Orb Weaver, Investigations 2

The first day of school since my job in Boston had gone well. None of the Wards brought it up, and  I wondered if Emily Piggot had told them not to. My debrief was short—the Bay had no local containment zones, so the need to recheck them didn’t apply to us.

After school, I’d taken a little trip to check out my bug reactors…

A very large number of them had small, unobvious sensor systems installed by them.

Armsmaster.

Well, I’d known I was pulling a lot of aces in the holes out.

On the other hand, noticing a number of “under new management” signs in the former E88 zones, and a lack of E88 gang tags…

Well sometimes it was worth it to pull out your ace in the hole.

Other than that, I had a leisurely day. Aisha wasn’t at school, something about her, Clockblocker and a… “PR intervention.” Chris had been snickering the whole time, so either I’d hear about it or it would be buried deep in deference to Director Piggot’s blood pressure.

But now, it was time to get back to work.

Here I was back in my bedroom, afternoon shading to evening.

I hated it. I was tired. I was getting better, but it seemed like building myself up a second time was taking longer than it had the first time. Or maybe I was more aware of what I’d lost. Greg had finished the entire assignment, and now I was going through it—as well as any other literature I could find.

The problem was, outside of pop sci-fi that promised to ‘unlock the origin of powers’, most actual serious studies were so full of exceptions that rules were few and far between. One book even cited Kaiser.

“He produces swords, made out of steel. And even if that steel seems to degrade, it’s still matter. How does he produce it? By any means we know, pure synthesis would use an immense amount of energy, more than humanity has generated in its entire existence. Bringing them from an alternate assumes that somewhere there’s a ‘world of infinitely varied swords.’ Which would be difficult enough to understand if the world was full of Kaisers, but how does that power relate to Alexandria’s? What about Tinkers, who can put a mixture of salt, copper and food coloring into a microwave, cook it for 12 minutes and come out with a material impossible to replicate by any method we can imagine?

We are not scientists. We are blind men, reaching out our hands and touching an infinitely complex elephant and claiming we know what the whole is from what tiny pieces we touch.”

It wasn’t a popular book. More books, even professional literature, argued that eventually we would understand how powers came to people and how such tiny organs could manipulate such immense energies.

They had been claiming that since the late 1980s.

Under the ground, my bugs worked phone screens. And quickly, another pattern started to form.

Individuals who claimed to be making breakthroughs vanished from the public literature… Not all, but a large minority. They weren’t kidnapped, they just faded… stopping publications, moving to less prestigious schools and then… vanishing.

The first nation to understand how powers worked, truly, would be a dominant power in the world. So… being recruited?

Possibly. It makes sense they’d want to wait a while to see if the candidate would be worth it…

And likely a dead end. Outside of rumors, such as the Fallen and the Gesellschaft there was no real indication that anyone had the ability to create new artificial triggers. There had been some attempts using massive trauma, trying to recreate trigger events in individuals, but most of them had failed and those that succeeded seldom did so in the way the initiating organization anticipated. One that had succeeded, at least with official confirmation, was a cult in Oregon that had isolated and abused several children…

And had succeeded in one case. Unfortunately for them, she triggered as a Brute3/Blaster6. Today, she was with the Protectorate, and the few survivors of the cult were in federal prisons.

And then there were the rumors of a power-selling conspiracy. It didn’t pass the smell test for me. Such a group would stay secret and likely sell only to those they supported, not make it available for anyone willing to pay the price.

So start with—it’s unlikely anyone knows how powers work. Nobody can… reliably create new parahumans. And nobody, but nobody, is talking about powers that have conversations with bystanders while their wielder is unconscious.

Not even the Butcher and I don’t know about the Fairie Queen.

And in any case, she was unavailable, and even if not, I remembered Dad’s warning.

I leaned back and rubbed my eyes. There was some fun in researching, investigating. Less fun in understanding I didn’t really know what to do. I wasn’t as smart as several generations of scientists, and they’d hit this problem and bounced, and I bet “trigger powers to order” was a very high item in a number of black programs across the world.

Break the problem down. I don’t need to know how powers work or to make them, just to understand why my power is capable of independently communicating. Maybe be able to communicate back to it…

Because the idea that there was an intelligence, possibly a human grade one, in back of my power…

Very disturbing.

One that evidently was concerned for me.

So. Possibility one: Powers, at least some of them, are sapient.

Possibility two: If their user dies… they die?

And yet, they can’t just be part of us… The Corona Pollentia controlled powers, most scientists agreed, if for no other reason than even a thousandth of the energy many parahuman powers displayed would fry your brain. But destroying it in several recorded cases didn’t remove powers; it simply rendered them uncontrollable.

Possibility three: “our” powers are actually independent organisms. The Corona Pollentia is just the… wireless link?

But then why us? If… I underlined the “if” in my mind, this is true… why not act on their own? The way they work, it’d be almost as if we were controlling them via… a remote control.

There was no sign of independent powers, up until my case. So… But a remote control, an organism…

You had remote controls in TV stores. But someone—something made the TVs. The idea that powers just “appeared” had always been a gaping hole in most theories, nobody able to come up with proof. But…

We always talk about how powers just showed up. But… what if the other end of that theory is also true? What if whatever was behind powers… Mankind just “showed up” for them?

But if so, why the hell didn’t they communicate with us? Why did my power or whatever had been speaking wait so long?

Or I could be completely wrong. Running up a blind alley. I needed evidence. I needed proof. I—

My phone beeped. Two messages. One from Dad, notifying me that it was 12:30 and I was certainly asleep so I could ignore the message. I smiled and shook my head at that one. The other one from Armsmaster, reminding me that I’d be coming to the rig with Kid Win tomorrow after school to start working on the unification of his Endbringer Prediction program and my work on evacuations. Dragon would be in attendance. After that, he sent notes on how I’d be helping. They’d be throwing several simulated emergencies at me, evaluating how I handled them, while I provided feedback into the program. I nodded, put the phone to the side and turned the lights off. School would be easy.

Armsmaster? Well. He pretty much defined work ethic. I might also talk to Dragon. She was his coworker, and he’d apologized to me four times over Sheila and his “stupidity” I letting me meet her. For someone like Armsmaster, I had a feeling that was equivalent to sackcloth and ashes. Probably because he was a bit of a control freak.

I snorted. Well, I certainly couldn’t hold that against him. I was one as well.

Then, I rolled over and went to sleep.