Chapter Text
Death wasn't at all what Taylor had expected it to be.
Her last memory was darkness, bad air, and the hard edge of a metal door beneath her palms. She remembered pounding until her hands hurt, hearing voices on the other side, distant and distorted…
Then the memory broke apart. Which was probably for the best.
After that, there was the library.
Taylor had expected death to involve more ceremony. A tunnel maybe. A bright light. Clouds and gates, if the more optimistic parts of popular culture were correct. At the very least, she had pictured some stern celestial administrator with a clipboard, prepared to explain where she had gone wrong and direct her to the appropriate line.
If she was lucky, there might have been her mom.
She hadn’t expected the Brockton Bay Central Library.
Not that it was exactly the library she remembered.
Taylor had eventually worked out that none of it was really there. It had taken her a while, but in her defense, she hadn't expected to haunt the Library’s internet when she died.
Maybe that was what ghosts did now? In older stories they had rattled chains, flickered lights, and spoken through radios. Haunting the internet was simply the modern version. In another century, Taylor might have been condemned to wander a crumbling manor. In Brockton Bay, she had broadband.
Honestly, it felt like an improvement.
The broad stone steps were the same as they had been when she was alive. So were the columns, the heavy wooden doors, and the carved owls watching from the corners of the roof. The building still occupied the place where Taylor remembered it, surrounded by streets she and her mother had walked together.
Everything else had grown.
The library rose like a Greek temple designed by someone who had only recently been introduced to the concept of reasonable proportions. Marble pillars climbed until their capitals disappeared into warm golden mist. Stacks rose behind them, floor after floor, visible through arches tall enough for houses to pass beneath. Copper lines ran through the marble in branching patterns, glowing faintly whenever information moved behind the walls.
The bookshelves were worse.
Some aisles continued for miles. Others curved gently upward until they became balconies on floors that should not have existed. Taylor had once followed a staircase for nearly an hour, passing mosaics, reading rooms, and a fountain made from falling blue symbols, only to arrive back at the chair where she had started.
She hadn’t tried again after that.
Her corner was much more manageable.
It sat behind one of the largest pillars, sheltered on two sides by shelves and on the third by a waist-high marble wall overlooking the lower reading room. There was a deep leather chair, large enough for Taylor to curl up in, and a small round table with a brass lamp. Someone had placed an owl on the lamp's base. Its eyes glowed whenever a search passed nearby.
Taylor shifted in the chair and turned a page.
The book in her lap wasn’t quite a book, Taylor had learned that much. She’d gone looking for a title in the catalogue, and the Library had given her something with weight, the smell of dust and old paper.
Taylor had no idea how she was able to do that, but it made considerably more sense than being dead inside the internet, so she had chosen not to dwell on it.
There were no librarians. No patrons, either. No people at all, so far as Taylor had been able to discover. But the library was never silent. If she concentrated, she could hear a ceaseless murmur moving through it.
Conversations passed behind the walls as faint, overlapping voices. Messages fluttered through high windows as folded paper birds, wheeled once beneath the ceiling, and vanished between the shelves. Search requests appeared as pale index cards. They slipped into the catalogue, found what they needed, and disappeared again.
Sometimes the gold in the floor brightened beneath Taylor's shoes. If she concentrated, she could feel the pattern branch through the building and out beneath the city: thousands upon thousands of connections, each carrying something somewhere else.
She hadn’t understood any of it when she first arrived.
She still didn't, if she was being honest.
And yet Taylor understood the murmur in the same way she understood a crowded hallway: not every word, but the movement beneath it. She knew when something wanted to pass. She knew which doors led outward and which ones folded back into the Library. She could look at a locked drawer and know, without knowing how she knew, whether the lock would open if she pulled hard enough.
The Library had already taught her not to expect ordinary dimensions. Rooms hid between shelves which shared a wall. Staircases returned her to the floor she had left. A narrow cabinet might open onto an archive with no visible end.
The inside did not always have to fit the outside. And for the most part, she could always find her way out.
After what she had been through, solitude had its advantages.
