Cool Things: The Protomen

Posted by natechen on

Time for something a little different! The Protomen are an indie band that produces rock operas (and occasional covers of Queen). Now even if you don’t like opera and Queen isn’t your thing, the Protomen have a lot to offer you.

You see, the primary focus of The Protomen is Mega Man. Yeah, the video game character. Okay, that’s not entirely true. The primary inspiration for The Protomen is Mega Man.

For those not familiar with the general gist of the Mega Man storylines (yes there are more than one) they’re about a plucky blue robot and his epic battles with the mad scientist Dr. Wiley. A number of characters, including Dr. Light, Mega Man’s creator, and Proto Man, an earlier model of Mega Man and the source of the band’s name, are featured.

Most Mega Man stories revolve around Dr. Wiley, a former associate of Dr. Light, building a number of powerful and intelligent robots, providing them with armies of much less intelligent but still dangerous robots, and tasking them with taking over the earth. Mega Man foils these plots by defeating Dr. Wiley’s robot masters and exploiting the similarities in their construction to turn their own weapon systems on their creator.

This kind of stuff is now fairly standard video game fare, but fortunately the Protomen don’t dwell on that part of the Mega Man franchise.

The Protomen are two albums into a three album story cycle. The first album, titled “The Protomen” but perhaps more accurately thought of as Hope Rides Alone, introduces us to a dark, dystopian world ruled by Dr. Wiley and his armies of evil robots. Here, The Protomen introduce us to many of their major themes.

And it’s in their choice of themes that they really set themselves apart. They mull over what heroism really means, to what extent we must take responsibility for the evils we see and act. And it reminds, in Mega Man’s own words, “hope rides alone” and often, doing the right thing means standing alone.

In “Act Two: The Father of Death”, The Protomen take us back in time to meet the young Drs. Light and Wiley, and introduce themes like discerning use of technology and the value of work in a mechanized society. They also give one the feeling that one of the two doctors at the center of their story isn’t entirely sane. Here’s a hint: It’s not Wiley.

It’s true that on occasion The Protomen can border on the melodramatic. But that’s not often, and hey, it’s opera, right? They’re entitled to be a little melodramatic.

If you want to hear what they sound like, here’s a link to their preview track from The Father of Death.

Heat Wave: The Wood Pile

Posted by natechen on

Helix

As it turned out, Circuit had actually left is a lot, but not much of it was meaningful.

Perhaps because he didn’t want to draw attention by bringing in a fleet moving vans, Circuit had chosen to leave behind most or all of what passed for furniture inside his little environmentally sealed bunker. Most of it was piles of pallets and crates with boards laid across the top to serve as makeshift tables. There was an empty server rack over in one corner and a serviceable desk nearby. A hand crafted walnut chair sat by the desk. Beyond that there was a map of the city with a bunch of papers tacked around the edges. Here and there a discarded piece of electronic equipment sat, either forgotten or unneeded.

SWAT had declared the room free of danger before letting us in, but I still felt a twinge of caution as I poked through the piles of junk. The whole place was kind of depressing, and not just because there weren’t likely to be any signs of where Circuit was in it. It reminded me of an empty factory, a place that used to have purpose but didn’t any longer.

I shook off the melancholy and walked over to the desk, pulling on a pair of white gloves as I did. Contaminating the crime scene is still a blunder, even if asteroid impacts are more likely than Circuit leaving fingerprints for us. Mosburger trailed along a few steps behind me and Herrera went part of the way with us, but went to look at the map instead. Mosburger started poking through the drawers on the desk, musing to himself, “You have to wonder if it was even Open Circuit who was here. There could be any number of reasons for someone to use this kind of elaborate vacuum set up.”

“Yeah,” I said, turning the chair over and looking at the bottom side of the seat. “But this almost guarantees it.”

“What?” Mosburger asked, looking back at the chair with a confused expression.

I tapped the maker’s mark stamped on the bottom of the chair. “This. Circuit has left at least one piece of furniture of this make at every place of his we’ve raided in the last four years.”

“How many is that total?”

“Counting this, six,” I said, setting the chair back on its legs.

“Is it always his chair?” Mosburger asked, looking at the furniture a little more closely.

I shrugged. “It’s not like he labels them, and not every place we find is his personal laboratory, but yeah, we think so. It would certainly fit what he seems to be doing.”

“What? Is it some kind of message?” He was studying it more closely now, as if a simple wooden chair that consisted of four legs, a seat and a back could tell him something. And he was a getman, maybe it could.

“Personally, I think he’s just making fun of me.”

“You?” That got a raised eyebrow. “What makes you think this is personal?”

I waved my hand at the chair. “This came from the same online store as all the other pieces. It’s a-”

“Hey, Mossman!” Jack waved from over by the server rack. “We got something here that requires your particular talents.”

“Right!” He got up and started away, glancing back long enough to say, “Fill me in later.”

A nod was all he got for confirmation, but I was sure that he’d here about the chairs sooner or later. I went back to the desk, but didn’t really find much there. It was mostly piles of old electronics and computer trade magazines, most with dogeared pages. I left them be.

“You folks think you’ll need anything else before we go?”

I jumped and turned to find the SWAT Lieutenant had snuck up on me. Tunnel vision strikes again. “No Lieutenant, uh… I never got your name.” And suddenly, I felt bad about it. We’d dragged him and his team off their normal beats to help out here and they had found a big fat nothing.

“Don’t feel bad, Agent Helix, I didn’t give it. Harold Duncan.” He stuck out his hand and I shook it. He glanced around and sighed. “I gotta say it doesn’t feel right to just up and walk off with the scene unprocessed like this.”

“What department do you usually work, Lieutenant Duncan?”

“Vice.”

That made sense. He probably went along on a lot of raids like this before he even got anywhere near joining SWAT. Or not, the Project doesn’t really get involved in the drug trade all that often so I wouldn’t know. “Well, when you look at a scene like this what are you thinking about?”

Duncan looked around and shrugged. “Chain of evidence, how many convictions we can get at this level and how far up the food chain we can go.”

“See that’s just it.” I spread my hands. “The only part of that which really concerns us is going up the food chain. The classic motive, means and opportunity trifecta makes our job very easy- there’s only so many people with a given talent in the country, and there’s usually only one per state. It just boils down to proving opportunity, since you can manufacture a motive for just about anything. ”

“That must be nice,” he murmured. “Keeps the suspect pool down.”

“And with Circuit it’s even easier. We’ve got a list of crimes a mile long we can pin on him if we ever find him. But what it means in this case is that we have our own way of dealing with these scenes. Yeah, it’s similar to yours, but we like do have our own guys do it for reasons I’m sure you understand.” The look on his face said he did. We were muscling him out for reasons of secrecy and jurisdiction and expertise and he knew it. I could also tell he didn’t really hold it against us. He was just uncomfortable because of it. Hopefully he’d get over that if we needed to do this again.

“Well, good luck to you, then,” he said finally. “We need to get back to our precincts.”

“Good working with you, Lieutenant Duncan.” I shook his hand and he went on his way, stopping to look over the warehouse one more time before he left. I mused for a moment, wondering if we’d see his name on an application to join anytime soon.

