Monthly Archives: February 2017

An Hour Beyond

Posted by natechen on

“And it’s on.” Sam checked his phone and confirmed he was getting input from the temporal relay. “Nice to have my eyes and ears back.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.” Sharon plopped down in one of the chairs at what he affectionately called the Snack Table, since it was where he ate when working. “That shouldn’t have happened.”

“Since I’m still not sure how she’s finding me I don’t see how we can place any blame for this on anyone.” Sam grabbed a chair next to her and sat in it, looking over the new work space. It was the same place as before, actually. He was hoping that not moving after The Girl found him might throw her off her game. “She only fried the relay, didn’t touch anything else, so we’re not too far behind schedule because of it. And from what he said Alejandro knows something about her, hopefully something we can use. So on the whole the trip was a win. If I’d been here I don’t think it would have worked out as well for me.”

“He really managed to stop her?” Sharon gave him an incredulous look. “I was here when she showed up, you know. She smashed the safe you keep the relay in by waving her hand.”

“And he knocked her through a concrete wall.” Sam leaned back in his chair and looked over his handiwork. “Humanity is changing, Sharon. We can read about what happens in the future but we’ve only got the here and now to do something about it. And it’s not time to tangle with those two yet. How’s your side of things coming?”

She leaned back in her chair with a sigh. “You catch Thunderclap and I’ve got the case for deputizing you as a temporary law enforcement officer ready to go. I can’t say it will work, but we can make the case.”

“That’s all I can ask.” Sam casually looped an arm around her shoulders and smiled. “Humanity is changing and we may not understand the reason, but we still have our wits and morals. It’ll be enough.”

Sharon shot him a sideways look. “You got all that out of the relay after it’s been back two minutes?”

“That’s not a prediction, it’s a conviction.” He patted her shoulder. “Without them predictions are useless.”

——–

Teddy crashed down on the armored car feet first, leaning hard back and forth to keep it from swerving off the road as it screeched to a stop. It had taken some practice but on this fourth attempt he managed to keep it from straying out of its lane in spite of the several tons of vehicle bucking to a stop beneath his feet. As soon as they were stopped he smashed both hands through the windshield and hauled the surprised looking guard out of the drivers seat and tossed him to one side. The other guard in the passenger’s seat had enough time to draw his weapon but not enough time to fire before he went the way of the driver.

Teddy slipped down and picked up the guard’s weapons and threw them as far as he could, which was more than far enough for them to disappear beyond the scrub brush along the sides of the road. Then he turned and flew himself to the back of the armored car, ripped the door open and pulled out his cell phone. “We’re in! Come on over.”

The armored car rocked with a loud bang.

Teddy drifted a few steps back and a foot or so off the ground, peeking carefully over the top of the car.

A seven foot tall suit of tan colored body armor finished pulling itself upright and into his line of sight. The most distinctive feature was the helmet, a bullet shaped thing that covered the head and the top half of the face, with an opaque strip around where the eyes should be. Below was a half glimpsed set of fairly intricate, interlocking plates that whirred with half heard motors. Almost the instant Teddy spotted the armor it sprang forward and hit him with a square on body block.

Teddy pushed back and up, flying up and away even as his head swam. The guy in the suit had hit him hard, way harder than Teddy thought possible, and your actual fighting had never been his thing. He’d figured that whatever had happened to him was enough that he’d not get hurt and finding out he’d been wrong wasn’t fun.

Teddy stopped about ten feet up, shaking his head to try and get his bearings. The world came into focus just in time for him to see the armored man leaping up at him from the ground. Teddy threw his hands up and wheeled backwards, flipping head for heels. By dumb luck Teddy got his heels planted in the chest of the armored man as he spun and their collision sent both bobbing erratically through the air both of them scrabbling with each other. An armored hand clamped around Teddy’s arm and he couldn’t shake it off so he used the attached arm to lever his opponent around and pushed down, driving armor boy into the ground with both feet.

Without pause the other man pulled Teddy down into his rising fist.

