Infiltration (9 page)

“All the…?” I frowned, not liking this at all. “So, wait a minute. You’ll be able to see exactly where everyone is? Whether we’re in our own rooms or someone else’s?”

“Yes. We’ll also know whether you’ve been naughty or nice.”

“Isn’t that a flagrant invasion of privacy?”

“What are you going to do, file a complaint with the co-op board?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, since I am, ostensibly, the co-op board, when it comes across my desk, you may rest assured that I will give due attention and deliberation to your concerns. Then I’ll shred it.”

I couldn’t help laughing at that. Mouse really had an awesome sense of humor.

“Okay,” I said, still grinning, “what’s the real reason for the cameras?”

“The real reason? So I’ll know when boneheads aren’t listening when I tell them to stay out of certain areas of the building.”

I laughed again, and this time I even heard Mouse chuckling on his end.

“Alright,” he finally said. “You’re going to find out soon enough anyway. When they’re finished, all of the living quarters will have a secret exit. While we’re in the process of constructing them, I want to make sure that no unauthorized individuals are roaming around on the floors in question. Hence the cameras, which will come out when everything is complete. Satisfied?”

I nodded. “Seems to make sense.”

“I’m glad you approve, milord. Now, are you ready for your debriefing?”

“Sure.”

“Great, how fast can you get to my” — I teleported and popped up behind him — “lab?”

“Pretty fast, I’d say,” said an attractive blonde standing next to him. Mouse turned around, already knowing what he would see.

“One day I’ll learn,” he said, seemingly to himself, “never to ask him that.”

I grinned, as this was something Mouse said almost every time I popped into his presence, as if he couldn’t get used to the immediacy of my teleportation power. Dressed in the trademark black-and-gold uniform of the Alpha League, he often feigned irritation at the way I popped in, but we both knew that he wasn’t bothered by it in the least.

At six-foot-three and with the physique of someone who lifted weights regularly, you would have assumed that the nickname Mouse was an intentional misnomer — like calling a bald guy “Curly” or a big brute “Tiny.” However, I always felt there was something more to it than that, although I hadn’t been able to find out what it was yet.

Mouse, who was standing at a worktable, leaned over and pressed a button on a small, palm-sized device on the tabletop. It looked like some kind of mobile speaker, obviously his connection to the intercom. Next to the speaker sat an open laptop, with an image of the room I’d just left on the screen.

The blonde, who was wearing a black tank top and a pair of chinos, came over and gave me a hug.

“Nice to see you, Jim,” she said.

“You, too,” I replied, returning the hug a little stiffly.

The woman was actually a clone, part of the hive mind known as Braintrust. I’d known Braintrust almost my entire life and considered “BT” one of my closest friends and allies. Along with my grandfather, BT had played a significant role in my training and development as it relates to my powers. However, the clone I’d normally dealt with had been male; when he was killed during the previous summer, his replacement had turned out to be this stunning blonde. (“Killed,” of course, meant something entirely different to Braintrust. To BT, replacing a clone was probably not much different than swapping out dead batteries in a remote for new ones.)

On the whole, I still hadn’t fully adjusted to thinking of BT as female — despite the fact that I didn’t really know if the original Braintrust was male or female. (In fact, having only dealt with its clones, I didn’t even know if the “real” BT was even human.)

I glanced around Mouse’s lab, an exceedingly large room with several oversized worktables covered with hi-tech contraptions. A large array of complex computers and machinery were lined along one wall. A steady stream of information flowed across no less than a dozen large, flat screen monitors placed strategically around the room. This was, in general, the way Mouse’s lab appeared at almost any given time, but it suddenly occurred to me that something was missing.

“Hey,” I said, turning to Mouse. “Where’s Li?”

Li was an AI (artificial intelligence) previously housed in an android body. He had been indispensable during the crisis at the Academy, but had sustained irreparable damage during the conflict. Mouse was in the process of building him a new body, which he usually kept on one of the nearby worktables.

“We moved Li’s construction to a more private area,” BT responded.

“‘We’?” I repeated.

“Yes,” Mouse said. “Braintrust is helping out with Li’s new body.”

I nodded, as this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. Mouse was undoubtedly one of the smartest people on the planet, and BT was a living repository of knowledge and information. It made sense that they would collaborate on something like this. I had introduced them a short time ago, essentially in response to a request from Mouse’s girlfriend Vixen, another member of the Alpha League.

“What’s this about privacy, though?” I asked, perplexed. I would be the first to admit that Li had a lot of life-like qualities, and — despite the fact that I hadn’t detected any emotion from him — even I had initially assumed he was human. However, I was pretty sure that, while Li understood concepts like privacy, it wasn’t anything that bothered him. Thus, I was a little confused as to why privacy would play a role in anything concerning him, and I said as much.

“Look,” Mouse said, “when I first started dealing with Li, I just assumed that he was a typical AI, albeit one whose mainframe — for lack of a better term — was shaped like a human being. But in working on a new body for him and dealing with him every day, I’ve come to realize that he’s more than just some computer program. He has thoughts, intellect…even desires, although he may not express them in the same way you and I would.

“Bearing all that in mind, building his body out here in the open, where anybody who stops by could see it, felt a lot like performing oral surgery on someone on a busy street corner. No one would want to be exposed like that. Even though Li may not emotionally care about that kind of thing, if I’m his friend
I
should care and take steps to protect him.”

As usual, Mouse was right. If I were truly Li’s friend, then there were certain efforts I should be undertaking on his behalf, even if he himself did not realize they were necessary.