“Helix.” Herrera motioned me over to the map. She was browsing over the various papers stuck up there. Most of them were just notes about road construction or, on occasion, buildings being renovated. There were a few photos mixed in and there didn’t really seem to be any theme to them. Houses, restaurants and office buildings were all there.

I couldn’t tell what she found so fascinating about all that, so I said, “Any idea what this is?”

“None. You know the talents in the Midwest pretty well, right?”

So this wasn’t about the map, apparently. “I’ve probably met half of them personally. Don’t know as I could remember all their names or talents, much less where they were at the time.”

“Is there one called Enchanter?”

“Not that I know of.” I folded my arms and gave her an appraising look. Her attention was still on the map. “Should I heard of him?”

Herrera pointed out a note on the map. “What do you make of that?”

I carefully poked a photo of a narrow, three story row house out of the way to get a better look. It was a printed note on white paper, the kind of thing you might find on photocopiers in any office anywhere in America. It said, “There is no king in America. Death to pretenders.”

It was signed, “Enchanter.”

“How about that,” I said. “Never seen anything like it before. It’s definitely not written by Circuit. He doesn’t strike me as the type to enjoy fanciful names.”

“I agree with you there,” she said. “The message sounds familiar, but I can’t think of where I’ve seen it before.”

I frowned. “Doesn’t sound like song lyrics or something you’d put in advertisements. On TV maybe?”

“No.” She frowned and closed her eyes, then opened them again. “I feel more like seeing them is familiar. I’m more a visual person, anyway.” She closed her eyes, this time covering them with one hand.  “I’m sure I’ve read this before, but I’m not sure where.”

“You giving the new boss headaches already, Helix?” Jack shouldered his way into the conversation, Mosburger by his side.

“Trying to relieve them, actually,” I said. “You remember any talents under the code name Enchanter?”

Jack shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry.”

“Never mind,” Herrera said, looking up again. “I’ll look into it when we get back to the offices.”

“Then Mossman has something for you to see.” Jack nudged Mosburger in the shoulder and he held up a small gray box in his hands.

It looked like a simple metal case, just big enough to cover both his hands, with one of those little black antenna things and a bunch of wires sticking out of the side. It looked just like a bunch of other, similar boxes scattered about the room. It could be a hard drive, a modem, or any one of those other parts you cram into a computer to make it work. As far as I could see, there was nothing special about it.

Herrera apparently agreed with me, because after staring at it for a minute she said, “So what?”

“This is the only piece of gear in the room that was still hooked up,” Mosburger said. “Agent Howell found it over by the rack. It looks like it was designed to go straight into the wall.”

“What’s it do?” I asked.

“I was kind of hoping to find out, but it doesn’t look like it was intended to open,” he said. “My guess is that it’s some sort of cell phone repeater, so that Circuit could still talk to people while he was in here. Second guess would be that it’s a wireless internet signal repeater, same concept except it gives you the Internet. Jack told me to bring it with me.”

“Right.” I glanced at Herrera. “Do you want me to crack it open?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Do you want me to melt the case?” I rapped my knuckles once on the thingie for emphasis. “I need your okay before I can fire up the ol’ heat sink. That’s what the oversight agent’s for.”

“Can you do that without damaging the contents?” She asked.

“It’s possible,” I said. “The case is metal, which conducts heat better than air, so any heat that leaks from the sink should flow back in faster than it would in open air. Less likely to cause damage.”

“But still possible?”

“Anything’s possible, ma’am. I can’t say how likely it is.”

“Right.” She glanced back at Mosburger. “Is there anything opening this tells us that can’t wait until we can get it back to the offices?”

“We might be able to access a call log from it,” he said dubiously. “But this looks like a custom built model that probably has all kinds of safeguards on it. It might tell us something about how Circuit encrypts or disguises his communications. But no, nothing that would matter right this moment.”

She nodded. “All right then. When the forensics people get to it we’ll have them mark it priority and they’ll rip it apart first thing when we get back. You’re job is to outthink Circuit, not pick apart his gadgets.”

“With all due respect, ma’am,” Jack said, “with Circuit it can be one and the same.”

 “Duly noted.” She sighed. “Hopefully it tells us something, or this whole thing was a waste of time. See if forensics wants any help. If not, we’ve got people to debrief back at the office. Let’s get moving.”

Circuit

“No, I do not want you to look into optimizing the design, Davis,” I said with as much patience as I could muster. “Mr. Nayar has already done most of that work for you. What I want you to do is duplicate it, stress test it and then start building more.”

“Look, I’m sure it’s good work. But this,” my supervising engineer gestured at the hydroelectric generator with expression of tolerant disdain, “was built by a grad studen. I’m sure with a few days work we could make it even more efficient.”

“I’ve no doubt you could. But what I want is not a new prototype that requires a new round of testing. I want this prototype functional and mass produced, and I want it yesterday.” Davis opened his mouth to protest but I held up a hand to stop him. “Once you have a proposal for producing more of these, you can look into improving the design.”

I’d hoped that would be enough to mollify him but apparently he was still upset, because he started to say something again. This time he was cut off by Heavy Water, who slid into the room at a half run and grabbed me by the arm. “They just showed up, Circuit!”

“Who?” I wasn’t expecting anyone at this location. At least, no one other than Davis and his perfectionist work crew, who’s enthusiasm I normally appreciate more. Then it clicked. “The Project raided Warehouse Three?”

“We just got the word,” he said. “Delacroix called it in a few minutes ago, said it looks like they bypassed the outside alarms somehow.”

I frowned. The outer alarms consisted of basic temperature and barometric pressure measuring devices attached to equally basic transmitters, the idea being to detect the weather changes created by an active heat sink. If they hadn’t been tripped then the Project had gained entry using conventional means rather than Helix’s talent, or some other talent that I hadn’t anticipated. That was odd.

Usually, the FBI doesn’t give any kind of major ordinance to Helix’s team. They know that if he needs to go through something he can do it himself, so why waste their precious budgetary allotment on joint ops involving him?

It seemed his new oversight agent had more pull or different contacts than Robert Sanders. That could be a problem.

Aloud I said, “Well, nothing ever goes exactly according to plan. That’s what the back ups are for. Still, we need to get moving.”

“The van’s ready to go, boss,” Heavy replied. “Say the word.”

“I want that production plan by Tuesday, Davis,” I said, giving the engineer one last stern look. Then I turned and headed out the door with Heavy. “Let’s go say hello to the Feds.”

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Fiction Index

Original VS Derivative: In Defense of Derivation

Posted by natechen on

Okay, so this is really a big subject, and really when I sat down to poke at it I really meant to just talk about world building, so I’m going to restrict myself to that this time around. I did have some thoughts about this on other subjects, such as characterization and backstory, but I think I’ll leave that on the back burner for now. Who knows? Original VS Derivative may become a running theme. Or maybe I’ll just tackle the issue whenever I get to rambling about those subjects.

Also, as you may have already guessed from the title, I intend to continue this next week, and look at Originality.