With stars in his eyes Teddy pushed up again, swinging around wildly and flailing at the armored man. He managed to land a hard hit somewhere on the other’s arm and body. With the second hit the hand holding his arm let go and Teddy spun for a moment in the air before he got his bearings.

Armor guy was scrambling to his feet and Teddy had enough time to line up and dive bomb him, slamming both hands into this side in a full powered shove that sent him bouncing off of the road like a hockey puck. Teddy settled to the ground, breathing deeply as he took stock of the situation. Slim was watching from around the side of the armored car, his piece dangling forgotten in one hand. Not that a 9 mm was likely to do much against whatever crazy stuff the armored man was wearing. When he didn’t immediately pop back up and come running onto the road again Teddy touched down next to Slim, who had motioned two others out from the shadow of the car and started gathering money out of the back door. “Where’s Upsilon -”

Before Teddy could finish there was a loud whizzing sound and Slim rocked backwards with a dull thwap. A second later one of the two guys in the back of the truck recoiled clutching his side accompanied by the same noise, except this time a series of metallic thunks followed as whatever hit him bounced around the inside of the truck. The other guy, miraculously unhit, bent over and picked it up as it rolled along the floor. Teddy snatched it away and looked it over. It appeared to be a hard rubber ball, blue in color, like you might use to play handball. As he looked it over another one hit him square in the face, bouncing away harmlessly.

Slim had gotten to his feet again and was pointing off to one side of the road, yelling into his phone. Teddy followed the finger to see the armored man crouched down in the brush at the side of the road, his entire left arm unfolded into some kind of weird, snub nosed gun that was firing the rubber projectiles rapidly. Teddy tore the door off the back of the car and slammed it down in front of Slim as a makeshift shield only to see several of the balls bank off the ground and up into the armored car, to a chorus of pained grunts from the guys inside.

Cursing he took to the air again and flew towards the armored man at top speed. His target jumped to his feet, the gun arm folding up into normal configuration as he braced for Teddy’s arrival. Just before Teddy hit the other man stepped forward and ducked, letting Teddy sweep by overhead and grabbing him by the heels as he went past. With a comical grunt Teddy was jerked to a stop and then whipped into the ground like a rag doll. He lay there in a daze, vaguely aware of more yelling and the sound of that rubber shooter firing again, then the armored man was back, staring down at him.

Teddy gave him a weak grin. “I’m Thunderclap. And you?”

The corners of the mouth visible beneath the helmet turned down. “I guess you can call me the Clockworker.”

“Weird name.” Space behind the Clockworker bent and two hands slapping firmly against the back of the armored suit. “That’s Upsilon. Nice to meet you.”

The suit of armor shimmered for a second, then collapsed in on itself with a quiet pop, leaving a shocked looking woman with an unflattering bowl cut staring at the space the Clockworker had just occupied. Teddy sat up with a groan. “Thanks for the save, Upsilon. What did you do with him? Send him to China? Or just out to the middle of Lake Michigan? That’d be fine, too.”

“I don’t know.” Upsilon turned her confusion to Teddy. “I don’t know where he went. Something different happened that time.”

That was true. People she teleported usually just popped out, without the protracted visuals. It had only taken a half second for the thing to play out but even that was unusual. “So we don’t know where he is or when he might come back. Guess that means we just have to grab what we can and go. Pop the other guys out of here and back to the meeting spot, I’ll go up and keep an eye out. When you’re done text me and teleport home. I’ll fly there and meet you.”

She nodded. “On it, boss.”

——–

Sam came to feeling like he was floating.

He opened his eyes and realized it wasn’t a feeling. All around him there was vertigo. He didn’t know how he knew to call it that, but he knew that was what it was. Dizzying horizons were all around him, beckoning him fall back to reality but he wasn’t sure how to get to them or why he was wherever he was, rather than down underneath them. He wasn’t even sure his mind was forming coherent thoughts.

