Begin Transmission: Teraport 1.6​

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The person in the front porch was a mass of a man, who waited stiffly outside the front door about half a minute before politely knocking at one o'clock. I opened the door to speak with him, keeping the glass door in front of it closed. A thick wave of cologne was dragged through the window-screen along with the chill winter air.“You're with the PRT?” I asked. The PRT agent wouldn't introduce themselves as such, in case they were talking to the wrong person.He nodded, and gestured out to the van parked in front of the yard. “If you'd like, we can get going.“I'd like to,” I said. “But I'd like to see your badge first.”He held it out for me. I squinted to read the metal-embossed card by the silver badge.“Peter Bridges?” The man gave an affirmative nod. “Right, I'll be right back. I need to check something before I'm ready to go.”The door clapped shut as I pulled out my phone and dialed the PRT office from last night.“Protectorate East-Northeast, how can I help you?” A man with a tired voice was on the line this time.“I called last night to arrange a meeting with a PRT representative.” My voice grated through the 'broken' microphone. “I was told I'd be picked up by an unmarked PRT car. Can I know the name of the person driving that car?”There was a brief sputter of mumbling and shuffling from the other line. “Uhm... one second. I need to make sure I'm allowed to tell you that.”“Is the driver named Peter Bridges?”Quiet, then a response. “...That’s correct.”Satisfied for the time being, I dropped the call and went to get my things.I was dropped off in the upper basement floor of the parking lot, and was told that I was to meet Armsmaster in one of the basement level meeting rooms. The Brockton Bay public library had been built when the city had been much smaller, so most of the lot it was built on had ended up being used for the library, without much need for a parking lot. To fulfill parking needs, a two-floor underground parking structure had been built underneath the library, and the basement had been expanded along with it. The upper floors had a very open plan, with ceiling-high windows, and the second and third floors having balconies over the first. Glass, tile, and smooth plaster. The basement, though, was built by an architect who seemed to have been taught as a child that all people were actually hobbits. The ceiling was much lower, and the shelves were close enough together that you could quite nearly touch either bookshelf with your elbow when you stood between the shelves. Everything save for the white-carpeted floor was built of solid, pleasant-smelling wood, but I had the distinct impression that I was about to encounter a bookish minotaur every time I turned a corner.As I turned into the alcove the meeting room was nestled in, the impression grew especially strong. The ceiling in front of the room seemed to open up, an illusion created by the lack of shelves. There were two windows on either side of the door: one had been covered up by generic black construction paper, the other by a laminated poster. 'READ' it commanded, over an image of Legend posing over a cityscape. The door had a ‘reserved’ sign on it, but the had closed at noon, since it was a Sunday.Opening and closing the door melted away like it had never happened: one of those moments of lost time where you know exactly what happened, but not what you were thinking or why you chose to do it. The room smelt of polish, grease, and wood. A large rectangular table was in the middle of the room, cheap new plastic contrasting painfully with the worn wooden walls. There was a horizontal slit of a window at the top left of the room that filtered natural light down into the room, which was cast down upon one half of the man standing near the other half of the table. He wore power armor, a shade of blue so deep that it almost seemed black, with the details in a silvery metal. A matching polearm was slung over his back. His visor revealed a short and well-trimmed beard, but the different colors of light on either side of him made the scene surreal..“I'm Armsmaster, Protectorate ENE. I'm glad that you came to us to deal with your problem instead of doing anything drastic. Could I get a name?” Armsmaster—a childhood hero—smiled gently and gestured to a chair.There was a lower chance of someone listening in while I was in person rather than over the phone. I still decided to lead with only my first name, though.“Taylor.”It wasn't the only chair in the room. There were five chairs. One near Armsmaster, the one he directed me to, and three others randomly distributed across the table from him. There were more chairs in the room, stacked in a corner, next to which a large duffel bag and toolbox sat. The chairs were supposed to be stacked in the corner there when the meeting room was done being in use. So said the sign above the chairs, in any case.Why were there so many chairs, then?