Chosen Different (Book 3): Different Paths

by Kozinn, Nat

4

  Log of Notable Ultracorps/Nita Activity Week 236

  Gathered the best information I’m going to get from HAM radio sources. Estimates range from 20-40% of Differents joined in the strike in other Metro Areas, closer to 60% in Los Angeles. Including nearly 100% of Telepaths and Big Brains around the nation. Notable individuals include: Reggie Crane (powerhouse), Elson Ray (Slug-maker), Louis Reyes (ForteSilk), the Vaskos Twins (super fast), Leslie Ochos (high-level Cooler), Hector Quan (Construct).

  Theories: Even if they are in better shape than Los Angeles, without think.Net, all the Metro Areas will eventually devolve into chaos. “Strikers” are most likely Alphas, Betas, and Gammas, so resource consumption will be lower than a normal cross-section of Differents which would include Zetas. Best guess is strike can be maintained for at least a year even if Nita doesn’t take over Manna Fields. And she will, or she's figured out a way she won't need to.

  Ben rubs his weary eyes then turns back to the diary, flipping through the pages fast enough for them to appear animated. He has taught himself to read an entire page at once, his mind interpreting two hundred words at the same rate a normal person would read five. Not only can he read with great speed, he can perfectly recall every word that he sees.

  Too perfectly, in fact. Ben has gleaned nothing he didn’t learn that first time he read the book. The diary is mostly filled with records of Billy the Kid’s exercise routine and diet. The man was absolutely dedicated to extracting every iota of performance out of the human body.

  Even if his goals were demented, his focus and commitment were admirable, as was his ability to make it obvious that his benefactor was Governor Khan while simultaneously making that fact impossible to prove in a court of law. He never slips up, he always refers to Khan as the Money Man and describes their meetings in vague terms. If Ben is going to deliver justice, he’s going to have to be inventive, and fortunately, invention is his forte.

  #

  Ben turns the crank on the hand-powered clothes iron. Steam shoots out the top: it’s ready. He carefully presses down the valuable hunk of metal and pulls it down the length of the trousers on the board, creating a perfect crease. He repeats the action on the other leg and moves on to his shirt and finally his suit coat.

  He polishes his fine brown leather shoes, the real stuff. Fake leather would ruin the disguise. Once shiny, he dresses himself in the fine wool blue pinstriped suit and stiff-collared white shirt, and puts on his expensive leather shoes. He pulls out a red checked tie and perfectly performs a half-Windsor knot. He then goes into a drawer and pulls out a gold watch for his wrist. The D tattoo has already been completely covered with a cake of thick makeup, an illegal act that Ben often performs.

  Ben used to earn a good salary as Head-Librarian for Ultracorps, and before he fled he managed to launder a good deal of his savings out of his bank accounts, which were of course frozen when he became a wanted fugitive. A few smart investments later and money has not been a limiting factor for his endeavors. Which is good, because tonight is likely to be expensive.

  #

  “Come here often?” the bleached blonde, scantily clad woman asks Ben as she takes a seat on the bar stool beside him.

  Ben picks up his glass of ice and throat-burning brown liquor, and downs the remaining contents, holding his breath to lessen the pain on his taste buds. He knows that a $45 glass of whisky should not be wasted, or at least the character he’s playing would know that.

  “From time to time,” Ben says staring off, trying way too hard to be cool.

  “I usually start with ‘you from out of town?’ but that seems pretty unlikely considering there’s no way to get to town.”

  “I could imagine a man walking here from Seattle to buy you a drink.”

  “Aren’t you lucky then? He’s still on his way,” she says with a smile. “That means you have time to buy me that drink. Or maybe we could just raid the bar in your room.”

  “I don’t have a room. I’m not from out of town, remember?”

  “What an unfortunate turn of events. But you look like the kind of man with the resources to rectify that situation,” she says, twirling a lock of her blonde hair.

  “Do you appreciate men with vast resources?” Ben says, gulping for air.

  “Exclusively,” she whispers into his ear.

  “And do you have friends with similar proclivities?”

  “Ohh, am I not enough for you?”

  “No, I was just wondering if you high-end gals hang out together?”

  “Oh,” the blonde woman says and pulls away from Ben. “Is that what this is?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I might be able to tell you where you can find whoever it is you’re after, but that doesn’t mean she’ll want to go back with you. I’m sure whoever hired you told you that they were sweet parents or boyfriends or whatever, but believe me, nobody doing this came from someplace better.”

  “That means you’ll help me?”

  “It means I sell my time. If you want to use that time asking me questions, that’s your choice. But like I said, even if I know how to find her, you’re just wasting your time.”

  “I can save on the hotel room at least. How much is your time worth?”

  “$300 a question,” she answers all hints of flirtation long gone.

  Ben digs into his wallet and pulls out the cash. “Do you know anyone who sees people in the Metro Area government?”

  “Every girl I know. You’ll have to be more specific,” she says and takes the money off the bar.

