Tag Archives: maglev for fun and profit

Original Art: Circuit Over Michigan Avenue

Posted by natechen on

Time for another display of original art! If you’ve been following Water Fall at all you know that the Michigan Avenue Proclamation is a major plot point. If you’ve ever wondered what that looked like, wonder no longer, for the answer is here!

michiganavenue

The composition here isn’t everything I wanted it to be. The black/gray/white ratios aren’t everything I could want. I painted the concrete display case black hoping that would make the image pop better but, in the end, it’s not all I hoped. I thought about adding some tone to the background, but I was worried that would muddy the image more. Still, here it is, hope you enjoy.

Water Fall: Live Wires

Posted by natechen on

Six Weeks, Three Days Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation

Circuit

My life would have been a lot easier if the soldiers had decided to do something stereotypical and stupid, like using their rifles. However, real soldiers get warned about things like ricochets and so they came after me with knives instead of shooting up the inside of an armored tin can so I was forced to deal with them without the benefit of stupidity.

On the bright side, a magnetic can was an environment that I was practically born to work in.

There was a light in the center of the vehicle, just behind the soldiers who were coming at me, but a cursory examination, which was all I had time for, revealed no other places I could hijack current from the APC’s battery. I had exactly two seconds to figure out how I wanted to get to it. There wasn’t time for anything fancy and the fact that we were still in a moving vehicle cut down on my options, too. So I kept it simple and fired up the magnetic boots and vambraces again, using them to grab onto the side of the vehicle and throw myself towards the ceiling.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get both arms in good contact with the ceiling and I wound up swinging sloppily from one arm. But it was enough of a surprise to the guards that none of them managed to get their knives around and stick me before I crashed into the one on the right and sent us both to the floor. I was getting quite used to seeing the floor of the APC and it wasn’t exactly an experience I recommend. At least the guards weren’t wearing body armor, which made it a lost easier to drop an elbow into the soldier’s gut before shoving him under his companion’s feet and scrambling back and to my feet.

The other two guards stumbled just enough to give me time to get up without interference. In the process I grabbed a small device from my belt, a miniaturized version of the lightening funnel I’d used against Helix just a couple of weeks ago. The principle was simple. Using a precisely balanced set of magnetic fields I could change the balance of magnetic potentials over a much greater range than any other fusebox I’d heard of before. While the one I was holding wasn’t nearly strong enough to arc lightning out of storm clouds it was more than enough to let me hijack the APC’s electrical systems and arc them through people and into the floor of what was essentially a large metal box.

I reached up to the light fixture and switched it on. A second later there was a sizzle of ozone, a quiet pop and the other two guards dropped to the floor. Just to be sure they wouldn’t be any more trouble I gave all three a quick kick to the head, fairly certain that would keep them quiet. Then I switched the lightening funnel back off and I slipped it back into my belt. With my other hand I smashed the light fixture, throwing the compartment into darkness and siphoning much of the vehicle’s battery charge into my harness.

That gave me more than three quarter’s charge, enough to risk switching the maglev harness back on and feeling around. Unfortunately the weird, slippery feeling that I’d felt just before it went screwy was still there, which meant I couldn’t count on it for an escape if I needed one. Since there was no point wasting charge I switched the harness back off and cranked the volume of my headset back to conversational levels. “Hangman, something’s gone wrong with the maglev rig.”

“I tried to tell you earlier,” Hangman yelled in my ear. “You’re too low!”

“Stop yelling!” I yelled. “I turned you back up. What do you mean I’m too low?”

“The highway’s dipped too low,” Hangman said, her voice back at a manageable volume. “There’s only one maglev relay that’s low enough down for you to push on. That means-”

“Yes, I follow the theory, thank you.” Getting aloft using maglev relies on making a three point triangle. Magnets can only push directly away from each other, so if there aren’t two of them to balance your maglev array against you just wind up sliding along the path of least resistance – which usually means bouncing awkwardly along the ground getting lots of fun new bruises. But this was even worse, instead of pushing myself up with the relays they were now positioned so that I was a between two of them, and the weird slippery feeling from before was the repelling force of the maglev relays pushing against each other – and me. Until I could get some more altitude I was grounded.