So, what do I mean by derivative world building?

The most obvious example is fantasy world building because, as many people familiar with the genre are already aware, most fantasy world building from the 1970s to the mid to late 1990s (and even some today) is heavily influence by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, who’s Middle Earth is still the defining fantasy world for many people, including me.

The influence of Tolkien over fantasy is pronounced. For instance, one of the most ubiquitous antagonistic races in fantasy is the orc, creatures that first appeared as the shock troops for Sauron in The Lord of The Rings trilogy.  Magic rings, dwarves that are antagonistic to elves but can learn to be friends if they spend enough time with each other and rotund little people who just want to be left alone and live the good life – all of these are staples of the fantasy genre.

But isn’t relying on that kind of thing lazy writing? Shouldn’t a world builder take a little more pride in what they do?

Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that Tropes Are Tools*. Just because a work doesn’t strike you as original doesn’t mean it isn’t good. In fact, you’d have to look far and wide to find a truly original idea, most story and/or world building elements have been done before in some way, shape or form. It’s just that some patterns of them have been used more than others. So why are they so prevalent?

For starters, they give the reader a definite grounding point in the work. If an author is planning on spending a lot of time working with ideas of political or magical theory, they might not want you to have to try and remember all the details of a half a dozen new fantasy races, temperaments and class systems as well, so they just give you something they’re relatively sure you’ll already understand. It’s true that you, personally, might be able to follow all that, but you may not be representative of the audience as a whole.

Alternatively, world building tropes give the writer a definite grounding point in the work. Perhaps they feel that some part of the trope has been consistently overlooked, and needs to be explored. Perhaps they want to subvert the trope, showing what they feel is inconsistent or ill thought out about it by writing a story built around it. Or maybe the scope of the work doesn’t justify reinventing the wheel, as noted above. Readers aren’t the only one with limited headspace for dealing with a work of fiction, after all.

A third possibility is that the broad lines of a pre-existing world already provide what your story needs. Why reinvent the wheel when there’s already perfectly good framework to draw on? Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics are the starting point of most people’s A.I.s, and why not? Most people agree that it’s a sound theoretical starting point for their development (whether it can actually be implemented or not is another question, and has more to do with how hard or soft you want your sci-fi to be.) Once again, a big part of it is where the author wants to spend his or her time, world building or somewhere else. And let’s face it, there’s a lot of other places they could spend their time.

Finally, some people are actively trying to retell old mythologies in modern contexts. The appeal of old fairy tales, or Greek or Norse myth is enduring. You can’t be totally original and pay homage to those sources effectively. You can try, but you might be better off aiming for authenticity.

In short, when you stumble across what strikes you as a derivative world, don’t just dismiss it as a failure of creativity on the author’s part. Stop and ask yourself what they’re trying to do with their story, then judge it on those merits. You may find that the story still manages to be a good one after all.

*Follow the above link at your own peril.

Cool Things: Easie Damasco

Posted by natechen on

David Tallerman has a degree in English Literature, specializing in Tales of Witchcraft. He currently works as an IT Contractor. Naturally, he writes stories that involve neither.

Easie Damasco is a thief – hardly unique to the fantasy genre. He lacks significant skill in battle, deception and even in thievery. In fact, when we first meet him he’s so poor he’s resorted to stealing food from the camp of an invading warlord.

When he gets caught he’s offered a simple choice: be treated as a common criminal or join up and help the invaders by riding herd on one of their giants. However, as soon as no one’s paying attention he wheels his giant away from the battle, raids the camp and hightails it in the opposite direction.

What ensues is less of a caper than it is a chase story. Easie has somehow turned himself into the equivalent of Harrison Ford’s Fugitive, albeit with a twelve foot tall giant in tow. He spends a great deal of his time ducking away from pursuit and trying to figure out why he’s being chased in the first place.

It also brings him face to face with the central conflict of the series. While Easie is a thief, and a fairly well known one, he’s not rich or well established. Like many people do when deciding on their careers, he seems to have thought that he was starting out on a path to easy money and early retirement, however all he’s gotten himself is more and more trouble. Getting chased by a whole army is certainly an extreme manifestation of that, but it’s hardly the first.

Over the first two books of the series he spends a lot of time thinking about thievery and whether he even wants to keep it up. Given how stubbornly many fantasy characters hew to their profession, that’s unusual in and of itself. On the other hand, everyone knows that all crooks are just looking for a big job that will let them get out of the game. Whether Easie will ever actually try to get out is another matter.

Two things that set Easie apart from other fantasy characters are his friendship with the giant Saltlick, which evolves in a believable fashion and is by no means smooth and one dimensional, and his total lack of magical talent. Far too many fantasy stories rely on magic as an easy out of tough situations, but Easie has no easy button to get him out of a jam. In fact, while incredible creatures like giants do exist in his world, it seems that magic does not. Or if it does, it’s so rare it hasn’t made an appearance yet.

Tallerman hasn’t delved deeply into the history of his world yet, nor do we know much about it outside of the small area that marks the bounds of Easie’s admittedly provincial life, but so far it seems to have a promising start. If you like fantasy without a lot of magical nonsense cluttering it up, or you just like a slightly more realistic look at what a life of crime might really be like in a world with all the technological advancements of the Middle Ages at its disposal, the Tales of Easie Damasco might be for you.

Books in the Easie Damasco series include:

Giant Thief

Crown Thief

Heat Wave: Stray Embers

Posted by natechen on

Helix

“We need a new plan,” Herrera said. “Kesselman, see if you can get ahold of that SWAT team and coordinate with them, take the new factors into account. Helix, how do you want to handle these people?”

“Click my red shoes together and hope they go away?” I suggested. “Honestly, I have no idea. We don’t usually catch amateurs in the act.”

“Forgive me if I sound like an amateur myself,” Mosburger said, “but what kind of an amateur are we talking about right now?”

“Amateur crime fighters, Mossman,” Jack said. “Typically, but not always, talents who have gotten it into their heads that they’re the heroes in some comic book somewhere, and set out to right the wrongs of the world.”

“And boy have they ever found a whopper,” I said. “Of all the criminal organizations they could pick to poke at, they go after Open Circuit. Why me?”

“The innate perversity of the universe tends towards maximum.” Mosburger fitted his helmet on over his head, making him look a lot like an academic masquerading as a soldier. “Doesn’t the Project have a protocol for dealing with talents like this? You seem to have everything else.”

“We do,” Jack said, passing earpieces to Bergstrum and Herrera as soon as Lanier, out tech guy, had them checked out. “It’s pretty simple, really. Step one is determine if they’re in our records or not. Unfortunately, you can’t do that from a heat signature.”

“And since it’s a procedure that can require two or three hours of explanation per talent it’s hardly suited to the present circumstances,” I added. I fitted an earpiece on myself then strapped my own helmet on. “I’d like to propose a different approach for the time being.”

“Go ahead,” Herrera said.

“We throw them all in jail and forget we ever saw them.”

“Try again,” she suggested.

I frowned, because that was the only practical idea I had a the moment. “We go home and let them get fried by Circuit’s booby traps?”

