"Run that by me again, Doc. I still don't get it, my lace works just fine, I don't have issues with the drugs, so why can't I upgrade?"

I sighed, wishing that I'd upgraded to a model of lace and vocal cord that let me emit canned speeches on demand, with accompanying facial animations, all while playing solitaire in my head.

"It's called Metahuman Rejection Syndrome. I mean, that's the official name, I'm sure you've heard of more lurid alternatives like Meta Not Metal disease or cyberpsychosis, which is a bullshit term I might add, the only reason they went crazy is because they had a whole chunk of their brain removed and the lace didn't pick up the slack."

The blonde girl opposite me grimaced, but looked expectantly at me to elaborate. I was glad to have her attention now, she'd dozed off while I'd been preparing the forms she needed to sign for her official Intro To Metahuman Powers course, and then the UNSEEN certificate that would grant someone like her safe passage through places that didn't like having mind readers about.

"Your lace, it was put in last year wasn't it? And, let me check, you manifested last week?"

She nodded eagerly, leaning forward in her seat.

"I tried to hide it, I mean, that's not a crime right? Not using powers at least?" She looked a little anxious, but I reassured her that the regulations were flexible enough to excuse a little tomfoolery before you had your new (restricted) rights read. Maybe that was why she was sleepy, she could be jetlagged from being dragged all the way from Canada overnight to Geneva, then straight to Atlantis.

"Right, so MRS kicks in when you get powers, if you have, say, a lace, a vestibular augment, an old pacemaker or internal insulin pump, they usually work just fine afterwards. It's only when you try to add something new that issues arise." I explained, signaling the bot passing by to fetch us more coffee.

"That doesn't make any sense, a lace is a lace isn't it? The new one from Huawei is so much better than this one, I wanted a newer model last year, but my parents said I had to buy one on my own." She pouted, looking at where her anxious family waited outside in the lounge.

"Metahuman-" I wanted to say fuckery, but I was pretending to be professional today -"reactions to technology can be extremely unpredictable. There are people who can upgrade no problem, others who suddenly lose their shiny new legs. You're quite typical in that regard."

"Nooo.. I'm stuck with this thing forever? It doesn't even have a playback and recall module!"

Her mom stuck her head through the door. "Astrid, we're sorry, we just didn't want you to slack off in class." I made a face at her, this conversation was usually confidential, but the important stuff was over and her parents, as her legal guardians, had every right to come over. Astrid rolled her eyes and turned back to me.

"Who knows? It hasn't been that long since we had either laces or powers. When I was in med school, we had to give a boat load of drugs to people to stop their new kidney from killing them, we can only hope someone might figure it out." I reassured both of them, not that I really believed that myself.

"Besides, Mrs. Lindberg, you should be happy you got her anything at all, if you hadn't agreed to her request for a very expensive birthday present, she'd be locked out altogether. Although, why do you even send her to school?"

It was her turn to roll her eyes, like mother like daughter.

"And have her hang out with her junkie friends all day? There could be neomorphine in the syringes for all I know!"

Her husband hovered earnestly outside, looking sheepish, if those old marks in the crease of his elbow were anything to go by, he'd tried some shit himself in his wild teens.

"Mom! It's legal!" She wailed, clearly frustrated at the helicopter parenting. More like an old Apache, in this case, I checked her for the missile pylons.

"Only when we approve it, otherwise you'll need to wait till you're eighteen!" She said.

"I know you're lying, it only takes dad approving the waiver, and he was going to sign it until you stopped him."

The man was as astounded as I was, for altogether different reasons.

"Astrid. Listen to me." She did.

"Do not use your powers again on a human, not if you don't want to meet people far less friendly than I am." I instructed, hastily hitting the reset on an automatic panic switch, hopefully in time before security came over.

"It was nothing, okay? I barely peeped, she still married dad despite him shooting up behind school for years." She protested.

"That's not true sweetie, he hasn't touched anything since you were born."

Even I could tell that was a lie. It was still eminently legal, even before they'd emigrated from Sweden.

"Anyway, I know the stipend is a lot of money, especially for a teen, but if you behave, then we can pull you out of school and have you doing a real job, maybe even in Hollywood." I told her, knowing again the right buttons to press, though the glowing poster on her smart shirt didn't make that much of a leap.

"She doesn't leave school Dr. Sen! She needs to go to college!"

"Firstly ma'am, I'm afraid that that's a decision between her and her case officer, which would be me for the next few months. And look at me, I went to med school, and now I'm just a paperweight for you to look at. There's no point, just let her live her life."

"You're still a psychiatrist right? They don't just let anyone do that." She retorted.

"Because there are so many of us still around that they don't really care, and it looks good on the books. By the time she's grown, the only people who might have jobs are the metas. Which she is right now, so good for her."