“Okay back there, Donner?” That question came from the APC’s driver, who was looking back over his shoulder. I realized that draining the vehicle’s batter had also fried something important and the vehicle was stopped, probably totally inoperable. When he realized I wasn’t one of his buddies his expression changed from concern to hostility. “What the-”

I grabbed the first handy thing, which happened to be a shoulder bag sitting on one of the benches, and swung it around into the driver’s face. He went down, the rest of his sentence lost in the whump of the bag making contact. It sounded like there was something fairly weighty in there but I didn’t have time to wonder about what it might be.

Now apparently a man mysteriously landing on top of a vehicle in your convoy is not a valid reason for the Army to circle the wagons but one of said vehicles stopping unexpectedly is, because that’s exactly what the rest of the convoy proceeded to do. It didn’t take quite as long as fully subduing the driver so I had a few seconds to get the lay of the land. “What are they talking about, Hangman?”

“Why your APC is stopping. Why they’re not getting any response over the satlink. What they’re going to do when they find out who’s responsible for sending things so far south. Not very pleasant talk, that last bit.” There was some kind of strange background noise mixed in with Hangman’s voice. “I don’t suppose you could have your driver call them off?”

I finished dragging the soldier in question out of his chair and laying him none-to-gently on the floor. “I’m afraid he’s a bit indisposed.”

“I figured.”

“Hangman, are you moving?” I straightened up and looked out the front window of the APC. The lights of the rest of the convoy were getting close, blocking off the highway. Absently, I wondered how soon we could expect to start backing up traffic. I was actually rather surprised there weren’t a few civilian cars out there already. “I’m not ready for extraction yet.”

“No, you’re not. You’re in the middle of what you’re new friends would call a Charlie Foxtrot, when they’re in polite company, and it’s time we changed plans.” There was a squealing sound that sounded a lot like tires spinning on pavement, then, “I can be there in two minutes.”

“That’s-”

“You can’t solo this one, Circuit,” she insisted. “You don’t have time to keep those soldiers jumping and grab the goods. All eyes are going to be on you, so I’ll make the grab.”

“They’re going to see you coming.”

“You’re in the middle of a highway. It may be 2 AM local time but you’re still going to be ankle deep in cars in just a few minutes.”

“Corporal Donner,” a voice called from outside the APC. “I want all your men out of there now!”

“Fine. We’ll do it your way, but keep your head down and don’t get hurt. You have the lot number we’re looking for?”

“‘Course.”

“Good.” I grabbed the step that swung down from the APC’s topside hatch. “And Hangman? We’re going to talk about this after we’re done here.”

“Of that I had no doubt.”

I vaulted myself up and clambered onto the top of APC. Since the silhouette of a man in a fedora and suit is much different from that of a soldier, even when he’s not in full battle dress, I got a lot of attention quickly.

“Up top!” One of the soldiers shouted.

That was my cue to leave. With a quick mental command I switched the maglev harness back on then bent my knees, ignoring the popping noise because I wasn’t that old, and jumped. Then I pushed as hard as I could against the closest maglev relay, sending myself slipping sideways across the highway and into the grass in the median. Of course, since I started a good ten or twelve feet off the pavement and the median was much lower than that, my meeting with the ground was fairly abrupt. Even with padded body armor and my best fall breaking techniques I was pretty winded but the scattered gunfire from the highway told me I really need to get moving. I’d probably just surprised the soldiers into shooting just then but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be making very deliberate attempts to punch me full of holes in the near future.

So I pushed up and scrambled along the side of the road in a crouch. The only light was coming from the vehicles in the convoy and any other cars that had come along and gotten stuck behind them. In the wild crisscross of high beams it couldn’t be easy to see anything out in the dark. Unless one of them had infrared goggles or something, and wouldn’t that be just my luck?

