Talyesin's Tales

Previously on Squirrelman: Sins of the Past -

Upon returning from investigating a secret lab beneath Downtown where a clone of the metahuman mass murderer known as Harvest was being gestated, Squirrelman and his colleagues discovered that not only were all the inmates of both the Kane Sanitarium and Bendis Correctional being freed, but the contents of the Department of Metahuman Affairs' Protected Registry had been hacked into and displayed for the world to see on the Maskwatcher datasite, rendering thousands of secret identities pointless.

The Crimefighters' League found its ranks swelling following an attack by a group of powered criminals calling themselves the Implacable Foes. During the ensuing few hours, the League managed to thwart several powered criminals' schemes, actions which earned them the attention of Mayor Elizabeth Ross-Carter.

Tracking Dr. Hi-Q to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town, the Crimefighters' League witnessed the explosion of the criminal genius' head. Despite this, they managed to obtain the access code and the biometric components required to shut down the Harvest gestation chamber.

Squirrelman expressed his concerns to Ragdoll that the recent series of unfortunate events seemed to be linked somehow, that they couldn't possibly be simple coincidence.

Investigating the wreckage of his apartment, Squirrelman discovered an unwanted guest: Derrick Wolfe, recent escapee from the DMA and STAR Forces. Wolfe insisted to Squirrelman that he had nothing to do with the Protected Registry's datahack.

As the full financial and legal ramifications of the datahack began to be felt, Squirrelman and Ragdoll staggered wearily into the lobby of the Sterling Spire...




Starring:

Matt Mattheson ......... as Squirrelman
Kimmy Sinclair ................ as Ragdoll
Rick Duncan ........................... as Ace
Lisa Dumont ................... as Physique
Anna Kimble ................. as Darklight
Stephanie Cooke ............. as Blue Jay
Jay Allen ........................ as Red Bolt
Mike Washington ............. as Dragon
Trevor Andrews ............... as Phenom
Jessica Wagner .............. as Rapunzel
Katie McCormick ............ as Superia
Hank Scott .................. as Powerband
Wayne Masters ... as Midnight Avenger
Jill Suzuki ........................... as Naiad
Hannah Cohen ................... as Psifire
Kyle Drake ........... as Troubleshooter
Jackson Archer ............ as Moonbow
Alistair Crombie ............. as the Mole
Cricket ............................... as herself

with

Reed Sterling ............... as Doc
Julia Sterling .......... as herself
Jeannie Sterling ...... as Zephyr


The next couple days go by in a bit of a blur.

The government asks Maskwatchers to take down their site until they can get control of the situation, but it's not hosted in the States so there's very little the government can do to enforce their request. By Wednesday morning, though, the two governments have exerted enough pressure on the site's owners to get them to take it down, but when they try, they can't. It's like the data is permanently posted to the site. Doesn't matter, really, since the damage is done, and it's posted on a hundred other datafeeds by then.

Kimmy and I spend our time at the Sterling Spire, co-ordinating with the rest of the Crimefighters' League to deal with emergencies and crimes and whatnot. And there's plenty to deal with, because even with us and the Sterling Squad and TeenSupreme and the others, all the solos and duos and trios out there, we've only managed to put about thirty percent of the escaped convicts and patients back where they belong. Which isn't bad for three days work, but that's still nearly three hundred bad guys and gals running around making trouble.

But that's not the problem, not really. I spend most of Wednesday talking to lawyers about getting my credit card company to re-establish my credit, but my case is nothing compared to the big guns out there. I'm just the former CEO of a middle-sized accounting firm. My secret identity being blown is a small matter affecting maybe fifty people.

No less than six CEOs of multinational corporations had secret identities. Twenty-seven national corporations had powered directors on their boards. The Masters Foundation isn't the only non-profit organization with a crimefighter in a highly-placed position. Midnight Avenger's name being attached to a charitable organization isn't exactly the image they want to project. The President has to suspend trading on the stock market to keep panicky investors from causing a crash.

Five senators had secret identities. Nineteen members of Congress. Two governors. Eight highly-placed military officials, including a three-star general.

Over fifty assistant district attorneys across the country are named on the Maskwatchers site, three in Action City alone. Over a hundred public defenders. Nearly a thousand cops, paramedics, and firefighters.

The media is the hardest hit. Journalists, photographers, graphic artists, news anchors. It's quickly obvious that reporters are slightly ahead of law enforcement officials when it comes to putting on the mask and tights. Despite that, or maybe because of it, media coverage takes a decidedly anti-mask attitude.

Personal ramifications are pretty varied. My uncle and cousin in California won't take my calls, picking up and hanging up when they hear my voice. Stretch tells me Mr. Accountant is under investigation by the IRS, which means a lot of our clients are suddenly antsy, a couple even looking to pull out. The IRS doesn't have a case against us, so if our clients can weather the storm everything should be fine. Kimmy's firm politely declines her offer to freelance consult for them. Beyond that, though, we're not too badly off. Not everyone's so lucky.

