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The yacht wasn’t that big, but there was another deck below the cabin where I’d woken up. The footprint of the room Jackson led me down to was slightly larger than the one above but I couldn’t really draw any conclusions from that. Although I do most of my work along the West Coast boats are not something I know a lot about. My approach to psychometry doesn’t bring a lot of value to work on the ocean and I’m a homebody, so I’ve never wanted to go sailing for fun either. If I’d had to make a snap judgement, I’d have guessed we were below the waterline at that point just from the way the sound of water on the hull changed, but again it was pure speculation on my part.

And there were other things to see on this deck. Jackson had a recording studio and a pretty expensive looking camera and computer there. Beckoning me after him he paused long enough to check something on his computer before pushing past the desk and through a door hidden around a corner just behind the workstation. With nothing better to do I followed along, wondering how big a boat I’d gotten stuck on.

The next room would have counted as a closet in any building on dry land and most of that space was taken up by what looked for all the world like a septic tank with a door on one side and wires running out the top. Jackson had squeezed himself in towards one end of the room, leaving enough space for me to squeeze towards the other end without touching him or the mysterious device, which Jackson indicated with a flourish. “Allow me to present Backboard, stage two.”

I stared at it for a long moment, then looked back at Jackson. “What does it do?”

“It’s the next stage of cyberwarfare. It’s a psychometric hacking facilitation tool.” Jackson rapped his knuckles against the cylindrical object. “Hat Trick and I have been working on it for the past two years, part of what we call the Safety Valve.”

“I’m familiar with your Backboard social media app, how does this Safety Valve factor in?”

“You’ve got it backwards. Project Valve came first, Backboard was an outgrowth of it.” Jackson leaned a hip against the device and gave me a candid look. “Do you know what the biggest danger coming out of Silicon Valley is, Armor?”

“The constant capacity for distraction slowly driving people insane as they lose touch with reality?” I asked.

“Social engineering, more broadly,” Jackson said, “although that’s a part of it. We’ve been doing test runs with it for the past six months, although our first use of it in the field was two days ago. You really spooked Hat Trick when you tried knocking on Backboard’s back door the other day so the test date got pushed up.”

“What is it for?” I gently ran my fingers along the tank, trying to pick up any impressions I could. Since it proved to be a huge pile of electronics there wasn’t much, but I could tell from the safeties and redundancies built in to it that it was, as Jackson suggested, a device built expressly for the use of the Gifted.

“Broadly speaking? It lets us turn Backboard into a kind of monitoring system, makes it easier to parse out what all the various algorithms our Silicon Overlords are setting up to mess with us. We were planning to publish an expose as soon as Hat Trick could compile all the information.” Jackson crossed his arms. “I honestly didn’t think the FBI was deep enough into their pockets to investigate us for it, but apparently I was wrong.”

“What?”

“But it does give me the chance to talk to one of the top investigative psychometrics in the country.” Jackson rapped his knuckles against the tank and I jerked my own hand away subconsciously. Faint amusement registered in the back of Jackson’s mind as he went on. “Hat Trick thinks the two of you, working in shifts, might be able to crank through all the data in a matter of a week, maybe less. Don’t ask me how that adds up, I’m not the expert.”

“Wait.”

Jackson dropped a sort of mental marker for himself as I tried to break in, a kind of reminder to go back to this point in the conversation, but ran right over me in part by taking my elbow and leading me back out to the studio space. I resisted the urge to try and get away from his grip, at the last moment I noticed the linen gloves he had put on. He must have grabbed them when he entered the room, probably a precaution to reduce contamination from people maintaining the tank when Hat Trick wasn’t using it.

Of course, the touch derailed my thoughts long enough for Jackson to talk over what I wanted to say, which was no doubt his point. “Now I know you’re probably under a dozen kinds of NDAs and contracts and retainers with different government agencies. And you’ve been told that we’re a conspiracy – an actual conspiracy, not a conspiracy theorist for a change! – that we’re trying to disrupt business, that we’re violating intellectual property, the Silicoverlords have all kinds of nonsense they throw at people who are trying to pierce the veil of secrecy and find out exactly what they’re doing.”