Fortunately the arrival of civilian vehicles gave whoever was in charge of the convoy something to think about besides finding the guy in the hat and beating him until he admitted to being a terrorist. There was a lot of yelling going on up there but I did my best to ignore it. Hangman might think she could get ahold of the package we were there to pick up by herself but she apparently didn’t know how big it was – one way or another I was going to have to be there to help out. Might as well start looking for the thing myself.

My luck held as I scuttled along the pavement and over to the nearest truck, no one spotted me even though it felt like the whole world could hear my feet scraping on the pavement.

Magnetic boots are not exactly built for stealth.

Any hope of getting in and out without being observed was now long gone, so I felt no regret at slicing through the canvas and into the bed of the truck. I clambered in, produced a small penlight from my belt and took a quick look around. Thankfully the box I was looking for was fairly large, at least four feet long, and the boxes in the truck weren’t large enough for that. I wasn’t sure what all I was looking at but I was pretty sure it wasn’t what I was after.

The next truck in line was similarly devoid of my objective but I hit pay dirt in the third. The box was strapped to the truck bed and the rest of the vehicle was empty. I couldn’t see the whole identification number on the box but I really didn’t need to. If this wasn’t what I was after I would eat my hat. I was about to climb into the truck bed when I heard boots coming around the side of the truck. I slipped down the side of the vehicle and moved as quickly as I could, although it still wasn’t all that quiet.

The soldier came around the side of the truck before I could get up to the corner; so unfortunately he had enough time to shout “Hey!” before I could slap him with the taser. Then it was up into the truck bed. I threw my suit jacket off then fumbled the maglev harness off and looped it over the four corners of the box and switched it on. Voices were yelling outside the truck as I slashed the box free of the truck bed and sheathed my knife.

“Hangman,” I whispered. “Are you here yet?”

“Out of the van, sneaking along the side of the highway.” Her answering whisper was almost lost in the background noise of a idling cars.

“Well get back in the van,” I hissed. “I found the package and we’re ready to go, but the van needs to be running, with you leaning on the brakes, in order for this to work.”

“Wha-”

“The van has a relay built in, Hangman.” My voice was rising and I took a moment to throttle it back down to a whisper. “It comes on when the motor is running. I need the van running but stationary if I’m going to maglev this piece of junk out of the truck bed and into the van.”

Hangman cursed and I heard quiet scrabbling noises over the headset. Then one of the convoy guards poked his head through the canvas truck cover and I got distracted.

Option one was to shoot him, but if you don’t want to be killing a cop before you’re ready to deal with all the cops in the county then you really don’t want to be killing a soldier unless you’re ready to deal with, at a minimum, whole infantry divisions. Option two was to close the distance and go with the tasers in my gloves. But I didn’t have the element of surprise this time so my chances of coming out of that in good condition were much, much smaller and I needed to stay near the harness to make it work anyways. So I went with option three and slipped out one of the two magnesium flares I kept on my belt, closed my eyes and lit it with a snap of the wrist.

I’d packed them with the idea that Hangman might have to move the van and the come find me later. The flares were to make the finding part easier. Well, she’d moved the van but we were close enough that finding me shouldn’t pose any problem, and it would be a shame to let a perfectly good flare go to waste. From the pained noise the soldier made when his night adjusted eyes were blinded by the brilliant glare, it had definitely been put to good use.

The flare wasn’t much use now so I threw it down and grabbed hold of the box and nudged the maglev harness to life. For a few nerve-wracking seconds there was no sign of the van’s maglev relay, then it sprang to life. There wasn’t anything to do but hope that Hangman had already set the brake, flip polarity on the harness and push it to life.