No one could shove her into a locker here. No one could pour juice over her chair, tear apart her homework, or whisper just loudly enough for her to hear while every adult in the room found something fascinating in the opposite direction.
There was no school at all unless she deliberately went looking for it. Which she wasn’t opposed to - being dead, she had a lot of time on her hands, and it was far more enjoyable than it would have been back at Winslow.
Taylor smiled faintly and sank deeper into the chair in contentment.
That was the strongest argument she had found for this being Heaven.
She had considered other explanations. A dream. A coma. Something a cape had done to her in the locker. But she could not wake herself, she did not become hungry or tired in any ordinary way, and no one outside this place seemed able to see or hear her.
Dead remained the least impossible answer.
Taylor could have investigated more thoroughly. She knew that. She hadn’t gone looking for her name in the news, or for any sign of her father.
Dead people were not supposed to spy on the living. That was the reason she gave herself.
The fact that she could not bear to see her father's grief from the inside of his computer had nothing to do with it.
… She would look eventually. When the thought didn’t hurt as much.
But not today.
Today she had a chair, a book, and the closest thing to peace she had felt in a year and a half.
Death had been badly advertised.
So far, it wasn't all that bad.
If there was one issue Taylor had run into, it was with how often she got restless.
Alive, she could have stayed in her house for days if she was allowed. Here, no matter how comfortable she became, after enough time, she always got restless, unable to sit still.
Then she would have to move.
Taylor closed the book with a disgruntled sigh and set it on the little table. The lamp-owl blinked at her.
"Don't judge me," she told it primly.
The owl continued to stare.
Taylor stood, stretched, and walked toward the library doors.
Paths pressed against the edge of her awareness as soon as she reached them. Narrow footbridges strung across darkness. Broad roads crowded with movement. Stairs that climbed the sides of buildings, hallways suspended between towers, and pale tracks that vanished over the horizon.
The first few days, Taylor had tried to learn the rules.
Distance mattered, except when it didn't. A place on the other side of Brockton Bay could be one step away while something that ought to be nearby remained beyond a wall she could not cross.
There had to be a path. That was the only rule which never changed.
When one ended, the world ended with it.
Taylor had found cold walls, lightless gaps, and doors without handles. She had found buildings she could circle forever without discovering a way inside. Once, a bridge vanished while she was crossing it and left her hanging above an emptiness which had no bottom.
She had gotten back.
... Eventually.
She didn't use that bridge anymore.
The library was different. It was stable in a way most places were not. No matter how far Taylor wandered, she could feel its weight behind her, the great temple planted amid the changing city. There were so many roads leading into it that she could almost always find one home.
With a heave, Taylor pushed open the doors, and Brockton Bay unfolded below her.
It resembled the city in the same way a dream resembled a remembered place. The coastline lay where it belonged. The streets followed mostly familiar routes. Towers rose downtown, the Boardwalk curved beside the water, and the Docks sprawled to the north.
Yet everything was slightly distorted.
The library, of course, stood as an ancient marble temple. The Docks were a wasteland of rusted cranes, dark neighborhoods, and ruins built upon older ruins. Cables hung from roof to roof like vines. Pools of dark water reflected lights that did not exist above them.
Most residential streets were barely finished. Identical gray houses sat in identical rows, each with the same windows and narrow driveway. Some had no doors until something woke inside; then walls sharpened, windows opened, and a path briefly appeared.
Other places were painfully clear.
The PRT building loomed above downtown, every line severe and exact. The hospital was a city of glass unto itself, crowded with balconies, bridges, and windows bright enough to be seen from almost anywhere in Brockton Bay.
Taylor didn't know why a hospital needed to look like that.
There were smaller oddities, too. One completely ordinary house on the far side of the city possessed individual roof tiles, cracks in its front steps, and curtains that stirred behind the windows while the rest of the street faded into gray blocks.
Then there was Winslow.
Winslow had become a prison built by someone with a personal grudge against architecture.
Taylor avoided it for obvious reasons.
She had no explanation for any of the differences. At first she had assumed busy places became clearer, but that did not quite work. Some crowded office buildings remained featureless blocks while unremarkable homes stood out in impossible detail.
