I was thankful that whoever had visited me while I was passed out had been kind enough to let me get some sleep. Other than a couple get well soon cards, and a box of chocolates, I wasn't inundated with paperwork right away..
I checked the rota, discovered that I'd been given the day off, and thanked that kind soul in HR before taking a walk through Atlas.
Embedded inside its heart as I was, it was easy to forget what a monumental feat of engineering it represented, $25 billion USDE spent on building it in that short golden age right after the start of the Centaur War when all the nation states and corpos were busy holding hands and singing kumbaya in the face of an alien incursion.
Needless to say, that didn't last very long, it never does.
But the cloistering was intentional, Atlas 1 was a hardened facility, designed to thwart the machinations of the aliens, mutants and heretics.
Sorry, I keep having my proposals for installing a gigantic golden throne with a ESPer on life support rejected, so I need to express my nerd instincts in some other way.
From the outside, Atlas looked like a squashed American football, with a slightly concave base where momentum transfer took place, and a football field sized structure above. It was proofed against anything short of a direct megaton yield warhead, interior walls so EM resistant that you'd lose wifi if you went to take a shit.
Uh, perhaps that last bit was just the UN being cheap again. It worked fine in the offices at the least.
On the topic of the offices, they were vibration-proofed, and the most sensitive ones were actually perturbed minutely and randomly to throw off laser pickups. Swarms of nanites flowed through the plumbing, looking for anything untoward, and the security robots lacked a sense of humor. Sensitive mass detectors calibrated to the gram measured the weight of the building, and any surprise changes were usually met with lockdowns. And the truly top secret stuff was airgapped to boot.
The interior was intentionally labyrinthine, with the pieces made modular so that every week or two, the structure could be reshuffled. Made getting around without a map a PITA I tell you. This was a measure against teleporters, who usually require a rough mental map of a locale to get there, not that they'd last long against the laser turrets if they did.
I walked past the official teleporter arrival point (831 days since the last telefrag incident), to the employee lounge, which consistently tended to be towards the outer surface of the structure, with walls that projected the outside view well enough that you could mostly be fooled.
My arrival prompted cheers from the motley crew currently taking their lunch break, the Munchkins as I called them, or more officially, the Applied Sciences division of the Metahuman Resources department. They were usually responsible for figuring out optimal and unorthodox ways of employing superpowers, and I had to liason with them on a regular basis.
But they were hell to DM for when it came to DnD, I'll tell you that much.
I abandoned them after a heated debate regarding the feasibility of ending the war by seducing the aliens using Lothario's powers (highly dubious) to grab a drink and stare out the virtual window for a bit.
Atlas 1 was just offshore from Atlantis, the continent-in-progress in the middle of the Pacific. Yes, I'm aware that it's a dumb name, or at least one that ought to be reserved for one in the Atlantic Ocean. A pan-national conglomerate had hired out a cabal of supes specialized in terraforming, and they were busy dragging gigatons of dirt off the ocean floor to build their own nation, with blackjack and superpowered hookers. Predictably, this was a geopolitically fraught process, and nary a day went by without the cold war with a bunch of environmentalist movements flaring up.
To call it a continent would be an exaggeration though, right now it was more county sized, but progress was rapid. I watched the ocean dredgers floating serenely below, rendered the size of beetles even if each one was actually akin to an obese aircraft carrier.
I tried not to think about the fact that someone had tried to kill me a few hours back.
Hekate class Basilisks were relatively benign as they went, more likely to drive you insane than kill outright, but sufficient personality change was death as far as I was concerned. The IT team was too overstretched to investigate in detail, barring time taken out to berate me for missing my last OTA security patch. ExtSec would look into the matter, but it was exceedingly difficult to pin-point where Basilisk exposure had occurred. The when was comparatively easier, about 24 hours before the victim started convulsing.
A ping informed me that my field team had arrived, so I settled in and waited for them to decon and come by.
Soon enough, they walked into the lounge, wearing fresh clothing. I stood up to greet them, but was interrupted by a woman who wrapped me in a bear hug hard enough to make my eyes water.
"Adat you idiot, if you plan to die, at least do so in an interesting manner." Emily said, poking me in the chest hard enough to bruise.
"Nice to see you too Em, enjoy the beachside trip?" I said, taking the beer she then handed me.