  “Governor Khan,” Ben says as he slaps another payment on the table.

  The woman doesn’t say anything. She just stands up and starts to walk away. Ben goes wide-eyed. He didn’t think he could have found her from just the brief description in Billy the Kid’s diary. Sometimes he amazes even himself. He reaches into his wallet and slams the entire contents onto the table. The woman sees it, sizes up the pile, and sits back down.

  “What do you want to know?” she asks, annoyed to be put in such a precarious situation.

  “I need to see a necklace he gave you.”

  #

  Ben unscrews the top of a small copper container, covering his nose and mouth to avoid inhaling the toxic vapors pouring out of it like smoke from a chimney. He pulls out a steel knife and dips the tip into the container. Then he uses the knife to cut into the reinforced glass in front of him. The sharpened metal does nothing to the glass, but the acid does its job like a champ, cutting out a small round hole. He catches the piece of glass before it can fall. On his way out, he will use a magnesium flash to melt the glass back into place and remove all traces of the break-in, or pretty close at least.

  Now that he has an entrance point, Ben pulls out a funky-looking hose which he feeds into the hole. He hits a button activating a small battery that provides an electrical charge, which turns the hose from flaccid to stiff. Now the tube is easier to manipulate, and more importantly, it is a giant electromagnet. Looking in through the window, he pushes the hose over to the door of the bank. He wiggles the hose around while simultaneously hitting a button to change the polarity on his magnet. The haphazard action combined with expert design and engineering proves successful and the door clicks open.

  Inside the bank, it is apparent why his ingress was so easy. The vault is made from Maceo Steel. Traditionally, bank robbers perform their crimes in order to get money from the vault. Even Ben cannot conceive of a way into a vault made of Maceo Steel, short of his now-missing Maceo Steel knife. Would-be bank robbers have learned they can’t get in either, so few waste their time breaking into the building; there are many places to steal pens.

  Ben isn’t after the vault. He’s after a much sexier prize: the records room. In another stroke of luck, both the high-end jewelry store where Khan bought the necklace and Khan’s campaign keep accounts at this same bank.

  Governor Khan bought the necklace using money funneled to him by Nita in exchange for his supp
ort of Ultracorps business interests. Even though Ben knows this, it would be nigh impossible to prove. He’s already been through Khan’s personal bank records along with scores of Ultracorps financial records, and those bribes are so well hidden their existence could never be proven in a court of law. That’s what happens when you have the smartest person on the planet executing a money laundering scheme.

  So what if instead of buying that necklace with untraceable bribe money from Nita, he had purchased it with funds his campaign had collected for his reelection effort? Why, that would be a violation of federal election law.

  A few months ago, such a fiendish scheme would have necessitated hacking into bank records stored on think.Net Librarians, an act Ben was loathe to perform lest Nita detect his incursion. But with the people responsible for running think.Net on strike, the paper copies that used to serve as a backup are now the only authority.

  Ben heads to the records office and deftly picks the lock with a few quick wiggles from a tool in his bag. Once in the office, it takes him little time to find the Steinway Jewelry files and go back to June 5th, where he can see the $10,000 wire transfer from Khan’s personal account.

  Ben tracks down an empty records sheet and grabs one of the nearby pens. Then he painstakingly rewrites every line, mimicking the handwriting perfectly. The only change he makes is that instead of the $10,000 coming from Khan’s personal account, it now comes from his campaign account.

  Now, of course, if this event had transpired, Khan’s personal account wouldn’t show the transaction, so Ben tracks down the appropriate records and once again performs the proper forgeries to remove the transaction from the personal account file. That’s not all, he still needs to add the transaction to the campaign account records, which he finds and forges.

  All three files now show the appropriate transactions, but Ben is far from finished. The final balances are now all off by $10,000 dollars. If the police look, someone will redo the math and find the discrepancy, maybe even before an indictment hearing. That means Ben has to hide the money in all the other transactions in the record, changing each expenditure by a matter of a few dollars or cents. His watch shows eight hours until the bank opens again. He’s going to need every minute.

  5

  When we needed him, he came to our aid once again. Not just by exposing our new Governor Khan as corrupt, and if the rumors are true perhaps much worse, but by showing us that there is a future. That it doesn’t have to be us vs. them, Differents vs. Humans. At least, Gavin Stillman doesn’t see it that way. He wants to do what’s right for people of all persuasions. He stuck his neck out to help us all. Even as he was put on the top of the most wanted list, even as our Governor used the power of his bully pulpit to denigrate the man, Gavin stayed true. Now, what he has done is illegal, I’m not denying that, nor am I calling for the repeal of the Different Acts. But we all know rules are meant to be broken. Despite whatever physical changes he's gone through, Gavin has worked tirelessly to help this Metro Area. So let’s all just look the other way this one time, and then look back and say thank you.

