Willem sat on a stool in the private training area that the team had been training in solitarily for quite some time—close to each other, but ever so separated. The short man was elevated to Mirah’s eyelevel atop the metal stool, rubbing at his trimmed but still bushy eyebrows.
“Again.” He said perplexedly. Mirah grimaced in her own little display of frustration.
“I see webs of strings. They are all different. I can pull on some, others are hard to move, some feel impossible.” She said, culling down her previous, far more laborious explanation.
“Alright,” Willem said slowly, “so you can see the future when you touch them?”
“I can feel them, understand them.” Willem hummed in the protracted silence his mind swirling with possibilities. However, his hum was interrupted by the baffled, and slightly reedy tone of Walter’s voice.
“Why are you digging so hard? It seems pretty simple to me, all things considered.” Willem’s slate grey eyes turned on the man, eyebrows raised in admonishment.
“Simple?” Willem scoffed, “You have no idea what simple looks like, kid. If you think her link is in any way simple, then you’re just deluding yourself into thinking you understand.” Walter gaped slightly at the harsh words, but swallowed his instinctive response when Aaliyah elbowed him in the side. He hissed slightly, turning to look at the much taller blonde woman reproachfully.
“Shut it, short stack. You’re trying to outclass the highly paid trainer in his own field.” Aaliyah’s tone was almost amused, her face pulled into a little sneer of its own. Walter grumbled to himself, though he might’ve tried to lash back if it weren’t Aaliyah he’d be flailing against. She had a sharp tongue, and could think on her feet, both of those were skills that Walter lacked significantly.
Though he wouldn’t quite admit to himself that he didn’t want to argue with her because she was ungodly beautiful.
“Why is that different?” Mirah said, somehow more lost than anyone else, which only made the process of determining exactly what her link was even more difficult. Willem crossed his meaty arms over his just as ludicrously muscular chest, sighing deeply.
“Well, it’d effect how powerful your precognitive abilities are. In the far past we used a number rating system out of ten, but special exceptions were being made so often that it made the system almost entirely obsolete. I think the highest recorded number we got was a twenty,” Willem scrunched his eyebrows then clicked his fingers in remembrance, “that’s right, it was when Gigantesca appeared in Brazil and made her own miniature earthquake and walked straight out of Rio de Janerio and into the Atlantic. Though we never tried to rate Centerpoint. A fool’s errand.”
Mirah struggled to remember the names that were being thrown at her, even as the others in the group seemed to understand instantly. Mirah vaguely remembered Gigantesca, the four-thousand-metre-tall woman, mindlessly wandering the oceans. A terrifying display of what happens when a link goes wrong. Centrepoint, however, was more familiar, a name that had come up a few times in general conversation and in her unfortunate research surrounding Suicide.
Centerpoint was considered the most promising candidate for being the strongest Linked on Earth. The true extent of his abilities haven’t ever been revealed, but those with high enough clearance within the US government and any of his former allies concede the title to him without a single thought.
The ability to control gravity, just on a scale far past any other Linked who exists. At least for now.
“Regardless of the old system we abandoned, now we just delineate into ‘classes’ and leave it at that.” The man hopped from his stool, beckoning the group to follow him as he talked, “Your typical low-class would just be someone who can hit a little harder, run a little faster. Mid-class gets to the real meat and bones of what you consider powerful, with people capable of launching people through concrete, going supersonic, thinking with the mental power of ten people at once, and so on.”
Willem stopped in a location that Mirah had become very familiar with, and nobody else by Ajax had ever bothered to come meet her in. The wide lightboard up against one of the training area’s walls.
“High-class are the people at the pinnacle of that vision. They are the people capable of lifting inordinate weights, developing extremely advanced technologies in the span of my coffee break, evaporating hundreds of thousands of people in the blink of an eye.” The group collectively swallowed at the sharp turn into darkness. Willem’s eyes held their attentions captive as he glanced towards Mirah.
“Then there is beyond that. It technically has no name, though we just call it beyond-class, because they are exactly that.”
“God-class” Walter whispered, making a grin flutter onto Willem’s face.
“Some call them that yes, though don’t fool yourself into thinking they can’t be killed. I’ve seen a beyond-class die right in front of me. It was… eye opening.” The team’s ears perked at the man’s mention of his own past. In the time that they’d known Willem, he’d said almost nothing about his own history or who he was before he was a trainer at the AASAU.
“Every little part of your link matters, regardless of how small. The smallest of discrepancies could mean the difference between low-class and being the strongest Linked on Earth. There is remarkably little barrier between them.” Willem turned to the board and hit a few buttons in short succession, menuing through the options until he moved out of the way leaving Mirah standing in front of a glowing button.
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“This is just one such assessment.” Willem said, now standing off to the side as Mirah prepared herself. The others watched on curiously, only Ajax having watched Mirah’s display of her prior precognitive prowess.
However, now Mirah’s link was different. No whispers filled her ears like before, all clamouring to be heard over one another until she stripped the noise down to what she wanted to hear. Instead, as she closed her eyes for just a moment, she reopened them to see the dark world she’d seen not so long ago. This time Mirah was careful about limiting what she saw, the pain of what Aaliyah had explained was ‘link-burn’ still lingering in her mind.
The golden lengths of twine that surrounded her closed in on themselves, only letting her see a fraction of their true bulks. Instead of the thousands of little branches, she limited it to only three, something still difficult to comprehend as she looked at them.
