19

Explosion 1

One thing I had learned from the cape fight alongside the Undersiders - I needed to find a way to control my bots better. I needed to be able to extend my range, but I'd just lost my primary manufacturing facility. If I didn't have to actually visit my workshop to save my bots, I could have evacuated them hours earlier. If I could have controlled Abyssal from across town, I would have been able to fight crime from the safety of my bedroom. But try as I might, no matter how much I practiced, my range was fixed. Apparently it wasn't like a muscle; working it out did nothing to improve it.

I wasn't sure if I could actually boost my range, but I figured the only way to do it would be to mimic my own power. Maybe like a booster signal? I still had no idea how I actually controlled my bots; they just worked. Tinker bullshit, as usual. The studies I was doing with Dr. Akagi was almost definitively pointing to the fact that powers (or, at least, the control of powers) stemmed from the brain structures, and therefore if I were to do anything then I'd have to study my own brain even more. There were not many volunteers beyond New Wave, unfortunately. Turns out capes were hesitant to have their brains scanned about as much as they were reluctant to unmask. Who knew?

Despite the small sample size, Dr. Akagi and I still had plenty to work with. If we couldn't get more volunteers, then we would have to just find a way to get more information from the volunteers we had. Namely me.

That, of course, meant I had to design better bots. Ones that could detect brain activity to even higher detail. That would require changing both their function and their shape, but without losing any of the functions that my current designs were capable of.

Incidentally, since I had lost a good chunk of my bots from the fires, it was the perfect time to rebuild almost-from-scratch. Not that I had much else to do – go to the hospital, study at home, rinse and repeat. In the meantime, I'd be building more bots.

I didn't do much more than that because it wasn't exactly safe to stay outside. I watched the news and kept in contact with Lady Photon for updates on the gang war. I wasn't sure if the Empire was focused more on recapturing territory from the ABB now that Lung was in PRT custody, or if they would attack the PRT themselves to get two of their deadlier capes back. Either way, the fighting wasn't dying down.

Lisa, meanwhile, still kept her promise of providing me more raw materials from wherever she got them. However, this time, it came with an extra note to meet up. I decided to oblige her, since I'd be having a hell of a time trying to rebuild my bot reserves without her help.

"Abyssal was even more impressive than I thought he would be," Lisa said.

"Um... thanks?" I replied.

"I think he's exactly what I need against Coil. How soon do you think you can have him up and running again?" Lisa asked.

Ah. That's where she was going with this. "If it's just the mass, only a few days as long as you keep supplying me. But... well, I'm not sure if I'm ready to take him on."

"It's not any worse than... oh. Right. That night was pretty tough for you, huh?" she realized.

"Yeah, like, I could barely keep up with those dogs. Doesn't Coil have mercenaries? With cars? And guns?" I pointed out. "I'd rather be, I dunno, on the opposite side of the city when I'm fighting him."

"You can do that?" Lisa asked, her eyes bugging out. Then she narrowed them again. "No. Darn."

I shrugged. "I've tried practicing, focusing as much as I can, but I seem to have a hard limit on range," I told her. "And, well, if I'm going to fight Coil, and all his mercenaries, me being two blocks away at most is still a bit more of a risk than I'm willing to take. I'm sorry, Lisa. I don't think I'm going to be the solution to your problems."

"Well, you're not a panacea," Lisa said with an annoyed frown. "But don't sell yourself short. Let me think."

I gave her a minute.

"That coat. It's made of bots," she pointed out.

"Yeah?" It was kind of obvious for her, especially after she'd seen me do it before. I liked having bots on hand. And my clothes could self-repair and self-clean. And they always fit perfectly.

"And, meanwhile, you're building bots right now." She pointed down to the ground, where my bots were at work in the sewers.

"Yeah?" It had been her suggestion, after all.

"And how much concentration does that take you?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Well, the first time around, I have to really focus, but after I've got it once, it's not hard. I just order my bots to do the thing, repeat it a few trillion times, and they get to work."

"And you know what they're doing in case something interrupts them."

I nodded.

"You're keeping a lookout in a two-block radius to make sure there aren't any eavesdroppers right now. While doing all of... that,"she confirmed, waving her hands vaguely at both my clothes and the sewers.

"Yep."

"So let me get this straight. Your power automatically organizes all that information - which is continuously shifting, by the way - into a coherent image in your mind," Lisa said as she took a sip of her coffee. "They do this automatically, and you can do something once, and repeating it to near-infinity doesn't matter to you. No difference in effort. You can see what they see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel."