“Or not.”

“We could always just send them back to the office and tank ’em until we’re done here,” I said, more thinking out loud at this point. “We don’t normally initiate new talents there but these aren’t normal circumstances.”

“How do we hold them when we don’t know what their talents can do?” Mosburger asked.

Jack threw an arm around his shoulders. “Well, Mossman, the idea is that you figure it out before we send them off.”

Mosburger seemed to shrink into his armor, making it even more comical looking. All he said was, “Oh.”

“Relax,” Jack said with a laugh. “We’ve all got plenty of field experience, too. You’ll be fine.”

It was true, outside of Mosburger and Herrera we had a minimum of four years experience in field work a piece. Just to be on the safe side, though, I crossed my fingers.

 

It took another ten minutes for the SWAT team to arrive and get set up. In that time the three people in the warehouse wandered out of my range on one side of Circuit’s sealed room and came back on the other. Apparently, they were doing the same thing we had been, except with a closer view. That reinforced the idea that they were amateurs, but didn’t tell us much else.

Since there were potential civilian complications wandering around in the warehouse we decided the best approach was not the usual door-buster routine most people associate with SWAT operations. Instead, there was some more low-key reconnaissance, which would theoretically be followed by the door-buster routine. Among other things, they discovered that the main employee entrance was unlocked and standing open.

“That settles it,” I said. “Circuit’s not here anymore, and those aren’t his people. He’s not one to let things get that lax.”

“Which does beg the question who these people are and how they got in here,” Jack said, leaning against the side of one of the SWAT vans and eavesdropping on their radio chatter.

“I was wondering if we’d ever get a chance to go in there ourselves,” Mosburger replied, wiping sweat from his face with, of all things, a black bandana that looked way to gangster for a retired engineer.

“They wouldn’t have let us come out here if they weren’t planning to take us in with them,” I said. “Besides, if one of the people in there is a talent, they’ll need us.”

“And if they aren’t?” Mosburger asked.

“Then we book them for criminal trespassing and give them a stern warning about the dangers of vigilantism,” one of the SWAT members said as he stepped out of the van. “I’m more worried about if they are. This is our first time working with Wizard Central, and what I want to know is if we’re even going to matter in this operation.”

I exchanged a glance with Jack. This was the first time I’d heard the term Wizard Central, but it was pretty clear that was local slang for Project Sumter. Looked like there were some misconceptions to straighten out. Thankfully, Jack was on the ball.

“Look, Lieutenant,” he said, “I know that you’ve probably seen a lot of movies or TV shows or some such crap that has a half a dozen near-invincible supermen doing huge, crazy, world-saving stuff on a regular basis. But that’s not the way talents actually work.”

“No?” The cop pointed at me. “Didn’t I hear something about him melting a hole in the wall a couple of minutes ago? You telling me that was just hyperbole?”

“No, that’s a practical option,” I said. “But in our line of work that makes me something called the glass cannon.”

“The what?”

“A rule of thumb that actually relates back to wizards, Lieutenant,” Mosburger said. “It basically refers to something powerful and dangerous, but fragile. Based on what I’ve read, most talents have greater awareness than the regular person. Some of them, like Double Helix here, have a lot of potential to cause damage. I’ve yet to see or hear of one that couldn’t be stopped by the kind of equipment you people are carrying.”

“Honest truth, that,” Jack added, patting his own handgun. “If it weren’t the case I’d be carrying something a lot bigger than this.”

That seemed to satisfy the cop, who went back to sorting out the other officers on his team. I got the impression he was the one in charge, particularly since he seemed to be the one coordinating with Herrera. A couple of minutes later we were broken up, two of us to two SWAT officers, and got ready to go in.

Herrera and I wound up at the unlocked employee door, closest to the people inside. Jack and Mosburger were going in through a side door, Bergstrum and Kesselman the back. There were other teams for the loading dock and the fire exits, but there weren’t enough of our people to go with every SWAT group.

There were a few minutes of confusion when we went in, the kind of shock and awe entrance that looks impressive for the sole purpose of looking impressive and keeping unhardened civilians from doing anything stupid. It’s heady stuff when you’re there but really boring to talk about because it’s basically all shouting and noise, at least when everything goes well.

Fortunately, this was not one of the cases where something went wrong, probably because Circuit is too smart to deliberately antagonize the law when he could just ignore us and do whatever he wants. There were no booby traps on any of the entrances, in fact the only thing in the warehouse was the massive concrete block that held Circuit’s vacuum insulated chamber.

And three sheepish looking civilians who looked like they couldn’t even be out of college yet.

I groaned inwardly. It’s not that I was never that young, idealistic and obnoxious, because I was. There’s reports filed away somewhere in the Records department that can prove it. But it’s a far cry from knowing you have a past to having to deal with it a second time, from the other side.

I do have to give those three credit for being more sensible than most. The smaller two of them were wearing body armor, not high grade stuff, the kind you might see a serious motorcyclist wearing to protect against a bad fall. It didn’t protect the lower body but it would get the job done against anything short of close range gunfire, at least for a little while. They also hadn’t made any attempt to add a logo or brightly colored patterns to their clothes. Other than the body armor, they looked just like people off the street.

They lost points for letting one of their number run around with no armor. Also, only one of them was wearing a helmet. Two of them were men, one thin and one big and blocky, no surprises there, and the other was a petite young blond woman who was arguing with the Lieutenant and her skinny friend at turns. I instantly labeled them Skinny, Charlie and Biker Girl.

“All right, folks,” I said, using my best authoritative cop’s voice, “at this point we should probably mention that you have the right to remain silent!” That instantly got me everyone’s attention. “There’s a whole bunch of other rights that you’ll be advised of shortly, but that’s the one we really want you to exercise right now.”

“You can’t arrest us without telling us why,” Skinny said.

“I think criminal trespass is pretty clear cut at this point,” Herrera said. “We can probably add obstruction of justice to the list if you don’t cooperate.”

Which I’m ninety-nine percent sure is untrue, but most people, myself included, don’t know what obstruction of justice actually means, so you can throw it around all you like until it’s time to go to court. Or at least until the attorneys show up.

“Look, we’re not trying to make any trouble,” Charlie said, “We’re on your side, but-“

“If you’re on my side, Charlie,” I said, “you’ll go with the nice folks from SWAT and let us do out job.”

“Charlie?” He asked, raising an eyebrow.

“As in Charlie Brown,” I said. “You’re not the only blockhead here but-“

Herrera elbowed me gently and said, “I’m sure you folks have questions, but I think they’re better answered back at the office.”

“What office is that?” Biker Girl asked. “I don’t see a badge on you two.”

I reached for my ID automatically, flipping it open at the same time Herrera displayed hers. I noticed Skinny glancing back and forth between the two and followed his line of sight in the corner of my eye. Apparently he had been thrown because my ID was issued by the FBI and hers was from the HSA. I made a mental note that we should probably do something about that.