Then he heard a footstep, a comfortingly normal footstep, near his head and the indescribable panorama around him faded away, turning to a barely perceived fog at the edge of his vision, and a head swam into view. It was surprisingly bald.

“Found it,” the face said, looking up and back over it’s shoulder. “Want I should put it back or do you feel like talking to it first?” The voice was a bit coarse and gravelly, in contrast to the smooth hairless expanse on top of the head.

“Talk to him, I think.” A second voice answered, moving closer from the sound of it. As it approached the fog around them seemed to solidify more and more. “Is he awake? He’s twitching. Might want to step back, Jack.”

Jack did just the opposite, reaching down to give Sam’s cheeks a quick slap. “You awake? Snap out of it, pal.”

“We’re officially not pals,” Sam groaned, rolling onto his side and hitting the quick release on the armor, popping it open so he could crawl out and scramble to his feet. “Where am I? Who are you two?”

Jack grabbed him by the arm and steadied him as he rocked back and forth slightly. “You don’t know where you are?”

“No.” He gave Jack a suspicious look. “Should I?”

“It’s not that unusual for people to take their first trip accidentally,” the third man answered, “but stopping Out Here takes a lot of precision for most. It’s certainly unusual.”

Jack smirked at the other guy, the action transforming his featureless face into something more personable, if a bit unpleasant. “Way to explain it clearly for him, oyaji.” Then to Sam. “You’ve left the world as you know it, kid. Kinda stuck inbetween expressions of reality right now, not common like the old man says but not rare either. Any idea how it happened?”

Sam ran over what had just happened. “I was fighting Thunderclap. Then the world went topsy turvy. And I woke up here.” Something he’d read from the future’s news occurred to him. “Thunderclap ran a criminal gang with a teleporter in it. Could that have something to do with it?”

“Teleportation could have something to do with it,” the so-called old man said. “But I think it has more to do with you. Look, Jack.”

Jack did just that, peering closely at Sam from several angles. “Oh. I see.”

Annoyed, Sam gently pushed him away. “What? And are you going to tell me who you are?”

“We’re the Gatekeepers,” Jack said. “It’s our job to make sure travel between worlds runs smoothly.”

“Sorry, what?”

The old man sat down by Sam’s armor and started rummaging around inside. “Look, you seem to be a smart kind of guy. The problem is, when people get smart they start to think they’re in control, and the two are not the same. Look at us. We weren’t always the people who made sure comings and goings between worlds didn’t tear the universe apart.”

“Yeah?” Sam gave him a skeptical look, not sure he belied it. That they were such beings or that the universe could be torn apart. “How do you get a job like that?”

Jack shrugged. “Let’s just say, if you ever get mad at the universe don’t insist you could do a better job than it is on whatever’s pissing you off. You might just get the chance to try.”

“O-kay…” Sam shook his head. “So if you’re the gatekeepers who regulate interdimensional travel-”

“There’s a nostalgic phrase,” the old man muttered. Sam ignored him.

“-why are you here digging me out of whatever I was stuck in?”

“Because your world is, for lack of a better term, under quarantine. At some point in the next two or three hundred years it’s going to collapse in on itself and we’re preventing travel between it and other worlds in an attempt to minimize the damage the collapse causes to the surrounding horizons.” The old man pulled a fried circuit board out and set it aside. “There. Your armor was out of synch with your base pattern and it was holding you in a permanent transweave state. If you stayed out of it after we collapsed this pocket the chaotic state outside will kill you but you couldn’t return home in it. But if you reset the power systems now and think happy thoughts you should be able to make it without too many problems.”

Sam stared at him, mind blank.

The old man’s brow furrowed. “What?”

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An Hour For Legacies

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“Wow. Fifty years makes a big difference.”

Sam broke a newly refabricated piece of ceramic exoskeleton out of his newest ceramic printer. “This? This is more like tech from thirty years forward. I’d need a couple of weeks of retooling in order to produce something on spec for fifty years futuretech.”

“He says it so casually.” The remark was addressed to no one in particular as Sharon picked her way through the living room work area. “Not bad, all things considered. You only had to relocate twice this month.”