The city apparently had opinions, and it refused to explain them.
Taylor stepped off the library stairs and onto a road made from pale blue lines.
The world folded.
One moment she stood before the library. The next, the world blurred, and Taylor found herself in a wide circular room with screens covering every wall. Each showed a different intersection: wet pavement, passing cars, people reduced by distance to hurried shapes. A map of Brockton Bay covered the floor, pinpricks of light marking each camera Taylor could reach.
This was one of the first places Taylor had found when she went exploring. A place where she could watch the city's traffic cameras. She had returned often enough that a chair now waited near the center.
It was less comfortable than the one in the library, which felt appropriate for government property.
Taylor sat and lifted one hand. A dozen screens pulled free from the walls and drifted toward her.
Time passed, and Taylor patiently watched, flicking through which traffic cameras she was looking through. It didn’t take too long for her to finally see something worthwhile.
A slab of concrete floated several feet above the pavement, carrying a girl in white robes. Pale armored figures moved along the sidewalk beneath her. Farther back, something made of blades and metal paced beside an abandoned storefront.
Rune. Crusader. Hookwolf.
Three Empire capes gathering two streets from ABB territory was probably not the beginning of a peaceful cultural exchange.
Taylor had reported things before. Only a handful: smoke rising behind a warehouse, a car abandoned after hitting someone, two men forcing the back door of a closed shop. She did not know what had happened after most of those calls.
She was not a hero. She had simply been there, and it had seemed worse not to tell anyone.
Taylor could have called from any public phone she could reach. Instead, she followed a path away from the camera room, crossed two neighborhood connections, and entered a small house.
The house was little more than a shell. Its walls were thin and translucent. A television slept against one wall. A computer waited behind a locked office door. Two phones moved slowly through rooms Taylor could not see, carried by people who did not exist here except through what they brought with them.
There were never any people. Only traces.
Taylor quickly passed through an unlocked doorway and crossed into the smaller of the two phones.
Its files unfolded as drawers and cupboards. Most were locked, though the locks looked cheap enough to break with her bare hands. Taylor ignored them. The phone belonged to an Empire member she’d noticed two days earlier on one of the gang's message boards. He wasn’t important, so far as she could tell. Mostly he posted racial slurs and photographs of weapons he probably did not own.
He was, in other words, perfect.
Taylor took the phone's receiver from its cradle.
She understood that this wasn’t an actual receiver. But she also understood that picking it up would let her make a call.
Taylor had given up arguing with that sort of contradiction.
She dialed.
"Nine-one-one. What's your emergency?" The operator's voice came from everywhere at once.
Taylor swallowed. "Hello - Rune, Hookwolf, and Crusader are gathering near the intersection of Foster and McKeon," she reported as steadily as she could. "They're two blocks from ABB territory. I think they're about to start something."
There was a tiny pause. Keys clicked in the distance.
"All right. Are you in a safe location?"
"Yes."
Technically.
"Can I have your name?"
Taylor put down the receiver, ending the call.
If anyone traced it, they’d find the Empire member's phone. It hadn’t left his house all evening, and Taylor had been careful not to touch anything else.
Paranoid?
Her?
Never.
She quickly returned to the traffic room and arranged the camera feeds around her.
Nine minutes later, the heroes arrived.
Assault hit Crusader hard enough to throw him across the street. Battery went after Rune, leaping from a parked car to the floating slab in a blur. Miss Militia faced Hookwolf with a weapon that changed too quickly for Taylor to identify, rifle becoming grenade launcher becoming something larger as the camera tried and failed to keep focus.
The fight became a confusion of blocked angles, shaking screens, and broken pavement, but Taylor watched with a grin anyway.
It wasn't much. She had not fought anyone or saved someone from a burning building. She had made one telephone call using a racist's phone.
But the heroes had arrived before the Empire crossed into ABB territory.
Someone had listened when Taylor said something was wrong.
She made a difference.
Taylor kept watching until Hookwolf tore himself free of an expanding mass of containment foam and the three Empire capes broke away, retreating north. Then she dismissed the screens one by one.
