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.”