The elevator to wherever 'Further Testing' was seemed to go on forever. There was a solid 2-minute gap between the bottom floor and where it finally settled down; and when it opened, the room looked... strange. It was enormous; like a giant underground warehouse with grey walls in every direction that seemed seamless; and a trio of men in labcoats were chatting back and forth, as a prim, proper-looking hispanic woman directed them to set tables out in orderly rows; a whole stack of a few dozen folding tables were against the wall.
He studied the foursome for a moment. One of them could be the woman's brother; the other two looked almost like twins; pasty, overweight, identical short greasy hair.. "..Ya'll need help with those?" He stepped out into the room, and the group all turned to stare at him for a moment; the woman nodded at the others, before marching his way.
"Mister Bennet. I'm Doctor Martinez. I'm primarily with the Metahuman Testing and Training department, and I'm the only member of that department read in on Project Ground. On the surface, you shouldn't have anything to do with this. Only twenty-seven people even know this project exists, and frankly this project, for all its operating budget, usually does almost nothing, most of its work going to entirely different projects."
Jason chuckled. "Surprise surprise, another 'mop up the rain' sort of project in the US military budget. Or is this the military?"
She gave a long-suffering sigh of exasperation. "It's not like that. Have you ever heard of Mark and Steven Maxwell?"
Jason tilted his head for a moment thoughtfully. "Ahh... Mark Maxwell, yeah. Lightning, everybody knows him, saved the world and all that. Who's Steven?"
"Well. You're familiar with Lightning's powers? Baseline runs around forty or fifty times our rate of time, with no upper limit? Can be in Antarctica in a quarter-second if he wasn't worried about devastating the pathway in between?"
"Of course."
"Well. Mark's cousin, Steven, has similar abilities; only his body doesn't keep up. Only his mind. He literally went crazy the day he gained his powers; apparently he got up from bed, stumbled, fell, and spent, to him, weeks or months in terrible agony before anyone noticed. It took months of drugs and therapy; which, to him, would have seemed like decades; before he was able to function again. Lightning ended up here in Washington for most of that time, as the only one whose mind could keep up, and helped get a computer rigged up for him. Nowadays, Steven helps us with our research... but his circumstances are what led us to establish the project, which he is part of."
Jason stared at her for a moment. He knew that mutation was a risky business. Most mutants just died, their bodies unable to survive the process that changed them. Others had mutations that left them disfigured or crippled; super-strong muscles with an ordinary skeleton that shattered any time they moved. And of the slim minority that acquired viable, useful powers, most of them had some level of radiation sickness that would lead to infertility and, usually, a short life.
There was a whole documentary; or a dozen; about all of the mutants that had developed powers in the concentration camps, and the devastation they did on liberation before ultimately dying, mostly before the war ended.
This, though? What should, in theory, be an incredibly useful power, but just turns into torture?
"...Good lord. That sounds like both a pain to deal with and incredibly useful. I bet he makes a killing on the pro-gamer circuit. Or is he banned from doing that due to his powers?"
Dr. Martinez blinked for a moment. "..No, he isn't banned, unless the event has anti-metahuman rules. And most powers aren't good for online things, so he'll probably keep getting away with it for now. Still. That's beside the point. The concern was, what if something happened, Lightning got trapped in a similar way, and went crazy, unable to interact with his environment, just to suffer for possibly apparently infinite time? Lightning wanted us to find a way to deal with him if that happened."
Jason looked at the tables that were being setup. There were at least forty of them by the time the men stopped; and they started putting small black plastic boxes on them, all spaced out. "So. Project Ground is an attempt to make a Lightning-killer device."
"Exactly. We tried dozens of possibilities, both so that we could have something if we needed it, and to protect him if a villain came up with something. We ended up with five we spent most of our time on, and we got Lightning protection from all but two of them by getting him Infrared and Ultraviolet vision. The last two are essentially different ways of making obstacles that aren't visible to even infrared or UV sight. But..."
She chuckled. "For the expensive route, we can setup an invisible barrier that, for about thirty or forty seconds, will be completely invisible to everything but sonar; and Lightning moves too fast for sonar to be useful. Unfortunately, after that, it'll create patterns in the air that someone paying attention can notice. For the cheap route, we can drop beads that are the right size and consistency for water droplets in among rainfall or the falling water of a fire suppression system; but after a very short period of time, they'll be noticeable on the ground in the area. Which means that either method will only work if we have warning Lightning is coming; and its either raining out for the second, or a clear day for the first. If it does work, though? Lightning will hit the obstacle at full speed and critically injure himself. He heals over fifty times as fast as a normal person, so you'll still want to finish him off quickly; but if you get him on the ground, that's trivial enough."
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He looked around at the tables. "Whats all this then?"
"Entirely seperate, a test of your precognition that won't bear fruit for a while, so we want to start the test early. Honestly, what little we know from Hiller's recording is that you can see at least two seconds into the future. If you're awake, and have good reflexes? You're the solution to Project Ground. We just need to figure out how to integrate you into it."
