I continued with the time honored tradition of waking up in Vegas with only your boxers on, a pounding hangover, and no idea what time it is.

I hadn't even gotten a hangover the fun way, it was a side-effect of the cheap amnestics they'd had me guzzle to help reverse the parrot they'd shown me. Wiped out all my memories of leaving, but that was a plus as far as they were concerned.

I made a visit to a local clinic that advertised its discretion, and had my brain thoroughly scrubbed. I still had distortions in my visual field, but at least I wasn't going to end up with a degenerative brain disease anytime soon.

After a little bit of time spent sampling casino buffets (the only reasonably priced thing in the city), I reactivated my lace and was relieved to see that things hadn't burnt down in my absence.

I tentatively set my lace back up, going through a frankly exhausting series of calibration exercises, and that incredibly awkward sensation of deja vu when it refused to unlock some of my memories without 2FA.

Still, I emerged from the ordeal reasonably sure that nothing critical was broken, at least not obviously so.

I caught a flight back to Atlantis with my mind racing through the possibilities. El Presidente needed to die, and the sooner the better.

As far as metahuman controlled nations went, Cuba was probably among the worst off.

Sure, we all knew who really runs the UK, but they were good little royalists in the first place, so a new de facto monarchy wouldn't do them any harm. At least the basic pretenses were kept up.

Russia, still coalescing as it was after its second dissolution, had its share of tinpot dictators. They still paid lip service to liberal democracy.

Cuba did no such thing. When the Chang admin took over after the dual secessions, they'd gone for a hardline approach against any powers that didn't hold onto a share of the original US nuclear arsenal. Eager to prove a point after Texas had bloodied their nose, they'd invaded Cuba and deposed the nominally communist government, which had been on its last legs in the first place.

At the time, the man currently known as El Presidente had been the right hand man to the right hand man, a power broker of modest import. Still, he'd manifested by then, and begun his quite literal whisper campaign, subverting first the head of state and then making his way through the ranks.

The second coup was comparatively bloodless, it was rumored that he'd secured the blessing of Chang himself, the man tired of the brush fire wars in South America and Africa.

I remembered smuggled footage, still heavily censored, of US Marines standing by as hundreds of his political opponents knelt on the streets, were handed pistols, and then gently, almost lovingly commanded to kill themselves. Debate still raged about whether the soldiers had been under a compulsion themselves, but they'd never have been in a position to be so compromised in the first place if Chang hadn't assented.

Now, Cuba was a hellhole, an international pariah barely kept alive by US aid, which was an interesting reversal if you think about it. El Presidente had grown increasingly paranoid, outright delusional even. It was rumored he'd had all of his thousands of children put down when he'd learned that one of them had a facsimile of his power. As soon as he did the rote work of ensuring their undying loyalty to him, he always ended up losing interest in his lieutenants, leaving them to jockey among themselves for his favor, often with a great deal of bloodshed.

About a full percent of the entire country was so compromised, but that included all of the upper echelon party members, and a large chunk of the military and police.

To make things even worse, he was in poor health, refusing to take the usual senolytic drugs because he was afraid of losing his powers. Bodyguards dying on their feet because he told them to stand guard and forgot to tell them to stop, obese children starving themselves to death after he visited their school and told them to eat less, he'd long lost touch of reality.

What had kept him alive so far was his slavish obsequiousness towards Ernest Chang, and the fact that he still had the good sense to keep his powers restricted to his own citizens. Even with its nominally neutral status, the UN General Assembly security guards had a standing kill order for him if he tried to use his powers on the other dignitaries.

As soon as I got back home, I unpacked my things and then left for Atlas. No point showering, I'd have to go through decon anyway.

To say the place was a mess when I got there would be an understatement. I was overloaded with a barrage of memos and messages regarding a large scale collapse of precog predictions.

While the majority blamed the Lycosan, some had started rampant speculation that the fact that the predictions largely dealt with fleet movements and metahuman distribution in AC meant that the Centaurs had found a new way to thwart precognition. I resolved to quell those rumors as best I could without implicating myself.

I dug through the archives and found a few plans for a coup in Cuba. Most didn't inspire confidence, likely being drafted up by interns fresh from their model UNs, but I did find a couple that were by serious analysts, with precog validation.

