Retroactivity Read online

  “Subtle, both of you,” said Foresight with a trace of irritation. “She may not be on video, but we are. And we’re looking for another member, yes.”

  “Okay,” she said. Her frozen picture vanished, and was replaced by a near-identical, yet clearly living, image. The mask swiveled, and she leaned her spear casually back over her shoulder, one arm holding it near the head. “Pitch it to me.”

  “Our MO is containment,” said Foresight. “Shock and awe masking subtlety. You cut an impressive figure and draw the eye. If you can back it up, you’d be an asset to the team. Describe your power, please.”

  “Retaliation,” she said. “Anyone who hurts me receives the same damage. Instantaneous, uncontrolled.”

  “Does it work at range?”

  “Yes. Thrown items still deal the pain back to the thrower.”

  “What about bullets?” asked Asclepius. “That’s now an object from another object from a person. Getting pretty far removed.”

  “I’ve never been shot,” Golden said, “and I hope to keep that track record going.”

  “Ah, I can fix it if you are,” Asclepius said, waving his hand casually. “No big deal.”

  “And I’ve got kinetic shields,” said Keystone, “which ought to keep you from having to deal with Schlep in the first place.”

  “If she doesn’t get hit, she can’t use her aug,” argued Asclepius. “Better to just let her get hit, watch the bad dudes take themselves out, and have me patch her up after.”

  “We’ll call that an emergency backup plan,” Foresight told him. He turned back to Golden Ruler. “With that exciting pitch, I think you’ve seen the dynamic of the team fairly well. Care to come in and discuss things in person?”

  Golden laughed. “I’m not sure why, but yes. Can you do tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” agreed Foresight. “We’ll talk then.”

  Her image vanished from the floor and the wall. Mimic faded back into view on the couch.

  “Seems good to me,” he shrugged.

  “Blowing the cover of our secret member during a wave interview? Moron,” Keystone mocked Asclepius.

  “Hey, I caught myself!”

  “You caught a pillow to the face, is what you caught.”

  Foresight raised his hands. “Any objections?”

  “Not so far. I’ll confirm tomorrow,” said Mimic.

  “Success on the first try! No more interviews,” said Asclepius.

  “No,” said Keystone. “What if someone else is better?”

  “They’re not,” said Foresight.

  “What?”

  “There’s no other group consensus. She was the only one.”

  “Are you—come on! You can’t just tell us that we were going to have interviews and not like them! Are we supposed to just take your word for it?”

  “You can do anything you like,” Foresight said, standing up and stretching. “But I’m not sitting through twenty-two fruitless interviews.”

  “I will definitely take his word for it,” said Asclepius, also standing up. “One hundred percent.”

  Keystone looked to Mimic for help as the other two wandered out of the lounge area. “You with me on this? You can pose as Sight for the waves.”

  Mimic shrugged. “It feels kind of fruitless, non?”

  Keystone sighed. “I mean—yeah. Fine. He’s probably right. I know he’s right. Just—man. How could we ever know if he was lying to us?”

  “Well, if it doesn’t work out in person tomorrow, we’ll know he was bluffing today. He can’t see that far out.”

  “True! Honestly, I don’t think he is lying to us. But it’s nice to have a way to confirm.”

  “So…unexpectedly free day. What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going back to sleep,” said Keystone, stretching out on the couch.

  “Teenagers,” said Mimic. “You’re like kittens. Completely revved up, or sleeping. Enjoy your sloth.”

  “Shh, shh,” said Keystone, closing her eyes. “Sloth time.”

  VII

  “And what of our intrepid hero Mathias, so briefly glimpsed?”

  Mat cracked his knuckles as he considered his opponent. He took his time, unwilling to be goaded into a battle on any terms other than his own. Only after identifying the weak areas and formulating a full plan of attack did Mat finally launch into action.

