“I have something I think you should see.” Princess Pixel announced, her fingers resting on the tiny, obsidian-black mainframe she preferred to use as a focus for her magic. It was an affectation, really. At her level of technomancy, things like screens and keyboards were just training wheels for amateurs. Even though Kali hated her colleague’s ridiculous, frilly super-name, she wasn’t going to criticize the incredible work that came with it. The girl was a living broadband connection to the sum total of human digital folly.

  “I assume it’s important?” Kali asked, her voice flat. Pixel’s idea of ‘important’ could range from a foreign power testing new crypto to a particularly amusing cat video.

  Pixel nodded, her eyes glazing over as she conjured a holographic representation of whatever data-stream had caught her fancy. There was a damned good reason she was considered class five, and the combination of technomancy with lesser light control was high up there. She might not be a combat alpha—her idea of a workout was a brisk session of data-mining—but she was probably worth her weight in big, fat, conflict-free sapphires.

  “What is this exactly?” Kali asked. She wasn’t even going to pretend to understand the scrolling mass of 3-dimensional hexadecimal that shimmered in the air between them. It looked like a migraine given form.

  “Oh, right, sorry,” Princess Pixel replied, not sounding sorry at all. With a flicker of her will, the chaotic code resolved into plain English. “A new support just lit up the telltales from one of the assessment centers near umm… Empire State College, and get this, Linker gave them a reassessment at class six, as a Y-awakened male. It’s getting shot up the chain for a full audit.”

  Kali’s professional interest, previously languishing at a three, spiked to an eleven. A live, functional Y-unlock was rarer than a humble supervillain that just quietly committed supervillainy. “Really? Do we know anything about his background?”

  Princess Pixel’s hands began to dance over her black cube, a concert pianist playing a sonata of intrusion. Several screens flashed through her holographic projection at dizzying speed. Surprisingly, she started giggling. “Yes, we do. Oh man, this is perfect!” she started humming as more screens, this time containing a variety of different languages and data formats, started flashing. “You are gonna LOVE this!”

  Kali was starting to get a little irritated; she preferred her world-shaking revelations without the giggly preamble. “Okay, what am I going to love?”

  “He is Strategic Special Simulations.”

  The name was familiar, a minor player in the hero-villain ecosystem. “Oh, he works for them?”

  Pixel shook her head, her pink pigtails bouncing. “No, he IS Strategic Special Simulations. The only employee. The owner and sole shareholder.” Her gaze flicked through the hologram, absorbing data at a rate that would liquefy a normal brain. “It’s all him. One guy. The whole damn company.”

  “Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. I mean, there are a dozen different cowls that work for them, a few of them on the Vilnet top 100. Does he have, like, a stable of contractors?”

  Pixel shook her head, a wicked grin spreading across her face. “Nope, they are all his. Our new Academy student has been a very bad boy. Six spots on the list, and two of them are supposedly dead… they aren’t near the bottom of the list, either. Oh wait, sorry, eight spots on the list, under different identities… and three spots on the BSA watch list, too.” She let out a low whistle. “Kid’s been busy.”

  Kali was a little shocked, a rare sensation. “What the hell is he doing going to the academy then? Won’t the BSA notice?”

  Princess Pixel beamed, proud of her discovery. “He’s still in the holding system, and I am pretty sure none of their amateur data sleuths have noticed it yet. Do you WANT them to notice? It says here that he’s only being ranked as a class six because of alpha strength issues, with a recommendation for close surveillance and reassessment after graduation.”

  Kali shook her head and flopped down into the office chair next to Pixel, the gears in her head turning. “Hell no. Not if there’s a chance for recruitment. What’s his power? Why’s he flying solo?”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Pixel brought up a secondary screen that showed various clips of footage, a montage of one man’s bizarre and multifaceted career in professional loserdom. A guy in several different cheap-looking costumes, mostly armored in what looked like scrap metal. “No one’s done a deep scan of his abilities, but so far he’s shown class three in several different elements, class five energy absorption, and what looks like better than class five regeneration, as well as some serious widgeteer or maybe even tinker gear. They have him down as a support, and it looks like his offense is pretty low, but defensively? If they saw this, which I am going to make sure they don’t, he’d be on the international team before you could blink.” She shrugged. “If he’s a tinker, he’s a hell of one.”

