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Galaxy and the Masks are not the only organized groups of psychometrics in the country, much less the world, they’re just the oldest and most influential, the most likely to have governmental connections, support organizations and large numbers of nonpsychometric staff. These smaller groups come in all shapes and flavors, most never last more than a few years. Somnolence, the group longest lasting and largest group after Galaxy, was put together after the Civil War and vanished during the Cold War collapse left most of the country’s psychometrics dead or catatonic. Given how little my job involved the internal workings of psychometric communities I wasn’t up on which other organizations might have cropped up to take its place, so I’d never heard of En Machina.

According to AJ Jackson they’d organized in the late 1990s, not due to the Internet, as you might expect, but due to early cellphones. They’d been interested in the potential of cellular technology to enhance the range and potential applications of psychometric abilities, something Galaxy had looked into itself. Like we had, En Machina had concluded that, while psychometrics could communicate via cellular phone as easily as we could landline, there wasn’t much more we could do than that. For reasons that Jackson wasn’t entirely certain of, En Machina had decided to stick together after reaching that conclusion and keep looking into other intersections between psychometry and emerging technologies.

Galaxy has teams dedicated to that kind of research as well. But it’s not a heavily encouraged specialization nor does Galaxy pour a lot of resources into the technological side of things. Listening to Jackson talk about En Machina took me back to what Vinny had mentioned a couple of conversations ago, talking about psychometrics developing treatments for psychometrics with damaged psyches, researching true telepathy or just digging into the nature of the Gift for the sake of curiosity. I’d been part of Galaxy from a young age and I had to admit I’d been thinking of these smaller groups as fly by night, untrustworthy collections of people scattered and flailing ineffectively against the vast mysteries of the Gift and the difficulties it brought to people. To my surprise, Jackson made them sound more like pioneers, out on some kind of metaphorical frontier. I suppose frontiersmen could count as the untrustworthy, fly by night kind of people but there was still a charm to the idea.

Actually finding En Machina was not charming at all.

It required a lot of navigating back channels, exchanging passwords and references and ultimately a lot of waiting. The morning of the second day after realizing Vinny was the linchpin binding the Masks and Silicon Valley I was still waiting to hear back from the third and final intermediary that Jackson had told me was between me and Hat Trick. I’d spent the last two days doing busywork, closing off lines of inquiry that had little to do with the main thrust of the investigation. Hennesy knew I didn’t think Jackson was the mastermind and he was happy to put me on any other part of the inquiry, the problem was the FBI was convinced Jackson was somehow tied to whoever was behind the attacks and was devoting more and more resources to looking in to his activities and vast media activities to try and prove it. There wasn’t much outside of that for me to do.

I remained convinced Vinny was the best lead we had, even if no one else really thought that way. So I kept pushing harder to find Hat Trick and by the end of day two I had a location and a time. They arrived in an email with no easily tracked sender, so subject line and no message beyond the name of the store and when to be there. The requested meeting time was well after the FBI was going to insist I leave to “get some rest” so I deleted the message and made a quick phone call, then finished out my shift and headed back to the hotel to get ready.

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“This isn’t really necessary,” I said, holding the door for Aurora.

“Don’t be silly,” she said as she passed me, looking more annoyed than she actually felt. “I don’t want you going missing again. It’s already happened twice in the last two weeks.”

“Does it count as going missing if you never leave your hotel room?”

“Yes.”

There wasn’t much arguing with that. I wasn’t really arguing with her at all anymore, if there was a time for that it had been back at the hotel. And, in fact, I had argued there. A lot. But she’d insisted on coming, since this wasn’t an official FBI contract and Natalie wasn’t going to be there, and since the alternative was to wind up benched by Galaxy and ignored by the FBI I’d ultimately been forced to bring her along.

And it wasn’t like there was a lot of danger involved in visiting a custom computer shop after hours.

It wasn’t exactly my kind of place so I didn’t have a lot to compare it to, but Solid State Computing looked a lot like what I’d expect a computer specialty store to look like. There were some display computers on kiosks at the front, a service counter to the left and rows of outrageously priced components to the right. The shop itself was part of a strip mall in a yet to be gentrified part of town. The shops were mostly closed but there were still a few places open.

