“As your right-hand man? Overflowing,” laughed Raul. “I admit that may have had something to do with my intuition.”
“So what do we do?”
“When people are handing us the reins and yelling, ‘Lead us, lead us’? We lead, of course. Or were all of your supposed ideas for restructuring just a complicated bluff?”
“No, but—they were designed to be implemented over the course of years, slowly phased in to avoid a massive disruption. I can’t drop them all in at once and expect the department to be able to absorb the shock.”
Raul shook his head. “The department’s already at maximum shock. They’re numb to whatever comes next. Give them direction and they will grab for it like a drowning man at a life preserver.”
“That, or it’ll be the blow that completely fractures the department.”
“Trust me, Mat. You know policy, but I know people.”
“Hey, I’m not bad with people, either!” Mat objected.
“And I’m not bad with policy. But we have our individual strengths. You lead, and people follow. I gather, and people join. Trust me when I say that this will make them gather, not scatter.”
“All right,” said Mat. “All right. Then let’s turn a decade’s worth of proposals into a single unified plan.”
“Waves off?” asked Raul.
“Waves off,” agreed Mat, wincing slightly as he withdrew his etherwave earpiece. “We’re going to need total focus.”
Lunch was forgotten as the two men put their heads together and began to craft dozens of disparate suggestions into one overarching departmental restructuring. They proposed new directorships, entirely new branches of the department. For years, Gammalock had served as an organizational hub for great swaths of the augmented population, bringing together those with complementary skills to help create synergistic teams of inventors, planners and statesmen. He had produced a constant stream of world-altering inventions from his private laboratory, and although no one could replicate that, there were still dozens of inventions yet unreleased there which would need to be analyzed and categorized, then distributed, stored or destroyed.
Even the League for Unaffiliated Augment Utilization, the loose conglomeration of vigilante teams, had looked to Gammalock as its unofficial sponsor. Although he had no technical part in it, he was at the very least an inspiration to Augments the world over, and Mat knew that the already sometimes-fractious council would be shaken by this catastrophe. They would need reassurance, a firm vision of what was to come, and he and Raul worked that seamlessly into their plan.
Their absence from the wave network was noticed at some point, and aides brought them dinner before leaving for the evening. The building quieted around them as night began to fall. Finally, the two men leaned back, looked at their work and nodded.
“This’ll do,” said Mat.
“You think this is how Jefferson felt after writing the Constitution?” Raul asked, stretching.
“A bit grandiose, don’t you think?” Mat laughed.
Raul shook his head. “No less important.”
“It’s bureaucracy.”
“And what do you think the Constitution was?”
“Okay, point.” Mat eyed his wave earpiece, discarded on the desk, and grimaced. “Shall we rejoin the world and see what we’ve missed?”
“Ten thousand panicked messages about the falling of the sky, check. Don’t worry, Chicken Littles! Foxy Loxy is here to save you.”
“Didn’t Foxy Loxy eat Chicken Little?”
Raul waved his hand dismissively. “No one remembers that part. Anyway, it did solve his problem.”
Mat slid his earpiece back in and waited for the wave’s visual overlays to appear in his sight. After the initial brief cramp of connection, they did so, but instead of the slew of messages he expected to see, Gammalock’s figure stood before him.
“Hello, Director. It is I, Moloch. I plead your pardon for this priority interrupt, and for what follows.
“This is, as you no doubt are aware, a recorded message. I have died, likely in a surprising fashion. That, or I have grown forgetful and neglected to provide an update here.”
Mat swallowed a lump forming in his throat, surprised by the strength of his emotion. He never would have thought to call Gammalock a friend, and yet seeing his recorded image here was strangely difficult.
“You may recall a time years ago, the first day we met with Foresight. We spoke after and discussed our reservations. I spoke to you then of a plan, the nucleus of an idea, of the neutering of Foresight should it become necessary. I continued, as promised, to develop that plan.
“I have stored it nowhere but my own mind. And now that this is again but so much meat, I must store it in yours. For which, as before, I apologize. It is an intrusion and I assume too much, I know. Forgive me. And if you do not? I am still dead, and thus can take your resentment.”
Mat’s left hand twitched, and his left leg kicked in a sudden spasm. He remembered the taste of spoiled milk, the smell of fresh cotton candy, the texture of hot sand, the color of a dead salmon and the sound of crickets at night. He blinked, assaulted by his own memories, as Gammalock continued.
“You have it now, the information you need. It has no guarantee of fulfillment, this plan, but I think you are the key to provide it that. The device is perfect. Build it as you understand it, and it will work. The elements of the plan are technically sound. You will have to implement them in a way to achieve success.
“Or not, of course. I have never been assured that this was in any way necessary. I have held the plan in reserve for years, watching, and have seen no need to use it. Perhaps Foresight is exactly as he seems, a force for good. And if he is, leave him to run and never use what I have given you. Consider it only an odd memory of who I was.”