"Always a pleasure, especially when UNSEEN is footing the bill. Not that there was much beach left when we got there, or dry land for the matter.." She grimaced, and cracked open her own beer.
"I saw for myself. You guys couldn't have made it in time, at least the Americans had it under wraps by the time you got there."
Emily was a supe herself, a Class 2 Bruiser. I'd seen her throw an APC half a block, and tear turrets off tanks.
Unfortunately for her, her super strength didn't come with the subconscious near-field telekinesis that higher grade Bruisers had, in other words, if she tried to stop a train by standing in front of it, she'd just end up tearing through it like tissue paper. The better heavy hitters could extend their will into macroscopic objects, and slow or speed them down without concerns about structural integrity. She would end up making a hole in the ground if she tried to use her strength to jump about on anything but the hardest surfaces, but she brought much needed muscle to the team, and I was glad to have her.
I turned to talk to her junior team member, currently under her tutelage, but she was still shy, and wouldn't make eye contact.
"Hey, I'm sorry you had to see that kiddo, I promise that there'll be days when you do get to make a difference." I said, gauging her response.
"I'm glad you're okay Dr. Sen." Alia replied, before nursing her drink. I noticed her discomfort and took her untouched beer away and handed her a glass of OJ, which she took with gratitude. I didn't bug her, it always sucked to show up to a trigger event when it was all done and dusted, the dead in no position to say thank you.
Alia was nominally a Class 2 Euclid, but her powers didn't fall into any neat category. She had the ability to turn flat, becoming two dimensional in any orientation of her choosing. However, she was far from invulnerable in that condition, which made the usual industrial applications of thinner than monomolecular cutting edges difficult to handle. However, she could roll and contort herself into near arbitrary shapes, and thus she could slip through the thinnest of cracks. I'd slapped down Emily's suggestion of Cockroach as a suitable name, and had suggested Origami instead, a name she had adopted with pride, but wasn't nearly fully of herself enough to insist on.
A young lad from Applied Sciences came over to say hi, she was fond of him, I knew that much, was the name Jim? He was the one who'd figured out how to roll up her edges so they wouldn't slice through whatever she touched, a neat trick, and it made for a fun picture when she let us actually fold her into a paper plane and fly her around the office.
I went over to where Alan and Grim were hanging out by the ice machine. Alan patted me on the back with his bionic arm, and crunched an ice cube noisily.
"No luck with the hands doc, since I know you'd ask." Alan said, splaying them dejectedly before me.
I nodded, it was exceptionally rare that cybernetics interfaced well with superpowers, and Alan was faced with the unenviable choice of either having two arms and not using his, or having them literally fall off when he used his power.
He was a Class 1 Jumper, a teleporter with severe limitations. For starters, his jumps were far too slow for industry, teleporters who could do FTL were worth their weight in gold, and automatically warranted at least Class 4 status. Everyone from high frequency trading firms to various militaries and aerospace companies would throw money their way, and the truly gifted were prized assets you couldn't buy off them for love or money. Back when Anjana was on Earth, we'd been rich, instead of me struggling to get by with my measly salary. It was better than nothing, especially with the recent cutbacks on Universal Basic Income, citing the unforeseen increase in military expenditures.
Alan took several seconds to make a jump, slowly becoming intangible before vanishing for several more minutes and reappearing at his target, once again taking a while to fully materialize. He couldn't go beyond line of sight either, and had a range limitation of a few hundred meters. He was a trained sniper, capable of showing up at unexpected angles, but a few weeks ago in Lagos, he'd gotten too close to our target, a Class 3 metallokinetic specializing in blades, and lost both his arms at the elbow before he could dematerialize.
A Healer capable of whole limb regeneration would take a while to become available, so he'd been outfitted with cybernetics in the interim. Unfortunately, his ability to take things with him when he teleported was also limited to what he could physically carry in his arms, and you can see the rub there I'm sure. The tests I'd run with the AS boys suggested that his ability was strongest at the parts of the skin most sensitive to touch, and other than holding a gun in his mouth, he'd be hard pressed to take more than the clothes on his back with him now.
Still, he could do the search part of search and rescue in a pinch, and I'd insisted he join missions so he couldn't sit around and mope.