Of course, Solid State wasn’t one of them, we were met at the door by a man who was not what I was expecting – short, fairly fit, long but well-groomed beard, hard eyes. He gave us a once over and said, “Name?”

“weakArmor.”

A look at Aurora. “Who’s she?”

“A friend.”

She lifted one hand and let it casually rest over his on the door handle. The hard lines around his eyes softened slightly. “I’m just here to make sure he doesn’t put his foot in his mouth.”

“That a problem he has a lot?”

“Not a problem, a talent,” I said.

He let us in to the shop and locked the door behind us. “That’s not a talent that will win you friends. At least your lady gets that.”

I decided to let the comment about my lady pass. “Are you Hat Trick?”

“That’s what I call myself, anyway. I’m not as deeply invested in my handle as you folks from Galaxy tend to be.” He led us through his shop, between racks of pricy computer parts, to a second room about half the size of the first. The walls were empty and there was a large table with a bunch of electronic hookups and a large monitor on it. There was an equipment cabinet under the table that all the cables ran in to and probably contained some kind of computer. Unlike the main room, which was a muddle of customers coming and going, this room had a clear feel to it. It brimmed with anticipation, spiced with an undercurrent of disappointment. Aurora shifted slightly, unsettled a bit by emotional feedback she wasn’t used to parsing.

Hospitals have powerful emotional landscapes but they tend to be quite narrow in the emotions you find. The kind of baited breath excitement this room was rank with wasn’t one of them.

Hat Trick apparently noticed her discomfort because he said, “I use this room for stress testing systems and robotics for customers. It gives the room a unique impression.”

“Systems you’ve built for them, or systems they bring to you?” I asked.

“Both.” He waved us towards the table and we all took seats.

“You do robotics?” Aurora asked, adjusting herself nervously on her seat.

“When something interesting comes in,” Hat Trick replied. “I try to dabble in as many things as I can.”

I could see that. Aurora has the kind deep, powerful reserves of mental energy I’d expect of a tier five Gift, focused in a single field of study for a lifetime. You could give her a problem and she’d push against it until it was submerged within herself and her understanding permeated it down to the very smallest details. Most tier four and five psychometrics in Galaxy were like that.

In contrast Hat Trick’s mental energy spread wide across an array of subjects, less a pool to submerge a problem in and more a lens to magnify it in and study it from any number of angles. I’d originally been under the impression he was a tier four psychometric at the least. But with the unique structure he’d given to his Gift and the unorthodox mental structures that made it possible I was no longer sure he was even a tier three, like me.

I was curious but asking about it seemed kind of rude and there’s no way to test a person’s Gift without their cooperation. I decided to stick to the reason I was there. “So I heard of you from AJ Jackson.”

Hat Trick nodded. “Unfortunately he wasn’t available to vouch for you so I had to put out some feelers on you, that’s why I took so long to get back to you.”

“No surprise. Jackson’s in jail right now.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”

“He actually had me kidnapped.”

“I always wondered when he would cross a line…” Hat Trick shook his head, clearly he’d had doubts about Jackson’s stability before this. “For the record, I wasn’t a part of that idea.”

“No one thought you did,” I assured him. “He’s very good at coming up with bad ideas all on his own.”

“That he is.”

I opened my mouth to change the subject to why I needed his help when Aurora jumped in and said, “Who vouched for him?”

Hat Trick looked a bit confused. “Jackson?”

“No, Armor.” She cocked her head to one side. “You said Jackson couldn’t vouch for him, so who did?”

“That would be me.”

I turned around so quickly I almost fell out of my chair. The door to the room thumped closed and the lock was thrown before my brain fully caught up to what I was seeing. Natalie Chase gave me a pained smile. “I guess this isn’t exactly how you were expecting this meeting to go, was it?”

Aurora helped me get situated back in my chair, which was nice because I couldn’t stop staring at Natalie long enough to look at it. Finally I found my voice and said, “No, it was not.”