“Still more than I’d like. It’s slowing down what I can accomplish a lot.” Sam carried the new piece over to the exoskeleton and started installing it.

Sharon swung around the work space to peer over his shoulder.”So what is it? Power armor?”

“Powered exoskeleton.” He carefully broke a set of seals and pulled out the old left arm array. “I’m waiting until I can put out the next generation of ceramics to print the armor.”

“You know, people the office thinks you’re an entire cadre of supergeniuses cranking out groundbreaking technologies with the help of neuroenhancing drugs.” Sharon laughed. “I’m not sure the truth is any stranger. I mean, this tech is decades away.”

“Three of them, to be exact. Although functional powered exos will be patented first in twenty years.” He locked the new part in place and extracted himself from his project. “I don’t have anything pulled anything new from the future for a patent yet.”

Sharon shook her head. “Not what I’m here for. Although you do have another request to use that memory metal patent from last month. Looks to be another big earner.”

“I’ve been picking things with a lot of potential uses. We’re going to need capital down the line.” He shrugged uncomfortably, still not entirely comfortable with profiting off other people’s inventions. There were going to be a lot of people loosing out on their rightful profits in the next few years. Hopefully he could make it up to them by altering history a bit. “Speaking of, have you looked over the superhuman accords from the latest iteration of the future?”

“No.” Sharon tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, turned the gesture into brushing her hair over one shoulder, leaving her slim neck exposed on a backdrop of golden curls. “I found something interesting last night.”

“Yes.” Sam snapped himself back into the present moment. “Sorry, what?”

She rolled her eyes and handed him a tablet, one he’d modified to be able to access the temporal relay. It showed him a picture of a barrel chested man in a conservative suit that didn’t quite hide the tire around his waist, seated in front of a Congressional panel. “I was browsing the futurenews late last night, just seeing if anything would jump out at me, and I saw this guy.”

“Alejandro Gutierrez. Assistant Director of the CIA.” Sam thumbed down to read the article. “Atlantis. Yeah, I remember seeing something about that a month or so ago. Archaeologists find evidence of it in a few years or something. I didn’t have time to look into it when it last came up.”

“Well,” she took the tablet back from him. “In twenty five years Atlantis isn’t a legend anymore, it’s a real place in the Atlantic. And Gutierrez has a lot of weird rumors swirling around him in days to come. One is that he knew about Atlantis since he was very young, part of a secret society or something, and that’s part of what got him to his position at the CIA so young.”

“How young?”

“Appointed at forty. He’s forty-five in that picture.” She swiped from that article to another one. “Now look at this.”

It was a blurry photo reportedly taken by an U.S. Navy observation drone that showed a fuzzy mound in the middle of the ocean with what might have been a city skyline on top of it. More importantly, a dizzying spiral of glowing light rose above the shape as if the stars themselves had come down to greet it. Sharon pointed at it needlessly. “I saw that and couldn’t help but think of what you told me about The Girl.”

In spite of being an MIT graduate Sam’s brain still insisted on counting backwards very carefully. “So, if Alejandro Gutierrez knew about Atlantis from a young age and he’s forty-five twenty-five years from now…”

“He’s twenty now.” Sharon wiped from the relay to a more standard web browser. It showed a Facebook page for a student at the University of Phoenix. “Worth looking into, don’t you think?”

——–

Sam had exactly zero infiltration skills, something that didn’t strike him as a problem until he got to Phoenix and realized that he had no idea how to find Gutierrez or what his typical routine was. Finally, after a couple of hours poking around the Internet he found the right dorm and started peeking through windows and comparing them to pictures Alejandro had posted online. He felt more than a little like a stalker.

But he did eventually find where he needed to be. Thankfully he was stalking someone who lived on the first floor.

A few hours of waiting, nose buried in technical specifications for new future tech, and Alejandro Gutierrez made his appearance, passing through his room long enough to collect clean clothes before leaving again. With his ear pressed to the window Sam could vaguely pick up the sound of a shower running. Time to get through the window.