The subtleties of Federal IDs were lost on Biker Girl, or she saw all badge carriers as the same, because she just crossed her arms and said, “Is this where we disappear with the black suits and are never seen again?”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at the totally unnecessary melodrama. It would be unprofessional. I was saved from having to answer when the Lieutenant leaned in and said, “Agent Herrera, do you want us to try and breach the door?”

He jerked a thumb back at Circuit’s concrete box. I’d been so focused on trying to get these civilians out from under foot I hadn’t noticed the entrance was no more than twenty feet away. It was actually a pretty simple thing that reminded me of the door to a walk-in fridge. I walked over to the door, running my hands along the concrete as I moved. A couple of feet away from the door my fingers passed over a ripple in the concrete and I paused. If I looked carefully I could see that there was a raised circle of concrete about two feet wide in the wall. It wasn’t very big. I doubt I’d have noticed it if I hadn’t been touching the wall, but it was there. It looked almost like someone had dropped a rock into a pool of water, then transferred the last ripple onto the concrete before it hardened.

“Something wrong, Helix?” Herrera asked, from just a half a foot behind me.

“Not really,” I said, moving on. “I just remembered a story my grandfather used to tell me.”

The door was well insulated but I could tell that the insides were still really cold. “Not sure blowing it off the hinges is a good idea, Lieutenant,” I said. “I don’t know what Circuit was pumping through to cool this rig, but I’d bet good money exposing it to air can’t be healthy.”

“There’s nothing in the door,” Biker Girl said. “If there was anything being pumped through before it’s gone now.”

I turned and quickly crossed back over to her as the Lieutenant asked, “How would you know?”

She gave the poor cop that classic “like duh” look that only women can pull off. It tilted her head at just the right angle for me to pick out a series of four piercings in her ear. They were hard to spot because the rings or studs she normally wore in them had been removed. I frowned and pitched my voice to a whisper even I couldn’t really hear, then said, “Don’t talk about your hearing.”

Biker Girl gave me a surprised glance, but said, “Nevermind.”

The Lieutenant glanced from me to her, then back again. Clearly he knew something had happened, but he seemed to get that we wouldn’t talk about it out here in public.

“She’s right, though,” Mosburger said. I jumped and swung back to face the door. Mosburger and a couple of SWAT people had jimmied open a metal box that looked kind of like the ones you see over underground power lines. He gestured down at it. “This has hook-ups that you might expect for something like a dishwasher, but could easily run a small pump system. But there’s nothing here now, which means they probably drained the coolant out and removed the pumping system when they left.”

I sighed. “Which means they probably had a lot of notice.”

“Wouldn’t take more than an hour, Helix,” Mosburger said.

“But it’s not the kind of thing you’d prioritize while clearing out,” Herrera said. “You’d probably save it until last.”

“We’ll, we’re hear anyways,” the Lieutenant said. “We might as well go in.”

“Helix, how did you get through last time you visited one of these place?” Herrera asked.

“The way I usually get through just about anything,” I said. “The melty way. Which means letting SWAT take the door off its hinges this time has the benefit of novelty.”

“Do you think the door will still be trapped, if it was ever trapped at all?”

“Not his style,” I said. “He doesn’t go out of his way to cause difficulties for us. He just wishes we’d show him the same courtesy.”

“Then we’ll go through in a minute,” the Lieutenant said. “What about these three?”

Herrera shot a glance at Mosburger, who shrugged. I said, “Those are our case, not yours. Bergstrum and Kesselman can take them back to the offices, I don’t think we’ll need them here. And Bergstrum.” I grabbed his elbow as they came up to take custody of the three musketeers. “Put Charlie there down in the L2 tank.”

Bergstrum grunted his acknowledgement and a minute later we were back to having a civilian free work environment. I felt some of the tension between my shoulders relax immediately. As the SWAT boys started setting up to get into Circuit’s little bunker Herrera leaned in and asked in a low voice, “We have a holding room in the basement?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Normally you’d be shown it during the orientation tour, but I don’t think you’ve had time for that yet.”

She gave me a funny look but didn’t have time to ask about it before the Lieutenant came back and said, “We’re ready.”

“All right,” Herrera said. “Let’s see what Circuit left us.”

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Jargon

Posted by natechen on

Double Helix is a talent. That means he has an unusual ability that sets him far, far apart from the majority of other people. Specifically, he’s a heatsink, a talent that lets him reverse the normal tendency of heat to spread out, but only in a set area. He works for Project Sumter, a branch of the government that handles threats to the public safety from talents of all stripes. He works with getmen, tac teams, specialized equipment and dozens of other federal, state and local government organizations with their own names or abbreviations to keep straight.

Open Circuit is also a talent, one known as a fusebox, with the ability to feel electrical potential and force circuits open and closed, an ability from which his name is derived. In addition, he’s a computer savant, and fluent in all the accompanying techspeak that goes with that field of study, and an electrical engineer with an interest in hydroelectricity and the accompanying architectural challenges.

That’s a lot of terms to juggle, and that’s without bringing the other kinds of talents in Project Sumter’s archives into it, not to mention the fact that each individual talented person gets their own code name, which they’re supposed to use in place of their real name whenever they can. Not to mention the bureaucrat-speak that goes with anything run by the government.

Not to mention the legalese.

Now I love technical terms. Using them makes you sound smart, tends to impress people who know what they mean and can tell that you’ve used them correctly and generally lets you get away with using fewer words to describe a situation than you would otherwise. The problem with jargon is, not everyone knows what it means.

For a writer like myself who loves to jargonize* words, that can be a problem. You see, as often as not a reader who doesn’t know what most of the words in a piece mean tends to stop reading, rather than look them up.

Gone are the days when Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky would be something most people could enjoy. Now, it’s just meaningless garbage that people ignore in favor of their texting shorthand (infinitely more comprehensible, apparently). Not that I’m getting up on a soapbox here…

Ahem. Finding the right level of jargon to let readers follow along yet still let your characters sound informed, reliable and smart about the subjects they’re talking about is a challenge. Your best bet is probably to write the technical dialog out, define as much of it as makes sense in the current context, then try to cut the amount of jargon you use in half. Then run the whole segment by a test reader who has never looked at anything about your piece before.

Then cut the jargon in half again.

Hopefully, by that point you’ll be good to go!

Most importantly, don’t become over attached to any piece of jargon, whether it’s something you’ve cooked up or a real, technical term. Sometimes it’s more important to keep things comprehensible than to sound as authentic as possible.

 

*Jargonize: 1) Verb, the act of taking a word and assigning it an unusual and/or technical meaning.

2) Verb, to take a word and add a technical sounding suffix such as “ize” or “ium” to it, thus creating a technical term.

Heat Wave: Thermal Vision

Posted by natechen on

Helix

Problem one: Project Sumter is not, in the strictest technical sense, a law enforcement agency. Nor is it a branch of the military or part of the American intelligence network. Although we loan our personnel to the organizations that handle those responsibilities, we ourselves don’t have any jurisdiction or special authority to engage in law enforcement, intelligence gathering or military operations unless we’re working in conjunction with some other branch of the government that does. In order to act on the evidence that Herrera and the HSA had provided, Project Sumter would first need the cooperation of the police and a warrant from a local judge.