  Sir, he wrote, I respectfully disagree with your assessment. We place too much dependence on Gammalock as it is. He is a necessary linchpin in many strategic initiatives due to his unmatchable Aug-5 creative ability, but we can and should seek to relieve his burden as much as possible in all other areas. This is especially true in the administrative sector.

  Gammalock is not a machine. When we saddle him with work more properly divided among our people, we are treating him as a tool. Not only does he, as a person, deserve better than that, we run the risk of stifling his creativity, over-occupying his time, or offending him with day-to-day tasks better suited to other people.

  And even in a best-case scenario, where Gammalock never objects to this treatment, we are still setting ourselves up for failure. When he chooses to retire, do we want to find ourselves scrambling to prop up the entire DAA? Or secure in the knowledge that we have built a system that can outlast any one person, Augment or otherwise?

  Or worse, what would happen if he were to die unexpectedly? Without time for an orderly step-down, our entire department would be in chaos if we continue to structure it all around him. For our own good and for his, we must re-organize.

  Mat frowned at the email for a minute, re-reading what he had written. The final paragraph in particular kept his attention for some time.

  Too hypothetical, he decided. Likely to sidetrack the discussion.

  He deleted the last paragraph, signed the email and sent it off. With luck, the policy makers above him on the departmental food chain would take the time to read and consider his points. Without luck, they’d just regard him as another bureaucrat grubbing for more power and delete it essentially unread.

  They really were putting too much on Gammalock, though. The man never much seemed to mind, and his capacity did appear to be virtually limitless, but Mat couldn’t help feeling that they were putting all of their eggs in one basket.

  For years, Mat had been pushing for the creation of an oversight task force, a mixed group of paper-pushers and field operatives responsible for keeping tabs on the more powerful Augments. The augment levels didn’t officially have descriptions associated with them, but unofficially Aug-3 was “potential for large-scale abuse,” which seemed to Mat like the sort of thing worth watching out for. Aug-4 was “world-changing” and Aug-5 was “unstoppable,” which is part of why the descriptions were never used outside of the department. “Unstoppable” was only good to think about when it was on your side.

  There were only a handful of Aug-5s in the world, and with the exception of Seed, all currently held sinecures with various governments. Gammalock assured them that Seed wanted nothing more than to be left alone in his alien kingdom, though, and so the government simply relocated people away from his section of the Everglades and left Gammalock to deal with any potential problems, Aug-5 to Aug-5.

  Which was fine, Mat reflected, as long as it lasted. But it couldn’t last forever, even with Gammalock’s medical advances. He was still just a man. If they built their whole system on his back, then the entire structure would crumble in his absence. In certain areas, Gammalock truly was irreplaceable, and they would have to deal with that when the time came. But where they could build support and safety structures, they should.

  Unfortunately, Mat seemed to be the only one in the Department of Augment Affairs who felt this way. Everyone above him was apparently content to hand over complete control to Gammalock and do nothing more than produce reports on the data he returned. Mat chafed at this. He had not risen to director to do nothing more than produce slide presentations. There was work to be done, and the bureaucracy
could be a powerful force if he could just get it moving forward with him instead of pushing back.

  Mat sighed as he sorted through the remaining emails demanding his attention. The simple fact of the matter was that he’d gotten into this job to work with Augments, but it felt like the higher up in the organization you went, the less anyone there regarded Augments as anything other than tools to be used or irritations to be handled. Mat wondered sometimes if his Aug-0 status made him a diversity hire, the kind of person his bosses trotted out to show that no really, they weren’t prejudiced, why they even hired Augments!

  Mat felt his bitterness rising and pushed it down, refusing to get caught in that quagmire again. In search of a break, he waved a message to Alyssa.

  How’s it going?

  The response popped up in his vision almost immediately. Another day at the office. You?

  Yeah, bureaucracy, wrote Mat.

  I hear you. We’re inprocessing today.