“Point taken,” I said.

“Good,” Mouse said. “Now, let’s get the 4-1-1 on this cage match you and AP had last night.”

“You sure you want to do this now?” I asked, with a short nod towards BT. She wasn’t a League member (she had no official standing, really), so I didn’t know if it was appropriate to officially report on what had happened in her presence.

“Why not?” Mouse asked, after following my gaze to BT and then looking back at me. “You’ll just tell her anyway if she asks, so let’s just save you the trouble of doing it twice.”

He was right, of course. I had full faith and confidence in BT, having put my life in her hands on numerous occasions in the past. In fact, she and Mouse were the two people I trusted most outside of my immediate family, and both were among the select few who had full knowledge of my pedigree. In short, regardless of how the debriefing went, I was bound to talk to her about it sooner or later.

“Okay,” I said. “What did you learn from Alpha Prime?”

“Never to loan you a car, for starters,” Mouse said.

“I’m just trying to avoid reinventing the wheel,” I replied, ignoring his attempt at humor. “Repeating things he’s already told you.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Mouse said. “The entire point of debriefing the two of you is to get both your insights into what happened. You may have noticed something he didn’t, and vice versa. So just tell us how things played out as you remember them.”

*************************************

It didn’t take particularly long to tell my version of what happened. During my soliloquy, I noticed that neither Mouse nor BT took any notes. Mouse, I knew from experience, would remember all the pertinent details. (I suspect he actually has total recall.) BT, to the extent it was necessary, probably had a dozen clones out there somewhere writing down my every word like it was soul-saving gospel.

When I was finished, Mouse merely nodded.

“That’s essentially the same report Alpha Prime gave,” he said.

“So, what do you guys think?” I asked.

“About which part?” Mouse asked.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, there are a lot of moving pieces here,” BT said. “First of all, what’s the significance of an explosive on
that
overpass? It’s typical construction, although in a deserted — practically uninhabitable — part of town.”

“In other words,” I said, “it’s not anything someone could have demanded a ransom for, like threatening to set off a dirty bomb in a densely populated urban area unless they got paid.”

“Exactly,” chimed in Mouse. “And then there’s the matter of the explosive itself.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“It caused a lot of destruction like you’d typically expect with such a device,” Mouse said, “but, aside from that, I can’t seem to find much evidence that it acted like a bomb. There’s no blast epicenter, no explosive residue, no device fragments.”

“But there was actually a bomb, right?” I asked. “Alpha Prime saw it.”

“AP saw what looked like a timer attached to something,” Mouse said, “but never got a chance to look it over closely. It may have had some kind of proximity trigger.”

“Any chance that all the bomb remains were destroyed in the explosion itself?” I asked.

BT shook her head. “That rarely ever happens. I suppose an incendiary device could have destroyed
some
of the bomb material, but there’s nothing indicating that any type of combustion took place. No char, no fire damage, nothing.”

I frowned in concentration, trying to remember. The sound I’d heard, the unheralded destruction of the overpass…

“I think you’re right,” I said. “Thinking back, I don’t recall there being any smoke or fire. There was just the overpass suddenly being razed.”

“Sounds like we might be dealing with a new type of weapons technology,” Mouse commented.

“What about those three goons who showed up?” I asked. “Maybe whatever allowed them to appear and disappear also affected the detonation of the bomb in some way.”

Mouse seemed to contemplate this for a second. “Possible, but not probable. Are you sure they weren’t teleporting?”

“No way,” I answered. “This wasn’t teleportation. It was more like…” I paused, searching for the right words. “Like matter transference.”

Mouse and BT shared an odd glance, and I assumed that they were both thinking how unlikely my last comment was. Matter transference was the technological equivalent of my teleportation ability. However, whereas teleporters move objects en masse from one place to another, matter transference actually operates by deconstructing an item — breaking it down into its constituent elements — then transferring those basic components to another location where they are reconstructed (hopefully in their proper order).

Moreover, just like brakes failing on a car and engines shutting down on a plane, there was always a chance that something could go wrong in matter transference, and nobody wanted to come out the other end looking like something Picasso had painted while drunk. Thus, even though the technology had purportedly been perfected by a select few, matter transference had a long way to go before it overtook something even as basic as a unicycle in terms of being a preferred mode of travel.

Bearing all that in mind, I half-expected Mouse to make light of my comment. Instead, he seemed to mull it over, saying, “Hmmm… That’s actually pretty much what your dad said, and he’s not really prone to exaggeration.”

I raised an eyebrow, surprised at having gotten an unexpected assist from my father. Even more, I didn’t feel any type of irritation at having Alpha Prime referred to as my “dad,” although I still couldn’t see myself ever calling him that.

“Great,” I said. “Speaking of our attackers, I don’t suppose you’ve got an ID on the third guy?”

“Of course,” said BT, which should have come as almost no surprise. There was very little info BT didn’t have or couldn’t get her hands on. “His name is Saul Gorgon, but he’s known as the Gorgon Son.”

“Gorgon?” I repeated, frowning. “You mean like Medusa?”

“Yes, except with him you don’t actually turn into stone,” BT replied. “You just become paralyzed, as you experienced firsthand, although he does have augmented strength as well.”

“Unfortunately,” Mouse interjected, “we don’t have a firm idea of how his power works, so we don’t have effective countermeasures for it yet.”

“I may have some info on that,” I said, and then told them about my grandfather’s theory.

“That actually makes a lot of sense,” Mouse said after I finished. “It would certainly explain why almost no one has a defense against Gorgon Son’s power.”