She cleared her throat. "Now. Those black boxes. All of them are sealed in a way it will take a while to open. Each of them contains a plastic card with a QR code on it, and there are one thousand of them. Over the course of the past few hours since we started prepping for this, we randomly selected and purchased about a million dollars worth of stock. I know one box has six shares of Apple, and at least one box has about a third of the available shells of a penny stock of some company that's probably going to die out soon. What I want you to do is walk around those boxes, feel them, look at them, without opening them or scanning those QR codes. And pick ten of them. Whichever ten they are, you get to keep that stock, and will be given either the shares or the current cash value in six months. The rest will be sold off at end of day."
He blinked. "So. If my powers work six months out.... I should be able to sense which stocks will be the best in six months, and pick the right boxes?"
"Exactly. So. Just go take a look. Examine all the boxes. And choose."
He frowned, and walked over to the tables. There didn't seem to be any particular order. The men who had laid out the tables, and the boxes; considering they also must have classified status, probably doctors, or highly competent men; all just watched him from outside the neat rectangle of tables as he slowly circled.
None of them looked even slightly different. He could see himself picking up the box and starting to open it but.... he couldn't get it open within three seconds. They were nice, rugged boxes; he'd either have to work the tabs, or crush them with brute force. Either way...
He did a complete circle of the boxes, taking at least twenty minutes to study them all closely. Not a single visible difference. A few weren't as well sealed as the others; he could open them. Absolutely no reason to pick one over another. But....
He kept being drawn back to the same box. It was....if he counted from the corner, the thirty-fifth box. Out of a thousand. When he laid his hand on the box... it just... felt right. He picked it up, looking around. "Ahh... where should I put the ones that I pick?"
Dr. Martinez stepped up with, of all things, a blue IKEA bag, and calmly set the box inside. "Do you mind telling me why you picked that one?"
Jason shook his head. "I don't know. It just.... felt right." He got more of an idea of it now. Some of the boxes just felt wrong. Others felt right. After the first one, the rest went like dominoes; he just walked directly to a box, and picked it up, handing it over, one right after the other. His final selection was the very first box out of a thousand, in the furthest corner from where he'd entered the room.
After the box was settled into the bag, she smiled. "There we go. So, we can monitor the prices of these stocks versus the rest, and pay it out in six months. We won't be completely sure until the six month mark, but if those ten are the highest value out of the lot, we'll have confirmed your power works for six months out, so long as we make sure not to tell you before that." She glances back at the men. "Nobody who interacts with him is to know the performance of the ones he chose for the next six months. The only ones who get to know are the accountant who sells the stocks and Director Thomes, in case someone has questions."
She looked around at the boxes thoughtfully. "Still. That's only ten data points. My apologies for the lack of preparation here, we didn't have much time to set this up. We'll go for a second set of boxes to give you at the one year mark, the two year mark, five, and ten, if you don't mind? Exact same process. Just stay right here, I need to get a few boxes and properly label them, make sure we don't mess any of this up."
***
An hour later, Jason was staring at the boxes, frowning, while the four researchers waited patiently. For the first batch, the second, and even the third, it had gone swiftly once he got started. He picked the first box, then the second; it was as if a divine hand was guiding him as to which box he should grab.
Now, though? The batch that he shouldn't know the result for ten years? Nothing. That gut feeling, that instinct that had pushed him to pick the others.... nothing at all. He looked around one last time. "I can stand here longer, just in case, but... nothing. Either I'm imagining things, or the power has a limit somewhere between five and ten years out. Or the whole thing could get shut down on year six, who knows."
Dr. Martinez nodded thoughtfully... and calmly wrote down a different set of dates on the box; to open in six years instead, without saying a word aloud. Almost immediately, Jason felt drawn to the next box. "Wait. Nevermind. Don't know what changed, but I can feel a pull towards other boxes now....huh actually, it seems to be... wavering somehow?"
She had the marker over the date. She had been about to change the year, make it seven... she did so.
"Alright. Its gone again. Maybe I'm just imagining things."
She looked down at the box for a moment. Considered explaining what she had done, how it could have changed things; decided to leave it be, for now. It seemed clear that his powers had an effective length of about six years; though she wouldn't bet on it until she saw the results in six months.
"Okay then, mister Bennet. This was the easiest test we could put together. We're aware of agent Hiller's test with the lights, but the next round of tests is going to require more prep-work. Our boss is going to be your case-worker, which... is a little unusual. His office is this way..." She starts walking towards a seemingly flat section of wall, leaving the three men to gather the boxes and start dismantling the tables. Laying her palm on what looks like a perfectly smooth grey section of wall, a soft hiss of escaping air was heard; and a seamless section recessed backwards, before sliding out of the way; revealing a short hallway and what seemed to be more ordinary offices.
"...How do you find where to put your palm? I didn't even see any doors, this whole floor looked like one giant room to me."
"Security measures. The folks who work here have contact lenses, glasses, or even implants that spot the right points, while visitors are let in by the boss after the scanners are done with them. To me, I can see any doors that I'm supposed to see. Its always possible the boss... or the director... has others, or even a secret second elevator, in here somewhere." She chuckled before gesturing onward. "Go on ahead. You're being expected. While we were getting this test together, and then actually doing it, your boss was deciding what your job was going to be going forward. I'm sure it'll be something exciting."