When she put it that way, it did seem kind of amazing. I could easily see what Abyssal saw when he was walking around. I didn't quite realize how weird it was, because seeing things while walking around was normal to me. I just... forgot I wasn't seeing through his eyes, I was seeing through every bot on his exterior surface. The three-sixty degree view was easier to get used to than I realized.

"Yeah, I never really thought about it, but..."

"The seeing? You're not interpreting light the same way human eyes do it. And hearing? Your bots don't have ears. Billions of them vibrate from the air pressure, none of them individually are processing sound, and yet your brain just... takes all that information and uses it to give you something coherent to listen to."

"Okay, where are you going with this?"

"You can see, hear, and feel with your bots even though they themselves don't exactly see, hear, or feel. Have you tried using your bots to think?" she asked.

"My bots don't think," I told her.

"Not yet. But they could, couldn't they?" she pointed out.

"I... wait, maybe... hmmm..."

"You've been studying brains for how long? You could make a bot that mimics a neuron. Link them up together and I'm guessing your bullshit power will make them work somehow," Lisa explained matter-of-factly, as if "bullshit" was certain.

"Okay, first off, I've only been studying neurology for a month. Secondly, my powers aren't exactly as bullshit as you think. At least, not as bullshit as other Tinkers. I don't even know how to make a bot that acts like a neuron." Still... the idea had merit. I was already in the process of redesigning my bots for higher accuracy and detail in research.

"That's not too hard. It's pretty similar to how you make those perfect diamonds for your current bots, except you incorporate silicon and a few other things," she explained. "I can recommend you a few computer engineering textbooks on that later."

"Thanks," I told her. I was honestly seeing her as more of a friend than an ally. And I knew that people were quick to declare people villains by association, but I didn't want to give up on her. Maybe she would be forced to work with Coil longer than she wanted to, but I could rebuild quickly, get the ball rolling faster now.

"Bitch wants to thank you for helping save the dogs," she said. "And you lost your main secret storage room, didn't you?"

"She does?" I asked. Huh. That girl didn't seem like the type who would thank anyone. Given her attitude, I didn't think the word was even in her vocabulary.

"She didn't say it exactly, but when you work with her enough, you figure out what she's getting at. Look, we still owe you. We Undersiders pay our debts. We'll find you a nice, safe location for you to build, and keep the raw materials incoming. Help protect stop the gang fighting from coming anywhere near your home. Or the hospital. Or the dockworker's building. Sound good?"

"I really shouldn't be seen associating with you guys," I said. "I'm glad you're not hitting legitimate businesses for now, but like I said before..."

Lisa held up a hand and shook her head. "We don't have to meet in costume. We'll do our own patrols, keep it discreet. We want to give you more breathing room, so you don't need to worry, okay?"

Weighing my options, I decided that it was probably better to take her offer. Finding the original hidden backroom was hard enough. If they could find a better place for me, I think it was worth having them know where my manufacturing base was.

Unlike other Tinkers, I didn't have tons of prototypes and plans and tools to hide. I just had bots; they manufactured themselves. The Undersiders didn't have a Tinker on their team and they probably weren't interested in trying to steal my tech anyway.

In fact, if I didn't have to carry bags of charcoal to the building myself, there was even less of a chance that people would associate me with that location. All I had to do was walk within a few blocks of the building each day to take direct control of my bots, otherwise I would just leave them to manufacture themselves.

"Alright. Let me know where it'll be. I'll mostly need charcoal or other cheap sources of carbon," I told her.

"Oh, and for the new thinky-bots you'll be building," she said, smirking. "I'll tell you which books to pick up from the library."

Even though I was soon building bots to give me more brainpower, I had no doubt that Lisa would still make it known that she was the smartest one around.

I fell into routine once again while the Undersiders helped me find a new base. Sure, working at the hospital did give me plenty to do, although at this point there were only so many patients I could help. It wasn't really my fault, either; the neurologists themselves could only perform so many surgeries, and the researchers could only find so many test subjects. Without having to go to school, I spent most of my time in between reading the neurology books in the hospital's library, or the computer science textbooks that Lisa had recommended to me at home. I still didn't spend much time on the streets; working at the hospital reminded me enough of what was still going on out there.

While I was at home, I mainly spent the time designing and further refining my bots. The great thing was that I had enough bots now to manufacture over a thousand different variants at a time. Though it still took hours to make each one individually, it meant that every few hours a day I could quickly experiment to find out what worked best, and refine the next batch based on the best variant of the thousand.

While working in the cellar at home, I heard a knock on the door. "I'll get it!" I shouted. I needed to move a bit before I ended up fusing my butt to the chair. I had already seen from my bots monitoring the house outside that there was a well-dressed man who had pulled up to the house in a very shiny, new BMW. I was really curious as to what he wanted from us. Just in case he was hostile, I had better protection than Dad.

