52 Superpower? That's barely a midpower

AN: I am going to adjust the previous chapter that had the date for the meeting as "July 5". Instead, it is September, as I think it should be closer to the end of the year. I will also include a date/location at the beginning of the chapter and at any chapter breaks, if it changes, from now on.

September, 2066

Night City

I stepped onto the elevator and glanced behind me. There was a couple that looked like they needed to go up, too, so I held my hand to block the door of the lift from closing. However, they smiled funnily and just said, "We'll catch the next one, thanks."

I snorted. The elevator was huge. You could fit almost a squad of soldiers in here if you wanted, fully kitted out too. But I nodded and ducked back inside, allowing the doors to close. I said politely, "Floor one hundred, please." I was always polite with man-machine interfaces, just in case the AI actually took over the world, which was actually a serious possibility, one that might keep me up at night if I didn't have a way to instantly and infallibly fall asleep. Perhaps they'd remember my politeness. It didn't hurt anything.

I was a little surprised when the doors opened. I half-expected the ninja to be waiting for me, but instead, it was a woman in a literal maid's outfit. In another situation, I would accuse the woman of cosplaying, but she wore it more like it was a uniform.

If this was an anime BD, she would be armed to the teeth. I shifted my vision modes to a combination of forward-looking infrared and multi-millimetre wave radar, then used graphical compositing to combine the images in my vision. Machine learning software that I had co-opted from last century airport security scanners highlighted in red boxes several suspicious areas, and sure enough, she had a pistol and a brace of knives in her stockings. Lightly armed, then, like me. Not to the teeth at all.

The MMW radar was a new addition that I added to myself recently. I haven't even got a chance to put it in my other bodies. Dr Hasumi would get the addition soon but myself in space might have to go without. I was sure I would get enough tools to perform some rudimentary self-surgery, but probably not for some time. The radar transceivers were too large to fit in my already crowded Kiroshis, so instead, I put them in a small strip on my forehead, underneath the skin.

It allowed me to look beneath people's clothing to some extent so I could, occasionally, identify hidden weapons. The images produced weren't of sufficient resolution to be lewd, especially because to generate a fully three-dimensional image, I would have to walk around a person in a circle while shaking my head at them. Despite that, it was still quite useful to identify who was approaching me with a gun in their waistband or wearing a suicide vest—the latter I hadn't seen yet.

"Miss Hebert?" the maid asked me, and I inclined my head. She smiled affably and said, "If you'll follow me." I nodded and followed behind her, switching my eyes back to visual spectrum mode and ceasing my radar transmitting. The penthouse was very large and set up in an open plan that I absolutely despised. It wasn't like there was anything wrong with it in particular, but I just liked walls and clearly separated areas. It was the architectural equivalent of having a bunch of screws piled in a drawer instead of sorting them by size in their own individual cubbies.

We walked around a corner from the vestibule, and I could see most of the entire penthouse level, even the edges of a bedroom area that was barely hidden behind a SmartWall that took up a large portion. The living area was what I might refer to Japanese-Euro fusion as there were wood-panelled flooring instead of tatami and small, low-to-the-ground open-backed chairs instead of zabuton pillows. However, all of those were sat to the side, and a more traditional circular European table and chairs were in their place.

Ah, there was the ninja. Standing a little bit behind and to the left of Gram. I was a little more confident I could take him this time, especially if he had to protect Gram here, but I wasn't here to find out. I doubted very much that they would fight fair, either. This maid was probably a combat gynoid or something ridiculous like that.

I tried to avoid tensing too much as I got my first look at Gram. I almost tripped when I realised she looked somewhat similar to an older Sarah in her elf guise that I had helped design for her, except red headed. Was she trying to make a statement that she knew about me as Dr Hasumi? I already thought that she might, but as soon as I thought that was what she was trying to say, I discounted it. She wore her "style", for lack of a better word, too well, and I didn't know anyone that would go as far as elective biosculpting just to send a message to a granddaughter that they had never seen before.