“Silicoverlords?“

“Catchy, right?” Jackson gave me a toothy grin before sitting down at his computer and setting to work. “But I know a little about Galaxy and what you’re supposed to be working against, and I think once you start to see what Hat Trick and I have been finding out you might start to see it my way. “

Frustrated, I banged my hand against the wall and shouted, “I can’t help you break the law, Jackson. I’d never be able to work again!”

A wide eyed, guileless stare answered me. “Armor, nothing about what Backboard is doing is strictly illegal. At the very least, it would need to be hashed out in court which means they can’t stop us from doing it just yet.”

“I’m not talking about your stupid watching the watchmen gizmo.” My voice was climbing higher and I took a moment to compose myself. “Jackson. Less than a week ago you knocked out power to half the state of California.”

His eyes almost bugged all the way out of his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. I had nothing to do with that. What do I stand to gain from terror attacks?”

“I don’t know but you seem awfully hostile to the people they targeted!”

“I’m a talker, not a fighter.” He shrugged, his brain realizing a half second after he said it that it wasn’t true. “Mostly. My point is, I’m not stupid. Only stupid people chose to solve problems by violence first and only stupid people take it off the table entirely.”

That got him a skeptical look and he hastened to add, “Unless they have valid psychological conditions, of course. My point is, I don’t think we’re quite to violence yet. I’d like to avoid getting there. And I know someone with your skills can see that I’m not lying to you.”

Flattering as that assessment was, it wasn’t actually true. I didn’t know Jackson well enough to have a baseline to compare his current mental state to, so I couldn’t judge his honestly based strictly on the thoughts he was broadcasting subconsciously. But there was a way I could turn up the gain on his signal. I pulled one glove off and held my hand out to him. “It won’t hold up in court but if you want to convince me there’s an easy way to do it.”

He looked at my hand skeptically, then took his own gloves off and clasped my hand. “I didn’t have anything to do with the power station attacks last week, or the drone attack before that. Neither did my media or tech development groups.”

AJ Jackson had an incredibly fast moving, almost spastic mind. Without his speaking the thought aloud, to bring it to the front of his thoughts, I probably wouldn’t have been able to track them through the other crazy sensations I was getting. He was worried about how long he’d been gone, he was framing my face for a camera shot, snatches of conversations in the voices of people I didn’t know whirled through his head, all associating freely with other, his mind was a whirlpool of half formed ideas smashing in to each other, breaking up and reforming on the gravity of whatever was most important to him. It was jarring, but with his denial of involvement in the attacks at the center and more concrete than anything else I could be sure of two things.

First, he was telling the truth. Second, with the kind of free association of thought he was capable of, it was no wonder AJ Jackson was the Internet’s premier conspiracy theorist. With a mind that worked like that, you’d almost be obligated to be.

I let go of his hand and quickly pulled my glove back on. “Okay. You’re clearly telling the truth.”

He brightened up at that. “So you’ll help out?”

“No.” I scowled. “I still want you in jail. Mainly because you had me kidnapped off the street. If you’d left well enough alone you wouldn’t’ve had this problem.”

“You were already investigating me!” Jackson protested, hands waving dramatically. “I know how badly people want me to stop looking in to them. How was I supposed to know you’d be fair about it?”

“You could have asked your pal, Hat Trick.”

“Hat Trick knew your professional rep, but not much about you personally.” Jackson shrugged. “All I knew for sure was that you had a good sense of humor.”

I folded my arms and wondered if he’d really worked that one out. “What made you think that?”

“Don’t give me that.” Jackson gave me a sly look. “Why else would a Chinese man call himself a chink in the armor?”

“Fine.” I waved to the computer. “I’ll give you a chance to show me what you’ve got. Let me see what you and your friend.”

Rubbing his hands gleefully, Jackson took his seat at the computer. “You won’t regret this.”

I doubted that, but I knew I wouldn’t be the only one regretting in the near future.