When I opened the door, the man smiled at me and immediately gave me a business card. "Hello, you must be Taylor Hebert, also known as Eunoia. Is that correct?"

"Yes," I confirmed. I took a quick glance at the card. Bryson & O'Malley, Personal Injury Lawyers. "What's this about?"

"Miss Hebert, I'm Mr. Bryson. I recently learned about the injustice you suffered early January at Winslow High school. I would like to represent you, pro bono, to ensure that justice is served and you are awarded the rightful compensation for your suffering."

Dad walked up behind me. "I don't hear about many lawyers who go door-to-door looking for work."

Mr. Bryson's smile didn't drop. "Well, this is definitely a special case. You're such a high-profile client, needing representation against such powerful organizations, I believe it is better to be proactive with such things." His smile dropped. "To be frank with you, I have a daughter who is about to enter middle school. When it was brought to my attention how poorly a school handled a clear-cut case of bullying, I fear for my own daughter's well-being. I do want the school board to change their policies, and your case will have the public backing to ensure it will happen."

"So you want us to sue them?"

The lawyer nodded solemnly. "Unfortunately, there are many people who only speak one language: money. I suspect the school board won't change its policies unless it hits their bottom line."

"I'm not sure if we want to go through this," dad said. "We don't need the money. We just want to get on with our lives."

Mr. Bryson didn't express any dismay when Dad said we didn't need the money. I'm sure he noticed Dad's old truck and the flaky paint on our house. Even looking into our doorway he could probably notice the relatively sparse house. "Mr. Hebert, I know you're an honest, hardworking man. You've done your best for the Dockworkers. But think about it this way. Do you want anyone else to suffer as Taylor did? The school hasn't learned any lesson and their policies haven't changed. All the staff that enabled the bullying are still working there. You've suffered and they've gotten off scot-free. No justice will be done without a lawsuit and all the facts have been made public. If there's anything I think we can both agree on, is that we both value justice. Isn't that right?"

Dad looked at me. I think he knew that this would be my call in the end. True, I wasn't hurting for money. I didn't even need to sell diamonds yet. But Emma and Madison were getting out of it with their hands clean. Sophia was only caught because of her own massive screw-up, not for what she did to me before. Principal Blackwell was practically my fourth bully and she was coming out smelling like roses. Yeah, I wanted this to happen.

"Yes, I think a lawsuit might be a good idea," I said. "But I'll have to consult with my teammates first..."

"Thank you for meeting with me again," Mr. Bryson said, shaking my hand. He turned to Mrs. Dallon. "And it's good seeing you again, Carol."

"James." Mrs. Dallon just nodded to the other lawyer. I supposed they must have collaborated together before - personal injury lawyers and criminal prosecutors probably tended to have some overlaps in terms of cases, but she didn't seem very friendly with him. Just strictly professional.

"I called for this meeting because Taylor Hebert here, otherwise known as Eunoia, is considering filing a lawsuit against Winslow High School, otherwise known as School District 204. Currently, investigations have revealed that the Protectorate is involved in the case. Obviously, this will be very public, and given her membership of New Wave, we agreed that we should consult with you before moving forward. However, the events of this case happened before she joined New Wave, and we don't foresee it involving New Wave in any way."

"Aside from our reputation by association," Mrs. Dallon said.

Her sister, Mrs. Pelham, crossed her arms. "What exactly are you charging them with?"

"Well, Taylor, do you remember when that bully of yours broke into your house?"

"You mean Shadow Stalker?"

He nodded. "Nothing came of that case, did it? Did the police ever contact you again?"

I shook my head.

"Naturally. They take over investigations involving parahumans, and then merely buried the case. They don't want bad publicity, you see. After all, it wouldn't look very good if it turns out that one of their so-called 'heroes' is up for assault, uttering threats, bullying, illegal use of powers. At first, I thought it was merely a case of the school's negligence or obstruction of justice, for trying to protect one of their track stars. But when one of my... contacts at the police department told me about yet another case that was quashed by the Protectorate, well, I knew we had something even bigger on our hands. The School Board will be charged with neglect, corruption, failure to report, child abuse, and possibly obstruction of justice. The Protectorate may be hit with obstruction of justice and corruption if they deliberately destroyed evidence of the fact."

"Those are pretty heavy charges," Mrs. Pelham noted.

"They are pretty serious crimes," Mr. Bryson said, looking at me and Dad.

"That's a lot... do you think we can actually get them for all of that?" I asked.