I hated that I knew this term, but it would be difficult not to with all the elves I had made in the past, but Gram went along the traditional "erofu" model. She looked to be in her early thirties, although I knew she was in her early seventies if she had the same relative age difference as Brockton-Gram. She was slim, not surprisingly, except for some well-defined hips and bust-line, with pale-complexioned skin and long, braided, red hair. There was a light dusting of freckles on her face, but my expert eye immediately decided that they were cosmetically added.

I didn't think anyone as wealthy as Gram would keep the bog-standard human gene expression for freckles when it also opened you up to certain illnesses like basal-cell carcinoma, as well as a number of kidney issues. The most striking part of her was her eyes. They were green in the same way that a cut emerald was just a rock, and they seemed to stare directly through me. It looked like she could see five metres through me while I was a pool of clear water only two metres deep. It was kind of upsetting, actually, and I frowned.

"Taylor, Taylor... thank you for accepting my invitation," she said, standing up and motioning me over to the table to take a seat. I stopped myself from raising my eyebrows. Her voice was quite melodious, and she had to have either some sort of vocal cybernetics or serious vocal training. Her accent was something like Irish, although it wasn't as overpowering as I remembered from my brief testing of the "Derry" mode when I was pretending to be the blonde Miss White.

I let myself flow towards the seat she indicated and sat down, saying neutrally, "Thank you for the invitation. I appreciate it."

That caused her to chuckle and say, "Is that so?" She took a seat as well, although the ninja man remained standing behind her. Damn. I didn't have any trustworthy minion to bring along with me, but I had the time to clone a random body and install a Haywire FTL com system and Tinkered-up remote control system so that one thread of my consciousness could control it. It would have been equitable if I had my own minion, even if I had to play the role of it myself.

Just to be safe, I double-checked all of my contingency systems. I had a couple of things that might or might not kill everybody in the room except for me. They were actually three types of the same thing, a type of rabidly virulent flesh-eating bacteria that I could aersolise. I carried the speciality bacteriophages in the form of white smoke which might save my own skin. I wasn't sure of the chances of the bacteria working on the ninja, though, since the organic material in a Gemini body didn't have very much actually in common with a human genome, despite the fact that its appearance mimicked humans so well. Attack vectors for biological agents were small as well, and even with no organic components, a Gemini body would still be somewhat functional.

I didn't know at all about the maid. She looked like a regular, petite girl, which probably meant she was a combat gynoid, even if I couldn't detect it.

This was something I had taken from NC-Taylor's files. I got the impression that she was a bit better than me in terms of creating wildly implausible things like this, and I was a little jealous.

Most everything I created had to be more down-to-earth, at least physically possible most of the time. I wasn't sure, but this bacteria seemed to violate some of what I knew about thermodynamics. It shouldn't have the chemical energy necessary to be as ... effective as it was. It had skeletonised an unfortunate test rat in seconds, and seconds after that, the bones melted. Still, my power dutifully let me duplicate it, at least, but I got the impression that it would appreciate it if I didn't go ham with things like this all the time. Even Mrs Pegpig cooed at me in disapproval when I made and tested it. It was also the single most dangerous thing I had ever had near my body, and even with the alleged counteragent, it made me nervous.

My last resort was a system I installed in my cyberbrain that would stop all electrical activity in my brain. Permanently. And then my cyberbrain would explode, just to be sure. The activation requirements for this were quite complicated, not surprisingly. I didn't want someone to be able to hack me and kill me. It had to be activated by one of my other bodies and wasn't, by default, connected to any part of my system's network. I could arm it by having Dr Hasumi or Hana touch my tongue to the teeth in my mouth in a certain order five times in a row.

That sounded hard to do, but it was something I absolutely wouldn't do by accident as I had crafted the pattern to make that utterly impossible. Plus, one of the things I discovered I was better at now was spatial memory things, which followed, somehow, to tongue dexterity.

It was only when the system was armed would the circuits be physically connected that would allow it to trigger. At that point, I could trigger it manually, or it would trigger by itself if it detected I was either being tortured severely or if it detected my cyberbrain was being tampered with. This was mainly for "fate worse than death" options, but I wouldn't allow myself to be subjected to thorough brain scanning again.

Well, the last time hadn't even been that thorough. I was more worried about systems like Soulkiller. If my brain was thoroughly scanned, destructively or not, I and all of my memories could be digitised, and something digitised could be inspected and interrogated via software. That couldn't be allowed. My secrets were for keeping.