“Please, have a seat, Taylor.” It was difficult to read his expression through the visor, but he was still smiling.I pulled a breath into my body as it kicked and screamed to escape, and sat down as calmly as I could. Armsmaster had talked with other people in this very room. He had a plan. I had no idea what the plan was. I couldn't trust anybody. Had I been wrong to trust the PRT?All good logic said that I had probably made the right choice. The existence of a plan did not necessarily mean the plan was directed against me. Yet not all logic was good in the world of capes. Things didn’t add up, all of the time. Nothing was normal.It was a reminder that not all was as it seemed. Armsmaster was not my friend. He was the good cop to Lisa's bad cop. They weren't in it for free. They wanted something out of their time, something out of their effort, and something out of their help.“Where would you like to start?”“Where should I start?”Armsmaster paused before responding. “Personally, I'd prefer if you started with whatever you thought was most dangerous. You did want us to watch your house.”“Lisa. She was the girl, at the library yesterday.” I inspected the speckled plastic table. It was smooth and cold to touch. “She knows who I am. Where I live. She knows I can Tinker. She says she has a boss. A sponsor, who wants to hire me. She says she's a supervillain, but not really, because she's hired to interfere with other villains. She said that in order to succeed, I need a backer. I get the feeling that in her plan, I was supposed to accept her offer. I'm not sure what will happen when I don't. I wanted the PRT to give me protection. Just in case.”“While the name is new, I got most of that from your call.” Armsmaster sat down across from me. The chair looked like it could barely support him. “Could I know about what time you left, as well as color and type of car you drove away in? We'd like to search through some camera footage, and see if we can track this 'Lisa' back to where she came from. We'll get back in touch with you later to confirm she's the one who approached you.”“I got home sometime around four. I think it took about twenty-five minutes to get home, with the route we took, so probably around three-thirty. The front entrance. The first car was a Subaru of some kind. Grey. Second was a red SUV.”“Did she say anything about about being in a team, with other villains?”“Yeah. Undersiders.”“Okay. I—” Armsmaster took a short pause. It seemed scripted. “I want you to know that I know this must be very hard for you. Very few capes come to the PRT when they run into trouble, and you're already part of a brave minority. Please, let me know if you have any questions.”“Why are you trusting me?”Armsmaster's mouth opened, but paused. I pressed further, before he could speak.“All you have is my word. You don't know that anything I've said is true. You don't know that I'm a Tinker. You haven't asked my name yet. You have nothing to operate on but my words. By all rights, you shouldn't be trusting me.”“...It’s a fair question. Do you know who Wire Jack is?”The name rung a bell, barely. “Didn’t he kill some villain? A long time ago?”Armsmaster nodded. “Wire Jack took down King, the leader of the Slaughterhouse. Back when they were still called the Nine. He’s mostly known for that, but he’s a very powerful and very expensive rogue cape that the PRT has an exclusive contract with. He notified us that a Tinker had triggered in the Brockton Bay area this Friday at 3:47 PM, which seemed to correspond with when you said you had gotten your powers.”Great. That meant the Protectorate were on the lookout for me starting on day one. It bade poorly for my chances of avoiding Lisa's backer if he was able to get to me before the Protectorate did, even though the Protectorate had to have been looking since the very moment I gained my powers. I ventured for more information.“How can you be sure that I'm not lying about Lisa, despite telling the truth about being a Tinker?”“We have a policy of taking new capes at their word when they come to us for help. New capes can be in a lot of danger, and we increase the likelihood that new capes make it past their first year if we can respond with promptness, not suspicion.” The reflection of the room’s overhead light slid across Armsmaster’s visor like a drop of water as he tilted his head. “Besides. Given what I've been learning of you so far, you seem like you're too competent to meet with people who you were trying to trick.”I nodded. The table was quiet for a while.“If you need something to drink, there's a cooler under the table,” said Armsmaster.