Let's consider some of his key weaknesses:

Unlike Class 6 Controllers, EP had to rely on short range speech. No broadcasting over the radio to dominate the entire planet.

He'd also largely exhausted Chang's patience, especially with his uncomfortably public antics. He might be coaxed into using his powers on an ambassador, or just disgusting the man enough to be outright left to the wolves.

He was also rumored to be in rather poor health, provoking such fear in his loyalists that they rushed to find an acceptable way of extending his life that also wouldn't draw his wrath upon them. Further, it was possible to trick those under his compulsion. As long as they received orders from what they strongly believed was him, they'd be unable to distinguish that from his real self, at least until they were in hearing range of his power. Perhaps something deepfaked to sow fear, confusion and doubt in their ranks?

Time to meet with the man in charge.

Director Van Der Waals had shed his humanity a long time ago. He'd had a relatively inconsequential power of his own, but did his duty as an upper level bureaucrat without applying it. Unfortunately for him, just shortly after he'd made Director of UNSEEN, he'd been struck by a particularly nasty engineered disease.

Back when I'd been a full time psychiatrist, I'd never encountered a case of fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, it was rarer than hens teeth. It was a gruesome disease, you'd live several decades of your life unremarkably, until one morning, you'd wake up feeling particularly sore and stiff.

You might pass it off as a mere consequence of sleeping awkwardly, content to take a painkiller and carry on.

Unfortunately, it wouldn't stop there. You'd become ever more stiff, unable to bend or move comfortably, and you'd eventually notice nodules and bumps all over your body.

A quick visit to an online medical AI would suggest evaluation for some kind of arthritis, but the xray or CT would reveal a far more concerning diagnosis:

You were becoming a Spoopy Skellington.

No really, your bones, deciding that there wasn't anything like too much of a good thing, would start turning the rest of you into good solid calcium phosphate.

Or rather, your tendons and ligaments would decide to ossify, turning what certainly ought to be flexible tissue into hard bone.

Your life would become a thing of pure agony, merely moving would involve breaking and disturbing the thousands of newly forming bones, and any trauma or strain would only accelerate the process, turning what was once muscle into bone. Those new bones were fragile, and would rupture on a whim, leaving you writhing as bone fragments worked their way through your body.

Eventually, you'd become bedridden, unable to even eat or turn your head without assistance. Death would be slow, as your chest finally hardened enough that your lungs no longer inflated. You'd die with your own body as your coffin.

At least that's how it had gone, the old form of the disease had been eradicated a while back with standard gene therapies. Unfortunately for the Director, the viral agent he'd been infected with provoked a far more aggressive form of the illness.

Overnight, as he'd slept next to his wife, he'd started hardening, being left practically rigid by the morning when he'd woken.

He'd been rushed away for treatment, but by then it was too far gone for surgical remediation. Immune nanites, the Healers on hand, nothing worked fast enough to undo the damage.

A few days later, when his very eyes had begun to fuse to his skull, he'd consented tor an experimental version of the Florence-Sen procedure, had his brain cracked out of his overgrown skull and decanted into an external container. Luckily for him, both standard FOP and the bioweapon variant didn't affect nervous tissue.

He was hooked up to life support systems until he had a new cybernetic body crafted for him, using some of the finest Crafter work. He'd still lost his powers, but as a mere Class 1, they hadn't been worth much in the first place.

I managed to squeeze out an hour in his busy day, and ended up wandering into the bowels of Atlas to where his office lay.

As he buzzed me in, I felt like a toddler walking into the Principal's office. Even sitting down in his reinforced chair, he was as tall as I was, and if he stood, he'd tower over me at 9' tall.

He was slim, his humanoid body streamlined, with a kintsugi marble texture, his enormous chest packed with the life support systems that kept him alive. Graphene muscles flexed inside their sleeves as he turned his head to greet me. He'd opted for a blank face, a nearly featureless visor on which he'd project whatever visuals appealed to him. Anyone who found it unsettling usually had their laces give him a normal face with a filter, but I was used to it by this point.

"Adat, what brings you in today?" He asked me, voice so deep it rumbled. An affectation, more to intimidate than a genuine necessity. He didn't have a voice box after all, and could have sounded like a little girl if he wanted to. Still, it suited his frame, and you expected a Director to be imposing.