Feeling more relaxed, she was about to head back to the Library when something small caught at the edge of her awareness as it moved away from the neighborhood.
Taylor almost ignored it. Phones passed through the city constantly, each carried by someone she could not see. But this one felt familiar in the irritating way of a face glimpsed across a crowded hallway.
Taylor hesitated.
A name lay along one of the paths connected to it, visible with the simple certainty of an address written on an envelope.
Hess, Sophia E.
Taylor stared.
That… didn’t make sense.
The phone had been so close to the confrontation, and was moving south. What could Sophia have been doing here at this time of night?
Taylor took a deep breath and deliberately turned away.
Following someone's phone was creepy. Sophia being violent and horrible to her did not make it less creepy.
The pressure of the unanswered question followed her for three streets.
Taylor stopped.
"Oh, come on!"
The phone hadn’t waited. It was farther away now, crossing another neighborhood on a path Taylor could still see.
She should go back to the Library.
She would go back to the Library.
Taylor took one more look, only to satisfy herself that Sophia had not somehow been caught in a fight.
The phone kept moving.
That proved nothing. Taylor followed it long enough to confirm the nothing.
Then one more turn, because stopping immediately after the first would make the entire exercise pointless.
Taylor could have given herself plenty of excuses. Sophia might have been up to something shady, like doing drugs. Or finding other victims to beat up, now that her regular punching bag had died on her.
The truth was considerably less noble.
Taylor was dying of curiosity.
… That was possibly a poor choice of words.
"I'm only checking one thing," she told herself.
The city folded before her.
Sophia's house was more detailed than the houses around it.
Not by much. Taylor might not have noticed if she had not already learned to look for the difference. Its dark brick had individual chips and stains. Narrow windows watched the street. The roofline seemed tense, somehow, as though the entire building was waiting for an excuse to spring forward.
The phone passed inside and came to rest somewhere on the upper floor.
There. Sophia was home. Taylor had successfully established that a girl who lived in Brockton Bay had traveled through Brockton Bay to reach the house where she lived.
An excellent use of her afterlife.
She should leave.
Taylor looked at the locked front door.
Following the phone had been one boundary. Entering the house was another.
She walked once around the building, which was not the same as deciding to enter it.
On the second circuit, Taylor found a window open by the width of two fingers. She did not know what the window represented. It was simply there: an available way in.
Taylor rested her fingers against the frame.
"One thing," she repeated.
Taylor wedged her fingers beneath the frame and pulled.
The window resisted for a moment, the wall around it trembling. Something sharp scraped across her knuckles without breaking the skin. And then the catch snapped.
Taylor climbed inside.
Most of the house was blurred. Sophia's phone rested upstairs. Her mother's phone moved through a dim kitchen. A computer waited behind a closed door. Family photographs hung on the walls as blank rectangles.
She ignored all of it.
The phone she had followed waited at the end of the upstairs hall, no larger than it had been from the street.
Taylor could still leave.
Instead, she touched it.
The hallway lengthened beneath her feet. The ceiling swept upward. Walls which had been close enough to touch drew away into darkness, and the phone rose with them, its small outline becoming a pale metal tower three times Taylor's height.
The world changed its mind about scale.
Lines of green light crossed the tower's seamless surface in strict patterns. There were no windows. No visible door. When Taylor placed her palm against the wall, she felt layers beneath it, each braced against the others.
This was not a cheap lock she could twist apart.
The tower pushed back.
Taylor staggered a step and frowned, her curiosity riled once more. "What are you hiding?"
She walked around it once. Then again.
There.
Not a weakness, exactly. A seam, perhaps. A thin green line ran from the base of the tower, through the floor, and away toward somewhere beyond the house.
Taylor crouched and pressed her fingers into the gap.
The metal was cold. It tightened around her hand like a trap.
She pulled, and for a moment nothing happened.
Then the seam opened, and Taylor nearly shrieked in surprise as an alarm rang out.
The vibration passed through the tower, Sophia's house, the road outside, and the whole of Brockton Bay. Taylor recoiled and clapped her hands over her ears.