Grim towered over both of us, and I knew better than to attempt to make smalltalk with the man. He was a damaged super, effectively depowered because of his loss of conscious control over it now. That didn't mean he wasn't useful, even if I usually forgot he existed, let alone to use him. He had been a seriously augmented military cyborg even before he got his powers, though like most, he found himself unable to upgrade afterwards. He often acted as our infiltrator, but where stealth wasn't necessary, he was our heavy weapons specialist. Turns out a lot of supes were allergic to high velocity railgun rounds to the cranium.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
What was his power again? It slips my mind.
ALERT: 78% PROBABILITY OF INCOGNITO INTERACTION.
ALERT RESCINDED: PRIOR MANUAL OVERRIDE
Ah. That.
Grim used to be a Class 3 Incognito, capable of evading all biological detection mechanisms. Unless he wanted you to know he was there, he was practically impossible to notice. Eyes slid off him, your mind dove to ever weirder explanations for the discrepancy without every considering his presence.
He'd been in the Israeli military at one point, an operator in Sayeret Matkal. During an assault on a Centaur base, he'd taken a head wound, followed by the sudden manifestation of his powers. When the rest of his squad was evacced, nobody even realized he was absent until they had an alert thrown by an AI back on Earth. He spent an entire year desperately trying to make contact, only to be entirely ignored by a dozen expeditionary forces, resorting to stealing from abandoned supply caches until an AI craft happened to fly overhead and picked him up.
He'd been severely traumatized, with debilitating PTSD, and his power had become increasingly unreliable and uncontrollable. After I'd approved him for return to the field, he'd had episodes where he lost his immunity to his own power, causing him and his team to forget he even existed, often leaving him alone and starving in a near catatonic state till he was weakened enough that his power fizzled out. These days we had an AI dedicated to checking in and reminding us of his presence, as well as scheduled doses of mnestic drugs, but I often found myself extremely confused when he made an appearance on a raid, forgetting that I'd given him his marching orders.
What was I talking about again? Something to do with Alan I think.
Since nothing too interesting had happened to my team, barring showing up late to a sea of waterlogged corpses after our target had already been bagged, I finished the casual debrief and went back to my office, resolving to get something productive done.
I decided to stay over tonight, without an agrav, it would take me several hours to commute back, and I'd only been home to water the plants and talk to Anjana anyway.
I decided to check the news:
1) Newly triggered superhero being sued by the RSPCA and PETA for animal cruelty:
A Grade 4 Ex Nihilist, name withheld for privacy, caused a furore in Canberra today.
[Simon Wells]*, an autistic 12 year old boy, was taking part in an exercise by the Australian Junior Parahuman Corps when he apparently decided to make it "rain cats and dogs". Before senior supervisors restrained him, residents of the neighborhood were traumatized by a hail of mewling and screaming bodies falling on their roof, breaking windows and smashing cars under their weight.
The streets ran red with blood, and several injuries have been reported from impacts by the animals. After the boy was made to desist by his commanding officer, a recovery attempt was made, and approximately 2700 dogs and 16000 cats were rescued alive.
Critiques have been made of the laxity with the Australian army handles manifestations in its recruits, and some have called for stricter monitoring of powered individuals with mental health disorders, a position that has attracted the ire of Autism acceptance activists in turn. In the meantime, readers interested in adopting one of the animals may call 890-
2) Progress on Intel's fab in the Hellas basin has run into complications. After the terrorist attack by Centauri sympathizers killed two hydrokinetics employed by the US Martian Administration last month, a gigaliter shortfall of water production has left austerity measures in place for the foreseeable future.
Deprived of water, the fab is unlikely to be able to resume production, even if retooled for obsolete manufacturing processes.
The Hellas colony itself has been receiving regular shipments from the poles via freight train, but as of today, only critical life support systems are cleared for water consumption, and further greensmithing of the basin is on hold.
3) Senior UN official Tarun Biswas was arrested on charges of Centauri collaboration, while details are still thin, Mr. Biswas had been a prior activist for further diplomatic overtures, including submitting his approval for a proposed oversight committee that would handle the demilitarization and deindustrialization of compute production before the atrocities on Pluto ended their momentum.
While publicly decrying his previous position afterwards, investigators have claimed that he continued providing classified information to Centauri collaborators as recently as 2042.
He remains in custody pending the availability of certified clairvoyants.