After some fiddling he settled for carefully jabbing a single finger of his artificial hand forcefully through the glass, hooking it over the window lock and flipping it open, then carefully pushing the window up on its slide and letting himself in. Hopefully Alejandro wasn’t the type to wander around in a towel after his shower. That could get awkward. He kept reading to keep his mind busy.

The door opened some ten minutes later. Sam, sitting at the room’s desk, glanced up and set his tablet aside. “Nice room. Nowhere’s better than MIT, but it’s close to the same.”

Alejandro froze in the doorway. He was a little shorter than Sam was expecting, although still an inch or so above average, and he hadn’t grown a moustache yet, but Sam could still tell that this was the same man as they’d seen some years in the future. “I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong room.”

“Actually, no. You’re Alejandro Gutierrez and you’re here, so it’s the right place.” Sam stood up from the desk and carefully put his hands at a neutral position at his side. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Now?” Alejandro gave him an incredulous look.

“Yes. For starters, how did someone with your family background afford to come to a school like this?” Sam pulled a set of printouts from a shirt pocket. They didn’t have anything to do with what they were talking about but Alejandro didn’t need to know that. “You shouldn’t be able to afford it without a lot of help but you didn’t file for any scholarships this year. Or the last two years since you first enrolled.”

“I had some help from a friend. Look, who are you?” Alejandro pushed into the room, looking around as if he expected a camera crew to be hiding in the corner, waiting to jump out and announce he was being pranked.

Of course, Sam hadn’t expected a straight answer to that question right away. He pulled a printout of the Atlantis picture from the middle of the other papers and held it out to the other man. “Do you know what this is?”

Alejandro gave it a quick look, opened his mouth and started to say ‘no’, then clamped it shut and snatched the picture out of Sam’s hand. “Where did you get this?”

“It’s from the future,” Sam said, half smiling. As he’d expected, that got him another double take.

“No, seriously.” Alejandro crumpled the picture up. “Where did you get it?”

“I have more.” He was in the process of retrieving the phone in order to the next step of the conversation, showing Alejandro a taste of the actual temporal relay, when there was a muffled knock from the outer room. Presumably someone at the door to the suite Alejandro shared with his roommates. Alejandro looked at the door, then at Sam meaningfully. Sam just smiled and nodded, inside he was annoyed but he didn’t want Alejandro doing anything rash or someone at the door letting themselves in and hearing something they shouldn’t.

As the other man stepped out of the room Sam pulled out his phone and thumbed it open, ignoring a handful of notices and opening the relay’s app. There was a brief pause then the screen announced, “Not Found”.

That meant the relay wasn’t responding for some reason. Like it was turned off, or there had been a local power failure. Or it was being moved. None of which should have happened. He quickly backed out and checked his notifications. Sharon had texted him. Several times. The last few looked to be the same message over and over, starting with the words, “SHE was here.”

He switched off his phone and tucked it away quickly, pulling a patch like a nicotine bandage out of the same pocket and pulling the backing off it with shaking hands.

“Hey, this girl with you?” Alejandro called from out in the main room.

Sam slapped the patch to the side of his neck, neurostimulants hitting his blood almost instantly. Time seemed to dilate and his senses sharpened. He grabbed the thumb of his prosthetic arm and racked it back like pumping a shotgun, breaking the body of the arm open and letting him bring the riot gun inside to play. Almost at the same time there was a loud boom from the main room. Sam hooked one foot around the edge of the door and swung it open, tracking across the doorway with the stubby end of his arm, the fingers of the hand splayed to form a crude sight.

