by wildbow
He armored himself in normalcy. He wore only a button-up shirt and thin-rimmed glasses, his blond hair cut into a short style that was easy to maintain. To anyone on the street, he wouldn’t appear to be anything but a bookish middle-aged man.
He hadn’t always been this bland.
The Number Man stepped away from the screen. His office was plain, white tile with white walls. The rear of it was a floor-to-ceiling window, looking out on a foreign landscape, a place far from Earth. Still an Earth, but not the one he’d been born to, not even the one he was in at this very moment. The Doormaker maintained a portal to that foreign landscape, just behind the Number Man’s office and changed it on request. Today, it was a mountaintop view of a wilderness with a crimson foliage and gray branches, the sky perpetually overcast.
One of a number of Earths where humans had never been.
The Number Man had gone to some lengths to spruce up this place. He’d never liked the eternal white of this complex, so he’d adorned his walls with other images. To his right, there was a large print of the Golden Mean, the Phi decimal as a fractal image in gold against black paper, with mathematical notation surrounding it.
Opposite it, Dali’s Crucifixion, Corpus Hypercubus. The painting was blown up to one-and-a-half times the size. Jesus crucified on a fourth dimensional cross.
No chairs. He’d worked out the dangers of sitting against the convenience and decided it wasn’t worth falling into that trap. When he did enter his office, he walked, paced, tapped his foot while pondering deeper problems, stood and stared out the window at whatever landscape he had outside his window in a given week.
He crossed his room and touched a screen. It lit up, filled with data fed to his computers from a doorway to Earth Bet. The pulse of society, right under his thumb.
The Elite, a villain group expanding a subtle control over the western seaboard of America, putting pressure on rogues to bring them under their thumb as performers, thinkers, designers and innovators. He could see the numbers, extrapolate from the data to gauge their rate of growth. They were developing too slowly to be useful, not developing fast enough to outpace the predicted end of the world. They’d reach Brockton Bay in about a year. There would be time to decide if countermeasures were needed in the meantime.
Gesellschaft, a nationalistic organization half a planet away from the Elite, was moving large funds in anticipation of a small war. Money was being laundered through cover operations and businesses, almost impossible to track, unless one was able to take in the bigger picture, to see the intent, the beginnings and endings of it. They were investing in transportation, and their fundings seemed to decline at the same time some notable arms dealers in Southern Europe found themselves richer by an equal amount. The Number Man flicked his way past a series of windows detailing the transaction amounts. Arms dealers who specialized in nuclear materials. This was pointing towards terrorism, and not on a small scale. Troubling, but the system would address them. The major hero group in Germany, the Meisters, would attend to the problem. It didn’t warrant an expenditure of Cauldron’s full resources, not when things were already on shaky ground.
Still, it wouldn’t do to have a disaster at this crucial juncture. The Protectorate was required for just a little longer. If they were going to make it through this, there couldn’t be any substantial distractions.
Gesellschaft hadn’t elected to seek out the Number Man and make use of his services, as so many supervillains around the world did. He had no compunctions, as a consequence, about interfering with them. He tapped into a series of bank accounts he hadn’t touched in some time, then scheduled a large number of transfers to the personal Gesellschaft accounts. Ten or twenty thousand Euros at a time.
Where funds weren’t likely to be held for moderation, he scheduled more transfers and disputed the charges. The transfer amounts were large enough to raise flags, to draw attention to the accounts in question. The banks were on the lookout for suspicious activity, and a total of five hundred thousand Euros appearing in six checking accounts with typical balances of under a thousand Euros would be suspicious enough to merit a serious look.
That was only to slow them down. They would want to investigate, to be careful and find out where the money came from. Later, if the situation was resolved and they somehow managed to hold on to the money, they would want to know where the money disappeared to, as he reclaimed it with a severe interest rate. They would suspect interference, would wonder if this outside agent had connected their civilian identities to their personas within Gesellschaft.
Which he had.
The transfers took him less than thirty seconds to arrange, and it would occupy them for one or two days.
Freezing the larger business accounts would take only a little more time. One or two minutes. The meetings with the arms dealers had fit a vague schedule. The arms dealers always took a different route, but they traveled enough that they needed to buy gas at one point on the way. There was always a large transfer of funds.
He laid a trap, calculated to start falling into place when the gas was bought in the time window. The main accounts that the Gesellschaft used to manage their funds would be frozen by the time the meeting was underway. They’d likely find themselves at the meeting, the product delivered, but with no funds to pay for it.
He swept his fingertips along the window, dismissing the task. Who else? Where were the priorities?
The C.U.I. had bought a parahuman. Not so unusual. Higher rates, as of late, but then, the C.U.I. faced a slight chance of an Endbringer attack in coming weeks. They would want to bolster their forces, add parahumans to their peculiar team.
Tattletale had been actively separating herself from the Number Man, issuing new accounts to the Undersiders and her organization. Not so surprising. Eidolon had outed him, announcing the Number Man as a Cauldron-involved cape to a crowd.
