[This story is a prequel, set several years before The Fall of Doc Future, when Flicker is 16. Links to some of my other work are here. Updates are theoretically biweekly–going to try to get the next one out by mid-March.]

Previous: Part 7



Journeyman ran his fingers through his hair and sighed as he looked at the picture Flicker sent to his handcomp.

“Yep, that’s her,” he said. "Dr. Reinhart has a rep of knowing a lot about how minds are put together–and how to take them apart. She seems to be effectively immune to mental influence and hostile probability manipulation–no, I don’t know how she manages that–and I’ve heard enough complaints to believe that she can mess up Diviners and Seers just by being near what they’re trying to see. Not sure about Oracles. Also, she’s hard to kill. If she’s willing to help you, I doubt she’d be a weak point.“

"That sounds good. Except that the Database says her specialty is mind control. But I guess she concentrates on defense? That part wasn’t clear.”

“A lot about her isn’t clear,” said Journeyman. "She is very good at using fear, though. General opinions I hear about her are mixed. I have connections, and while I keep them private, the general idea isn’t a secret–I swap gossip, assistance, and so forth, move things around, and link people with what they need, all fairly quietly. Dr. Reinhart clearly has connections, but nobody knows how they work. She can show up somewhere, have coffee with a few folks, and sometimes everything stays quiet, and sometimes all hell breaks loose. Odd accidents, fits of madness, sudden unexplained deaths from no obvious cause, and occasionally ‘Blood–blood everywhere!’ And afterwards the details of what happened don’t always add up. Except usually some grim entrenched problem has disappeared. That part is acknowledged, but she still really puts people on edge. Oh, and there are rumors that she’s seriously annoyed several intelligence agencies, but they’re still trying to hire or co-opt her. Jumping Spider would know more about that than me.“

"Well, I needed to talk to Jumping Spider anyway.” Flicker frowned. "Anything else?“

"I don’t doubt Dr Reinhart’s competence to advise you about social interaction.” Journeyman looked down. "Motivation, methods, side effects? That’s over my head, but I would expect some warnings from your AI.“

"Why? Just her reputation?”

“Well… I know Doc is twitchy about mind control, and Dr. Reinhart apparently has issues with his methods. And the spy stuff.”

“She has a negative threat index–that means she’s helping. Doc is pragmatic about that.”

“Up to a point.” Journeyman spread his hands. "Anyway, that’s what I can tell you. Hope it helps.“

"Yes.” Flicker sped up to virtual type a response to Dr. Reinhart, then slowed back down again. "There. She’s traveling, and pretty inflexible about privacy, so it will be at least a few days before I can meet her, regardless.“

She stood up from the high speed interface station and glided over to stop in front of Journeyman where he sat on the couch. He watched her warily.

"Thank you,” she said, and paused. "I’m willing to at least consider rescheduling Speedtest, but I don’t want to argue about it right now. You don’t feel safe here and you probably need sleep. How much did you get last night?“

He shrugged. "A few hours before you woke me up. None since.”

“Then get sleep, consult your Diviners or whatever, and we can talk more tomorrow.”

“Might take a while to find anybody. If I even can. Tracking down Diviners is rarely easy.” He looked away. "And Flicker? I don’t want to argue about it at all. I’ll send what I find to the Database. Argue with Doc, or Jumping Spider, or Jetgirl, or whoever you need to. Not me.“

"I don’t…” Flicker stopped and swallowed. "Argue isn’t the right word. It’s just the one that sounded human to me. And my anger isn’t really at you, that’s just where I attach it. I think there’s something wrong with my human emulation.“

Journeyman shook his head. "No. Humans make mistakes, and they get angry, and no one should expect anything different. Least of all me. This isn’t something we can solve. Sometimes you can’t get from where you are to where you want to be.”

“And what I want is the problem.”

He waved his arms. "No! I’m the problem. I thought I could still finesse a way through, despite everything stacked against it, and I. Was. Wrong. And that’s why I have to go.“

"Partner…” She stopped again. "Damn. Having an emotional reaction to that word.“

”…Yeah.“ He blinked then raised his hand. "I’m sorry I don’t have any magic words for you. Primum non nocere is all I’ve got left.”