  This was accompanied by a picture of a single black boxing glove, and Mat grinned. Pushing his chair back from his desk, he strode through the hallways, out the front door of his building and across the DAA campus. All around him was the bustle of an organization in motion, and Mat reflected that perhaps things weren’t as tangled up and hidebound as they’d felt from his office. It was worth getting a breath of fresh air, both literal and figurative, on a regular basis.

  Mat keyed his way into another building and took the stairs down to the basement, where he entered a large gym strewn with exercise equipment. An area about ten feet square had been covered in vinyl mats, and around this area a group of about a dozen people had gathered.

  “Director Roche, welcome,” called Alyssa as Mat walked in. She was in the center of the group of people, clad in black track pants and a black t-shirt. She had grappling gloves on her hands and was squared off against a brawny younger man in jeans. He was shirtless and also wearing gloves.

  “Agent Emory. New hire?” Mat asked, observing the reaction of the group. A few of them straightened up nervously at his presence, apparently unsure of whether they were about to get in trouble. Those who had been there longer, though, just grinned and made space for him to come watch.

  “Yeah, this is Static. He thinks he can take me in an unaugmented fight.”

  Static smiled and pounded his fist into his open palm. “Any time you’re ready, boss.”

  “Director, care to call the start?”

  “Touch gloves, and…begin!”

  Static immediately lashed out with a heavy hook that had probably ended many a fight. The power was evident in his punch, and his movement was so quick and precise that it was barely telegraphed at all. Alyssa would have been sent sprawling and possibly knocked out entirely had the hit landed.

  But as quick as Static was, Alyssa was faster. She ducked under the punch, seized his wrist to continue his momentum, and threw him over her hip. He attempted to roll out of the fall, but she maintained her grip on his wrist and folded his arm behind his head.

  Static spun himself around toward Alyssa before she could complete the lock and, as part of the same motion, kicked out at her ankles. She dropped his arm and leapt nimbly over the sweep, landing next to him and kicking him sharply just below the ribs. Static folded up briefly, and Alyssa seized the opportunity to duck behind him and loop an arm around his neck. She locked her hand into the crook of her other elbow and applied the chokehold.

  Static’s face flushed as the blood flow was cut off. He flailed at Alyssa with his fists, but she had tucked her head behind his, and he was only able to land glancing blows on her shoulders. He struggled to rise from the mat, but he was slumped at an awkward angle and Alyssa had almost her full body weight pressing down on his shoulders.

  As his face was turning purple, suddenly Static’s fists began to glow with a bluish aura. He reached his hands up behind him, clearly meaning to grab Alyssa’s head. There was a general gasp from the gathered crowd, but before anyone could so much as shout a warning, Alyssa dropped the hold and grabbed Static’s hands in her own, lacing her fingers in as far as the grappling gloves would allow.

  There was an audible zap and Static shouted, his body spasming and arching off of the mat. Alyssa dropped his hands and rose smoothly to her feet, leaving him lying there on the ground, clutching his hands together behind his head and moaning.

  “Did you just try to cheat?” Alyssa asked her fallen opponent over the sound of applause from the crowd. “Because I definitely recall this being a no-augment match.”

  “I’m sorry,” managed Static. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to. It was automatic.”

  Alyssa reached down to help him up. “Remember this the next time you’re thinking about cheating.” She clapped him on the back.

  Static grinned a little shakily. “Nice moves, boss.”

  “Damn right they are. I didn’t get this job by being pretty.”

  Static retreated to get some water, and Alyssa and Mat walked a bit away from the group.

  “So, how’d you swing that one?” Mat asked.

  Alyssa held up a glove. “They’re called repeaters. One of Gammalock’s equalizers. No idea how they work, but they’re genius against all sorts of kinorgs. Causes some sort of biofeedback, turns their augment back on them.”

  “I thought you just told him not to cheat?”

  “You need to listen better,” Alyssa smirked. “What I told him was to remember this. I’m all for cheating. You just need to make sure that you’re doing it better than the other guy.