  “What he showed at his assessment was class four creation. I mean, the real thing, not widgeteer summons. He also had a weird healing ability tied to it. As far as why no one has locked him down… well, it looks like he’s been careful not to attract much attention, playing the PR game as a series of disposable mooks. Heck, I never even noticed him, and you know full well I am always on the lookout for that kind of thing. It looks like he likes to take a lot of downtime between gigs.” She said ‘downtime’ like it was a suspicious, un-American activity.

  “ID security?”

  Pixel nodded, her pink hair shaking. “Pretty much. A bunch of minor corporate cutouts for a Vilnet account. Clever for a normie, but he’s clearly not a hacker, only commercial security. He… oh.” Her grin turned into a sympathetic wince.

  “Oh?”

  Pixel nodded. “He’s straight, but I think he has trust issues.” She said it like it was a terminal medical diagnosis.

  Kali looked at Pixel curiously. “What do you mean?”

  Princess Pixel sighed, as if recounting a particularly trite tragedy. “He’s only nineteen, but the usual methods of dragging him along by his hormones probably won’t work out well. This newly awakened Tier four put him through a Heather's ringer last year… It looks like she somehow convinced him to sign over controlling shares in his dearly departed Dad’s company, probably with the promise of marriage or something, and then drained him dry, selling the shares off to a vulture capitalist. Funded her debut with a big-name heel.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Crystal, the newest member of The Flare. Class four shifter and elemental. Turns herself into bulletproof glass and focuses light, reinforcing gifts.” Pixel’s tone made it clear that ‘Crystal’ was now permanently on a very private, very non-legal shitlist.

  Kali nodded slowly, a plan beginning to form. “So basically she makes him fall in love with her, strips his assets, and trots off to become an A-list superhero, leaving him high and dry. Probably didn’t even know or care that he was an alpha too. That could cause… complications.” Understatement was one of Kali’s core skills.

  Pixel nodded. “Yep, about a month later, he started up SSS and started playing the heel game with a flexible identity. When the heat got too much, he killed off an identity. Not too successfully, since he didn’t tend to build up much fame with his heels, so he couldn’t charge the big bucks.” She sounded almost disappointed in his lack of ambition.

  “So he’s heading to the academy because he’s desperate?”

  Princess Pixel shrugged. “Beats me, maybe. He’s got a sponsor, maybe someone he did a favor for? But considering his finances, he might be desperate. He doesn’t seem particularly greedy; it just looks like he likes playing the villain game. He gets his ass kicked more than Mega-Mind. Maybe he’s a masochist?”

  “Either way, we can work with it. Do we have anyone at the Academy?”

  Princess Pixel shook her head. “Not as a first year, but we have a few people I could clean up and insert. How do you want to do it? This guy’s not particularly smart, but he’s really paranoid.”

  Kali smiled, a cold, sharp thing. “Get Matchmaker on it. She can find someone, you can clean her up and insert her, and by the time he graduates, those BSA shits won’t be able to touch him with a ten-foot pole. This might be the chance we need to get our own Graviton.”

  Princess Pixel sighed and dropped the illusory screen, the room suddenly feeling darker. “Nuclear option it is.” She didn’t sound thrilled. Nobody ever did when Matchmaker got involved.

  ***

  In a cheap, stiflingly hot apartment across the city, a woman named Codex grumbled and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. She HATED trying to keep an eye on technopaths. Their brainwaves weren't like normal Alphas; they were all jagged edges and chaotic, non-Euclidean patterns that gave her a psychic hangover. But she was one of the few who could do it without her own grey matter leaking out her ears.

  She’d caught the edges of Princess Pixel’s digital fishing expedition, a psychic tremor in the data-stream. It was enough. She picked up the heavy handset of a vintage, rotary-style telephone—a beautifully analog piece of tech that was utterly immune to technopathic snooping and used the old hard-wired city lines instead of the now-defunct wireless comms—and quickly dialed a number only three people in the world knew.

  The line clicked. “Yeah, this is Pollyanna twelve,” she said, using the designated code phrase. “The Jury is at it again, but I think this time they might have dialed into something. Please put me in touch with Director Gleeson.”