Flicker pulled off her glove and reached out to complete their fingertip touch.

“Take care,” he said.

She couldn’t find anything to say. So she just nodded. Journeyman took a deep breath and teleported out.

A faint whirl of disturbed air, then nothing.

Flicker looked around the room. It felt far emptier than was reasonable.

*****

Evening back home, pre-dawn in Kenya. Flicker didn’t want to wake up Jonathan or his family, but Chaser was awake and running to greet her as soon as she slowed down. Flying tackle and friend bites and his ridiculously tiny meow, and they played chase dance and dangle the fuzzy toy the way he liked. Then he flopped down on her feet and purred as she held him.

Chaser wasn’t her cat. He wasn’t anyone’s cat. He was his own cheetah. But Flicker had rescued him as a kitten, taken him far away from the lions that had killed his siblings. It wasn’t clear what had killed their mother, but life was full of perils for cheetahs, especially when they had to share shrinking habitat with lions. He stayed with the family of a park ranger, on land Flicker had purchased next to a wildlife reserve. Extravagant? Maybe, but it wasn’t hard to figure out why she’d identified so hard with an orphan who had social problems with other cheetahs.

Time zones made visits awkward, and they still hoped to reintroduce him back to the wild someday, but in the meantime she could hold him close, and whisper that he was a good cat. He purred and didn’t mind her tears from trying to accept a present that had crumbled unexpectedly, and a hoped for future that had been a mirage. He didn’t judge, didn’t care whether she was human or not; she was just his fast friend.

An hour under a slowly brightening sky made the world a slightly better place. Still not good, but better.

*****

Later evening. Ghosting through the darkness at 500 kilometers per second. Flicker was moving fast enough to be effectively invisible, but slow enough to leave no traces behind her. It fit her mood–she didn’t particularly want to be anywhere. But there was someone she needed to talk to at Doc’s.

Superhuman speed implied a superhuman ability to interrupt. So Flicker and Doc had worked out a protocol that allowed for degrees of urgency and desire to avoid disruption. 'Open door’ had a particular implication because of Flicker’s dislike of them. It was a way for Doc to indicate that she could join a meeting in progress, but it would be polite to wait and listen quietly until an appropriate pause, absent an emergency.

At Doc’s. Flicker entered the recovery room next to one of the med labs, sat in one of the chairs, and slowed down. She didn’t say anything.

Jumping Spider was sitting up with her left leg extended. Something complicated covered the knee–it looked like one of Doc’s support and monitoring minibots. Doc was frowning at a large display showing… Not her leg. Her left jump boot. Which wasn’t in the room, though her spare pair was. A quick Database check showed her main boots were down in one of the big fabbers in Doc’s workshop being repaired.

“…crash cushioning cells seem to have handled the landing fine,” Doc was saying, “and at least blunted the impact. Still…”

“They did the job,” said Jumping Spider. "Sometimes a gust of wind hits you at just the wrong time, and one did, right after I’d hopped off the roof.“

"The fourth story roof. Over icy concrete. In a blizzard.”

“Yeah, it was Tuesday. Wednesdays are overpasses. Hi Flicker.”

“Hello. What happened?”

“Nothing major. I banged up my knee a little yesterday and used the crash guards on my left boot. Doc’s going to give the boots a checkup, recalibrate the jump jets, and–” She turned her head to look at Doc. “Not stay up all night making minor improvements. Right?”

Doc raised an eyebrow. "I am most definitely going to run unit tests after the tuneup and the data updates.“

"That will only take an hour or two. And Flicker wants to talk to me anyway.”

Flicker didn’t understand how Doc’s relationship with Jumping Spider worked, except that it did. It was close, but they usually saw each other only a few times a month. Jetgirl described it as 'co-conspirators with benefits.’ There had to be more than that after almost two decades, but Flicker didn’t get how most more typical relationships functioned either.

