It had been a quiet week, at least by my usual standards.

On Monday, I had had to do little more than stand around and look the part of a psychiatrist while we served a warrant to a small Filipino boy in Manila.

Alia had been a boon, she'd been able to calm down his mother, explaining that her time working in the UN had been safe, fun and conducive to a child's flourishing. I wasn't qualified to comment on the last two, but while safe might have been a lie, the boy was unlikely to end up on the front lines. In fact, he would be significantly safer in our custody, before the US Secret Service sent over a kill team to deal with the devaluation of their currency.

He was a Class 6 Ex Nihilist, capable of duplicating anything his powers deemed 'currency'. UNSEEN normally didn't pay much attention to allegations of metahuman hacking unless it verged on security critical subjects, but what had multiple times been dismissed as a script-kiddie finding a way to end up with infinite robux kept on resurfacing.

I looked at the number of digits in the kid's bank account and winced. The only positive was that it was all in Filipino fiat, they'd be able to just erase the sum without crashing the global economy.

Thankfully, everything went smoothly, he didn't use his quadrillionaire status to call down the wrath of Rainwater mercs on us for disturbing his ranked match, and if there were superpowered SS agents on their way to kill him and the denizens of the block he lived in, they were taking their sweet time.

I thought of a way to leverage his power without causing triple digit inflation. You see, Ethereum and other newer cryptocurrencies often had smart-contract support. You could embed near arbitrary computations into them, and have the mindless grind of GPU fans keep computing them. The Munchkins better get me a beer when I next caught them, I always ended up doing half their work for them. Of course, it depended on how flexible the metaphysical aspects of his power were, but with USDE being a standard reserve currency based on cryptography, it was unlikely to be a stretch.

He proved quite docile, more than happy to play with the multiple M-rated games I'd bought on his behalf while I scanned the air for stealth fighters about to shoot my poor old helicopter out of the sky.

I'd had a stint observing another slash-and-burn operation in Cambodia. There were still parts of the globe that suffered from sporadic outbreaks of Centauri invasive species, albeit since the debacle in India in 2037 none of the incidents had been too serious.

It had been a relatively benign one this time, believed to be escapees from an automated BSL-5 lab that had been damaged by a metahuman-induced earthquake. Quite pretty, spore forming plants that released clouds of pollen that almost looked like Holi from back in India, and there were little flying animals that looked like a fairy got intimate with a lizard. Quite cute, except they tended to get bite-y.

Only a few dozen square kilometers needed to be burned down, so I was able to kick back with some buddies from the WHO in a nearby resort, wearing sunglasses as we watched the orbital lasers scour the surface down to the bedrock. A controlled nanite bloom dealt with any remnants, before the nanites were starved of essential trace elements so they couldn't self-replicate further and disintegrated under a specific frequency of far UV light.

But what made it the best week of recent memory was the monthly precog and clairvoyant audit, which announced a whopping 0.15% chance of a world-ending catastrophe, the lowest I'd seen in recent memory.

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That meant I only had to fight three layers of bureaucracy instead of the usual seven to get my annual leave approved. I'd given up on ever using it, or spending it while Anjana was around for the matter, so I took the rest of the week off and lounged about in Vegas, Miami and San Francisco. I took the chance to catch up with old friends, ties frayed by lack of periodic maintenence needed to keep them intact.

Vishwanathan and Martha had two kids now, and a pet miniphant, a house with a pool and little to do when their investments in a medical automation firm had paid off. I'd spent a day with them, which went quite well, except for the part where I spent my time lamenting that in all the time Anjana and I had been together, we'd had little to show for it. An apartment on Atlantis, some investments in Uranian orbit which the Centaurs had taken offense to and burned down, no kids or pets to speak of.

I resolved to get a miniphant for her the moment she was back for good. They were disgustingly cute, a GMO derived from an Indian elephant miniaturized, neotenized and crossed with a few key canine genes for friendliness. The one that they owned was great with kids, patiently letting them ride on its back while they squealed and kicked. It reminded me a lot of Gator, who I never had the heart to take away from my parents, in its love for crotch sniffing.

I'm telling you, if you think that a cold hard lab nose jammed in your crotch is annoying, wait till it's a two foot long prehensile trunk.

It was when I was two cocktails and a beer in, my mind four light years away, that it took my hands in its trunk to gently massage it when it noticed my distress.

I broke down utterly, I'd been operating at the very edge of my limits for as long as I could remember. I missed her so fucking bad, every moment I spent in this little suburban utopia reminded me that I couldn't have it.

What the hell did I have to look forward to? She's gone dude, you're kidding yourself if you think that her third tour will be her last. Old Timer did seven, and that was when the war had yet to intensify to this level, and he was far less versatile than she was.

One of these days, something would get me. I'd die cold and alone, and all the lives I'd saved would be no balm to the pain as I bled out. The UN was thankless, the bastards hadn't approved my pay raise for the fifth time, and that was after I'd brought them someone who could make functionally infinite money.

I left against their protestations, stumbling more than walking on the little trail that led away from their house. The miniphant had followed me for a little while, till I had inadvertently scared it away by letting my emotions get to me and punching an oak tree so hard that the motors in my arm seized up. I watched it run away trumpeting in a panic, and finally collapsed beneath the very same tree.

I lay there for a good while, staring up at Centaurus, bright in the night sky. It looked different now, even with the light lag, at this point four years ago, the progress on the Proxima Centauri Dyson Swarm had been swift, and you could make out the change with the naked eye if you knew what you were looking for.

I dreamt of her, right until the miniphant came back to me. Holding its warm trunk, I could lie to myself that everything would be all right.

It would, right? Right?