  “We Still Have a Hero” by Forest Brown, think.Net News LA (printed in the Los Angeles Times)

  His tag reads Officer Hall. I remember him from back when I was a vigilante. I broke a few of his bones when I was trying to escape police custody. Our relationship has changed now; he’s dressed in his formal blues to honor me, standing in front of the stage with two dozen of his fellow officers. A paradigm-shifting show of support from my new friends, the L.A.P.D. A shocking turn of events to say the least. The emotional parts of my brain are telling me not to trust any of this and run for it, and the rational parts are finding the emotional parts fairly compelling.

  I calm down by looking at something that is a much more pleasing sight. Standing behind the police officers is a throng of Los Angeles Metro Area citizens here to show their support. Several of them are carrying homemade signs with messages like “Thank you, Beast Slayer” and “You’re our hero.”

  Another calming factor is Maria on stage beside me. The new interim Governor, Leslie Royce, made it clear he plans to hold the two of us up as an example that Differents and humans can still live and work together. He’s going to start by thanking us for finding the evidence of corruption against Khan. Then he’ll transition into his plans to employ the Differents who failed to go on strike and use them to help bridge the gap left by Ultracorps’ departure. It’s so obvious that it’s hard to believe a politician could think of it. Besides Telepaths and Big Brains, half of the other Differents are still here. They are ready, willing, and able to help.

  I’ll give this to Royce: he pivoted into his new job like a ballerina. It doesn’t seem to matter that he’s never been involved in an election and the only reason he was appointed is because the roster of Metro Area officials is running dry. He saw his chance, and he took it. Not only that, he realized he needed to make some bold moves to turn the page on the previous administration, and he seems prepared to do just that. Or at least talk like he is, which in politics is the same thing.

  After a good deal of waiting, Governor Leslie Royce takes the stage to address the crowd, the third Governor this Metro Area has had in less than six months. Royce wastes no time breaking into standard political drivel full of platitudes and empty promises. Tomorrow is a bright new day, the mistakes of the past will be corrected, the safety of the Metro Area is his top concern.

  I can’t bring myself to pay close attention. I imagine the crowd feels the same way. There have been a whole lot of speeches of late.

  I feel someone reaching into my mind. It’s not Linda; she’s been in my head so much I know what her thoughts feel like, for lack of a better term, and these are not them. There’s another Telepath here and they want in. I’ll bite.

  >>>Hello, Gavin. How are you? It is Nita.

  <<
  >>>Gavin, you are being dense. Who besides your own confidants has knowledge of our relationship? And as for how I am contacting you, I felt it prudent to maintain awareness of the goings on in the Metro Areas. To that end, a few trusted individuals are maintaining a barebones think.Net system for my use.

  <<
  >>>I do not believe that term is accurate, as they are not being paid for their work. I believe scabs would more accurately describe the Differents the new Governor plans to employ. They refused to join the strike and are instead staying behind and performing labor that had previously been the responsibilities of Differents now on strike.

  <<
  >>>Gavin, I do not wish to rehash our argument from three months ago. I did not convince you then, and I know I will not convince you now. Stubbornness continues to be a weakness of yours.

  <<
  >>>I am not a terrorist, Gavin. Governor Khan bought the chemicals. Billy the Kid made the bombs and planted them. I do not see myself in that equation.

  <<
  >>>Gavin, have you heard the theory that President Roosevelt allowed the Pearl Harbor attack to happen in order to gain public support for America’s entry into World War II? I do not know if it is true, in fact I suspect it is not, but do you know why the question is discussed dispassionately, almost as a joke? Do you know why no one has ever demanded an investigation?

  <<
  >>>Because it does not matter if it is true. We were going to fight in World War II no matter what. It was a question of when, not if, so the particulars are a historical curiosity, not a crime.
Khan was going to enact his plan regardless of my aid. If I did not force Governor Hayes to resign, I imagine Khan had a plan to take the office, and it likely involved Hayes’ death. Once Khan took office, be certain I was not the only one who wanted to bribe him; I was simply the highest bidder. Khan would have gotten the money somehow. By having him take Ultracorps cash, I was able to better track his activities. You could not know this, but I actually minimized the effects of the bombs. I scheduled work details to ensure the facilities were staffed by skeleton crews.

  <<
  >>>Remember, Gavin, the deaths were inevitable, I could only control when, not if. I feel the pain of those we lost, but by manipulating the situation in the manner I did, I was able to win support for my cause.

  <<
  >>>I am not referring to the public at large, I am talking about the backing of our own people. They needed to be pushed in order to support my plans for a general work stoppage.

  <<
  >>>Gavin, you may count as intelligent amongst the normal population, but you are still miles from seeing the world with the clarity I possess. I have run thousands upon thousands of mental simulations on the future of this country. The relationship between humans and Differents cannot be maintained in its current state. Differents will not allow themselves to be mistreated indefinitely. Guilt over Cabot and his Plagues will continue to fade as time goes by, and with it, so will compliance from the Different population. Most scenarios end in open revolt and war between Differents and humans, and that most likely ends in worldwide nuclear annihilation. You call me a terrorist; I say I made the tough choice to save lives.