“All right,” said Doc. He nodded to Flicker. "I’ll give the two of you privacy, then.“

"Thank you,” said Flicker.

Doc must have read her expression–or more likely her 'No personal small talk currently welcome’ Database flag–and left the room without further comment. Jumping Spider pulled the swivel arm table with a Database interface over so she could use it.

“We’re secure–privacy locked,” she said. "Yes, from Doc too. Check.“

DASI was insistent on leaving up the warning flag on Flicker’s visor about limiting Doc’s access in his own HQ, but she confirmed the privacy lock.

"Verified,” said Flicker.

“Now we can talk,” said Jumping Spider. "My knee isn’t much worse than usual. But I heard you are. Doc says you seem determined to push a hazardous test series on short notice and you don’t look happy. Did Journeyman just turn you down or did you manage something stupider?“

Jumping Spider could be tactful. She usually chose to be blunt with Flicker. They weren’t friends, but Flicker tried to listen to her advice, because she was right far too often to ignore.

"Both,” said Flicker. "I don’t think I have a partner anymore.“

"You don’t think? Want to tell me what happened?”

“No. But I should. I’d been pushing patrols for a while and was off duty yesterday when I got an alert that Hermes was back…”

Flicker summarized the mess of the last two days, with a pause while Jumping Spider watched the vid of the handover of Hermes at the Box. It was even less pleasant to explain than she’d expected. She had to bounce up to speed mind several times to maintain her composure while staying on track. Jumping Spider said she would save any questions for later, which was just as well.

“…and after he ported out,” Flicker finished, “I did memory assimilation work, then visited with Chaser until the Database told me you were available. It’s been a long day.”

“It sure has,” said Jumping Spider. "The Database security AI called me for help. It needed a human other than Doc with the right clearance level bad. You ignored warnings, bypassed the blocks, and managed to set off a cross-domain priority conflict and a legacy conflict this afternoon. Why settle for one crisis at a time when you can have more?“

"Um. Those were for something that actually helped.”

“A book that flaunts that it’s full of traps in the dedication and you’re sure it helped?”

“Well… I’m running sims.”

“Yeah. You do that.” Jumping Spider smiled sardonically.

“Why was the cross-domain priority conflict so bad, anyway?”

“Because the AI was forbidden from telling Doc about something in one domain, and required to tell him in another–and he’s normally the one that resolves those conflicts. And you were no help, because you were causing it. So it had to call me, because I was the next person in line with clearance. I figured I’d better drop what I was doing to deal with what you stirred up. Doc was already on the way to get me when you sent your message about Dr. Reinhart–his flying car does come in handy sometimes. And I have heard of her. But I need to do some Database poking before I’m willing to make a judgement, so are you up for doing some tedious but necessary work to help me fill in a few holes? It would make up for what I had to drop, and let me test something.”

“Depends. What kind of work?”

“Spying. Under the direction of someone who knows what she’s doing. That’s why most of it will be boring. But it will also involve a lot of purposeful running around, which I’m guessing you could use. You’ve amply demonstrated how fast you go stir-crazy. I want to double check some clues to whatever was wrong at the Box that they didn’t want you to see, and have you take a quick look in some other places. I expect a lot of verification of negatives, or whatever is in the Database, but I have a nasty suspicious mind and suspiciously nasty things have been happening.”

“…Yeah. Okay. It’ll be slower in the dark, though.”

“Oh, some parts will be in daylight.”

Flicker waited a moment, and the Database projected the outline of a list that was far too long to fit on her visor display. It started with a survey of just who was staking out the home of the magician she’d talked to at the Box, and included whole sets of vehicles and buildings associated with spy agencies and less identifiable groups.

“All right,” she said, and headed out.

*****

Flicker settled into a rhythm. Slow down, take action, verify, speed up, move on. And consider her life, while she moved.

Human–for some value of human that was possible for her–was part of what she wanted to be. Speed and motion were a much bigger part of who and what she already was. Human was an illusion, an emulation. A load bearing one. Maybe even a necessary one, in the long term. But she wasn’t good enough yet. If the last few days had proved anything, it was this.