Problem two: As a collection of super-specialized operatives that tend to come in and take over situations that fall under our purview, we’re not usually very popular with people like the FBI, the CIA, the Marines, local police, ect.

Now, in the past, I wouldn’t have had to worry about these things, since Sanders’ team was on indefinite loan to the FBI, so any case that fell under their purview was open to us by some sort of bureaucratic deal he’d worked out two years ago.

But I’d been transferred to Herrera’s team which was, for all practical intents and purposes, a different section of the Project that didn’t have that kind of convenient arrangement to fall back on. Once our briefing with the Senator and Agent Herrera was over we wound up spending the next thirty hours cutting our way through the mess of red tape necessary to get the locals to sign off on our proposed operation and a judge to issue a warrant.

Luckily for us, we had a US Senator in our team. It was one of the few times I’ve ever been glad to be associated with Brahms Dawson. On top of that, Kessleman had been a local cop before joining the Project and, once he and the rest of Jack’s tactical team straggled in later that afternoon, he was able to get in contact with some people he knew and smooth things a little more.

Still, most of us spent the night on cots tucked away in the back corners of unused offices or conference rooms, waiting for the word to go to come in. Actually, all of us did except the Senator, who really seemed like he wanted to stay. He only left because Herrera shooed him away to some event of his daughter’s. In spite of how busy we were I found a moment to wonder how an ambitious twit like Dawson ever found the time for kids.

Finally, sometime around dinner time that evening we got the green light. To my intense disappointment we wound up going in saddled with a SWAT team. While I’m sure the local SWAT guys are competent in their job I’d have sworn on a stack of Bibles that they didn’t have thirty seconds experience dealing with talent in general, and Open Circuit’s not a normal talent either. Plus, the SWAT team wouldn’t be available until the next day.

Herrera got the rest of us together just before six that evening and briefed us on the plan, which essentially boiled down to “hit him around ten AM tomorrow” and told us to go home and get some sleep. It was a good call, although I wasn’t sure how much sleep we’d be getting that night. What I found most impressive was that, even after a night in the office, she still managed to look collected and cool. I wondered how well that cool would hold up under fire.

Rather than spend a lot of time wondering about it I decided to do as I was told and get some sleep. I’d see how she did under stress tomorrow. There’d be a lot more information to go on after that.

I arrived back at the office the next morning and was greeted by the distinctive odor of chocolate chip cookies drifting out of the offices. That could only mean one thing: Mona had been baking last night. I followed the smell into Sanders’ office to find a double batch of cookies heaped in a large red tin. Mona and Sanders were there too.

I reached out to grab a cookie and Sanders smacked my hand away. “What are you doing?” He asked. “Those are for the people who will be doing actual work today.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” I said, trying to slip around him and grab a cookie with little success. “We’ve got an operation in a couple hours, haven’t you heard?”

Sanders snorted and folded his arms over his chest, saying, “Yeah, I heard. You’re gonna pile in a van and wait six hours for the locals to show up and then find out they’re all on a domestic disturbance call on the other side of the city and can you guys wait until tomorrow? Sitting in a van all day isn’t work.”

“Very unsympathetic, coming from a guy I know has done the same thing six times before in his life,” I said, taking the moment when Sanders opened his mouth for the inevitable comeback to dart around the other side of him and make another grab for the cookies.

Mona pulled the tray just out of my reach and gave me an admonishing look. “Leave the cookies for people who will enjoy them, Helix.”

I stared at her. “What’s that supposed to mean, Mona? Everyone likes your baking.”

“I’ve noticed,” Mona said with a smile. “I wouldn’t keep feeding it to you guys if you hated it. But you hate chocolate.”

I stared open-mouthed for a minute. “I do?”

“You do, but you keep eating it and saying it’s delicious to make me feel better.” She gave me a light pat on one arm. “Best field analyst in the Midwest, remember?”

“I don’t know why anyone bothers trying to keep secrets around here,” I said, slumping slightly.

“Because you’re a sweetheart,” Mona said. She pulled a square tupperware container out of a bag on a nearby chair and held it out to me. “I baked you a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies instead. Take care today.”

“You’re the best, Mona,” I said as I snatched the cookies out of Mona’s hand and scuttled away.

Now only a fool eats when Jack Howell is giving a briefing, he’s the kind of man who demands absolute attention during briefings, and with good reason. Since Herrera was a newbie who wasn’t entirely up on the safety procedures that go hand in hand with being on the same team as a heat sink who expects to go active, Jack got to run our prerollout briefing. That included explaining how to properly strap on and check the complicated insulating body armor that, in theory, would keep people from getting roasted if I needed to light up Circuit’s warehouse for a late summer bonfire.

I’ll be the first to admit that all of that is important information, even the obligatory reminder to take care of your equipment because it is expensive. In fact being forced to sit through the whole lecture for the umpteenth time would have been worth it just to see Mosburger’s reaction when he learned one suit of the stuff cost nearly a hundred and fifty grand. Newbies get used to the Project’s expense budget eventually, but it does take time.

However the upshot of all that was that I wound up sitting around for almost three hours while Mona’s cookies got cold. I didn’t get a chance to crack them open until the eight of us were in our van and headed across town towards Circuit’s latest hideout.

I dug in as I watched Mosburger struggle awkwardly with his body armor. Kesselman was trying to help him get suited up but it looked more like modern art waiting to happen than someone getting ready for a potential combat situation. Everything about this mess, from Circuit’s involvement to the obvious greenness of my current team, was making me nervous.

Once we arrived on site Herrera got out of the front seat and moved into the back with the rest of us. “SWAT says they’ll be here in twenty minutes.”

As a matter of automatic courtesy I held the box out to offer Herrera a cookie. She peered in, saying, “Are these the chocolate chip cookies I was smelling earlier?”

“Oatmeal Raisin,” I said around a mouthful.

Herrera looked vaguely offended. “Did we not rate chocolate chips?”

“Helix doesn’t like chocolate,” Mosburger said without looking up from the boots he strapping on for the third time.

“Is there nothing sacred anymore?” I asked, spreading my hands to the van’s ceiling. “I prefer birthday pie to birthday cake too, is that such a crime?”

“Sorry,” he said, glancing up from his boots. “I heard Bob and Mona arguing about it this morning.”

“Sanders? What was his problem?”

“I’m not sure. Something about her assignment being therapy, not an excuse to baby all her co-workers.” He shrugged. “Not sure what that was supposed to mean.”

I grunted in disapproval. It meant that Darryl had talked Mona into transferring to field work as a way to distract her when she found out they couldn’t have kids. Yes, she probably babied her co-workers as a kind of substitution. Sanders should have known better to bring it up around other people, though. I gave Mosburger a stern look and said, “None of your business.”

Mona raised an eyebrow. “Your last field analyst was in therapy?”

“All getmen are in therapy,” Jack said as he checked through the contents of his utility belt. “It comes with the territory. If you aren’t yet, Mosburger, you’ll get your chance.”

“What’s a getman?” Herrera asked.