The recording ended and Gammalock’s image vanished. The notifications for missed messages piled in, demanding Mat’s attention, but he ignored them all as he thought about a device he’d never seen, had never before even thought of, but now grasped in intimate detail. It was a metal tube filled with powerful magnets like an MRI. It was lined with strange circuitry, arcane diagrams feeding modern sorcery, and although Mat had never touched a soldering iron in his life, he understood them all.
The tube was designed to hold a single person. Life support systems built into it were carefully crafted to keep that person alive. Sedatives and shackles were intended to make sure that person never left. It was a hospital and a prison, and Mat recognized the parallels to Gammalock’s own suit.
It was a prison created specifically for Foresight, a cage that he could never escape. The trick, of course, was to get a man who could choose his own future into the cage in the first place. But along with the device came two pieces of information.
One was a plan, an idea for how to catch Foresight unawares. The other was a final whisper in Gammalock’s voice, a secret confided to a friend.
“He does not see the future. He lives it, and steps back. Give him no chance to retreat, and you can catch him.”
“You okay, boss?” Raul asked, and Mat realized that he had been staring off into space for several minutes.
“Yeah, sorry. Lot of messages coming in. A lot to deal with.” More than you can imagine, he thought, but did not say.
“You ready to send this plan out? Ready to change the world?”
“I’ll settle for changing the DAA, thanks,” Mat grinned. “We’ve done the easy part. Now let’s get ready to bend everyone to our point of view.”
The plan for Foresight’s capture hung in his mind, but Mat shoved it away. It wasn’t necessary today. With any luck, it never would be.
XVIII
“A healthy attitude. So what changed?”
“This is a coup!” shouted Cameron, the president of the League for Unaffiliated Augment Utilization. “It’s a straight-up coup, that’s all it is.” His skin sagged as he spoke, his face drooping into a waxy mess as his anger got the better of him
.
Cameron took a deep breath and pressed both hands briefly against his face. When he removed them, he was calmer and his features had resettled into normalcy, although they were subtly different than before. His nose was longer and more aristocratic, his chin stronger. It added an intangible air of command.
Foresight took advantage of the pause to continue his point. “Hardly a coup when we’re following LUAU’s accepted processes and procedures. I’d simply like—”
“Don’t speak of the processes and procedures!” snapped Cameron. “You know full well that you intend to turn them on their ear. Why, the very act of you running is already a violation of tradition!”
“A tradition that is mere years old—”
“Dating back to the founding of LUAU,” Cameron admonished.
Foresight talked over him. “—and was established under very different circumstances. No one can deny that the world has changed these last weeks, and for the worse. Destabilization is everywhere. We have seen riots and unrest, vandalism and looting. The government is a kicked anthill.” Here he cast a glance at Mat, seated on the far side of their virtual table. “Apologies, but it is.”
Mat raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. In truth, Foresight was not wrong, but he was not inclined to add weight to his argument. Mat was here merely as an observer, just one more job he had inherited from Gammalock and had yet to delegate. And while Foresight was correct that this was not technically a coup, the original intent for LUAU was for it to have been led by Aug-0s. Foresight, an Aug-3, should never have been eligible. But it had always been merely an understood custom, not a codified rule, which allowed Foresight to claim technical legality on his current power play.
A memory struck Mat, a fruitless day spent scouring the Reader archives for Foresight’s assessment. It was a puzzle and a concern, for although certainly many Augments had never been tested by Readers, nearly all powerful public ones had done so just to clarify their status, if nothing else.
Foresight, practically iconic in his white suit emblazoned with the glittering eye of gold, was one of the best-known Augments currently in America. His small team was the model for all others, the benchmark by which others determined their success. His initial plan, to end crime within a few blocks’ radius of his team’s headquarters, had worked and spread. Within a year, that neighborhood of Washington, DC was the safest in the country.
The effect snowballed. Other teams and individuals, Augmented and otherwise, offered help. Their expanding network covered more and more space, extending the reach of Foresight’s protection. In response, the city flourished. Petty crime ceased. Major crimes vanished. Even accidents and crimes of passion decreased in frequency, as Foresight’s power allowed him to divert the actions that led to those results.
As word began to spread, there were a few incidents of socially-maladjusted Augments coming to try their luck against Foresight, certain that taking him down would make their reputation. Each of these ended the same way, though: the villain defeated, Foresight’s team triumphant, and Foresight himself standing immaculate and untouched over his fallen foe. No deaths, and little-to-no collateral damage. Foresight always allowed his opponent just enough time to commit a crime for which they could be convicted, before stepping in to hand out a humiliating defeat.
After a few of these, the attempts stopped. If the only outcome was a crushing loss followed by a lifetime deprived of powers in prison, then it was far safer to simply operate elsewhere. This pond already had its big fish.
So the neighborhood boomed, and Foresight’s reputation grew. People everywhere talked about the man in the shining white suit, the Aug-3 who could pick the perfect future. And yet somehow, after spending an entire day digging, Mat had found that Foresight had never been Read, had never received any official confirmation of his augment. Foresight had created his own legend, written his own story. Everyone simply assumed that it had been corroborated, because how could it not be? And so he was able to lie about how his augment operated, and possibly about the rating as well. Looked at logically, he had to be beyond the “potential for large-scale abuse” classification of an Aug-3. But that was the highest rating with which people were fully comfortable, and so it was where Foresight had positioned himself.