Mr. Bryson shook his head. "Unfortunately, the strategy tends to be throwing everything at them and finding one that sticks. It would still be a victory if we can catch them on half of it."

I looked to Mrs. Dallon. She gave a nod in confirmation, but with a grim frown.

"Personally, I don't want to simply let people who hurt my daughter get away with it," Dad said.

"It's going to be one hell of a case. I don't like it. The press is going to drag everyone's names through the mud, including ours," Mrs. Dallon said. "One thing we've learned about public opinion, it really doesn't matter if you have the high ground, morally or legally. People will follow the word of rumour and popularity."

"So, just like high school again," I could help myself from muttering.

Mr. Bryson put a hand on my shoulder. "This will be a struggle. I wanted to make this clear with you, and those close to you, before we went ahead. I know you suffered a horrific case of bullying, and you want justice. But Carol's right. The defendants will be ruthless in trying to demonstrate you don't deserve anything, that you brought all the misfortune upon yourself. They will take your bullies at their word and make them seem like the victims. The public will callous in their judgment. The press will be voracious in trying to dig up any nasty rumour they can get their hands on."

"I know the type. They hounded the Docks for weeks during the barricade," dad grumbled.

Mrs. Dallon turned to her sister. "Do you think we can afford to let this proceed?"

"I don't see how you can afford it not to," Mr. Bryson said before Mrs. Pelham could respond.

"What do you mean?" the leader of New Wave asked. "We don't want to be enemies of the Protectorate. There aren't enough heroes as it is. There's too much of a chance that people will turn against New Wave."

Mr. Bryson smiled as if he'd already won. "Both the School Board and the Protectorate are being absolutely irresponsible and using their authority to avoid justice. In fact, they covered up crimes by hiding behind secret identities, using the cape identity to excuse the civilian crimes, and using the civilian crimes to wash their hands of the cape reputation. If there was ever a time when New Wave's philosophy was proven to be superior, this is it."

Mrs. Pelham mused over his argument for a minute before turning to me. "Taylor, this is ultimately your decision. But if you don't mind, I'd like to know about the details of this case before you file anything."

I agreed. I didn't want to spring any surprises on them. I let them know about all the bullying, about Emma's betrayal, Sophia's gang, and the teachers' inaction. I also let them know, in detail about when Sophia attacked me in my house, which actually elicited gasps from the two women.

By the end of it I was feeling angered and anxious to tears all over again. I'd become much more detached from that part of my life, with Tinkering and healing and crimefighting keeping my attention. At least, I think Mrs. Pelham was on board with the idea. I knew I wasn't alone this time. Mrs. Dallon still seemed to have her doubts.

"I have just one question, James," Mrs. Dallon said, narrowing her eyes. "I've never known you to take on a case pro bono. Why now? Why this case?" I remembered the sob story about his own daughter the first time he met us, but I didn't fully believe him. Not that I thought he was an outright liar, but I was sure the motivations were way more self-serving than he had portrayed to me and dad. Dad was more used to hard-working blue-collar folk, so I think he was more forgiving and empathetic to that kind of story.

"It's quite simple. I was given a tip from a friend of mine, Detective Elizabeth Salle. Ever work with her?"

He received a nod in reply.

"Well, it turns out that she was working on a case. Obvious break-and-enter. Well, no breaking, because it turned out the perp was using powers." His smirk and glance towards me was all that was needed to tell it had all centered on me. "Unfortunately, even with all the evidence, very little was done. Too little, too late. All investigation by the police was shut down and the PRT took over. They hushed it up as a single case, completely ignoring the past history between the criminal and the victim."

"So you're seeing a big payout," Mrs. Dallon said flatly.

"Winslow High, the PRT and its Protectorate members, the Barnes family, and two other minors can easily be named in this lawsuit. I'm thinking, say, forty-five percent of a potentially multi-million dollar lawsuit with fairly strong evidence against them. Does that sound reasonable?" He smiled at me.

I narrowed my eyes at him. "So that sob story about your daughter – "

"Is still absolutely true," he said. "Sometimes, profits and justice do happen to align."

"I just want to say that I'm not in it for the money. I just got a new job with a construction company that agreed to hire most of the Dockworkers, too. We'll be doing fine even without the lawsuit. So just go with your gut, Taylor," Dad told me.

"Yeah, and I can still manufacture diamonds at any time," I shrugged.

Bryson fit the greedy lawyer stereotype well enough. But dad's news surprised me. Was that why he was out of the house and looking even more exhausted lately? Then again I had been so busy I didn't have much time to talk to him either. "You know what, I think we'll go ahead." It really wasn't the money I needed. I just wanted something to change. "Winslow isn't going to get fixed until someone sues their asses off."