Sure enough, The Girl Who Splits Infinity was there, still shimmering slightly from her transformation, Alejandro backing away with a look of shock on his face. Sam thought about making a fist with his left hand and the riot gun barked, sending a two in ball of rubber the rough shape of a fist whistling towards her at close to a hundred miles an hour. It hit her on the shoulder and bounced away without apparent harm. The Girl brushed at her shoulder in that annoyed, anxious manner that maintained his impression that she was still a pretty green fighter, just absurdly durable, then flipped her fingers through the lines of light that came with her transformation and spun them in a wheel, from which leapt a serpentine line of fire that rushed through the main room, winding over top of the dirty dishes on the dining table and punching through the back of the couch that faced the entertainment center before blasting through the spot Sam had been standing just seconds ago, before he dove for cover.

He pumped his riot gun again and turned the mental dial on it up from normal to high and fired the other rubber slug at four times the speed of the other one. It hit The Girl as she stormed forwards and she seemed to notice it this time but it still didn’t slow her. He snapped the arm’s thumb back down, closing it up into a more normal looking prosthetic, and yanked his left sleeve up, pulling it as close to the shoulder as it would go so that the hardlight generator in the upper arm could raise a shield without setting him on fire.

It wasn’t as big as the bubble generator he’d used back at the campsite a few months ago but it was just as powerful and it could run on batteries for at least a half minute so that was something. Enough that The Girl hit it and bounced off in surprise at least.

Before she could recover Alejandro was there beside her. What happened next was a bit of a mystery to Sam. One moment both he and The Girl were staring at Alejandro in shock, Alejandro in the middle of a flawless windup, hips rotating his torso as his fist lind up with The Girl’s sternum.

The next there was an incredible thump and she was gone. Sam thought for a second she’d teleported again. Then he realized there was a new hole in the dorm wall. He gaped at it for a second, then started at Alejandro. “Okay, I’m impressed.”

Alejandro panted for a moment, his head on a swivel as he waited to see if The Girl would come back. Finally, he straightened up and said, “So you know one of them?”

“There’s more than one?” Sam buried his face in his hands. “Why do I even bother?”

“No, no, there’s probably only one at a time. Look. You’ve got some tricks up your sleeve.” Alejandro winced, realizing how that sounded. “I mean, you’ve avoided her this long. Can…” He thought about it for a long moment. “Can I check with some people I know? I don’t know a whole lot about that side of things. You’ve got questions, I get it. But I’m not sure what I should tell you or what matters in your situation or what. So can I get back to you later?”

The kid looked awfully hopeful about it. Obviously he was interested in what was going on now, and understood that secrecy was the order of the day because he was playing his hand really close to the vest. Sam pointed at the printout he’d given Alejandro, left abandoned on the table. “You can reach me at the email on there. That girl’s had it out for me for a while, though, and she’s getting better at catching me faster than I can get better at running away. I’d appreciate anything you can tell me.”

He nodded, very serious. “I’ll tell you everything I can, as soon as I can. Now you’d better get going before someone comes investigating.”

Sam left the same way The Girl had, examining the hole she’d made on the way out. Alejandro had punched her through almost a foot of concrete. Obviously he’d been using kid gloves in this fight. It was time to stop.

A Peaceful Hour

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Sam slid into the seat with a weary noise. “What makes you think I can predict the future, Sharon?”

“This.” She plopped the pile of paperwork in front of him. Idly, Sam wondered if they ever replaced paper in the future. Might be worth looking into that. “Changes to the patent application process that came into the office bright and early this morning, due to go into effect next month.”

He stared at the paperwork stupidly, his pain and exhaustion fogged brain still able to suggest one pretty good reason Sharon might suddenly think he could predict the future. “And?”

“And they make the patent application you gave us 100% correct. I’s dotted, T’s crossed.” Sharon folded her hands on the table in front of her. “Problem is, no one outside the patent office should have seen these changes until this morning. You submitted your application to us two weeks ago. How do you think that happened?”

“It wasn’t time travel.”

She shook her head in irritation. “Mr. King, this kind of insider business move is highly illegal. I don’t know how you heard of the changes ahead of time but if you think-”

“I didn’t.” Sam pulled his left glove off and drummed the artificial fingers under it once on the table. The middle and ring fingers spasmed erratically for a half second then fell back into place. “Like you said, I predicted the future. The changes were already in place then.” There was a moment of silence as Sharon stared intently at the hand. “The hand is exhibit B. That’s how lawyers say it, right? Or is that just a TV thing?”