It was scary to think about because my philosophy regarding my networkself had never been tested. It was possible that I was just deluding myself on how it would be, and if that system ever triggered, I would just die, forever and ever, amen. It was almost a metaphysical question which I didn't particularly like, but it was one I had already answered, to myself at least. As much as that was a poor way to describe it, I had faith that my continuous stream of consciousness would continue, even if parts of it died.

Gram coughed delicately and said, "There was just one question that I'd really appreciate it if you could answer, dear, as Cara brings out the tea. And I do apologise for being so uncouth right off the bat, but... you are Taylor Hebert, daughter of Annette Rose Hebert, yes?" Her green eyes stared through me, and I felt a bit of a chill.

I sighed. It looked like some of my worst-case scenarios might be the most accurate. I had wondered, thought and modelled about why Gram invited me here. I had already figured out why the ninja-man attacked me... it was the same reason I suspected last time. They thought I was an impersonator, a changeling, a dopplegånger. I just had the wrong side of the family that was responsible. I had thought it had been from one of Alt-Danny's spook friends, doing his buddy a solid even after he had passed away. I had thought it was kind of nice, actually, after I got over it.

But since I discovered that I was wrong, I realised that she could have sprung for a lot more resources. Say, constant surveillance. I had been very careful to make my escape to LA, but I was worried about people finding me retrospectively. I was confident it would be hard, even for serious intelligence operatives, to do that, to make that link between Taylor Hebert disappearing and months later Sakura Hasumi reappearing. But it would be simple as pie if they followed me to the Konpeki Plaza, watched me do the gig, and then followed me to the safehouse Wakako set up for me.

They could see and count all the people who went in and out of that building, and then it wouldn't take even an especially smart cookie to realise who the Japanese woman with suspiciously similar cybernetics was when she left and immediately fled the city in the care and company of Nomads.

Facial recognition would have given Dr Hasumi's identity, and from there, they could have just waited until she resurfaced again. I suspect they were somewhat surprised when Taylor Hebert reappeared while Sakura Hasumi was still going about her day-to-day activities. The fact that we still have identical cybernetics between us would just add to the mystery. I felt that was the reason for the invitation. To be frank, I didn't know what to say about it. I was just going to try to avoid speaking about it if at all possible, and lie if I couldn't be vague. Perhaps she'd assume I had hired a stand-in and sculpted her to look like Hasumi, and I was pulling her strings like a puppet.

I nodded, "Yes, of course. She never told me about you, though." I shook my head, joking, "Otherwise, I would have asked for a bigger allowance."

If anything, she looked slightly relieved, although it flashed so quickly that I might have imagined it. I'd have to go back and replay this experience to be sure. It was a bit odd that she was taking my word for it, but before I could think about that, she placed her hands lightly on the table and said, "Taylor, I have to apologise. Years ago, when you shifted interests so radically, I was afraid that you had been murdered and had your identity stolen. I sent William here to check and, if necessary, to avenge you."

Yeah, I had already guessed that. I would have liked to be more angry about it, but all I said was, "Perhaps he could have knocked at my door and not defaulted to kidnapping." At that point, the likely combat gynoid walked back in carrying both a full tea service on one tray and a tray of little pastries and small mini-sandwiches in the other. The ninja in question smiled ruefully and rubbed the back of his neck.

She started serving us and poured tea for each of us but left the cream or sugar to us. I put a little of each in and used the spoon to agitate the beverage gently, being careful not to be so uncouth as to bang my spoon on the side of the cup, "Having said that, I don't think it would be advantageous of me to hold a grudge." I was actually shocked and amazed that she had apologised at all. I had considered the possibility, but I suspected that the ninja, this William, would apologise, not Gram.

Gram smiled and inclined her head, "I'm so glad, especially that you are you. I was a little worried that you had done something terrible to yourself, like those two gentlemen that you helped fuse into one in Los Angeles."