Irritating. At least it had been manageable. He didn’t exactly have a great deal of traction with the hero community. Tattletale was one loss, and he was hands-off with the Undersiders, regardless.
The King’s Men were in debt. Easy enough to manage an anonymous donation, keep them afloat for another two months.
Child’s play, all of it. The money, with its imaginary value, it was something he breathed. Setting up the tools to manipulate it had taken a little time, but that was it. Numbers were the fundament of the universe, as much a fabrication as money in some ways, more real than anything else in others.
He understood numbers, and through them, he understood everything.
A soft beep marked the arrival of somebody at his door. He turned. “Enter.”
There was only one person it could logically be. The Doctor only sent her personal bodyguard and right-hand woman to him, the others didn’t have access to this building.
Except it wasn’t a person. The door swung open, but there was nobody on the other side.
“You can’t handle it yourself?” he asked.
No reply, of course.
He broke into a quick stride, hurrying through the door. “Contessa is busy, I take it?”
Again, no reply.
He reached an intersection and felt his hair stir imperceptibly, little more than what one might excuse as the exhaust from an air conditioning vent thirty feet away. He took that as his cue to change direction.
He knew where he was going, now. He was relieved that it wasn’t the worst case scenario, if one could call it that. A mercenary calling herself Faultline had been leading a team that was opening portals for exorbitant amounts, traveling the world. It was a matter of time before someone contacted her to ask her to open a portal to here, or her own curiosity about Cauldron happened to lead her down that same road.
If and when that happened, the young woman and her team… perhaps organization was more fitting now that their numbers had grown, would get a visit from Contessa. They would be removed from consideration, the portal would be sealed, and Cauldron would be safe again.
In the meantime, they’d let things carry on like they were. Faultline would make contacts, she’d find like-minded individuals, and through her, Cauldron would uncover enemies, to be eliminated in one fell swoop.
At the very least, right here and right now, the threat wasn’t an invader. Given the layout of the complex, and the fact that whole wings of the structure were on separate continents, linked only by the Doormaker, there were only a few possibilities for why an invader would be here. Not that it really mattered, it would be near impossible for someone to find their way here, now.
No, this was a threat from within.
Double doors unlocked and slid open. The Number Man wrinkled his nose as he entered the basement areas of the building.
When the Simurgh had attacked Madison, she’d copied Haywire’s technology to open a gate to a building much like this one. A research facility. The portal had dumped the buildings, soil, plant life and all the residents into the city on Earth Bet, costing Cauldron a horrific amount. Even a stockpile of formulae had been lost.
Perhaps most frustrating was the knowledge, the near certainty, that they’d been near a breakthrough. She’d sensed, somehow, had known, and had dashed it to pieces with the ease that a person might tear down a painstakingly made sandcastle.
They’d rebuilt, and this facility was somewhat different. More reinforced, connected to the surrounding terrain.
Silly, to think she’d do the same thing twice, but they’d felt it necessary, after feeling the losses of that last attack.
The architecture here wasn’t white, and he was somewhat relieved at that. The tile was dark gray, lit by fluorescent bulbs and the light from windows at the end of the hallway. At regular intervals down the hallway, there were cells. Only some had windows to keep the occupants within. Others had only three walls and a white line that marked the division between the cell and the hallway.
In each cell was an occupant. Large metal plates engraved with numbers helped track who they were, matched to the numbers hidden in the right ‘arm’ of the tattoo that each subject received; a series of white dots that looked like nothing more than areas where the tattoo hadn’t taken.
The cells on the right were new test subjects, lost and angry. He didn’t hesitate as he walked past them. The angry words they spat in alien languages were nothing to him. Their glares and hatred less than that.
Their powers were only a small consideration. It was a rare parahuman that didn’t try to move beyond the boundary of their cell. There was no forcefield to stop them. They inevitably ignored the warnings and gestures from those in neighboring cells, stepping free, or they used their power, teleporting free or lashing out at one of the staff. The Doctor, the Number Man, Contessa.
They learned after the first time.
Several staff members were housed in the cells to the Number Man’s left. Those cells didn’t open directly into the hallway. There were short paths that led around to the back of the room. It helped mask the noise, gave them some privacy. The cells were bigger too.
Zero-twenty-three, with a placard beneath. ‘Doormaker’.
Two-six-five. No name. The Number Man knew him well enough, regardless. He’d been too young a subject when he’d taken the formula, his brain too malleable for the required changes, too slow to form natural immunities and defenses. Not a problem with regular trigger events, as it was. The boy’s eyes had burned out of his sockets as he’d tried to process the vast amount of information he was capable of perceiving. Even now as he was reaching his late teens, the boy’s mind had never developed beyond the mental age of eight, and his eyes remained like twin ashtrays.
A partner to the Doormaker, capable of granting clairvoyance, seeing whole other worlds at once. It left most subjects incapacitated for a week after use, and it overrode any other perception powers.
No use to the Number Man, but essential for Cauldron in vetting universes and finding individuals. Most individuals. There were some, like the Dealer, and triple-seven, who’d escaped.