“Oh good,” Mosburger muttered. “I’m not the only who doesn’t know these things.”

“It’s what we call field analysts,” I said, ignoring Mosburger’s grumbling.

“Why?” Herrera took off her jacket and began shrugging into her own tactical gear. At least she seemed familiar with the basic mechanics, if not the particular challenges of our specialty equipment.

“Because they always get their man,” Jack said.

“Or because they get things first,” Kesselman added.

I dusted my hands off and closed the empty box of cookies. “Also, I think it has something to do with the fact that the first one was from Gettysburg.” I got up and moved to the seat Herrera had abandoned at the front of the van.

“Going somewhere?” Jack asked.

“Just getting a feel for the place,” I said.

We were just across the street from the warehouse. I can feel heat anywhere within about half a city block when I really focus on it. That wasn’t enough to let me get a sense of the whole warehouse, but I could tell one thing important right off the bat. “Hey, Mosburger, I think I figured out why Circuit wanted this place as a hangout.”

The Project’s newest getman got up and clomped forward to look over my shoulder. “What’s that?”

“It’s one of the only places in the city where he could create a vacuum walled chamber to work in.” I felt my way outward again, just to make sure. There was no getting around the dizzying sense of finding an area that had no heat in it, in fact had no medium to conduct heat.

“He’s used a set up like that before, hasn’t he?” Mosburger said, quickly answering his own question. “When he was operating out in eastern Arizona. I remember reading about it.”

“Why?” Herrera asked. “What does working in a vacuum accomplish?”

“Not in a vacuum,” I said, “in a room with walls that have a vacuum chamber in place of insulation.”

“Circuit appears to know a lot about electronics, and, given the nature of his talent, that’s not surprising.” Mosburger rested his hand on the headrest of my seat and began drumming his fingers absently. “My guess is it serves to make them less detectable to Helix as they’ll leak much less heat.”

“That’s more like waving a red flag to me,” I said. “There’s nothing as obvious as a vacuum, trust me on this. If he’s trying to keep that place a secret, it doesn’t add up.”

Mosburger thought for a moment, then nodded. “You’re right – unless it’s serving as a blind for whatever his real countermeasure is.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Herrera said. “It can’t be a perfect vacuum, can it? He has to get in and out somehow.”

“There’s probably a door pumped chock full of coolant somewhere in the set up,” I said. “That’s what the room in Arizona was like. It’s just not on the side facing us now.”

Herrera tapped Bergstrum on the shoulder. “Take us around the block once. Helix, see if you can pin down where that door is, find out anything else about this set up Circuit’s got running. Look for any major differences between now and the way things were in Arizona.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said. Unfortunately, that wasn’t much. The warehouse wasn’t even in range part of the time. We’d gotten all the way around to the other side of the building when I slapped the back of Bergstrum’s chair. “Hold up. I got three people in there.”

“People?” Mosburger said. “What are people doing in there? Moving out some of Circuit’s stuff?”

“No, at this point he’s got everything he’s ever gonna want out of there already,” I said.

“So you don’t think they’re some of Circuit’s people?” Herrera asked.

“Honestly, no,” I said. Checking their locations again. All three were still plastered up against the edge of the vacuum insulated room. “I think they’re probably worse, in their own way.”

“What’s worse than Circuit in this situation?” Mosburger asked.

I exchanged a glance with Jack, who nodded for me to go ahead. I sighed and said, “Amateurs.”

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Thanksgiving Break

Posted by natechen on

Here in the U.S. we have a holiday every November that is dedicated to eating food with family and giving thanks for our blessings. Because of this great tradition, I will be taking the rest of this week off – there will be no Wednesday or Friday updates.

Hopefully, you’ll come back next Monday for another installment of Heat Wave – or you can just follow the blog via the WordPress Reader or e-mail. No memory issues at all, you’ll just get the new content as soon as it appears. Either way, I hope to see you after the break!

Nate

Heat Wave: Subtle Currents

Posted by natechen on

Circuit

In order to accomplish my goals in modern day society I require large quantities of cash and materiel. Some things I buy, because there’s no other, better way to get hold of them. A piece of land, for instance, is almost impossible to steal from someone. You’re better off just buying the deed.

However, things like land tend to be very expensive, and I find it wise to keep as large a reserve of liquid cash on hand as possible should I suddenly need to make such a purchase. Thus, even when I could afford to buy something I could also steal, I always choose the latter.

I had to explain all of this to Hangman, who was becoming more and more curious about my work the longer our association lasted, before he consented to finding a list of places where I could acquire the things I needed next. The same principle applies to time as money, incidentally, which is why I have information brokers to find information for me and I focus on things only those with my particular talents can do. I will admit that Hangman’s increased prying into my affairs did have me thinking of changing brokers.

Fortunately Hangman handled this request with his usual speed and efficiency, finding four places where I could find what I wanted scattered around the country. I choose to visit a certain university in Texas to get what I was after this time, both because it was far away from my home base and because it was a university.

Higher education in America represents one of the largest wastes of money in the entire nation. Colleges these days serve primarily to hammer the rough edges of individuality off of people, forcing them to conform to the idealogical lockstep of their professors in exchange for the piece of paper that they have been assured will keep them fed and satisfied.

Colleges get truly absurd amounts of money from the students and various levels of government for their brainwashing and they spend it liberally in making improvements and carrying out research, which in turn attracts even more money from the successful graduates who feel some misplaced sense of gratitude for success they would probably have earned on their own, and at a much reduced cost, if they had just found a seasoned pro to show them the ropes for a few months instead of locking themselves into an ivory tower for four years. On the bright side, the absurdity of the modern university is helpful to me in two ways.

One, people who come out of them are totally lacking in any kind of meaningful identity. The brainwashing their professors put them through makes them pliable and interchangeable. After all, once you sand the rough edges off blocks of wood they stack nicely and if one breaks you can throw it out for another. This is a crime against the people involved, but in order to fix it I’ll have to endure it for now.

Two, the disappearance of any kind of imaginative thought from college campuses makes them very easy places to rob.

Here’s how you move across a college campus late at night without getting into trouble: One, own a fairly inconspicuous white van. It should be about five or ten years old, beaten up, with painted over windows. Or no windows at all, if you can help it. Paint some totally innocuous sounding company name on it, like, “Hoffman Plumbing” on it. Two, don coveralls and glower at the students like you’d rather have their bright future as corporate drones instead of your current position as business owner.

You are now free to move about the campus.

I wanted a place in the civil engineering building so I parked my van half a block away and headed towards the chemistry building. Thanks to thousands of dollars of alumni and taxpayer money the entire campus was defended by state of the art electronic locks of a type I was very familiar with. The are secure from anyone without a keycard or the ability to manipulate electronic potential.

Actually, they’re secure from most fuseboxes like me, too. Convincing the lock that I had a legitimate keycard would require more specialized equipment than I wanted to carry with me and the circuits that controlled the actual lock were buried deep in the door, with no way for me to touch them. While a fusebox can reach a great distance through a circuit they’re close to, if they’re not within two or three inches a connection can’t be established.

