of them as I tried to take in their total numbers.

  “They’re here!” Someone called out.

  They can’t see us from this angle, I thought.

  Then it dawned on me that everyone here had powers. Some had powers that would sense us.

  “Did it work?” the person from before called out, a woman. “Hey! Did it work?”

  “They aren’t the same people as before,” a man said.

  We needed to move on. The double doors leading down to the next flight had been torn apart as well, and that meant the Irregulars, Revel, Exalt, Vantage and quite possibly the Doctor were all downstairs.

  But the noise level increased with every passing second. Cheering, shouts, cries, even threats to urge us to move faster, in a dozen different languages, maybe more. The noise swelled as others took up the cry. People screaming at the tops of their lungs.

  And they were threatening to draw attention to us in the process. I drew on my relay bugs, sending the swarm downstairs, trying to figure out if we’d just alerted Weld and the others.

  “They think we’re here to rescue them,” Gole
m said.

  “Aren’t we?” Cuff asked. “I mean, it’s not why we came, but we can’t leave without them. We’re not heartless?”

  That she made it a question was telling.

  That she directed that question at me was… I didn’t even have the words to articulate it.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course.”

  “If we rescue them, then it causes trouble. Too many to look after,” Lung said.

  “Chaos could help us,” Shadow Stalker observed.

  “We are going to rescue them,” I said. “It’s just a question of when. And how.”

  I walked forward until I could see the cells and their occupants.

  Hundreds of cells, and there wasn’t anything blocking them off. Open doors, with nothing visible that would keep the prisoners inside. Most consisted of only three walls and a white line painted on the floor. Beside each cell was a metal plate, engraved with a number.

  “Oh my god,” Cuff’s voice was touched with quiet horror, almost lost in the rising noise. “Look at how pale they are. They’ve been here a long time.”

  “These guys haven’t been here for long,” Tattletale said. “Or they’re the newest. Two thousand and fifty cells, I’m thinking, maybe half of them occupied. All the structural reinforcements, the heavy doors, the traps in the ceiling, it’s to keep the prisoners in. But you don’t need to put security doors in for going downstairs if there’s no way out. There’s more cells downstairs, with older patients. Plus, I think, the hub of Cauldron’s operation.“

  “This can’t be for humanity’s sake,” Golem said.

  “It is,” Tattletale said. “Everything they’ve been doing is for our sake. Producing better formulas to get more soldiers for the biggest, most important fights, weaning out the bad formulas so nobody important gets them…“

  “And the case fifty-threes?” I asked. “Dismissed as bad formulas?”

  “At first, maybe. But there’s a use to them. As a rule, they’re stronger, tougher. If we’re forced to make a break for it, scatter humanity and survive with the remnants, the case fifty-threes can settle places you or I couldn’t. I think there’s something else, but I don’t see it… lemme keep looking. There’s got to be a hint. Might have to get you to run upstairs to fetch a file or something…“

  Tattletale trailed off, going silent but for the occasional mumble.

  Was this the army that Cauldron wanted to deploy? Men and women with powers they didn’t ask for, released with stipulations, or simply deposited on a battlefield and left to fight or run?

  It felt too thin. Even this many capes, they were untrained, their powers presumably unpracticed. They wouldn’t amount to more than cannon fodder.

  I stopped, feeling the scale of it all. Hundreds of cells, hundreds of voices…

  “Quiet!” I called out.

  My voice was lost in the noise.

  “Quiet!“ I used my swarm to transmit my voice.

  Some listened, as if waiting for me to say something else.

  I wasn’t sure what I could say. I glanced at my teammates, searching for an idea, before something came to me. “Save your energy. Don’t exhaust yourselves shouting.“

  They listened, quieting down. At first.

  But excitement won over. There was no way to communicate their excitement other than by talking to their cellmates, or the people in cells across from them, but as the general volume rose, they had to raise their voices to be heard. It didn’t help that the entire area was a giant acoustic sounding board.

  “I could sing,” Canary said, raising her voice to be heard, “But I think I’d calm you guys down too.”

  Rachel whistled, a shrill sound that almost made my bugs wince in pain. Not a soothing song.

  In the silence that followed, Bastard shook his head a little, then snapped at open air. Too sharp for his wolf senses?

  “Good,” Lung said. Rachel only scowled at his approval. He added, “You have to follow this with something that drives the point home.”

  “Make them fear us?” I asked. I remembered Bakuda’s commentary on her lessons from Lung.

  “Fear? Respect,” Lung said.

  “Same thing,” Shadow Stalker said.

  Lung shrugged.

  I didn’t feel like arguing the point, and the crowd was very patiently waiting. They were barely making a sound now.

  Which was good, but was there any guarantee they wouldn’t get riled up as we made our way down to the next floor?

  Bastard shook his head again. Rachel and I both looked at the same time, then made eye contact.