Ohhh... Ab, or Paul and Will Ochoki. The two twins that I had installed that interesting Zetatech "neural oscillation synchroniser" on. I had totally forgotten about them, which wasn't like me. That meant that Gram was spying on me, or at least had a dossier about exactly what I had done at work, anyway. I wouldn't say that that hadn't influenced my network either. I had taken a bit away from it, but it was very limited.

But this was an option that was being tossed into to my lap; perhaps I could get her to think that my synchronisation was a lot more limited than it was. The issue was that this would still be incredibly valuable, at least to the very rich like her. It would be an even worse version of immortality than being digitised by either Soulkiller or my own private brain-scanning system, but it wasn't like there were a lot of alternatives here, so a lot of people might be interested in it anyway.

I wouldn't be, even if I was Gram. They already had serious life extension and could expect to live at least two hundred years. If you weren't an old fossil like Saburo Arasaka, that meant that you had a lot of time to wait for further improvements in the same life extension technology. When it was first introduced, you could only live about one hundred and twenty years. It's possible it will be improved and improved, and functional biological immortality, or bio-indefinite mortality as I liked to think of it, could be achieved just by waiting.

"Oh... no. I hope those two brothers haven't been vivisected or anything. While I found Zetatech's technology very interesting, and I admit I may have disassembled the implant before installing it... I'm definitely not interested in being altered like that," I said, chuckling. Then I tilted my head to the side, "I do find it odd that you're taking my word for everything, though. Not having ole Bill here hold me down so you can interrogate me properly, eh?"

"Ah... we can speak to that, but..." she glanced up, "If I could have the room, please. You too, William." I raised an eyebrow as both the likely combat gynoid and the combat cyborg left the room. William looked as though he was going to complain but finally sighed and nodded, leaving. She tapped something on the table, and I briefly felt my ears pop. I blinked, glancing to the left, seeing a slight distortion in the air, while Gram smiled, "Even if someone was still here, they wouldn't be able to hear us speak, and holograms would stymie attempts to read our lips."

It suddenly occurred to me that I could probably kill her unless the table itself was a secret, hidden robotic guardian, anyway. I tapped the wood and shook away the intrusive thought. There was nobody alive that was badass enough to kill someone in the penthouse of Konpeki Plaza and then escape without being ruthlessly murdered by both the security of the building and the security of whomever he or she murdered. I certainly wasn't, plus I didn't even have the motive. But my mind, being my mind, couldn't help but see options, "He didn't want to leave; I suspected he thought I was dangerous to you. Why the privacy?"

Her windchimes-like laugh reappeared, and she regarded me with momentarily slitted eyes, like a pawn shop owner who was given a Rolex watch to hawk. Assessing. Finally, she said, "Dangerous to my heart, such as it is, perhaps. Before I answer your question, you mentioned you would have asked for more allowance. Is that something you'd be interested in? Fabulous wealth?"

I snorted, almost aspirating my tea. I sat the cup down and regarded her levelly, "I'll be frank, Gram. The only reason I came here is because I am worried about what you can take from me, not what you can give to me. All things being equal, more money is better than less money. But, I am already making a lot, for me anyway. The entire point of money is to give you more options, and I just feel like taking anything from you would vastly reduce my options, and create all manners of fetters tying me down."

She smiled, it seemed genuine, but I didn't know. I knew she was a lot better social predator-type than me, so she possibly could fake that, "Yes, a fabulous product from what I can tell. I haven't tried it myself, of course, but I have someone using it every day. If their brain hasn't melted in a year, I will give it a go. How wondrous it would be to have more time in a day."

Her eyes almost sparkled at that, and then she got more serious, "My assistant, Edgecrusher, has modelled that, from when you release your next version of your product, there will be an approximate fifty-two per cent chance that your invention will be ..uh.. acquired from you, somehow, per quarter." She tilted her head to the side, "Along with a twenty-four per cent chance this, Dr Hasumi will be kidnapped as well. Knowing all this, are you sure you want to go it alone? You'll have fetters one way or another before too long."

I did some quick mental math. I let the former possibility be A and the latter be B. Then P(A∪B), or either one occurring, had a probability of a little over sixty-five per cent. But P(A∩B), or both occurring, only had a probability of about fifteen per cent, although I didn't know if that was precisely how I should calculate it because there seemed to be a lot of overlap in "steal invention" and "kidnap inventor" in my mind.