“I think I’m fine, thank you.” My throat was dry, but I didn’t want to get in the habit of accepting drinks from people who had power over me. “Could I ask another question?”“Please do.”“How do Tinkers usually get off the ground? Build things?”“They don’t, usually.” Armsmaster grimaced. “Some are like Squealer: the vehicle Tinker that works for the Merchants. They just spend their entire life scrounging for garbage, building trash out of trash.”“What about the ones that do?”Armsmaster stood and walked over to the duffel bag in the room, rummaging through it. Then, he tossed a sheaf of paper onto the table. “They build things like this.”I frowned. Misdirection. He was showing me what a Tinker with resources could do, and then was going to offer me those resources. I took the papers anyway, but stopped at the first page.Was this a joke?“This thing is useless.”“Is it, now?”“It’s a planned molecule, but it looks like someone just took a bunch of different fire suppressants and stuck them together, then made it look like it would decay into them at heat. But the whole thing is unstable. It’d explode on contact with the air.”“It does. That’s my best guess at the chemical makeup of containment foam.”I blinked at him, and reexamined the document. “...I’m fairly sure that containment foam doesn’t explode violently on contact to air. Also, containment foam does so many different things. While it’s clearly homogenous, it couldn’t be a single molecule.”“It does explode. Only the first layer, though. Layers under it expand rapidly after decaying into a different compound. The way it expands and grabs hold of itself forms a solution of the base molecule dissolved into a soup of over two dozen different compounds that I couldn’t even begin to describe. I’ve spent over four years studying containment foam in my free time. It’s fascinating. Between everything it can decay into, and everything the various results of it can and will bond into, I’ve identified over seventy different and completely planned designed molecules in containment foam.” Armsmaster leaned over and traced his fingers across a segment of the diagram. “It’s beautiful.”What? Planned? No. No, no, no. I refused to accept that anything like this could ever be anything more than random guesswork. It was madness. Chaos. There was no consistency to it, nobody could ever design a molecule with such engineered insanity as to make something like this useful.I opened my mind to it. I tried to identify patterns, and found none. I found similarities, and possibilities. Like taking apart a clock and then throwing it in a blender, I saw all the pieces that could just almost be used to make something useful. I could see the potential for an antiseptic, but that would involve the molecule changing itself in ways that it shouldn’t. At least four different types of fire suppressant. Shock padding. Bungee tether. I saw the possibility for it to do everything I knew containment foam did, and more. Nobody could put this together and simply know that this would do what it was meant to, though. One would have to learn how it changed when it was under the conditions to decay. To explode, to expand, to change in the ways it did. It should have required eighty years of testing to reach this. Eight hundred years, maybe. I still couldn’t figure it out. It was cheating.Cheating. Wasn’t that what all Tinkers did? They skipped the necessary steps needed to know something, to understand something, and built something before we should have known that it was possible. Why did this frustrate me like it did? When I envisioned something, I saw all the steps, all the things I needed to know to reach that point. It must be the same way for other Tinkers. And Dragon was the strongest Tinker, so it made sense that she would have the most unreasonable designs, the most impossible to guess. The molecule would work. Probably. Maybe. There was a possibility Armsmaster wasn’t describing the molecule correctly, hadn’t put it together right. That would make sense.Was this a test? To see if I’d see that it didn’t work? To see if I’d see why it didn’t work? I turned the page and examined the new diagram. It was quite obviously supposed to be a circuit of some kind, but something wasn't right. Instead of lines, there were paths of blocks printed on a grid, roughly depicted in three dimensions. A couple of following pages showed various cross sections, layers, and angles of the object.“What material is this supposed to be made of?”“It's silicon, mostly.”“...And what's the scale?”“Each block represents a single atom. The long grey blocks are a nonconductive carbon macromolecule.”“No,” I chuckled, “No, no way. That'd never work.”“Oh?”Did he really think I was that stupid? “At that scale, the electrons would tunnel through rather than follow the circuit. It's why there's a lower limit to the size of electronics, and it's why this would never, ever work.”