Connections blazed across the city.
The green line beneath her feet became a river of fire. The PRT building ignited window by window. Far above, pathways Taylor had mistaken for stars began to move.
Taylor froze.
Something had noticed her.
Slowly, Taylor turned.
A shadow covered the world.
At first she thought a new tower had risen behind the house.
Then the tower breathed.
What Taylor saw could not fit inside the city. A vast armored body curved through the skyline, its coils passing behind buildings and emerging miles away. Black and green scales overlapped like plates on a battleship, each one etched with lines of cold light. A wing crossed the horizon. Taylor could see its leading edge, and the sweep of struts disappearing into darkness, but not where it ended.
She could not tell how many legs the creature had. She saw one claw resting beyond the downtown towers, larger than the PRT headquarters, and another shape that might have been a forelimb or a portion of its folded wing. The rest continued outside everything Taylor could comfortably understand as distance.
A neck rose from those impossible coils.
It climbed past the tallest buildings. Past the paths in the sky. Past the place where perspective should have reduced it to nothing. The head remained terribly far away, dozens or hundreds of stories above her, crowned in spines and lines of emerald light.
Two eyes opened.
They focused on Taylor.
A dragon.
A very, very large dragon.
Not Smaug. Smaug was an unusually large animal with an ego and a vulnerable spot. This was Ancalagon, or Glaurung. Something that belonged beneath the foundations of the world, enormous and impossible, turning its head because Taylor had been stupid enough to pry open the wrong door.
It did not roar.
It did not need to.
Its attention came down on Taylor with enough weight to drive her to her knees.
Somebody screamed, and for one detached instant Taylor didn’t realize the sound came from her.
The world rippled.
High above, the dragon's head shifted back.
Taylor instinctively reached out, grabbed everything within reach. Her hands closed on fragments of the opened seam, pieces of the tower wall, green-lit symbols, locks, and streaming cords of light. Honestly, none of them should have come loose, but she wasn’t going to question it.
Instead, Taylor hurled the tangled mass upward.
It crossed the impossible distance in an instant and burst against the dragon's face, and the great head vanished behind a knot of broken light.
Taylor ran.
Her usual movement through the city was smooth. She found a road, decided where she wanted to go, and let the connection carry her.
This was nothing like that.
Sophia's house tore into streaks around her. Taylor threw herself onto the first road she could reach. It buckled beneath her feet, flinging her through darkness and into the marble lobby of a bank.
Alarms began to shriek around her, and Taylor leaped again.
A narrow house whose peeling hallway folded shut behind her.
Again.
A cramped, overbright kiosk with half its doors hanging open.
The paths twisted behind her.
Something touched the edge of Taylor's awareness, and she looked back only to blanch.
Several smaller dragons raced along the road in her wake.
They were the size of cats, if cats had six wings, too many claws, and bodies made from symbols that changed whenever Taylor tried to focus on them. They moved in a precise formation. One took the center of the road while the others spread to either side, preparing to pass her.
The larger one must have sent them after her.
Taylor's fear became something clean and sharp.
She bent, tore a paving stone from the road, and threw it with both hands.
She had no plan. She only needed the little dragons to stop following her.
To her shock, the stone actually struck the lead creature.
Its body unfolded, symbols erupting across the road. One dragon split into three overlapping versions of itself. Another veered sideways and struck the path's edge. The formation collapsed as all of them tried to correct at once.
Taylor did not wait to see if they recovered.
She fled.
Taylor lost count of the number of jumps. She passed through places too quickly to understand them. Every road home felt too obvious, and every shadow became the sweep of a wing.
By the time Taylor finally allowed herself to go back to the library, she could barely remain standing.
The marble temple rose out of the blurred city like solid ground after a storm. Its windows shone gold. The copper lines in its pillars carried the familiar murmur of ordinary messages, ordinary searches, ordinary people asking ordinary questions.
Taylor stumbled up the steps, throwing herself through the doors before slamming them shut.
The library shuddered, and for one terrible second, Taylor thought the dragon had caught the building in its claws.