She hadn’t delved into this space since she’d passed out, in fear that she’d make her recovery worse, buy she was already learning a lot about the threads and the trees and webs that they belonged to.
There were many origination points, all tangentially connected to one another in some form. As Mirah let her mind take in those origination points, she found that not all of them were human. In fact, most of them weren’t.
The members of her team and her trainer, standing around her, were the brightest webs, the most alive in comparison to the mostly static surroundings. However, in front of her there was a web that was almost as complex as the people that surrounded her.
She looked further, her mind subsuming itself within that web and each thread that branched from an inciting incident. One incident was Willem pressing against the button, the other was her doing so instead. From there, it was a severely branching thread, something that could only be determined as soon as she pressed that button.
So she did.
Immediately as her fingers reached out and pressed against the button, things changed within the web of golden lines. Mirah didn’t need to touch the lines, or to pull against them, they themselves changed and flickered.
In just a moment the complexly branching paths whittled themselves down at a speed that surpassed any normal human’s cognition, including Mirah’s own, but she could see the line become one, uniform thing reaching into the future with branches coming off the sides that were dampened in their brightness with their lack of importance.
Her mind wandered to its first section, the numbers of the countdown appearing in her mind as they did in real time, yet as she pushed her mind forwards along the line, she could see the signal as it was sent from the small computer that controlled the board, then across the mess of wiring to the button that it would eventually light up.
Mirah reached her arm out, tapping the button like she had so many times before, yet the board hadn’t yet displayed its second number in the countdown.
Mirah continued, her mind following the line with an ease that was only held back by how quickly her own body could be moved in the sequential motions. At a few points, she even used a foot to tap against a button she knew would be at the opposite end of the board from the previous one.
Then, in only a matter of seconds, Mirah reached the end of the thread before it terminated and slowly returned to the form it’d been in before she had pressed the button. Mirah blinked, realising that for the entire duration of the test she hadn’t blinked once, and the world of darkness broken with golden threads disappeared to become a view of a familiar board with unfamiliar text emblazoned across its screen.
‘Goal achieved.’
‘Average time: {If you are viewing this message, please call our service helpline at–}’
Mirah stared uncomprehendingly at the text as the screen switched to a graph displaying the time each button was pressed in. The initial button press was done in -2.44 seconds; however it had quickly compounded with each count going higher and higher as the timer lagged behind Mirah’s flawless execution of the future button positions. At some point the time had somehow elapsed the machine’s own software, managing to break its ability to correctly display Mirah’s average time with would have far exceeded -10 seconds.
The rest of the team, aside from their trainer, looked at the display dumbly. Ajax, even though he’d seen her use the board before, was befuddled by what Mirah had done, the total lack of illuminating buttons hade the act almost seems impossible.
Though Willem understood what he’d just witnessed, even if it was something he hadn’t been sure he’d ever witness himself.
“Well.” He began, his voice laden with some measure of shock, “Maybe I should’ve gotten corporate to spring for the linktech one.” The team turned towards Willem, only Mirah deciding to continue looking at the board in faint disbelief.
“Care to tell us what that was?” Aaliyah said, most of her snark left by the wayside with the genuine curiosity about what she’d just witnessed.
“That, Aaliyah,” Willem began as he rubbed his beard idly, “is the first sign of an immensely powerful precognitive.”
“We already knew she was precognitive though, right?” Ajax broke in, still unsure of just how impressed he should be. Willem nodded slightly in affirmation.
“We did. A little bit precognitive. Enough to give her reaction times that you’d consider superhumans. But with those test scores?” Willem laughed dryly, “She’d know your next three moves before you threw your first punch.”
The team turned back to Mirah wo was still looking at the little screen that switched between a few different displays, each of them quantifying her achievement in ways she didn’t quite understand. Her teammates, however, marvelled quietly at their precognitive team member.
“Isn’t that kinda…” Walter stared at Mirah intently, “crazy powerful?” Willem snorted loudly, forcing even Mirah to turn and look at him.
“Welcome to the wild world of Linked, where what we consider normal can change at any Godforsaken moment.” He sighed deeply, but continued on, “Alright, let me think more about this as you all go and run around the track twenty times as fast as you can. Mirah, you’re free to try get a better time if you’d like.”
The rest of the team, mostly Walter, gave her an envious look, but she quickly shook her head after looking bewilderedly back at the board of lights.
“I’ll go.”
Willem watched as they left the room and turned to stare at the screen still cycling through Mirah’s results.
“Fucking hell,” he murmured to himself, “colour me damn impressed.” He stood there dumbfounded for a few more seconds before he whipped out a phone at least a decade old and dialled in a number with the physical buttons at a rapid speed. The call went through, with a click and a muffled greeting.
“Tracker,” he greeted quietly before waiting as she said something, “Yeah they’re all doing fine, I’ve sent them all to do laps so I could give you this call.” She said something snarky and he snorted gently.
“Well, maybe. Though you might find this worth prematurely waking you up.” He waited another second as Tracker grumbled through her own phone.
“Yeah, it’s about Mirah’s link.” He paused for a touch of drama and then let the cat out of the bag, “Do you have any clue how powerful a precog you have to be before you can break one of the cheapo PC-LightBoards?”
There was an audible splutter as Tracker spat out her coffee over the other end of the phone as the call clicked to signify its end. Willem pulled the phone from his ear, looking down at the screen with a wild grin.
“Yeah, thought so.”