With polarities reversed the harness was no longer repelled by the maglev relay, but rather attracted towards it. Although the combined weight of the package and myself was nearly three times what the harness had been carrying before; I figured I could afford to turn the power up since the battery only had to get us a few hundred feet to the van. So I pushed as hard as I could and spared a little attention to make sure nothing important shorted out from the extra current load. And I did my best to hang on, twenty miles an hour is pretty fast when all you have to hang on to is an improvised set of straps on a large wooden box.

Of course, the van wasn’t parked directly behind the truck so I actually wound up sliding across the truck bed and into the canvas on the side – not the side I’d cut through on my way in, either. But as soon as I got my knife free and started cutting the force of the box pushing against the canvas tore things the rest of the way and the box and I went flipping over the side of the truck. For a moment I thought the box would land on top of me and that would be the end of it, but we wound up rotating just enough that the edge of the box caught on the pavement and it flipped one more time, sliding across the pavement with me on the top and not the bottom, accompanied by the surprised profanity of half a dozen soldiers.

For the second time in five minutes surprise was on my side, none of the guards managed to react in time to make a grab for me or the box and then I was beyond them and skidding through the cars that had come up on the stopped convoy and gotten stuck there. There were only ten or so civilian vehicles there and the soldiers had thankfully been in the process of clearing them off the highway, otherwise my trip could have come to an abrupt end against some hapless family’s Toyota, doing no good for them or me. Then the van loomed up, the back doors already open, and I flipped the polarity of the harness back around, letting up on the pressure on the maglev system some, so that the magnets repelled again and acted as brakes. The box slowed, tilting precariously up on one side. I hopped off and, at the last second, killed the maglev harness entirely and put my shoulder behind the box and pushed it. That, along with the last of the momentum from our mad rush out of the truck, was enough for it tip over into the back of the van. I gave it a good, hard push and got it the rest of the way into the van, then jumped up and swung the doors closed behind me. Not a moment too soon, either, as the guards were already starting to take shots at us.

But with the doors closed and all the armor in the vehicle’s chassis between us and them they weren’t really a threat anymore. I clambered over the box and into the front seat, saying, “Drive!”

Hangman wordlessly floored the gas and we took off down the highway against traffic. The vehicles I take with me on jobs are hardly stock vans, however, and between four wheel drive and upgraded suspension crossing a grass maridian like you find on the typical divided highway is no big deal. We were driving with traffic soon enough.

I noticed as I was settling in that the front windshield had taken a bullet, leaving a small impact crater in the bullet resistant glass. It wasn’t until Hangman fished the spent round out of her lap and tossed it in the back with shaking hands that I realized it was on the inside and not the outside.

I studied her carefully. She was pale, but seemed to be in possession of her faculties. “Are you alright?”

“Sure.” She spared a glance away from the road. “When were you going to tell me the package was so big we had to lift it by maglev?”

“When it became relevant,” I said testily.

“We have a bit of a drive before we can switch to a less conspicuous vehicle,” she said, matching my tone. “Maybe we can talk about that.”

“No.” I stood up and climbed into the back. “We’re going to keep all our attention on the road so that no one can sneak up on us. But believe me, we will talk about that, and a number of other things, once we’re out of the field.”

The promise followed us all the way back to base. A part of me would have almost prefered another disaster to deal with instead.

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Water Fall: Prologue

Posted by natechen on

It’s amazing how quickly a car running a red light can turn into an international incident.

At 7:42 PM, Central Time, on a Friday in late October a van pulled into an intersection along Michigan Avenue, cutting off traffic to the blaring of car horns. It was a nondescript white vehicle, with a decal touting a company called Hoffman Plumbing. Later investigation would reveal that no such company existed in the city. It was the first of four vans, which quickly positioned themselves to cut off all traffic entering the crossroads. The drivers were apparently not worried about property damage, as they collided with more than one other vehicle in the process of blocking traffic.