She preened happily, and even her tightlaced mom seemed proud. Sure, developing telepathy came with more restrictions than most powers did, including the requirement to disclose, and occasional monitoring and random surveillance. But it was still a big deal, a Class 3 telepath was in demand worldwide, they outperformed facial recognition and external telemetry by miles, leaving aside the reading thoughts bit. I didn't tell her that if she went into the military, she wouldn't even need consent anymore.

The rest was more boilerplate, I taught her how to submit a request for privacy if the audit happened at an uncomfortable time, such as when she had her boyfriend over, but I felt bad for the poor guy, I had a feeling she thought she was too good for him now. Eh, he's young, maybe he'll turn into a supe too.

What I didn't tell her was that there was one way to handle the rejection, with about 5% odds, for the truly desperate, which was a visit to the Red Doctor.

I don't know if it's true that 95% can't hack it, but that's about the proportion he sent back. Alive. He categorically refused to send the failures, preferring to perform further operations in a frenzied attempt to atone for his failings, at least until they too died.

I always felt terrible about any "referral" I made for that purpose, even if most of the time the supe in question had outright demanded it, and signed a few miles of disclaimers and waivers, and had a telepath screen them to confirm that they didn't have residual doubts. I didn't tell her that this was a promising career option too, the Clairvoyants/Telepaths who took the job had a disconcerting tendency to leave in a few weeks, shorter if they had the bad luck to catch the Doctor mid-procedure.

He didn't like being surveiled either, and whatever heinous set of powers he had, they included causing severe brain damage in the poor bastard he caught looking over his shoulder, even from the other side of the globe. When you dissected them for an autopsy, thankfully something I was no longer asked to oversee, they often had chunks of their brain removed, the wound neatly closed with fine, yet utterly obsolete sutures that I'm mostly confident nobody still sells. When he deigned to allow us to oversee, it usually involved more convicts as payment, and while I'll be the first to declare neurosurgeons had massive egos, it was still hard to find some that managed to fuck up badly enough to end up sentenced to death.

I suppose we should thank Texas for that, but I heard most of the local neurosurgeons had long fled, and nobody missed them anyway, the robots had been better for a decade.

The people were looking at me curiously, uncertain if my glazed appearance was part of the whole routine. They'd seen weirder things on the way in. Astrid had turned pale, and I suspected she'd decided to take another very illegal look at me, so I pressed the safety just in case. After a certain point, they'd send guards even if I kept on hitting it, with Telepaths you could never be too careful.

We shook hands, and I whispered to Mr. Lindberg where he might find a discreet cosmetologist, robot or not, I didn't remember, while the ladies went to use the loo. It was a very impressive loo, I had yet to find the supe, with whatever anatomy they had, who still needed to shit but couldn't use it.

Right. I had more forms to fill. I did Astrid a solid by putting a tick next to "Responsible use of powers after full intimation", even if it might bite me in my ass. Some stimulus there would be appreciated, I didn't have cybernetic legs and the reinforced glutes I do now, and they could get sore despite the cheap memory foam chair that UNSEEN had provided me.

(It was actually meant for the patient, but I'd switched the around on the first day, and nobody complained so far. My old chair looked mighty impressive, even if it got old, fast.)

It was a rainy day, they usually hired an Aerokinetic to keep the weather stable when Atlas was under construction, but maybe they were on union-mandated break.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

I hailed a robocab, which was still better than walking even if I was going from one end of the sprawling temporary UNSEEN complex built to hold us before the fancy new place was done. Nothing as permanent as a temporary solution, an old teacher of mine used to say, albeit in context of someone getting a PEG done for their cancer.

I'm a consultant too, I can make up my own bullshit/wise saws.

Assistant Director Van Der Waals was waiting in the lobby, shaking himself like a wet dog to get the water off, despite the complaints of a mop bot. This was before he'd been hit with the turn-to-skelly spell, by a terrorist organization still doing bong hits before they turned to violence. These days, you could spray him with a hose and it would slide right off without a single drop sticking.

"Adat. You have to stop being so lenient." He told me. Ah, I missed when he had a real face. AR tags were fine, if he remembered to use them, but it took a while even for us regulars to understand what cryptic messages he'd taken to conveying with the glorified wallpaper on his new one.

He wasn't whispering, so I took it as a sign that they hadn't finished setting up the surveillance systems here.

"Boss, she's a kid. A more importantly, she's read-only despite decent power. What's the worst she can do?" I told him. He liked it when people showed some spine, to a limit. He liked his own spine too, because after the surgery, he'd gone from a more than respectable 6'5 to nine feet tall.

"You know better. Someone with a Crafter-built countermeasure, someone who's recently seen a Basilisk, maybe she gets their bank details if they don't have biometric 2FA. It would look bad if she was done in for forging fake transactions right?" He lit a cigar, once again ignoring the bot's protests. Maybe he'd given me the habit, even if he hadn't smoked a real one in years.