"I wish it was just a courtesy call boss, but it's to do with what happened in Panama." I told him, sending over files that appeared as holographic notifications. It would take several minutes before they could be sanitized to the insane security levels he operated under.

"Good work there, I had planned to debrief you one on one, but for once you listened to me and used up your leave. You need to be more careful, I'm not questioning your methods- Jupiter will be quite useful in AC- but he's small fry. You should have focused on Monarch."

"Didn't have any feasible way of doing that I'm afraid. She was in a sub after all, and fled to Cuba as soon as it got hot." I told him.

"Just a nitpick then. Keep up the effort, I assure you that the higher ups have taken notice. I can't promise you that this chair will get handed over to you when I leave in a few years, but at the very least I'll see you make Assistant Director if it's the last thing I do." He summoned a drone and then handed me a cup of tea himself, it resembled a thimble in his hands.

"That's the thing Director. This is the fifth time this year that Cuba has aided and abetted the Penitents and other terrorist groups. I have her on record meeting El Presidente-" I drew up a news recording of the two of them at a Penitent rally in Havana, "-and she's gone to ground there." I summoned a clairvoyant heat map that bloomed red hot around the capital.

"I'm afraid that while the Church of the Redeemed is a known affiliate of the Penitents, they're still a legally distinct organization. Not on the terrorism list, so this isn't nearly as damning as you seem to think Adat." He said, cracking open a seam in the otherwise blank visor so he could gently sip his own cup.

"El Presidente is out of control. It's just a matter of years before something goes south, and we end up dealing with another Korea." I told him, reminding him about the fallout from the end of the Juche.

"He's still a head of state Adat. The UN can't be seen going around playing kingmaker, things are fraught enough as-is. I agree that it would be convenient if he was deposed, he sets a bad precedent after all, but I don't see a way to do it cleanly. If you're worried about the incomplete rendition being a blemish on your record, you really don't need to worry" An animated image of the Great Wave off Kanagawa displayed on his face, rolling on in slow-motion towards a hapless town.

I held out my hands placatingly. "I know. I just need you to look the other way when it's convenient. Monarch is bad enough by herself, I'm certain you can talk the Oversight Committee into approving another kill-order on her. I can make the rest deniable." I stressed the last word, suggesting that I was willing to take the fall if things didn't work out.

"If it was anyone else, I wouldn't even consider this. But I believe you've warranted some respect, even if I find the issue rather irregular.." He steepled his hands, the wave smashing into an anachronistic sea wall.

"Can you do it without requisitioning additional assets?" He asked me. I resisted the urge to whoop, if we were at this stage I was as good as in.

"Unfortunately not boss. But that's why I brought Midas in." I winked at him.

"I was wondering why his power sheet seemed so underwhelming. So he can work on arbitrary currencies after all?" He asked me, his face now displaying gears endlessly turning.

"As far as I or the Munchkins can tell, but OC doesn't know. You could get this done and not even dip into the Black Budget." I assured him.

"Now you're playing with fire Adat. Even I think twice before pissing off the Accountants, but as long as you keep the expenses below a few million USDE, I can sweep it under the rug." He stood up and walked over to the smartwall, which he'd set to mirror the room. With a gesture, he turned it to a view of the Caribbean. Tuned to thermal vision, I could just barely make out the dozens of refugee camps lining Panama's shores, and the billions being spent on rehabilitation.

A few million dollars was a tight budget to depose a dictator, but I'd done tougher things. I'd find a way to handle it.

We hashed out a few plans, but I was discreet and didn't bring up anything he didn't want to know. He'd help me in ways that went unsaid, leaving discretionary assets unused, distracting watchers from what went on in the shadows. In turn, I'd produce results and kill a monster. If this went to shit, I would likely be out of a job, but what use was my work if I couldn't keep Anjana safe?

We'd have to come clean about Midas at some point, perhaps hand him over to the IMF so they could milk the golden goose. Still, if we didn't set off too many regulatory alarm bells, there was room to play. Being one of the primary officials in charge of assessing the extent of superhuman powers had its perks after all.

I had balls rolling even before I took my leave, and the last act I did before heading home was ordering a boat load of fine cigars. I'd resolved to take them up myself, being inspired by Julia, and I had an inkling the price was about to sky rocket.

[https://i.ibb.co/HKj0pHF/image1.jpg]