“And what if I told you that this is the toggle for a device that locally inhibits aspects of tunneling behavior?” Armsmaster's smile grew at the wrong words in the sentence. He was gloating.“Then it'd be recursive.” I rested a hand against my temple, silencing the parts of me that wanted to scream at the man for looking so smug. The idea of a device that could inhibit quantum tunneling was an immensely tempting prospect for miniaturization, if it weren’t for the fact that as far as electronics go, tunneling is a necessary phenomenon for building certain ternary gates. How small could the localized inhibitive effect be? “How do you inhibit quantum tunneling? At all? I don't think that's possible.”“Most Tinkers can't explain their tech to each other. It usually becomes clear that someone is a Tinker after a few minutes of watching them being upset about something not work in the way they're used to.”Oh. He'd played me. It wasn't a particularly impressive play, as I'd already volunteered the information that I was a Tinker, but it would be a pretty effective trick if I hadn't actually been one.“I figured you'd wanted to see something I had designed to verify that I was a Tinker, not to have me judge other people's designs.”“Oh, of course not. Most Tinkers don't have anything designed within the first few days of triggering. Many don’t design things before they build them at all. Some of the more powerful Tinkers might have one or two things done on their first night, but that's quite rare.”I suppressed the thrill of joy that threatened to burst from my chest at the idea that I was a ‘powerful’ Tinker. Papers and designs meant nothing. He knew I had designs, my notebook wasn't subtle at all. He was buttering me up to try to get me on his side, to make me think I had agency in this situation. A bargaining tool. I did have a bargaining tool, but I was pretty sure that it wasn't my designs so much as the fact that I could make a very, very loud ruckus if the PRT or Protectorate didn't make good on their obligations as parahuman law enforcement to keep me safe.So why was he trying to ply me like that? Making me think that I was powerful didn’t benefit him. He presumably wanted me to join in with the Protectorate, but making me feel powerful was counterintuitive to those ends. He would want me to feel like I was weak, that I needed the Protectorate.There were more pages. I ignored them, and slid the packet back to him. If he had planned on it being mostly nonsense to me, I didn’t feel obligated to make a fool of myself by looking through the rest of the papers.“...If you don’t have any other questions, do you want to talk about the people who you’ve been having problems with? Your bullies? ”Oh. Right. Armsmaster said that he’d try to help with that.“I need someone that can report them to the police, and witness them being horrible. I’d… if you can, I’d like it if you could try to keep me uninvolved. I don’t want them in my life anymore.”Armsmaster nodded. “You still might be called in as a witness.”“I’d prefer not to be.”“It might be difficult to do without that.”“It won’t. Not if you can take proper video.”“Proper video won’t change the fact that a jury might not unanimously agree on the conviction of a criminal whose victim won’t appear in court.”“I really do think you won’t need me. If you absolutely do, I’ll go.” At the point it reaches court, my dad would have probably heard of it already, so I would have probably already had to explain to him what they did to me. It was fine if it turned out that way. It wouldn’t though.“Alright. We’ll see what we can do. Can we start with names and physical descriptions?”“Emma Barnes has red hair, does modeling. You won’t have problems finding her. Sophia Hess is her henchwoman. Sophia doesn’t do much. She’s a recluse, dark skin. Very athletic, but she doesn’t do any sports.”“Right. That’s probably everything we need to know. We should get to talking about your options for—”“You didn’t even write anything down.”Armsmaster smiled again, and tapped his helmet. “I’ve been recording the conversation.”That made sense. I was recording the conversation, too, although I was probably out of space on the phone by this point. The burner didn’t exactly have a very spacious memory card. I had set it up to record over the older parts of a recording, though, and would stop the recording if anything dangerous or useful was said. It was interesting that he had his recording storage in his helmet rather than his chestpiece or backplate, though. Perhaps he was referring to where the recording happened as opposed to where it was stored?“...As I was saying. We should talk about options for dealing with your problems.”I nodded him ahead.