*Unredacted due to UNSEEN clearance ULTRAVIOLET
I polished up the power law paper, having an AI design some infographics for the purposes of illustrating the power classification system that McKinsey and Wanton had worked on.
I sighed as I was reminded of the paucity of high quality superhumans in UNSEEN. To put it bluntly, we didn't receive the best, not by a longshot.
Class 0s, 1s, and 2s made up the bulk of our operatives. We had a couple dozen Class 3s, but everything 4 and above were rotating assets, usually spending their time with various national militaries except for when they could be requisitioned.
I didn't blame most private supes not joining us, nor governments not loaning their personnel either. With how tight funding had been recently, we could hardly afford any of the exotic powers, and the fighting in Alpha Centauri had ramped up, meaning the truly heavy hitters were being pulled out of the Solar System.
For example, that newly discovered hydrokinetic could easily charge millions in USDC per day for their powers on the colonies, and I half suspected that in light of today's news, he'd end up voluntold to Mars.
I knew that Euclid, the world's best teleporter, could earn as much as a billion per trip to AC, and before my wife had been drafted there, she was making hundreds of thousands a month just on Earth.
After making some final edits, I tossed the report over to the committees, ideally it would be published today, given that none of the contents were particularly classified.
I was just about to pack up and catch one of the return shuttles when External Security contacted me via my lace.
"Hey Dr. Sen, surprised to see that you're still burning the midnight oil after what happened this morning." Julia Wang asked me, dragging on a cigar through the video feed.
I quelled my med school instincts of chiding her for ruining her lungs, since lung cancer wasn't really a concern these days, and said, "Kinda hard to sleep after someone tried to fry my brain. I take it you're calling because you guys found something?"
She nodded, and stubbed out the cigar before continuing.
"Affirmative. As you're well aware, Hekate is a tailored parrot, only dangerous for a small range of neural architectures. We saw modifications that are highly suggestive of strong artificial selection pressures for circumventing standard Basilisk detection algorithms. Crafter work, in all likelihood."
"So you're saying I was intentionally targeted and this wasn't a drive-by?" I asked, leaning back in my chair.
"Out of the 11 billion on Earth, maybe 5 others would be vulnerable. So the smart money is on someone trying to get to you." She confirmed, swiping at her display to bring up some files.
"Someone went to that much trouble for a humble psychiatrist? I'm flattered." I drawled, and resolved to order some cigars for myself when I could.
She raised an eyebrow before continuing. "Hardly just a common shrink, Dr. Sen. I've read quite a few of your papers myself, you know, and you're on track for Assistant Director in a few years."
I waved her off, "You flatter me, Ms. Wang. If I was targeted, I'd bet on it being a way to try and get to my wife." That was true, and one of the reasons I hadn't sent a message to her today. That, and I wanted to get more facts in hand, not to mention that for non-military FTL transmissions to AC, you needed to wait for the weekly civilian courier service, with the messages arriving months later. I didn't want to alarm her, certainly not now, when she needed her head in the game.
"Besides-", I said, "-if I was really that important, you'd grab a forensic Clairvoyant for the case."
She looked somewhat uncomfortable, "You know how bad the backlog is. If we find anything else concerning, I'll try and pull some strings to slip you ahead in the queue."
I didn't bother asking what could be more concerning than an attempt to murder me, but after a little discussion about potential attack vectors, she bid me farewell and left me to finish up and head on home.
One small problem with being in a restricted information zone was that nobody had told me that my apartment had just been swept away by a tsunami.
I groaned in dismay as I surveyed the damage. The waves had been down to 5 meters or less before they hit Atlantis, but that had been more than enough to devastate any structures on the ground floor, especially an apartment like mine that overlooked the sea.
I trudged through the water, cursing my luck, but not overly concerned for the other residents, they'd have had more than enough time to evacuate, and most of the water was already being disposed of by the local disaster management robots.
I tried not to cry when I saw that my local data backup was trashed, and was successful, but only in channeling my rage over how much money we'd spent on a few minutes of intimacy, after how many months.
I checked my online backups, but no luck, the memories hadn't been offloaded in time. I could only hope that if I sent her a reminder, she could compress her own sensory data and send it back to me in another two weeks, though I doubted the censors would allow that.
I had my digital assistant do the rote insurance claims, settled into a waterlogged bed after sweeping off the worst of the broken glass and mud and dreamt of triple suns.