She’d read various versions of a joke about how many people stopped growing up and just started faking it after about age fourteen. Even humans sometimes had to fake being adult humans. And that went to the essence of what she thought Journeyman had been trying to say. For her to connect, to feel, to be the person she wanted to be, meant being socially human. But to relate as an equal, as a full partner, as… well there weren’t proper words, but to connect fully with him meant being a responsible adult.

And Flicker couldn’t manage both at the same time. Not yet. She could fake it for a while, but push too hard? Add the stress that came with being who she was in the world she lived in? Her emulation broke down. Humans used age as a proxy for responsibility, and she’d been fixated on the unfairness of that. But all the advice, the common wisdom, assumed you were human. And social support was centered on 'normal’ human, for an extensive and arbitrary set of dimensions of normal.

But if she gave up on human, if she fully accepted that there was no one like her, that she was alien to this world of odd bipeds, she risked finding the breaking point of the fragile thread of empathy that connected her to that world. Because they could be so foolish, so cruel to one another, so ignorant, so blind. Doc had always been very clear about the danger in that. And the Volunteer had spent a whole day talking her down from the edge, after her big fight with Doc, when she’d wanted to act, to treat the world like a dysfunctional terrarium that cried out for intervention to stop the evil, the oppression, the war, the starvation and brutality and shortsightedness and indifference, all the so very unnecessary pain, outside the narrow range of actions allowed for a superhero.

The most frightening part of that day had been seeing the edges of some of the Volunteer’s load-bearing illusions. The ideals that let him help the things he could, as an alien in a world of humans. But those illusions couldn’t be hers. Because she was more alien? She didn’t know. She did know they’d broken others who had tried.

She needed to find her own way. While she could still care. Because if she stopped caring, it would be way too easy for her to go over any one of several edges.

Maybe Dr. Reinhart could help Flicker find better ways to connect to humans. But she also needed to learn more about who, and what, she already was. The limits and idiosyncrasies of her power and being. Doc hadn’t stopped her experiments because they’d reached any firm conclusions. He’d stopped them because they’d become too dangerous to continue on Earth.

How fast was she, really? What new realms of sense and ability were beyond the limits she needed to maintain on Earth? The aim of Speedtest was to find out. It was the only thing she looked forward to now that was truly hers. It was past time.

*****

More than an hour and numerous additions to the list later, Flicker was finally done. She’d spent a lot of the extra time following up discrepancies in Italy. There was a messy but still relatively quiet political crisis going on there, triggered by some combination of Hermes’ rampage in Rome, the identity and contacts of the now dead magician who had summoned him, recriminations over the botched response that had resulted in his death, and a long-simmering conflict over the reasons that Italy didn’t currently have any resident superheroes.

She’d taken a brief moment to ghost over to the shop in Florence where she’d gotten takeout gelato with Journeyman to celebrate first becoming partners. It was still closed in the first hint of dawn light.

Sentimental human indulgence. Was there a point? Maybe there would be again, someday, a time when it would mean more than something she’d thought she’d lost, but never really had. But for now, it was closure. Acceptance.

She headed back to Doc’s HQ and decided against speeding up. Speedtest would be soon enough, and there was no point in leaving a bright plasma trail that could set off alarms for satellite watchers who might wonder why she was hurrying across the Atlantic at night.

*****

“I recommend that you agree to Dr. Reinhart’s conditions,” said Jumping Spider. She sipped from her coffee cup and eyed the Database display in front of her with mild disapproval. "She’s right about the amount of inconvenience adjusting her work around advising you will be.“

"You think she’s safe?” asked Flicker.

“Heh. No. I think she’s followed consistent goals, and she’s functional, competent, as expert as you’re going to get, skilled at error recovery, and very smart. Smart enough to understand just how vital and risky giving you psych advice will be. But don’t try spying on her. She didn’t think much of your failure to consider the consequences of stalking Journeyman.”

Flicker frowned. "How do you know that?“

"I talked to her while you were gone.”