The driver of the lone car that had gotten stuck in the intersection with no way of escape sat there for a moment, confused, before the he and his passengers were hustled out of it by men from the vans. In the confusion no one was sure exactly how many there were, although based on estimates of the vehicles’ carrying capacity and eyewitness interviews there were somewhere between fifteen and twenty people, total.

However many people there were, they were well coordinated. In less than two minutes traffic along the busy street was completely blocked, the intersection itself was clear of cars and pedestrians, and large speakers were being unloaded from the back of each van.

Those watching carefully might have noticed the woman breaking off from the main group of interlopers and climbing straight up the side of a nearby storefront at this point. The fact that she was wearing all black, and climbing without aid of any kind of visible equipment, would definitely have helped her get attention if it weren’t for the fact that all eyes were on the intersection.

Most of the men that had piled out of the vans were dressed in black coveralls and wearing ski masks. But the two who were moving into the center of the intersection were still dressed to stand out.

One was of average height, with broad shoulders and wearing a three piece, pinstriped suit. Witnesses agreed that his clothes seemed to bulge slightly, as if he was carrying some kind of concealed gear. He also wore heavy, knee high boots that didn’t really match the rest of his clothes. Instead of a ski mask, he wore a fedora and a scarf wrapped around the bottom half of his face, and his gloves had wires running into them.

The other had clearly started with the same outfit as the stage hands. But over his black coveralls he’d strapped a bulletproof vest. He rested one hand on a pistol at his waist. And he was big, about the size of the average football linebacker. All together, combined with the fact that four men with shotguns were hanging a few steps behind, it was enough to ensure the complete attention of anyone on the street.

So there were plenty of witnesses when the man in the hat raised one hand, snapped his fingers and all the lights on the block went dead.

In fact, an EMP hit everything within a quarter mile. It disrupted phone lines and ruined cellphones, knocked out power, fried computers, shut down cars, caused the loss of most of the day’s record of business in over a hundred stores and, perhaps most importantly to the person who caused it, destroyed the CCTV footage of every security camera and automated traffic monitor in the area. All records of what happened next were reconstructed from eyewitness testimony.

The speakers that had come from the vans crackled inexplicably to life, apparently protected in some way from the magnetic attack that had just destroyed the surrounding electronics. The voice of the well dressed man boomed out across the road and could easily be heard by most people in the crowd.

“People of America,” he said, his voice as cultured and controlled as any politician or highbrow actor. “I welcome you to a moment in history.”

A troubled murmur rolled through the crowd, but the leader of the band spread his hands wide as if in welcome. “You wonder what I mean, and rightly so for we all live in the midst of history every day. But most of us take no notice of it, because we’ve been told that history is made by those with power and who here can claim much of that?”

There was second shifting in the crowd’s attitude, from worried to vaguely belligerent. The well dressed man smiled and gestured to his much larger accomplice. “Some might say power comes from physical might backed with modern weaponry. Others would argue that it is money and the influence it brings that gives one control of history.” He chopped a hand through the air dismissively. “Lies, all of them. Told by people who prefer you living in quiet desperation to stretching yourself to you utmost and discovering you are strong! I come here to day to bring the lie to light. I come here to tell you there are other kinds of power in the world, and with them freedom and opportunity the likes of which would never have been possible just one year ago! Open your eyes and see!”

With that, the well dressed man shot into the air. One moment his feet were solidly on the ground, the next he had risen to a height of nearly twenty feet, arms fully spread, his fingers splayed out like a stage magician who had just finished his trick. “There are among you men, women and children who have abilities that surpass the thing you call common sense. Some of you know them, and work to help them remain hidden – friends, neighbors, brothers and sisters, daughters and sons! Some of you are like me, able to challenge the very notion of normal but forced into living quiet lives, afraid to use your gifts because you do not know how others might react. Some of you have never seen a person such as me before, and either wonder at the possibilities or tremble at the implications. But regardless, you all now know one thing beyond the shadow of a doubt: We exist, and now the world must adapt.”