So, instead, I tabled that and figured that there was an eighty-eight per cent chance that at least my invention would be "stolen" in the next nine months. That was more pessimistic than my own guess. I was thinking seventy-five per cent myself, but I was only using my intuition. I had already had a phone call from one of Dynacorp's investment analysts scheduled in the next couple of days. I had looked up the man who requested to speak to me online, and he was an entry-level analyst for M&A's, so it was likely that they were trying to get me on the cheap. I had to appreciate his daring in attempting to make the acquisition himself rather than notifying his boss, even if I wouldn't sell for the low amount he would be authorised to give.

I supposed I would trust the more pessimistic numbers more. After all, any quant that was called Edgecrusher had to be either a serious math head or possibly an AI.

I sighed, "Well, it is what it is. The longer I continue manufacturing, the more money I will make. And I suspect whatever happens; I'll be given at least a pittance. I'll just have to use that to start some other venture. And even if I end up in a cage someday in the future, it will, hopefully, be a cage of my own making."

This caused her to golf clap politely and smile knowingly, "Bravo, bravo. Your mother said something very similar to me once, although the context was totally different. Did you know I, myself, am a servant?"

I couldn't help myself, but I smirked, "The net mentioned something about the Astor-Armstrong being a subservient family to the Astors, a cadet branch."

"Mmm... yes. All of the Astors of the main branch family live in Low-Earth Orbit now. Over time they just wanted less and less to do with how the sausage was made, you see. We make sure that they want for nothing and aren't troubled by pesky things, though," she said in a conspiratorial tone.

Ah. I kind of thought that her asking me if I wanted fabulous wealth was a test; I mean, of course, it was, but I didn't know precisely the correct answer because for many Corpos, "Absolutely, you old bint!" would have been the expectation of a correct answer.

So she had basically taken over the family and placed the actual Astors into a gilded cage, just like I was trying to avoid. Well, I didn't care. Plus, it was very, very likely that the Astors didn't even care. Perhaps she liked the moxie in me. I thought it was approval, but still, I took a sip of my tea, "This still doesn't answer the reason—"

She interrupted me, "It's my superpower, dear."

I almost spit my tea all over her face, which I thought would have been a faux pas. Instead, I got out chokingly, "Huh?"

"William did run a pretty thorough if abbreviated word association on you, if you recall. He told me that you were convinced that you had a superpower. You know, like in the comics," she said mildly, "It's why I sent everyone away. Roughly a third of Astors, and by extension, us, develop one, of course."

Of course? Bullshit! I wanted to yell. I was the only parahuman on this planet! I could suddenly feel my power thrumming with curiosity. I hissed internally at it. No, I wouldn't vivisect Gram! At least, not yet!

I stared at her until she continued, "It's very often useless. Very, very often, but I have one of the most powerful ones that has ever been documented. It's always a knowing, you see. And I know if someone near me speaks the truth. I presume that you know biology, or medicine, or something along those lines. Incredible. There hasn't been a recorded case like that since the 17th century when Ronan Astor received the power to know mechanical timekeeping devices. He became the best watchmaker in the world."

Okay. My first idea was that I should decapitate her and escape out the window. I could probably survive sliding down one hundred stories somehow. If she could tell the truth from lies, then I had been very lucky that I took to mostly the truth, or shades of it. Then, I concluded that perhaps, she was insane or delusional.

Insanity would make sense, but I was still kind of in shock. I couldn't really help it because she claimed to be a Thinker, or at least whatever the local equivalent was. She claimed it was a superpower, but I supposed that it could just be a super-genius intellect. Even her miraculous claim about Ronan Astor could just have been a genius intellect combined with being on the autistic spectrum, with a fixation on watchmaking.

The possibility that she was merely a super-genius didn't make it better, though. I presumed that she had done tests, and even if what she was really doing was just super-accurate cold reading, like I once suspected Sarah of, then that wasn't good, either. If anything, a level of genius that could emulate a Thinker's power was in every way worse, although it did make me want to examine her brain a little bit, and not just because my power was trying to push me to do so.