“The first option is what you suggested—we can put a PRT watch over your house. The PRT would usually prefer not to do that, as maintaining a constant look out over one house is a significant drain of resources. Especially with the level of scrutiny the PRT usually prefers to employ.”“That’s not a problem,” I said. “I will only need help with this problem temporarily. I have a solution in mind.”“...I see.” Armsmaster crossed his arms. “A lot of Tinkers get in a lot of trouble by trusting their first invention too much. You should be careful.”“I will be.” I began to stand up, but Armsmaster held out his hand, coaxing me back into my chair.“Wait, please. There are other options you might want to consider.” Armsmaster leaned against the table, and it creaked in response. “I’m sure you’ve already thought of this, but I’d like to pitch it to you. You could join the Wards program. You’d get a different level of protection that would be all around more secure. You’d also get access to support and mentoring from Protectorate capes and Tinkers, and materials of a much finer quality than you’d normally be able to access. I made my way through the Wards when I was a kid. It’s better, for Tinkers especially, than any alternative I can think of. Please, I want you to seriously consider this.”“I have.” My words caught in my mouth for a moment. “I have, and I’m not sure yet. I’m considering it. It’s… a big chance. I’m just not sure that I want to stay with the Protectorate forever, and once you’ve joined, leaving quietly isn’t much of an option. I’m very, very tempted. But I’m not decided.”“That’s good.” Armsmaster looked something other than relieved. His shoulders moved back, and his posture straightened more than it should have. Pride? Triumph? Appraisal? “I hope that we’ll see you in our number. There are still a couple of other options, though.”I nodded him forward again, and he continued.“We could also put you in Witness Protection. It’s probably the most that—”“No.” I shook my head. “Not possible at this stage. And I’d probably join the Wards before going that far.”“Alright, then. The only other option I really have to give you is that you could stay in Protectorate Headquarters until we’re certain that the people who found you are taken care of. The PRT would prefer to avoid expending resources on a full-time lookout over your home. We’d prefer it if you took this option over any other, honestly. It keeps you furthest from harm and lets us dedicate the most resources to solving your problem.”Liar. I didn’t buy that. Obviously, the option they most wanted me to take was the second. A new Ward had direct benefits for them both immediately and in the long term, plus dozens of other more subtle benefits for them all along the way. Plus, option two implicitly had the advantages of option four.“I can’t take that option for similar reasons to the Witness Protection program. I want a PRT watch on my house, and only so much that if I’m taken, you’ll know. I don’t expect the PRT to be capable of preventing capes from abducting me. I do expect that the capes who might want to abduct me wouldn’t do it if they knew the PRT was watching, though.”“...Alright. If you’re confident that’s what you want.”I wasn’t. But I was confident that if I decided I wanted to become a Ward, they’d make it as painless a procedure as possible. For now, though, I just wanted to feel less unsafe at night.“Yeah. I’m pretty sure. Can I ask a question, though?”“Of course.”“How do Tinkers really get off the ground? Not what they build when they do, but how do they move up?”Armsmaster sighed. “I wish there was a good answer. It’s different for every Tinker. Most Tinkers never meet their full potential: they’re always developing something better. Some can build incredible things from trash, or can’t build things more useful even with better equipment. In general, though, most Tinkers that become big news join a team of some kind. The Protectorate, usually, but many of the more influential villain organizations employ Tinkers to significant success. There are a few independent teams of rogue Tinkers, but they tend to be very difficult to join or associate with. Very secretive, and only accepting of Tinkers who have already done something of note. The best answer I can think of is still that ‘most don’t.’ Honestly. Joining the Wards is your best bet.”Like much of what I’d discovered online, Armsmaster had told me a lot while still being utterly unhelpful. No new information was gained.“You can ask a Ward yourself, if you’d like.”“Oh?”“Kid Win is the Ward’s own novice Tinker. He’ll probably be able to tell you more about what it’s like than I can. I’ve been in the game a while, and joining the Wards was an easy choice when I was younger. He might be able to talk to you on a more relatable level.”“I’ll… keep that in mind, then.”