The crowd was really worked up by that point, some people crowding the vans and the handful of black clad men who manned them like makeshift roadblocks, others yelling questions lost in the noise, some ignoring the scene entirely to yell at one another. A few were trying to take pictures of the flying man and discovering that their cellphones were dead.

Of course, with a crowd that was growing by the minute all squashed into what was supposed to be a major thoroughfare of a large city, the attention of the police was inevitable. In fact, according to reports the first officers arrived on the scene less than five minutes after the first van moved to block traffic, just after the well dressed man began giving his speech. The numerous traffic violations and the unauthorized public address, to say nothing of the flagrant firearms violations, gave the officers plenty of cause to take the whole group into custody.

Unfortunately, dispatch had been laboring under the impression that they were dealing with a traffic accident and not a brewing riot, and had only dispatched one cruiser, which had a hard enough time making it to within a block of the scene due to the way traffic was backed up. By the time headquarters would have any idea the situation was different it would be a moot point.

The two officers from the dispatched cruiser traveled the last block to the intersection on foot, arriving as just in time to bump into a pair of officers who had been patrolling the area on bicycles. The four of them together managed to work their way to the front of the crowd just in time for the flying demonstration.

Say what you will about the police, they are well trained to quickly and efficiently react to a mind-boggling array of possibilities, most of which the general public never even contemplates. Flying men is not on that list, but after a certain point one simply becomes jaded. They showed no signs of being disturbed at seeing a man hovering twenty feet off the ground, seemingly under his own power. In fact, they were paying more attention to his armed companions.

In this they may have been behaving more wisely than the crowd. Not that outsmarting groupthink has ever been a great achievement.

Three of the policemen casually rested their hands on their weapons. The last officer cupped his hands and called out, “Sir, I need you to come down from there with your hands in the air.”

Some in the crowd called out, “They’re already there! Along with the rest of him!”

Ignoring hecklers is another core cop skill, and all four officers had it in spades. The officer turned his attention to the armed men. “You five there need to put your weapons on the ground slowly. We’re going to get ahold of the precinct and arrange for you all to be taken somewhere we can talk about this nice and privately.”

The first rule of volatile crowd situations is to deescalate things as quickly as possible.  That only four officers would attempt such a thing may seem surprising, but the fact is that the vast majority of people accept police authority, even when they’re upset that it’s being directed at them. Most people accept that law enforcement is a necessary thing, and they’re not out to cross it.

They also realize that cops have to assert their authority against anyone who levels a direct challenge to it or they’ll quickly loose it. In short, messing with the police is never a good idea, and when the city police department has more people in it than the standing armies of most countries the idea starts to look downright ludicrous. The structure and psychology of the system says that one cop is fairly safe in most situations and two should be downright invincible.

Later analysis suggested that the rabble rousers were counting on this mindset.

“Ah!” The floating man twisted twenty degrees in midair, without making any kind of obvious movement, so that he faced the police more or less directly, wavering uncertainly for a moment or two and then coming to a stop. “The keepers of law and order. I’m afraid there’s little you can do to contain the situation now.”

“Look, I don’t know what you want,” the spokesman officer said. “But you’re not going to get it by shouting at the crowd here. Come on down and stop blocking traffic. We can-”

“You are absolutely right!” The other man replied, his artificially amplified voice easily drowning out the officer. “What I want is an end to secrecy! What I want is an end to lies! What I want is an end to injustice! What I will settle for is…” He raised one hand over his head.

Every piece of iron within a city block rattled in response, the bicycles two of the officers had arrived on actually slid into the crowd and knocked several people over and the four vans rocked slightly on their wheels.  A large, flat iron and plexiglass case flew out of the back of one of the vans, came to a stop a few feet in front of the floating man then shot up another dozen feet before flying straight down and burying itself six inches into the pavement with a teeth-rattling bang. For a split second there was total silence as the man viewed his handiwork. Then he spread his hands high and wide, saying, “Freedom!”