Sharon ignored his banal question and asked, “Did you have that yesterday?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t attached to me.”

“Why is it attached to you now?”

“Well.” Sam ran it over once in his mind. “I guess it started with the lottery numbers…”

——–

“Damn, TC, you went through that like a thunderbolt!” Slim knelt down and ran his fingers along the edge of the sheet metal Teddy had just flown through, examining the almost cartoonishly round hole, complete with ragged edges jutting out, that he’d left behind. “Wasn’t expecting you to hit it so low to the ground, though.”

“Wanted to see if being as tough as I am protected my clothes along with the rest of me.” Teddy pulled on his shirt, which was full of rips and tears all up and down the front. “Which it apparently doesn’t.”

“You need a tighter fitting shirt,” Slim suggested. “Maybe something in the UnderArmor category.”

Teddy made a noncommittal sound, keeping his own lack of confidence in skin tight clothing to himself. Maybe less his confidence in the clothing itself and more his lack of confidence in him, wearing said clothing. A diet might be in order. “So I can fly, I’m tough and I’m strong. That’s really basic stuff, right?”

Slim shrugged. “Way I see it, you can take a bullet or ten and answer with a rock going twice as fast. Why complain?”

“Point.”

“Question is, what do you want to do with it now?”

“Me?” He gave Slim a look.

Slim started. “Well, yeah. I mean, I ain’t giving you orders anymore. I’m not stupid. The way I see it, you can do pretty much anything you want now.”

Teddy walked over to the large passenger van he’d lifted, figuratively and literally, as a test of strength earlier. He rocked back and for on it’s suspension with a light touch, rolling over possibilities in his head. “Tell me something, Slim.”

“Yeah?”

“How much do you think an armored car weighs?”

——–

“You had a file on me?” Sharon asked.

“It made sense, don’t you think? Anyways it’s all public domain stuff, forward facing social media and the like.” Sam shrugged, poking at circuits in his prosthetic, trying to track down where that spasm was coming from. “Of course you had to undergo some serious vetting when you joined the DA’s office five years from now.”

“I’m going to be a district attorney?” Sharon shook her head. “Don’t tell me, I know. Not necessarily, especially now that I’ve read this. Causality and all that.”

That got her a surprised glance. “Not a word I was expecting to hear from you.”

“Why? Because I didn’t post nerd memes to my public pages?” Sharon favored him with a wry smile. “You know a lot, especially with your temporal relay gizmo going, but clearly you’re not omniscient.”

“Meaning?”

“You have to have some kind of science background in order to practice as a patent lawyer. My undergraduate degree was in computer engineering.” She went back to the relay’s screen and kept poking around. “Futurenews. I’m guessing that’s how you got me yesterday’s headlines.”

“Yep.” Sam went back to his arm. It would be nice if he could use two hands to work on it but then, he’d preferred not to have lost the original in the first place. Or be chased by the Homicidal School Girl in the first place. Definitely that. “Why did you switch?”

She looked down for a moment, looking profoundly embarrassed. “Promise not to tell?”

“Of course.”

“Too many of the people I met in school had a problem with abstractions.”

The arm twitched frantically as his other hand slipped and sparks flew. Sam quickly tamped down on the problem and then looked back at Sharon. “I’m sorry?”

“It was all math and tolerances and highest returned value and-” She paused to gather her thoughts. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind those ideas and they’re really important in making things safe and functional. But I’m not sure I could work a full time job where those were the only things we thought about.”

“So you study the law and wind up working with the same set of people as a patent lawyer.” Sam shook his head at the irony.

“Hey, I have a shot at the DA’s office.”

“In ten years you’re only an ADA,” Sam pointed out.

“Five, since I get hired five years from now.” She went back to perusing the future news listings. “Do you use this for anything other than staying alive?”