Two-nine-three. Incapable of talking, barely able to move. Limbless, obese. Another key member of the staff.
No sign of interference. The odds of the threat being an assassin dropped.
He quickened his pace, reaching the stairwell at the end of the corridor.
Second floor basement. He stepped out of the stairwell and progressed down the main hallway. There were rows of cells to either side of him. Two thousand and forty-eight parahumans, each with a number, both on the wall of their cell and in their tattoo.
“You need to narrow it down,” the Number Man said. “Help me find the trouble.”
His voice resulted in an outcry, the people in the cells nearest him realizing he was there, shouting, swearing, insulting him in twenty-nine different languages.
He ignored the shouting, instead extending his right hand. “Is it this floor? Yes…”
He extended his left hand, “Or no?”
The faintest brush of air touched his left hand, so faint he might not have felt it while he was walking.
He turned back for the staircase, made his way down.
The third floor basement. Here, the special case studies could be found. Seven-seven-seven had been one. They got a name, more space, some quiet.
He paused. Again, a brush against his left hand.
“Damn,” he said, meaning it.
It was on the fourth floor.
He took the stairs two at a time, moving with an uncharacteristic haste. He also spoke, more to himself than his companion. “There are others who are supposed to attend to these matters. Which suggests the escapee is smart, is strong enough to deal with them, or… as is more typical for the denizens of the fourth floor, interesting.”
Smart, he could deal with. Strong, he could deal with, barring certain exceptions. Interesting escapees, well. There’d be degrees of unpleasantness.
He was still hurrying down the stairs as he reached the bottom. Two doors, both heavy, stainless steel top to bottom, capable of withstanding a small bomb blast. Only the Doctor entered the rightmost door. The Number Man turned his attention to the door on the left, and entered his access codes, pressed his hand against the disguised plate to the right.
As security measures went, it wasn’t impossible to crack, not when one considered the breadth of parahuman abilities, but if anyone who got this far decided to pass through this door, they deserved what they got.
The deviations, the ones who didn’t take to the formula, tended to fall into certain categories. There were those who had some minor physical or mental changes; they were little different from the most extreme deviations that appeared in typical trigger cases. Such deviations occurred a mere eighth of a percent of the time. They weren’t what he was thinking of.
The formula wasn’t exact. Though they learned more every day, there were still unknowns regarding powers. Whatever connection the agents formed with individuals before or during a trigger event, it didn’t manifest as strongly through the formula. When the subject was stressed, their body engaged by that distress, the connection grew weaker.
In typical cases, the agent seemed to momentarily reach out to search the entire world, many worlds for reference material, to seize on the subject’s conception of a ‘bird’ or conception of ‘movement’, to build up an understanding of things that didn’t exist in the agent’s realm of experience.
And in cases of a deviation scenario, the agent noted the physical stress and searched the subject’s frame of reference for something, anything that might reinforce what it saw as a damaged host.
For many—for ninety-three percent of the unfortunates who were so afflicted—the agent drew from plant and animal life, from physical objects, materials and designs in the subject’s immediate vicinity.
But seven percent of the extreme deviant cases didn’t find something physical, and there was little to nothing to rein things in.
Such cases were not, as a general rule, released into the wild. It would be count
erproductive. They were briefly studied, then disposed of. The Number Man’s office was in this building because he was but one line of defense against escapees and threats, even in this department.
He paused, concentrating.
As though it were penciled in the air, in thread-thin, elaborate notation, he could see the geometry and the numbers unfolding across the world around him, through the air.
He withdrew a pen from his pocket, spun it around one finger. The notation billowed around it, and through it, he could see the movement of the pen, the plotted trajectory, the velocity and rotation of it. The numbers clicked into place with a speed that made the rest of him, his very perceptions, seem like slow motion.
Here and there, there were incongruities. Painting an entirely different picture. His companion was here, near him. Bending the most fundamental rules. The Custodian.
In another scenario, she would have been kept here and disposed of once we’d found a way to dissect her.
“I know you want to help,” he commented. He wasn’t even entirely sure if he was being heard. “You see it as your responsibility. But it’s best you stay behind.”
That said, he pushed the door open.
If the cells on the third basement floor were twice as large as the ones on the second floor, these were larger still. Each was isolated, standalone in the vast, dark basement. The space allowed countermeasures to be maintained in each space.
And here, experiment number three-zero-one-six was out of his cell. The Number Man knew of this one. He’d paid particular attention, once he’d heard about the peculiarities, heard about the power.
The man was only half-dressed, his upper body bare, his beard a shaggy growth, his hair long and greasy. Showers were provided, where patients were able to make use of them, but the solitude wore on them, and few partook with any regularity.
But the part of the man was unusual was what wasn’t there.
One leg of his uniform flapped in the wake of a wind turbine used to keep two-nine-nine-zero contained. There was no right leg beneath the pelvis, but his right foot was there nonetheless, set firmly on the ground. He stood as if his weight rested on it.