He drifted a few feet higher and seemed to stretch his hands even further, as if he could somehow grab the edges of the city and carry it away with him. “If you chafe in this world of secrets and silence, then I offer an alternative. This is the age of information, and with it we have been controlled. But one circuit out of place ruins a whole computer, and a single weakness is the end of a network. I am the Open Circuit, the fatal weakness in the status quo! If change is what you desire, then there is a place for you with me!”

“That’s enough.” The cops were starting to look nervous, well aware than their authority was growing more and more tenuous in the face what appeared to be a serious Messiah complex. But the spokesman maintained a calm façade and pressed on. “If you won’t come willingly we’ll place you under arrest and-”

He was cut off by a series of rapid gunshots. The sudden noise panicked the crowd and cause the police to rapidly unholster their weapons, a move that just caused more panic around them. Only one officer managed to spot the source of the gunshots, the woman in black, her bare feet clinging impossibly to the fourth story of a large building, firing a submachine gun into the air. No bullets were found anywhere near the scene, so it was concluded that the weapon was probably loaded with blanks. According to the officer’s report, once her clip was empty she crawled across the side of the building and disappeared around the corner.

This ploy succeed in creating quite a distraction. When taken together with the way all four vans that had been driven into the intersection burst into flames a few seconds later, there was no one paying any attention to the people in black, who had completely vanished by the time anyone thought to look for them again. The only indications that it hadn’t all been some kind of mass hallucination were the burning vans and the display case, still buried in the ground and quickly surrounded by people who presumably had more curiosity than sense.

Any evidence the case might have offered was destroyed by gawkers long before it could be secured.

A cordon of additional police cars arrived five to ten minutes after the departure of the flying man and his accomplices. They did their best to contain the crowd, reassuring them that they were being asked to stay as witnesses, and secure the scene. Paramedics arrived as well, though there were thankfully few injuries to deal with, mostly people knocked over in the panic caused by the gunshots and burning cars.

Just behind the paramedics came a trio of plain, unmarked gray vans. These contained another fifteen to twenty people in rather nondescript business clothing. But they didn’t look much like businessmen or businesswomen. They were wearing earpieces, carrying sidearms and generally handling themselves like people who expected respect, not polite chit chat. In short, they didn’t seem out of place.

Most of them fanned out to check in with the police and paramedics, presumably to assist however they could. Three pressed their way through the crowd, which quickly made way for them.

The largest was a huge bear of a man, Hispanic, with gray salted through his dark black hair and neatly kept mustache. He looked like nothing so much as a retired wrestler and people easily yielded to his size alone. Beside him a blonde Pole, just as tall if not as big, walked with a careful, measured step. A few steps behind trailed a much shorter, wiry man who carried a megaphone and seemed to burst with nervous energy, absently cracking his knuckles or fiddling with the handle of the loudspeaker he carried.

The intersection itself was clear, and once the three men were through the crowd they split up. The two taller men went to look at the steel case buried in the street while the shorter made a loop around to each of the vans, still leaking occasional tongues of flame and smoldering as the last of their upholstery burned. As the short man passed by each van the fires seemed to vanish and its chassis would groan and creak as it rapidly cooled.

With the fires out he walked over to his two companions, who were studying the case intently. It was about waist high on them, and the clear top let anyone with eyes see the sheet of paper within. He looked it over then sighed and glanced up at the biggest of the three and said, “We need to take it in.”

The big man nodded and bent his knees and got a good grip on the case. Then, without even a grunt of effort, he ripped it out of the pavement and laid it gently to one side. The short man just shrugged and turned his attention back to the crowd.

They were already staring at him. So he raised the megaphone to his mouth and said, “Alright, people, listen up. I’m Special Agent Double Helix, of Project Sumter, your  government’s formerly secret agency for dealing with these situations. As we’ve had permission to work directly with the public for about ten minutes, we’d like to ask for your understanding and cooperation, since we’re all a little new at this…”

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