I coughed and sat my tea back into the saucer, and said, "I presume that this is a family secret?" She inclined her head, "It sounds unbelievable. Sure, I am a genius in medicine and biology, but I was just using, to myself, the phrase superpower to encapsulate that."

"Lie," she said, frankly, monotone.

A lucky guess? I used all of my mental capability to still my expressions and said, randomly, "I am a virgin." I was sure that I was letting nothing leak out.

"Well, good for you. That is a little surprising, though, I have to admit," she said wryly. Fuck, I should have picked something else, but I was flustered.

After that, I tried a number of different lies and truths, although, after that, I kept them impersonal, such as what I ate last night. Gram seemed pleased as punch to play along, amused by the whole thing.

Before I could think too hard about this and talk myself out of it, I had one more test. I disconnected. I suddenly felt stupid and kind of like I had just suffered a stroke. My Haywire comms were still working, though, and that meant myself--no, not myself, my other-self could talk through my body, kind of like I was a robot. This normally wouldn't be possible, but I specifically reconfigured the permissions and allowed it. While I was just floundering, she said to Gram, "My favourite colour is pink."

I didn't wait for a reply, I mentally mashed the reconnect button, and suddenly, I was back. The merge process for the memories was a little odd. In a blink, I had more memories. Even if it was only a couple of seconds, and while it wasn't quite like I had experienced those things myself, it wasn't too far off from that, either. At the same time, I had experienced both sides, too, so it was like I experienced those things while simultaneously not. It was a bit weird.

Gram looked at me oddly and said, "I'm not sure... how did you do that?" She tapped her fingers on the table for a moment before snapping, "You're a biopodder. You must have written a quick program or body macro to take over your body and force it to say the words that you programmed in advance. Smart." Cyberbrain users were considered biopodders, just like Gloria and the ninja-butler were, even if the pod connected to a real body. It was kind of an odd distinction, but I did have to mention it whenever I went to another country, as borgs occasionally had more difficulty travelling.

I hadn't done that, what she guessed, but now I wish I had because disconnecting, even for a couple of seconds, had been wildly uncomfortable. I had felt stupid. Like, stupid enough to be clinically significant. However, it was over now, and it did tell me that there was something beyond just cold reading going on here. When I had disconnected, my otherself talked, and she wasn't "nearby", so there was no reading available by Gram.

"Okay, I believe you, I suppose," I finally said.

Gram seemed amused, "Oh, I am so heartened, dear. I'm not sure whatever I would have done if you hadn't." I snorted and thought, 'Alright, bitch, don't rub it in.'

How to phrase this? "I was pretty sure I was the only person on the planet to have a... special ability, so I was a little bit sceptical," I said, which caused her to hum good-naturedly. What was the fastest way I could get out of here? I never wanted to be around this woman again. I mean, I wouldn't mind speaking to her, but over vidcall.

Still, I was curious, "You're basically right as far as my power goes. You're not going to have some team of ninjas pop out of the wardrobe and throw a bag over my head, are you?" I sighed at the prospect. At least my body in space was probably safe. Although she might have been noted by observers entering and exiting my clinic, still tons of people did.

"No," she said all too reasonably, "It might be the smart thing to do, just in case you get killed out there in the world, but... no. You see, Taylor, I would like to live forever." The last statement was said with a wistfulness of a young maiden saying she wanted a nice husband.

"I can think of a lot of situations where you would take back those words," I said amusedly. Like being trapped in the centre of the sun, being transferred back in time and meeting Jack Slash before he died, and being kidnapped by Scavs. Any number of things.

She waved a hand at me, "Don't be pedantic, dear. It doesn't suit Annette's daughter. It doesn't suit you." Ouch, Grams burn, "You don't have some sort of philosophical disagreement on the concept, do you?"

I shook my head, "Only if it were limited to only ridiculously rich people. Say, Gram, can you show me a brainscan of you? Like, an MRI or something better?" If every member of her family didn't have at least two doctors and loads of preventive medicine, including routine scans, I would eat this teacup.

She raised an eyebrow at the first sentence and then tut-tutted the second, "Who knows what someone like you could glean from a scan of my brain? I'd rather not."