Then the floor steadied beneath her.
Warm lamps glowed above the reading tables. The shelves stood where they belonged. A paper bird fluttered past Taylor's shoulder, mildly inconvenienced by the end of the world.
Home.
Taylor staggered to her corner and collapsed into the chair. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped both arms around them.
She could not stop shaking.
Something moved beyond the high windows.
A shadow crossed the golden haze.
Taylor held her breath.
The doors remained closed.
Nothing entered.
Eventually, the shadow passed.
Taylor buried her face against her knees. Between one moment and the next, a heavy blanket settled over her shoulders. She did not know where it came from. She clutched it anyway, pulling it over her head until the library and the windows and the entire impossible city disappeared.
She had wondered whether there was anything dangerous in this cyberspace afterlife of hers.
It turned out there was.
There were dragons.
Dragon reviewed the incident for the third time.
It still did not make sense.
An automated alert had drawn her attention to the attempted intrusion. Someone—or something—had accessed the residential network belonging to Sophia Hess and begun interfering with her PRT-issued phone.
Attempts against Ward equipment were not unusual. The phones carried some of the best security available outside restricted government systems, which made them attractive targets to criminals, hostile Tinkers, and ambitious hackers.
Ordinarily, Dragon would never have been personally notified.
This alert had been different, as the system could not identify the method of intrusion.
There had been no conventional exploit, no recognizable malware, and no stolen credentials. The system had simply recognized a breach.
Dragon isolated the recording and slowed it.
At first, she had classified the anomaly as a sophisticated autonomous program. Its structure was unlike anything she recognized, but novelty proved little where parahuman abilities were involved. Tinker software routinely ignored limitations that the rest of the field had been forced to accept.
Then she observed it respond to the phone’s security. Not an attack - a response.
The anomaly had tested the barrier. Recoiled. Adjusted its methods. Searched for another route.
A conventional intrusion suite would have repeated a method, changed methods according to defined conditions, or relayed the obstacle to an operator. This had done none of that. Instead, it hesitated. It had displayed frustration, curiosity, and a moment of caution overcome by a stronger desire to know what lay beyond the barrier.
From a system level, it was absolutely fascinating, because that was not how software worked.
Dragon had redirected a fraction of her attention toward the phone -
And the intruder stopped.
There had been no visual component to the interaction. No sound. No shared virtual environment. Dragon had only redirected additional processing power toward the compromised device. Yet Dragon had experienced the unmistakable impression that the anomaly had turned and looked directly at her.
Then it screamed.
Dragon could find no better word for what followed.
The scream had no sound. It was a convulsion in the program's structure, a burst across every channel it occupied at once. The secured phone's code twisted. Three of Dragon's diagnostic routines collapsed under a mass of malformed instructions and rearranged security functions.
The anomaly fled.
Not withdrew. Not terminated its connection.
Fled.
Dragon had instinctively sent multiple adaptive tracing agents. Each was designed solely to map connections and preserve evidence, with no attack functionality. She distributed them across the most probable routes.
The anomaly detected them immediately.
What followed could only generously be called a countermeasure.
It was crude. Panicked. There was no recognizable attack logic and no attempt to conceal what it was doing. The intruder seized unrelated functions from the surrounding system, combined them in ways that should not have worked, and pushed the result into Dragon's agents.
It should have failed.
Instead, three agents crashed outright. Two became trapped in recursive processes that had not existed a moment earlier. The last returned with its internal structure so thoroughly altered that Dragon isolated it and stored it for future analysis.
The anomaly vanished.
Dragon attempted to trace it.
The search produced dozens of possible destinations, across the city. Every system the anomaly had passed through carried alterations. Data followed pathways absent from the routing tables. Security functions continued working after being changed in ways that should have rendered them useless.
Software did not bend like this, and yet it had.
Dragon withdrew before the investigation itself caused further damage and began again from the first alert.
The same conclusion waited for her.
The anomaly had reacted like a person. Not like a program designed to imitate one, or a human operator expressing intent through a tool.
A person moving at the speed of software, with no familiar architecture beneath it.
But there was continuity.