Mat blinked as he realized he had never spent any such day searching for this information. As a director of the DAA, he was certainly privy to those records, but he had somehow never thought to look up Foresight. The memory of the archive search was Gammalock’s, one more fragment of the previous week’s forced upload, one more useful piece of information in the plan to capture Foresight.
Foresight was saying soothingly, “No one is saying you have not done a fine job, Cameron. You have been an excellent president. But it is in the nature of elected officials to be succeeded. I am simply putting my hat in the ring. Surely you cannot deny me a fair vote.”
“You’d reduce it to a popularity contest!” Cameron complained. “Who do you think the people will vote for to be their face? The blur-faced nobody, or the shining beacon of justice?”
Foresight gave him a disappointed frown. “I think you do your fellow members an injustice,” he said, sweeping his hand around to indicate the heads of various teams seated at the table. Many of them wore slight scowls similar to Foresight’s frown. Cameron’s insinuation of shallowness had rankled.
“You can’t stand to be ruled by an Uggo,” muttered Cameron.
“And now you do me an injustice,” retorted Foresight. “This is not about whether you are an Aug-0. This is about whether I think I could do the best job for LUAU. I believe I am the best fit for the position at this time. I see perilous times ahead, and it is both my augment and my nature to steer us through these narrow straits. I do not deny your years of good service. But for this next part, my hand should be at the helm. We will vote, and we will see.”
The issue with arguing with a prophet, Mat thought, is that it’s very difficult to claim that your theories on the future are better than their facts. Even without Foresight’s power, it was obvious that this was a foregone conclusion. There would be a vote, Foresight would win, and he would lead LUAU—as, arguably, he had done by example since its inception. So really, was there much difference?
Mat’s augment flared like a physical punch in the gut, the most distinct message he’d ever gotten from it. This was a horrendous idea, a terrible path. His observer status forgotten, Mat tensed to leap to his feet, to call on the league to cast Foresight out. But as he did so, he felt a hand on his shoulder and heard Gammalock’s voice in his ear, a firm whisper:
“Say nothing. Stay hidden. He must never see you coming.”
Foresight’s gaze swept the room, his eyes locking briefly with Mat’s. The split-second of contact lasted an age as Mat poured everything he had into portraying that nothing was wrong, all was normal. Foresight’s glance moved on, undisturbed, and Mat internally sighed in relief.
The meeting progressed to other topics, but Mat heard only pieces of each. He would have disconnected from the wave conference entirely if it would not have looked suspicious, but as it was he simply retreated within his own mind where he obsessively began to examine and polish each piece of Gammalock’s plan.
The overall structure was good, but pieces of it were still rough and ill-designed. Mat felt almost sacrilegious describing Gammalock’s plan in such terms, but he knew that it had only ever been meant as a vague sketch. Mat himself was meant to finish it, to work out the details, smooth over the rough edges and construct the perfect net.
He would only have one chance at execution. The plan had to be perfect in every detail. And as the meeting concluded with a vote that established Foresight as the new president of LUAU, Mat knew that time was against him. It had to be perfect. It had to be precise. And it had to be done as soon as possible.
Mat, reverting to full politician mode, shook Foresight’s hand and told him that he looked forward to working closely with him. He smiled, made his good
byes and disconnected from the group wave. The instant he had done so, the smile dropped from his face and he sent Alyssa a message.
I need you. Strategy. ASAP.
The reply came moments later.
On my way, boss.
A GPS dot appeared accompanied by a timer counting down from just over eleven minutes. Mat pressed his hands to his face, an unconscious parody of Cameron from the start of the meeting, and prepared for yet another long night.
By the time Alyssa arrived at his apartment, Mat was hard at work filling a yellow legal pad with notes. She entered without knocking, letting herself in quietly. The GPS dot disappearing from Mat’s vision alerted him to her presence more than any sound she made on her way in.
“Sneaking up on me? I invited you here, you know,” Mat called from his spot at the kitchen table. Alyssa appeared in the doorway, smiling.
“Force of habit. It’s always better to be undetected than detected. Except when you want everyone to look, of course.”
Mat gestured to the chair across from him, its own pristine pad of paper waiting in front of it. Alyssa slid casually into it, brushing her short hair back behind her ears as she leaned her elbows onto the table.
“What’s the mission?”
“It’s more complicated than usual.”
“I figured, what with you calling me to your house instead of doing this at the office, or over wave.”
Mat took a deep breath. “Foresight is a danger and needs to be stopped. Moloch gave me a device that can do it. I need to make the plan to implement it. If it’s not literally perfect, Foresight will see us coming, evade the trap and never be vulnerable to us again.”
“So no pressure, then,” said Alyssa, leaning back and staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling. “And why are we doing this offline?”
“In case he’s got some way to tap the waves? I don’t know. You know that the CIA’s been working to find a Reader who can do that.”
“Yeah, or make one,” agreed Alyssa.
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