I rolled my eyes, "I can't glean anymore than an exceptional doctor could. If not you, then someone else that also has a..." I used scare quotes, "power."

She hummed and nodded, and I received an image file wirelessly. It was a three-dimensional scan of a brain, as I expected. I opened it and looked specifically for any anomalies, my power thrumming with curiosity. There was no Corona, of that I could tell quickly. Gram said, "This is Conor Astor. His power is he knows what the ultimate orientation of an object he throws will be."

I whistled, "He must be good at craps."

This caused her to smirk, "No. He only knows the orientation of an object that will fall after he throws it. In most games of dice that I know of, you have to bet before shooting." She considered and then added, "Never play heads or tails with him unless you're the one who flips the coin, though."

Couldn't that be explained by super-proprioception? If I hadn't tested Gram here, this wouldn't make me believe it was a superpower. Just some freak quirk in the brain. "That doesn't sound very useful."

"It's actually one of the most useful ones in our current generation, Taylor. Your aunt has the power to know how many hairs are on someone's body," she said. Okay, that wasn't useful at all. I had heard of weird powers in Brockton Bay, but nothing like this. Parahuman powers always tended to have the capability to cause things to go terribly wrong in some way. Knowing when people were lying did sound like a very typical Thinker power, but it was clear she was the outlier. Parahuman powers always had the implication of violence, whether physical or emotional. Forget calling these "superpowers". They shouldn't even be called "midpowers," except for Gram.

Finally, she asked, curious, "Is there anything interesting about his brain?"

"I think he has a mutation to his myelin sheaths, but I believe this is a genetic alteration he received in childhood. It's quite interesting, but only because I hadn't considered this modification. Other than that, no," I stared at her. I was a little upset she had tricked me into talking in front of her before revealing the fact that I couldn't lie to her. I always liked having the option to lie, "Let's get down to brass tacks, then, Gram," I said firmly.

---xxxxxx---

Sionainn watched her granddaughter leave and summoned William and Cara back to her. Cara went immediately to clean the table while William arched an eyebrow at her. He asked, "You're just going to let her go like that?"

"It is what I agreed to with Annette," she said primly.

He snorted, "As if you wouldn't go back on that in a picosecond if you thought it was necessary. In fact, just inviting her here was going against your agreement with little Annette."

She waved a hand, "Yes, yes. Do you have the bullet points from the two observation teams again?"

"There is a bit more uncertainty due to the fact that she is likely using her own sleep technology. That said, there is a seventy-eight per cent chance that she and this 'Dr Hasumi'..." he used the air-quotes gesture, "...have synchronised sleep schedules. This would track with your speculation that she somehow modified Zetatech's neural implant architecture to synchronise and copy her mind into another body. Are you sure you want to let this kind of technology walk away? It would be like a second life, some might say."

She snorted, "It's worthless. Utterly. Why would I care that some copy of myself continued living if I died? It would not be me. Worse, it would know all of my secrets." She shook her head firmly, "Go and arrange the other meetings we scheduled today. I suppose we'll leave on the morrow, as planned."

He nodded, "You're meeting with one of the city councilmen next, Lucius Rhyne. And after that, a Militech VP. They're a bit nervous that you came to this city that they're trying to annex, especially with our ties to Arasaka."

She sighed, put out, "They're the ones that made us sell all of our Militech shares. Something about foreigners owning sensitive national defence infrastructure, if I recall." She waited until William left the room and then retriggered the privacy systems on the table.

This application of how to use her power she did not tell even other members of her family. It wasn't entirely accurate, either, but statistically, it was far better than a wild-ass guess. While focusing strongly on her sense of knowing, she said, "It was a good decision to let Taylor go to follow her own plans." She winced as she felt a slight headache and then nodded.

The truth of that statement was fairly high. Good. While she couldn't ask too many questions like this a day, as they caused headaches, they always helped her decisions when they were at this level of confidence.

The feeling wasn't objective. The knowing depended on all of the information that she possessed, but the power was able to collate everything she knew, including things she didn't even realise she knew, into a somewhat cohesive whole. The less she knew, the less accurate the reading would be. That was one reason she had invited her granddaughter to tea, as getting more information, even if it was information she didn't realise she had, always helped. That and she actually was concerned that the poor girl had hurt herself with some unreliable Zetatech neural implant.