Or so the prevailing theory goes. A few years back I found out that a properly calibrated magnetic field can be used to extend your reach. With a thought I flipped on the electromagnetic coils I was wearing strapped to my forearms, underneath my clothing, and suddenly I could feel the electronic circuits in the doorframe tingling. It took only a light push to trigger the solenoid that retracted the lock and as easily as that, I was through the door

Once I was through the door and into the building I made my way through the second floor breezeways that connected all the science and engineering buildings until I found the one I wanted. Then I ducked into a restroom and stripped off the coveralls. Underneath I wore my recently completed vest over a white button-up shirt and a pair of dress slacks. I smoothed the silk fabric that covered the delicate electronics beneath, enjoying the feel of it for just a moment.

In my business, style is just as important as power and intelligence. I like to think that I’m a master of all three.

I pulled a clip-on tie out of a pocket and slipped it into place. While style is important, I feel that wearing something that can strangle you or break your neck is taking things too far. Once again equipped to look like someone who might belong, either as an instructor or some sort of outside authority, I set out down the halls until I found the place I wanted.

Grad students are the middle management of the university system. Overworked by their employer/professors and usually loathed by the students whose education they wind up primarily responsible for, it’s really something of a miracle that any of them ever stick around to finishtheir degree. Worse, in addition to all the work and emotional punishment they have to stand up to, they also have to come up with a project of some sort to prove their ability in their field of study.

To do that they’re given, among other things, a lab in which to do their work. At least, if they’re working in the physical sciences.

I was about to visit one such lab. The one uncertain element in my plan, the one factor I couldn’t do anything to mitigate, was the tendency for grad students to work late at night. This was as much because they were busy with other things during they day than any real nocturnal leanings on their part.

So I wasn’t surprised to see a light on under the door of the lab. Disappointed, yes, since this made my life more difficult, but not surprised. Overriding the electronic lock was out of the question right now. That would attract attention and suspicion, which I didn’t want. So I moved on to Plan B.

I knocked.

Professional lawlessness requires a fair amount of reckless behavior along with everything else.

There was no answer after five seconds, so I knocked again, striking an impatient pose and tapping one foot on the floor. A moment later the door swung open and a young man of Indian descent opened the door. “Can I help you?” He asked.

I gave a deliberately brittle smile and said, “I hope so,” slipping a business card between the fingers of my right hand and holding it out to him. “I’m Daniel Hoffman, the investor that Doctor Porter mentioned. I know I’m here much later than I said I’d be, but there as a mix-up at the airport and my flight got here late. You know how it goes.”

“Not really,” the young man replied. “I’m sorry, but Doctor Porter didn’t mention any investor to me. Maybe tomorrow you can-”

“Well, he’s busy man, he probably forgot” I said, waving a hand dismissively. “But you are Mr. Trenton Nayar, aren’t you? Working on the portable hydroelectric project?”

After a moment’s hesitation he said, “Yes, that’s me.”

“Well, Mr. Nayar, I have a business proposition for you and, if everything goes well, it might even have all your student loans paid for by the time you’re finished with your doctoral thesis.” I pushed the business card a little farther forward and favored him with a slightly more honest smile. That’s the real trick to seeming honest, don’t start off seeming like you’re trying to win them over. I knew I still looked like a tired corporate shark, but that was just it. The less he thought of me as a thief the better off I was.

Hesitantly, Nayar took the card and looked it over. The dossier that Hangman had sent hadn’t included much about him or Dr. Porter other than their names and the fact that they were working on a high efficiency miniaturized hydroelectric power generator. I wasn’t sure if Trenton or his professor had even been looking for an investor in his project. It seemed unlikely, but the strange thing is, the more unlikely a lie is, the more believable it becomes.

“What exactly is your business proposition?” Trenton asked, stepping aside and finally letting me into the lab. There was the usual mess of computer equipment and parts scattered over a number of tables, and schematics pinned to the whiteboard on the lefthand wall.

I strolled over to the blueprints and studied them as I spoke. “It’s really a very simple thing. You’re working on a portable improvised dam and generator that can create power with less headwater and more output than anything on the market.”

There was a blueprint there showing a simple cofferdam made of high strength rubber and metal anchoring points with a hydro turbine at the center. It was really quite elegant. “This creates what, two kilowatt/hours at peak performance?”

“Four and a half,” Trenton said. The answer had a touch of pride in it, and well it should. In addition to being privately owned by people who weren’t likely to have the resources to track me down themselves, this was one of the most efficient generators around. Another reason to want it for myself.

“So you have a portable generator that produces two to four times what similar items on the market are currently capable of, and with your portable cofferdam, in more places.” I shoved my right hand in my pocket and turned to face him. “Why are you surprised that someone would want in on that kind of technology? Decentralized power generation is the way of the future, with all the regulation making building large commercial plants so much more difficult, systems like this are the first step to building that infrastructure.”

“You sound like you know a lot about power plants,” Trenton said.

“That, and governmental interference,” I replied with a smile. I waved my free hand at his prototype on the table, getting a better grip on the device in my pocket while he was following it. “Is there any chance its ready for a field demonstration?”

“We’ve run a few sandbox tests,” Trenton said, his pride now clear. “It’s held up fine under them, so I don’t see why not.”

I pulled my right hand out of my pocket, carefully palming the metal disk there as I held it out to Trenton. “Thank you, that would be excellent.”

The poor sap took my hand with a grin that vanished a moment later as his body went rigid. A carefully calibrated blast of electricity coursed out of the capacitors in my vest and fried his nerves with all the strength of a police grade taser. It’s a little bit harder hitting than a joy buzzer, but some tricks never get old no matter how you switch them up. I cut the current and let go of his hand as he slumped to the floor, saying, “But it won’t be necessary.”

The entire generator rig only weighed about eighty pounds, but it was awkwardly shaped. Worse, my right hand wouldn’t stop shaking from the current I’d exposed it to. I had expected my talent to provide me with a little more protection from the electricity than I’d gotten. The taser delivery mechanism looked like it was going to need a little more work.

I decided that the best thing to do with it would be to throw the whole thing in the lab’s trash can, which had been thoughtfully provided with wheels. Ten minutes later I was out on the building’s loading dock, where my van was waiting for me.

The back door popped open and a middle aged African-American man who I call Heavy Water leaned out to help me load the turbine and cofferdam into the back. Then we scrambled up to the front seats and buckled in. My hands still weren’t steady so I took the passenger seat reluctantly.

“Where to?” Heavy asked as he pulled out of the parking lot. “Home?”

I leaned my head back in my seat, thinking about it for a moment. Then I sighed and shook my head. “Not just yet. There’s something I need to do first. It’s going to be tricky, though, so I’ll understand your wanting to sit it out.”

“Never happen.” He shook his head. “I let you be the boss because I think you got enough sense to get us what we need without causing us trouble, don’t I?”

“Well, this is a uniquely difficult chore, even for me.”

“Yeah?” Heavy glanced away from the road long enough to give me a curious glance. “What are you planning to do?”

I smiled. “I plan to talk to Double Helix…”

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