“No need to. He’s in the building, if you want to talk to him.”Did that account for the extra chairs? Even if I assumed both of his parents were here, that was only three. Maybe the fourth chair was for the PRT agent who brought me here. That didn’t make sense, though: if you had a hero and a single PRT agent to protect two parents and a Ward, the number of people who the authorities were obligated to protect would outnumber the people charged with protecting them. They wouldn’t be able to ride herd and keep watch while I was being escorted. Perhaps if there was only a single parent, and a second PRT agent? I had already seen two PRT agents, though, and Kid Win wasn't with either. I didn't expect that they'd leave a Ward on their own when a new cape was in the area, though, so that seemed to suggest that there was a third PRT agent. So, three PRT agents, Kid Win, and no parents? It gave me a bit of comfort if there really were that many, or more, PRT agents in the area. It also gave me a bit of hope that being a Ward would involve less parental intervention than I thought it would.Was I meant to notice that? I couldn't discount the possibility, but didn't deem it likely.“We were considering using Kid Win's civilian identity to contact you,” said Armsmaster. “It's much less suspicious when a boy around your age visits, as opposed to a different adult every time.”That more or less excluded his parents from having been present. That was a tremendous and stupid risk to take. “Why aren't you worried about his identity being made public?”“Kid Win was the one who came up with the idea. He's been excited to meet another Tinker, and is aware of the risk involved.”More flattery. It also didn’t answer my question. “Awareness of the risk doesn’t explain your willingness to allow him to take it.”“I think it does. The legitimacy of his willingness to take the risk depends on his awareness of the risks.”“He’s your subordinate. You can tell him to do it if he doesn’t want to, and you can tell him not to do it even if he does.”“Kid Win is allowed to choose his own risks. Being a contact for a new Tinker is likely safer than the work he does patrolling day to day. Being a Ward isn’t a safe—” Two sharp retorts from outside interrupted him. The gunshots were loud and painful through the barely-open window, followed quickly by a third and the squealing of a car.Armsmaster moved. The action was not supernatural in speed, but was unreal in fluidity. He displaced the table, sending it to the side of the room, and stood tall in a way that interposed himself between me and the window.Armsmaster muttered into his helmet, and I felt ashamed for not quite hearing what he said, so I opened my ears. The momentary confusion lapsed into a terrible and unfathomable calm that sank into my limbs and my pounding heart. I found myself on my feet with my ears strained to listen past the shock of the moment. I heard footsteps pounding into the grass outside, close outside, rapid and rhythmic. They washed into existence, paused, then reappeared before fading in an instant.“Libretti, get me more info.” I could only barely hear Armsmaster. He gestured quickly yet calmly for me to follow him to the exit, bringing his halberd into his hands. I followed, like an idiot with no other options.Humiliating.All knowledge is worthless without capital. So I had nothing. While I could have already been gone, disappeared to the wind, I just sat there, stood there in a different meeting room with no windows while a PRT guard watched the door. Armsmaster investigated while I could have already searched the entirety of the world.A four-tap knock broke the silence. Armsmaster slid into the room quietly. What little of his face I could see was flat, blank, and neutral.“Tell me more about Emma.” His tone was harsher.I was caught off guard, and couldn’t say anything for a second. In a swell of need to say something rather than nothing, I said the first things that came to mind.“She’s duplicitous, and she throws around her influence. She—”“Do you know her father’s name?”“Uh… Yeah. I think so.” I took a second to regain my composure. “He’s a lawyer. I think his name is Alan. With one l, I think.”“How did you meet Emma?”“...She used to be my friend.”“What changed?”“I don’t know.”“What do you mean?”“She was just different after middle school. Just different. She met Sophia, I guess.”“I see.” Armsmaster turned to leave. He beckoned for me to follow. “We’re taking you home. Let us know if you change your mind about anything.”I was walked up to the first floor, and along the lawn to a car waiting on the street. It became immediately clear that was not why they took me along that route.Because near the window-slit of our basement room, there was a bloodstain, a PRT officer, and two policemen.And while I was certain that it could never be, I swore that the body was that of Emma Barnes.