Over the years, she had tested this part of her ability with Edgecrusher's assistance, and she was still over a standard deviation more accurate than the AI himself in prognosticating, even if she couldn't do it as often as he could. He was a prognosticating machine, literally.

Speaking of which, she pulled up some information from the AI. It made suggestions for decisions she could make, but she always would go over all of the information herself, at least what she could. She had numerous choices to make every day, and she always spent at least a little time looking at the underlying reasons for the suggestions.

It would be the height of irony if she outsourced all of her decision-making to a hyper-competent subordinate, just like the Astors had done with her. She wasn't about to let that happen. If the AIs behind the Blackwall took over someday, they would have to work for it, just as she had. She wasn't just going to hand everything to them on a silver platter.

She sighed in contentment as the world passed slowly around her. Advances in technology were truly great. She had recently upgraded her Kerenzikov system and now could get an hour's work done in a little more than ten minutes, which was fifteen per cent improved from the last version. Stealing more time from the day really was wondrous. As she worked, she thought about what William had said. He hadn't been entirely wrong, even as impertinent as he was.

She discounted the utility of a copy of herself existing, in fact, she would immediately kill one if it ever happened. There could only be one Sionainn. However, she was self-aware enough to realise that a lot of people did not think as she did. In fact, this was the thrust of Hanako Arasaka's work on Soulkiller for the past fifteen years.

She wasn't supposed to know about that research, though. Was the filial daughter attempting to seize immortality for her father? The girl was a genius netrunner and programmer and, despite everything, certainly seemed to love her father. It was a shame that poor Saburo was a bit too old compared to herself.

She was confident that even if Taylor didn't solve this issue herself with her Astor-family power of knowing biology that there was a very high percentage chance that existing life-extension technology would advance enough while she was still alive that she would still end up being functionally immortal. In this way, what she asked of Taylor was merely a hedge.

Both Edgecrusher and her own estimates had this breakthrough happening in the next fifty to seventy-five years. Saburo might not last that long, despite everything done to save him. Even if you could slow the process, your brain would still age, regardless of how young your body was.

If anything, it might be better for everyone involved if little Taylor only produced competing golden apples once old Saburo shuffled off this mortal coil himself. The man was a bit much. He reminded her of those last few samurai that lived after the Meiji restoration in Japan as a man-out-of-time. For Danu's sake, the living fossil had fought in World War Two.

She hummed and decided to use another question, "Taylor collaborating with Hanako or Arasaka in general, will appreciably extend Saburo Arasaka's life, or alternatively allow a copy to live as him after he passed away."

She winced at the increased headache but still smiled.

---xxxxxx---

Things could have gone much worse. I had been expecting them to go much worse. She had offered for me to "return to the family" if I wanted, but I was pretty sure that would only limit me.

In exchange for letting me go my own way, she wanted functional biological immortality within twenty-five years. Easily achievable. It was kind of fortunate that I hadn't actually solved that problem yet, even if I was a lot closer than she likely thought I was. I could use shades of the truth to, hopefully, bypass her truth sense, and she didn't remark on my statements about how I was working on such things but didn't expect to succeed soon. The only reason I didn't expect that was I immediately changed my priorities to put that on the back burner.

She was a little perplexed at my idea of releasing such a thing to the world at large. It was my opinion that we could easily house an order of magnitude more people on this planet in utter luxury if we, as a society, had the will to do so, and that didn't even include all of the construction in space. Space would be where true growth happened in the next one hundred years, I was sure. We, as a species, needed more people. Every time a person was born, there was a chance that he or she was a genius. Singular geniuses did more to advance technology than teams of researchers, in my opinion, so the more people around, the better. It sounded hokey, but people were one of our greatest resources.

She laughed at me and called me a communist jokingly. A communist? I preferred to think of myself as an optimist. Besides, I was by definition in the capitalist social caste, as I owned most of the means of my own production, so it wasn't like I was out to empower revolutionaries whose first step would be to guillotine me. I just wanted everything to be just a little better everywhere. Was that so much to ask?