Mrs. Dallon held her hand out to stop us from shaking hands. "I want to go over all the details before you shake or sign anything, got it?"

Mr. Bryson laughed. "Carol, I'm not your enemy here. What's good for me is good for you, this time."

I was just going to pretend that didn't sound ominous.

On the slightly-less legal side of things, the Undersiders had handed me a new base and new materials. It was little more than a storage shed, but it was more than what I needed anyway. Tattletale assured me the building was in legal limbo for quite a while, as the original owners may have been... arrested for something or were otherwise preoccupied for a long time. With my bot design greatly improved and finalized, I started cranking them out like crazy. Most of the other Undersiders never went to the building. Just Bitch. She occasionally brought bags of charcoal or other materials to feed my manufacturing while she walked her dogs. Of course, they still dropped off additional materials elsewhere, when I continued building at home or at the hospital.

While not as convenient as my original location, it at least had a coffee shop nearby. When I wasn't at the hospital, I tended to just bring a book and sit there reading, controlling the bots from my maximum range. I didn't need to step inside to see what was going on.

With all the prototyping and refinement I had done at home, I started making neuro-bots right away. I focused on them first; I wasn't in a huge hurry to re-make the masses of low-quality bots that spread across the streets until the gang war died down. I wanted enough of them to see if Lisa's theory proved true.

At first, I was sitting in the cafe, pretending to read my book, while concentrating on the bots inside my own brain, like I had done so many times before. I copied them as best I could so that my bots mimicked every cell and connection between them. With my newly refined design, I was able to do it. It took all my concentration, though. I basically stopped producing new bots, stopped watching the neighbourhood, stopped reading. I would have forgotten to breathe if it wasn't automatic. Every last bit of my brainpower went to, well, copy my own brain while it thought. About itself thinking. About itself.

It was extremely slow going at first. I didn't feel any results for a while, until long after my tea had gone cold. Unlike simply reading the blood vessels in brain for Dr. Kardon's research, or mapping the location of the neurons for Dr. Akagi, making them actually do something was far more work. The number of neurons and their positions weren't all that impressive really; it was the number of connections between each. And there were a lot. Each neuron had thousands of connections to other neurons, so mapping the actual connections was likewise that much more complicated. And then I had to match the actual timing and patterns that the neurons fired, making sure the bots mimicked the "settings" correctly – that they spat out the right signal based on what they received.

I don't think anyone else would have volunteered for this kind of extreme-deep-dive into their brains, so I really was going to have to push the boundaries entirely on my own with this one. I worked as long as I could at the coffee shop until the staff started looking at me funny, so I packed up and went home. I let my spare bots carry my half-finished brain model through the sewers until I got near my house, when I was certain nobody was watching me.

The walk home was a bit of a break, but I was so excited to keep working on it that I flopped on the couch, and concentrated on building my brain model. I put the model in the basement, which was a little safer than the sewers nearby. I worked until dinner, and then went straight back to it.

"Taylor, aren't you going to bed? You look like a zombie," Dad said to me, breaking my concentration once more.

"Uh, yeah. Sure, dad," I said, feeling a little annoyed at having to pause my brain-copying again while I walked upstairs.

Except my concentration hadn't been broken. In fact, I realized I was now copying a bit of my own annoyance from the emotion centers of my brain into my model, as well as the motor cortex activity where my legs were moving. Huh. Wait, my model brain was almost complete. Just a few finishing touches were needed to round off the whole thing.

I should totally build more of these, I thought to myself.

Wait. Was I thinking to myself? I'd talked to myself in my own head a lot. It tended to happen when you had absolutely zero friends at school. And this voice... it was mine, but it wasn't from inside my own head. I think.

Yeah, that's really weird, I agreed with myself.

I was officially freaked out a little. I flopped down on to my bed, and tried to stare through the floor into the basement, where my model brain was. It couldn't be.

What couldn't be? A perfect replica of your brain perfectly replicating your brain? I taunted myself.

Yeah, I had to agree, that was pretty obvious.

Of course I agree, I thought of it.

I glared vaguely in the direction where copy of my brain sat, hoping that I would get the idea of how much I disapproved of me sassing myself. Then I realized how stupid I was being and desperately tried to think of nothing at all. I utterly failed.

Maybe we should just concentrate on work or something, I thought.

Yeah, I agree, I thought.

Don't we always.

Author's Note: You know, I recall the fandom occasionally mention the whole "relay bug" thing being underused (I still haven't reached that part in the canon story). Definitely seemed like wasted potential, and would have been a major force multiplier.