Jumping Spider paused, waiting to see if Flicker would ask a question. She sped up. Her human emotion emulator indicated her nominal reaction would be anger or irritation. Human emotions weren’t serving her very well lately, so she ignored it. It would be a drop in the bucket compared to everything else, anyway.

DASI? Anything security relevant that I need to know about Jumping Spider contacting Dr. Reinhart?

No.

Well, that was unambiguous. She’d asked Jumping Spider for her professional assessment as an intelligence expert, and it was clear she was testing Flicker’s self-control, too. She slowed back down.

“Go on.”

“It was an illuminating conversation. She referenced some of my more subtle tradecraft tricks like an academic being careful about citation footnotes. If you focus on her advice rather than trying to emulate her, respect boundaries, and maintain a healthy level of skepticism about untested theory, I think her aid will help you. Once she’s ready to meet–it will be at least a week.”

“Good to know. Thank you. Was the information I verified for you helpful?”

“I don’t know yet for most of it. But your performance was technically adequate while under direct supervision.”

Jumping Spider had no qualms about hammering at a point or reminder until she was sure it got through–in this case that Flicker was still bad at the judgement part of spying, however technically skilled she might be.

Flicker nodded. "Any other suggestions or comments?“

"Do you want my assessment of what happened to Journeyman? It’s speculative, and you may find it upsetting.”

“I don’t ask for your opinions because I think I’ll like them.”

A snorted laugh. "Okay. I think Hermes’ arrival was part of an op, and was deliberately timed to coincide with whatever Journeyman did just before exfiltrating. I also think we’re unlikely to ever get enough evidence to prove that. From an operations viewpoint, I think Journeyman got entangled and dragooned into something far more dangerous than he’d ever voluntarily agree to, but all sides–and I definitely think there were more than two–in the conflict that might have wanted him dead knew he had your backup, and that’s why he lived. Tell me. If demons had killed him in some dimension you could get to, what would have been your first impulse?“

"Burn it to the ground, then burn the ground,” said Flicker.

“That’s the sort of thing Oracles and Seers pick up on. But since he came back alive, you’re much less inclined to do anything disproportionate, right? Because attribution is much tougher, even if an attack is aimed at you or Doc. And there will be probably be completely uninvolved people living in the same place even if you do know who is responsible.”

“…Yes.”

“That’s also the sort of thing Oracles and Seers pick up on. I also think that whoever Journeyman believes is your mother is part of one of the sides, and that an opposition tactic that he fears is a framing attempt to deflect any retaliation onto her. And he got dragged deep into the wilderness of mirrors, no longer fully trusts his own judgement, and didn’t want to drag you there, too. I’ll give him credit for that.”

Flicker sped up to consult the Database. 'Wilderness of mirrors’ was an intelligence term for living in a state of perpetual uncertainty about a messy mix of hard to attribute hostile action and coincidence. Just the sort of thing she hated.

“Great. So, was he being deceptive about–No. There’s no point it getting angry about any of it again until I can talk to Dr. Reinhart.”

“You’re learning. And you stopped Hermes without killing him or anyone else, Journeyman got back alive, you didn’t lose it when he disengaged–which was inevitable–and it’s much harder to attack someone who’s in a different dimension. And you know who is at home in the wilderness of mirrors?”

“You?”

“Dr. Reinhart. I do all right, but I suspect you’ll get along better with her.”

“Okay. Thank you for your assessment. Do you think I should delay Speedtest because of Journeyman’s warning?”

“Because of his warning? Are willing to put it off indefinitely?”

“No.”

“Then no, because he didn’t tell you anything actionable. But whether it’s a good idea at all is not my call. Talk to Doc.”

“I will,” said Flicker. "Jumping Spider?“

"Yes?”

“This was… less unpleasant than talking to you usually is.”

She smiled. "Don’t worry. I’ll make it up to you next time.“

Flicker shook her head, but felt her mouth want to twitch in response. Human wasn’t something you could just turn on and off…

She headed out to find Doc.

Next: Part 9