"Telepath in jail for theft. Next you'll tell me I'm going to jail for money laundering huh." I said flippantly.

He sighed deeply, and fished out a cigar for me. I immediately broke out into hacking coughs, and he sighed again and told me to stop yanking on it with my unaugmented lungs.

"I heard you're in for a promotion, already?"

"Now that would take a telepath to answer. The Director keeps saying she'll retire, but the old warhorse feels like a colt after that Healer laid hands on her. I feel like she's going to work till she drops."

"I mean, AD is pretty sweet isn't it? You still get to go into the field, occasionally."

"They'll figure out how to hook up superpowers to a robot any day now, and a clumsy old zero like me will be put to pasture." He replied, accompanying me as we took the rickety pre-fab stairs to the cafeteria.

The Munchkins had been let out of their cage, and were having another one of their regular DnD sessions (homebrewed 7th edition, I was pleased to see that the rulebook, which was now about a mile longer after I had to handle them, still had my notes, usually with a dozen upvotes and a salty downvote from the guy whose "fun" I was ruining.)

"Hey Buggy, whatcha trying to ruin today?" The man sighed, turning his retrocool AR glasses to transparent. It was an affectation, he got every lace model the moment it left the test monkeys.

"Trying to see if they've accounted for relativistic effects. So what if the peasant railgun doesn't work anymore, we're trying a peasant blackhole this time."

Typical Buggy. I switched to an AR overlay and saw a long, long line of peasants being shepherd by Infernals into a very small pit with an even smaller bag of holding in it. From the screaming, I took it that this wasn't entirely consensual.

"Do you think you have nearly enough peasants for this to work?" I asked quizzically. Against my better judgment, I was already half willing to accede to their requests for me to DM for them again. They never wanted to DM for each other, for some reason. And they usually broke the AI into allowing whatever they came up with, which wasn't fun either.

"There's an infinite number of Planes out there right? And peasants breed like, well, peasants. Or rabbits. Something that breeds fast anyway. And it doesn't have to be a big one, even a microblackhole will do, we're just trying to see how far we can push the engine till it crashes."

Another handsome gent, Siu Wa, nodded earnestly. "We had to go digital, get a few mods. You won't believe how long it takes to solve eigenvector calculations when you're using D20s."

Sounded about right. I left them to their questionable endeavors and took stage left. I think they were the only people truly chuffed about working for UNSEEN, while I was glad to feel useful, it did get a bit depressing at times. Another saying, plagiarized, "Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life."

Anyway, it was still work for me, but I wanted to contribute something to the household finances, even if it was pitiful next to what Anjana brought in. I wasn't quite ready to be a house-husband, my Indian upbringing had beaten that into my thick skull.

Speaking of her. I had a smile on my face as I approached the teleporter lobby, swiping away at the lasers checking for any objects, invisible or otherwise, in the way. You never knew what might happen, worst case was probably sudden nuclear fusion, and a big nuke, since Teleporters got lazy and chubby, at least until I put them on a GLP-1 agonist.

I ignored the sign stating:

62 days since last teleportation accident.

Ought to be 15, but they'd managed to stitch the arm back on without rejection issues. Helps when you can get to the hospital real quick.

I called her on my lace, but she picked up with that folding phone of hers. Maybe I'd buy her some AR glasses for her birthday.

Her smile was everything I could hope for. "OK baby, pad's clear right? You won't get into trouble this time?"

I double checked that the schedule was clear for hours, and the emergency beacon was green.

"It was fine, one of the Munchkins rolled a character too close to a classified supe, false positive."

She nodded, and before her head was straight again, she was standing right before me with a barely audible pop. I hugged her just about as fast.

Convenient, isn't it?

The Munckins looked on with gimlet eyes, and I unfairly prescribed that to a lack of feminine contact in their division, though I did know that both Buggy and Siu Wa had girlfriends, though if they put off proposing any longer that might not last.

The honest reason was that she was gorgeous, I mentally whooped everytime I saw her, glad that this wasn't the day she decided she was miles out of my league. Not that I'm ugly or anything, at least after the braces.

"Clear pad." Another humorless robot beeped, so we stepped aside, with me leading her by the hand to a convenient sofa.

"Damn, I'm glad I don't need an office or a permanent workplace, is this really what the UN budget gets you these days?" She looked around, less than impressed. I pointed upstairs, roughly in the direction of ATLAS.

The rest of us gave each other the side-eye, she still said this, even after I went to the trouble of replacing the dead succulents and patching the leaky roof myself? Women have far too high standards, that was the understanding we shared. Lucky she wasn't a telepath, even if she arched her eyebrows at us.

"Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime, excuse me, I need to shit on company time." Buggy bugged out, maybe trying to do me a favor by checking if the toilet was flushing today. Not that Anjana ever used a public one, home and our fancy bidet was a jump away.

"Office just closed, but I can show you around the place. Just don't teleport without loudly addressing the air okay?" She nodded understandingly.

It was a short tour, with regular attempts to avoid tripping on the cables of a mainframe someone had put in the only non-leaky room. She tutted at the terrible cable management, how they managed to get superconductor cabling several hundred meters too long was a mystery best left to Logistics.

"Mrs. Sen, a rare pleasure indeed." VDW told me when we knocked and entered his office.

"I'm here to demand you give my husband leave, we haven't been on vacation in months." She replied, examining the step up in decor.

"Well, I'd apologize, but Adat already told me you guys went to Maui and Switzerland during his last lunch break." Fuck. There were our excellent plans ruined.

We found a window that refused to shut, and stood happily holding hands while looking up at Atlas, which already towered over the starscrapers in Shangai and NYC. We could see the barest hints of movement, capes carrying loads heavier than drones could wrangle easily.

"I saw them again, in the Washington FedEx loading bay this time." She told me, mood somber. I clutched her hands a little tighter.

"Confirmed Gray? Did they have ID? Could have been doing something else, maybe they check the mail too." My attempt at levity was half-hearted, I was just as worried as she was.

"The opposite, the lack of ID tipped me off, and they didn't show up on national registries, even after I paid for full access. Adat, this is bad. It's the second time this week." I hoped she didn't feel my hair standing up, but she didn't have super vision last time we saw the ophthalmologist buddy.

"It's okay, we managed to get citizenship in Atlantis didn't we? Plus I'm UN, you're corporate or freelancing, fully registered. It's just bad luck honey."

She looked at me with her brown eyes, and I rearranged my expression when I saw myself in them. I looked far too worried.

"Adat, uh, hey robot, I'm going to TP with my husband for a moment eh? We'll use the door when we're done, no need to reserve the pad."

"Affirmative, Mrs. Anjana Sen." The disembodied voice proclaimed.

She did as she promised, and we ended up back in that little cove in Bali that nobody seemed to visit. Probably private property, but they hadn't caught us yet.

"Adat, I think they know. I'm being serious, you need to keep an eye out yourself." She leaned her head against my chest, feeling my chest rise and my heart thump faster than I wished.

"Honey, that's paranoid. Old Timer made it back didn't he? Let off as promised, he's UN now, in case he's too drunk to tell you. Besides, you've been hiding it like we discussed." She nodded seriously, shaking some of the sand out her hair. "Mass less than five hundred kilos, never more than 2000 kilometers without multiple hops. That's still Class 3 right? So the rules hold?"

"Act like you're struggling next time, that's dangerously close to the new proposed 4. That's high enough they don't give two shits what the UN says. I should know, I was in the room when they were updating the proposals."

"You couldn't squash it?" We looked at a crab that seemed dazed, which was an appropriate reaction to someone teleporting on top of your burrow.

I wrung my hands helplessly, she held them again. "Baby, I'm just a few tiers above entry level, still YELLOW. If McKinsey didn't like me, I wouldn't even be there, let alone say anything. You know how Wanton is, he's madly set on updating every week and fuck the consequences."

She sighed, giggling a little when I tickled her. Then I flopped over on my face on the soft sand, should have seen that coming, and I tried to ignore her laughter from the other side of the cove.

She flashed, and came back a few minutes later with pizza from that place in Chicago. Any urge to scold her for spending more time in the Federal USA than needed died when my stomach started grumbling.

"I'll be careful, just like you. Whatever you do, don't go to the Moon or the stations, not without a ton of jumps."

She rolled her eyes at me again, it was cuter on her than a stuck up teen and her mom.

"Nobody was watching, that crater is empty isn't it? I wonder if we still have spacesuits in the closet.." She reminisced fondly about our lunar hopscotch.

"As for me, I don't think they're that desperate, and if I don't visit DC for my parent's anniversary, my mom is going to make sure we don't have one ourselves. It was hard enough explaining why you couldn't make it.."

She kissed me gently, my hand finding her curves. Whatever, even if they cut my pay for staying beyond my scheduled break, she could cover it easy.

More curious crabs joined us, even more confused than the last.

She left with me, just barely in time to punch in again, and I said my goodbyes with an unusually tender heart.

A few months later, a SWAT team blew up my parent's house, or at least the front and garage doors, and only didn't kill Gator because his lazy ass was locked in the basement while we had guests who might fall for his begging while ignoring the warning about diabetes.

I won't forget the look on my parent's faces as they stood ashen, cake covered in broken glass, watching their son have a hood put over his head and explosive collar set to GPS detonation around his neck.

Then came the Grey Men. Then came the torture. We'll stop here, this was supposed to be a happy story.