“I object to the idea that my staying alive is somehow a bad use of my brilliance.” Sharon shot him a sour look. “But yes, I have found the time to look into a few other things that bothered me. Look at the ‘Changing Humanity’ filter.”

She pulled up the right option and started looking through it. “Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow.”

Sharon was quickly swiping through various news stories. “Flying guy. Crazy strong guy-”

“Dense, actually. He’s capable of quintupling his mass without causing damage to himself. Makes his bones more dense than lead, but he still moves as if he were a person of his normal mass. Except for jumping.” Sam reached over Sharon’s shoulder and hit a few commands, scanning forward two years. “There was a teleporter there, too, but let’s ignore him for a second. Things get scary around this point.”

A news story with a video loop of a woman who’s eyes seemed to fire beams of scorching energy that melted through a concrete wall.

“Laser vision,” Sharon murmured.

“Not exactly,” Sam said. “But destructive to say the least. This is when things start getting bad.”

“How bad.” She glanced up from the screen. “Are we talking human rights disaster here?”

“Pogroms, at least.” He sighed and sat down on the desk beside the relay. “Lynchings, if you will. Changing humanity will be cast as an opponent of everything from white supremacy to civil rights and through it all the government sits on their hands too afraid of a human rights disaster, as you put it, to seriously consider the problem.”

Sharon had pushed to the end of the available futurenews reports and found a mob surrounding and beating a man who was trying to defend himself with a pair of cables that moved with a mind of their own. Since it was an official news clip it cut away before anything gruesome but from the look on Sharon’s face it had been enough. “What… what are you planning?”

“Well, whatever happens we need to set up some kind of long term system, a legal system, for dealing with the changes that are coming.”

“We?” She gave him a skeptical look.

“Come on. Do you think I dug as deeply into your future just because I thought you were hot?” He shrugged. “I need someone who understands the law to help me come up with a long term solution.”

“Just because I’m hot.” She shook her head. “Nevermind. How do you plan to get anyone to listen to your long term solution.”

“Mostly by catching the world’s first major superhuman crime ring.”

——–

“Not good, TC,” Slim said, looking over the cash. “This was an ATM delivery truck.”

“So?”

“So what if the money is marked? They could have the bill numbers or something, and we get nabbed when we try and spend it.” Slim shook his head and grabbed the edge of the door, careful to ignore the sharp protruding edges where Teddy had smashed through it. “Risky.”

“Do they track that kind of stuff?”

“Dunno.” He rubbed his chin. “I know a guy who used to handle incoming product. He works as a rinser. We might be able to clean some of this, but we’re going to loose a lot of the value in the process. In the future it’s probably better to hit stuff outside of big stores, WalMart and whatnot.”

Teddy just grabbed two of the boxes and slung them over his shoulders. “Whatever. We’ve got enough to get some real wheels and keep us fed. We’ll get more next time. How long will it take to clean the money?”

“We can get an advance on some of it, I think. What do we need wheels for when you can fly?”

“I can only carry so much.” He braced himself and gave the armored car a hard kick, sending it rolling down into a ditch where it would be harder to find. “Meet me back at the old warehouse. Not the one we were using when the boys went up against you, the one when you brought me in. And let people know we’re looking for more hands.”

Slim scowled, no doubt unhappy at more hands drawing from the pot. “What for?”

“We need people to help us case marks. We do it ourselves someone’s gonna get wise.” He rose a few feet into the air, then stopped and lowered himself back down to eye level. “And one other thing. Don’t call me TC. I never like it.”

“Sure.” Slim gave a noncommittal shrug. “I mean, we justed used it because it had your name in it, but it didn’t, know what I mean? Got another name you like? Just wanna go by Teddy?”

“No. What did you say earlier? When I was trying stuff out?”

“Uh…” Slim thought for a minute. “You hit like a thunderbolt?”

“Yeah. But not thunderbolt. Thunderclap.” He grinned. “My name, but not.”

“Okay.” Slim grinned back. “See ya later, Thunderclap.”