  “Besides,” continued Alyssa, “it doesn’t count as cheating if he started it. At that point, it’s just adapting to a fluid environment.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Mat. “The old ‘but he started it’ argument, beloved by politicians and first-graders everywhere.”

  “Hey!” Alyssa punched him in the shoulder. “Which one of those are you suggesting that I am? If anyone’s a politician here, it’s you.”

  “Don’t I know it,” sighed Mat. Alyssa pulled a face in sympathy.

  “Another fun day with the muckety-mucks?” she asked. “Any luck on getting that watchdog program approved?”

  “We’ll see,” Mat responded. “I’m trying one more email salvo, and then—I don’t know what then. Talk to Gammalock directly, I suppose. See if he’s on my side in this. I’m just worried about offending him, you know? It would be pretty easy to interpret this as a lack of trust.”

  Alyssa stared Mat dead in the eyes. “I want you to run that sentence back by yourself again.”

  “What?”

  “Well, are you proposing the watchdog program because you don’t trust Gammalock to properly police potentially dangerous Augments?”

  “No, of course not! I just don’t think the entire department should depend on him.”

  “Right. So then why would Gammalock think that that’s why you were doing it?”

  “Well, it might look like—”

  “Like what? Like you’re trying to pull one over on Gammalock? Are you seriously suggesting that Moloch might be worried that you’re trying to outsmart him?”

  Mat was surprised into a laugh. “Okay, well, no. Obviously I’m not operating on anything like his level.”

  “Then give him a bit of credit and assume that he can read your motivations correctly, would you? Bring him the idea. If he throws his support behind it, it’ll happen. And if he doesn’t support it…well, if the smartest man in the history of the world doesn’t like your idea, it probably needs reworking anyway.”

  “You’re right,” Mat admitted.

  “Of course I’m right.”

  “So when are you going to start gunning for my job?”

  “Your job? Ha! Not a chance in the world. Being right doesn’t mean that I can get things done. It just means that I can sit there and go ‘I told you so’ after people ignore the thing that I was right about. You can keep the bureaucrats. I’ll stick with my strike forces, thank you.

  “What?” Alyssa a
dded, seeing a brief expression flit across Mat’s face.

  “Nothing. Just…have you talked to Judah lately?”

  “Sure, off and on. He’s running with a team now, a private group.”

  “Yeah, that. I don’t know. I’ve just got kind of a bad feeling about it.”

  “A bad feeling, or an aug-warning?”

  “Just a bad feeling, I think. It’s not a real clear-cut difference. That’s the issue with uggo-level stuff.”

  Alyssa frowned at him. “Nothing’s ever as good as we want it to be. Shore up the weaknesses instead of complaining it’s not perfect.”

  “And how do I do that, oh fortune cookie?”

  “Have you actually gone to talk to Judah’s team in person?”

  “Well, no,” Mat admitted.

  “Doesn’t your augment respond much more reliably in person?”

  “Okay, yes, fine.”

  “So maybe you should—”

  Mat threw his hands up in defeat. “I’ll talk to him! I’ll meet his team. And what if that doesn’t solidify anything? Or if it does, but Judah won’t believe me?”

  “What if you constructed a hypothetical that wasn’t a hopeless situation, and instead assumed things might work out for once?”

  Mat shook his head, grinning. “I don’t think I’ve ever won an argument against you.”

  “And you’re not going to, either. I told you earlier: I cheat.”

  “How do you cheat at an argument?”

  “The fact that you have to ask that explains why you’ve never won one against me.”

  “Schlep, are you going to put on a shirt?” Keystone frowned at Asclepius, lounging on the couch in only a pair of jeans.

  “Don’t call me Schlep in front of the new girl!”

  “Okay, in order: she’s a woman, she’s not on the team yet, she’s not even here yet, and go put a shirt on or I’ll call you ‘Schlub’ in front of her instead.”

  “As if a schlub could have these washboard abs!”

  “You’re about to have punchboard abs.”