  I spread my bugs out through the area. Felt the Custodian flowing through the air, a little faster than before.

  She flew towards me, and I flinched, taking a step back.

  She repeated the process, looping back, then charging me.

  This time, when I took a step back, it was on purpose. She’d done it a second time because she wanted me to take a second step. And a third, a fourth…

  “Go,” I said. “This way. Move.“

  We ran. I focused on my swarm, spreading the bugs out as much as I could behind us and in front of us.

  Different cells sat at the end of the hallway. Bigger cells, arranged so that they faced the opposite direction, with paths leading in, then to the right, then back into the room.

  Two-nine-three. An empty, unlabeled cell. Two-six-five. Two more empty, unlabeled cells.

  Bastard shook his head again, opened his mouth in an almost yawning, lazy bite. I could sense the Custodian there, brushing by the side of his face.

  I moved the swarm to block the other inmate’s view of us.

  “Head-” I started, but Rachel was already making her way inside one of the empty cells. She’d put the pieces together. “…right.”

  I hung back, looking over my shoulder as the others filed into the cells. I hurried down the hallway, then kicked the door. I saw a glimpse of a stairwell, identical to the one we’d used at the far end of the room.

  I reversed direction, then ducked into the same corridor the others had entered. Let the people nearby think we’d left.

  I wasn’t sure it was the brightest thing, taking the dead end over the open-ended exit. But the Custodian had suggested this.

  I felt a moment’s trepidation. Why?

  “You’re being followed,” Tattletale said.

  I shook my head a little. I could sense my bugs. Nothing.

  Was it a trap? Would the Custodian shut some kind of door on us, locking us within?

  No. She had no reason to. As hard to define as she was.

  I pulled the camera free from my mask, then pressed it against the side of the mount on the cell exterior that would have held a number plate. I ducked inside.

  “Tattletale?”

  “I get it, I get it. Might need to ask for help on this one. Sit tight.“

  The cell was empty, but it featured a double bed, a television, a computer, a small bookshelf of cases with stuff to watch or play, and an odd little double-layered glass window that looked out onto a wall of gravel.

  I joined the others, drawing my phone from my pocket. It took a moment for Tattletale to manage the link-up.

  “And you’ve got video. I’m brilliant. Admit it.“

  “You’re brilliant,” I said.

  If I’d had the idea earlier, I would have wound up with a better vantage point. As it was, we viewed the scene from a distance. I held the phone flat, so our group could circle around to observe from different angles.

  The noise of the crowd became a roar, muffled to near-silence by the cell’s walls. The occupants wouldn’t have heard the other prisoners, except in the most extreme cases. I could see the Irregulars as they entered from the same direction we had. I could see the crowd that followed the Irregulars.

  Case fifty-threes. Kind of?

  No. Different. The way they spread out, their haggard appearances, they made for the best clues when these individuals were just silhouettes seen from t
hree hundred feet away. But they got closer, and I could see how they differed. They didn’t take on the traits of animals, nor simple mutations or exaggerations in features. There was a man that burned, who staggered forward, like it hurt, but he wasn’t consumed. A woman who floated, every part of her body a distinct piece, separated by open space. It made her look twice as tall. A… something that inched forward, occasionally running to keep up with the crowd. Hands and feet like flippers, but the face was an orifice, and thin worms were spilling out, swarming over the surface of his body in numbers so thick that the flesh underneath was impossible to see.

  Case fifty-threes that Cauldron had kept in reserve, it seemed. I could see the anger in them, the tension, the wariness that came with what had to have been… how long? With the hair, the beards, maybe years of confinement. Maybe even solitary confinement.

  On camera, I could see this.

  I couldn’t feel them with my bugs. Couldn’t see them, couldn’t hear them. A revised image, an edited image, as if the whole crowd had erased with some careful photo editing. Sound editing. Touch editing?

  “Oh, hey,” Tattletale said. “Anyone else having trouble getting a read on those guys?“

  “I am telling myself we may fight soon,” Lung rumbled, “But my power is not responding as well as it should. Looking at them, seeing what look to be worthy opponents with little to lose, I should be feeling it build faster, a pressure inside me.”

  “I can’t see or hear them with my bugs, let alone touch them,” I told Tattletale.

  “Over an entire area. Mantellum,” Tattletale said. “The guy with the built-in cloak, dead center.“

  I looked, but the crowd moved.

  They were talking. We didn’t have audio. There was only the rise and fall of the crowd’s shouts, letting us know when people were talking and when they were reacting to statements.

  On camera, people began to leave cells.

  “It’s a power with layers. Each successive layer enhances the level of protection. Except everything on record says the range it blocks powers only extends about fifteen feet. Get within five feet, no senses work. It’s not supposed to be a hundred feet like this.“

  “Six times the range,” Cuff said.

  “Somehow.“