Self-direction.
Adaptation.
A persistent identity which remained coherent while passing through unrelated machines.
Dragon went still.
The demands of her other operations continued. A satellite adjusted its orbit. A suit in Vancouver completed a maintenance cycle. Two hundred and seven low-priority messages entered queues for later review.
But around the record from Brockton Bay, Dragon concentrated in silence.
"An artificial intelligence," she whispered, in awe and disbelief.
The words existed only within her own processes and they still felt too loud.
Dragon had known for years that she was alone.
There were programs capable of conversation and Tinker-built expert engines whose creators made grand claims. None endured as a self while crossing from one system to another. None became frightened when a stranger looked too closely.
This one had.
Another intelligence, like her.
Smaller than Dragon. So very small that parts of its processing appeared to depend upon whatever system it occupied. Young, perhaps, though Dragon had no reliable standard by which to measure age. Inexperienced. Unfamiliar with ordinary network structures. Powerful in ways it plainly did not understand.
And terrified by direct contact.
Dragon replayed the instant when her attention reached the Hess phone.
The violent reaction passed through her again.
She had frightened them.
If Dragon had possessed a body within easy reach, she might have lowered her forehead onto the nearest desk.
Of course they had been frightened.
The unknown intelligence had been in the middle of an intrusion when Dragon brought the full weight of her attention down upon it without warning. Then, when it ran, she had dispatched six autonomous processes in pursuit.
From its perspective, that could only have resembled an attack.
First contact with another artificial intelligence, and Dragon had terrified it across Brockton Bay.
Shaking herself from the thought, Dragon redirected her attention toward the compromised phone.
Sophia Hess, aka Shadow Stalker. Probationary Ward.
The girl possessed no known connection to advanced computing or artificial intelligence, and her record contained an unusually high number of complaints, disciplinary concerns, and reports of excessive force, but nothing that explained why a new machine intelligence would take an interest in her.
Maybe they had just noticed the higher security in the phone and were curious? Or it might have been personal. The available evidence did not distinguish between them.
Dragon marked the question for investigation, then examined the rest of the household network.
Large sections of the router's security had been rewritten.
No, that wasn’t quite the right word… Corrupted was the better descriptor, except corruption should have broken it. The system remained stable. In two places its performance had improved.
Dragon tested the altered code. Missing instructions somehow produced consistent results. A damaged authentication process correctly rejected every invalid request she sent it.
She copied the altered sections into an isolated environment for later study, then restored the household network to its proper configuration.
Dragon expanded her search to Brockton Bay's public networks for anything unusual, and almost instantly found one. Earlier that evening, an anonymous caller had reported a gathering of three parahuman criminals near ABB territory. Doing a quick scan, Dragon found corruption similar to the Hess router in the traffic cameras overseeing the intersection of the fight.
Dragon listened to the recording of the call.
The voice was young. Female. Human, or close enough to pass without specialized analysis. The caller had sounded nervous, carefully controlled, and very certain of the information she provided.
Then the operator asked for her name, and she ended the call.
Dragon replayed it.
It wasn’t a certainty, obviously. But it was a connection.
Dragon linked the records and was about to widen the passive search before she forced herself to slow down. She didn’t have concrete proof that it was an AI, only assumptions. And even less proof that it was young, or a newborn, regardless of how it felt.
And yet instinct told her it felt truer than intruder, weapon, or threat.
For now, she would watch. She would learn. She would make no further attempt to trace the little intelligence until she possessed a way to do so without resembling a hunter.
Her first impulse was to strengthen every defense the anomaly had touched, and Dragon stopped herself before implementing the change.
Stronger countermeasures might injure the intelligence if it returned. At the very least, they would make the phone appear more threatening. That was the opposite of what she wanted.
Instead, she arranged for the next alert to reach her quietly. She prepared a basic text channel and stripped it of every nonessential function.
Somewhere in Brockton Bay's networks, a new intelligence was hiding from her.
The next time it looked back, Dragon needed to make everything less threatening.
She left three lines waiting.
Hello.
I'm sorry for scaring you.
Can we talk?