The board of the Masters Foundation asks Wayne to step down for the duration. Katie gets suspended from school, since her continued presence on campus represents a "clear and present danger to the student body." Mike's church, St. Gregory's, gets firebombed. Anna's store gets a bad infestation of imps. Jessie's restaurant gets vandalized. Jill gets ambushed by the Sharx in Little Atlantis, the underwater neighbourhood in Crater Lake, and winds up getting run out of her own neighbourhood. Rick disappears for a day, getting his family into hiding, shows up at the Spire Thursday morning with a black eye and not wanting to talk about it. Trevor's self-defence classes at the Y all get cancelled. Steph's recently-ex'd boyfriend isn't the only one who doesn't want to talk to her - a lot of her clients start playing phone-tag with her. Both Kyle and Hank go incommunicado for a couple days, not answering their nanobeads. I'd be worried but I spot them both on a newsfeed, so they're at least alive. Alistair and Cricket come back from Downtown, reporting massive UnSeelie looting all through the neighbourhood. Steve, who doesn't have any family and is new to town, gets captured by the Nine Winds Yakuza, only to be saved from being torn to pieces by a last minute rescue by Jackson. Jackson's army surplus shop gets assaulted by the Do-Badders, but two employees and three customers hold them off long enough for the ACPD to arrive. All the same, he shuts the shop down after that. And Hannah...

Hannah gets mobbed by the people in her apartment building. They don't take too kindly to have a telepath in the building, presumably reading their thoughts. They should have been warned, they say. They act like being a teep is the same as being a pedophile. She's beaten up pretty badly. By civilians. People whose lives she's probably saved.

It's like the nineties all over again.

Back then, the public's attitude toward masks wasn't exactly what you'd call friendly. There weren't as many crimefighters with public ID's back then as a result of it. With so many secret identities, people didn't feel they could fully trust the masks. Vicious circle. The media and the paparazzi really fed on that mistrust and paranoia, painting crimefighters as dangerous vigilantes, despite the Samaritan Act legalizing the actions of costumed crimefighters since the forties, despite the Claremont Act and the Protected Registry, despite Action City Costumed Crimefighter Identification Cards.

My predecessor got started as Squirrelman back then. Picked a great time to get into the life, what with the cops as like to arrest the crimefighter as the criminal, the media painting him as the cause of costumed criminals rather than the cure, the government not stepping in to do anything about it, and the public just as likely to spit on him as thank him.

Then in 1999, something happened. No one knows for sure, because it's like three months of reality got erased. Well, not so much erased, as a world-wide case of mass amnesia. No one knows what happened during those three months. All that came of it was a vague sense that humans and metahumans weren't all that different after all, that they could live together if both sides were willing to trust, even a little, and not give in to prejudice and paranoia. It took a while, but public perception eventually changed.

And now it's like we're right back there.

Reed comes home, late Thursday night. I've just come back in from patrolling Lower Uptown. There was a riot and several break-ins. The cops put down the riot and Ragdoll, Ace, Blue Jay, Showdown and I took care of the break-ins. We head back to the Spire and Doc's there with Julia and Jeannie.

"Hey Doc," I say, shaking his hand. "How're you doing?"

"Much better, thanks, Matt," he says.

"Glad to hear it, Doc," Kimmy says, giving him a hug. He looks as surprised as I feel - Kimmy's not normally so touchy-feely, even in private, even with close friends.

"I just needed to work through it," he smiles. "I haven't been that badly baffled in a long time. And of course the ramifications are... staggering."

"It's not your fault, darling," Julia says, rubbing his back.

"I know."

"So, what's the deal, Doc?" Steve asks him. "Who cracked the registry?"

"I can tell you how it was cracked," Reed says, frowning. "And I can tell you who I suspect is responsible. But, as always with this individual, I can furnish you no proof. It's that lack of evidence, coupled with the magnitude of the crime, that makes me suspect him in the first place."

"Who, Doc?" Rick asks.

"I'll get to that in a minute. First let me tell you how it was done."

I know Doc well enough to know he's going to tell us when he's good and ready, so I play along.

"Okay Doc, how was it done?" I ask.

"You mentioned nanites when we were there on Monday," Rick says.

"Indeed I did, and I was in fact correct. You all know what nanites are? Microscopic self-replicating robots? Usually with a specific, simple command or set of commands. Now, introducing nanites into the Registry is a bit of an impossibility, quite frankly, because even in the early eighties I postulated the possibility of nanites as a viable invasive tool to extract the data and established counter-measures. You see, back then-"

"Doc."

"Right, sorry. Suffice it to say that I had postulated the possibility and devised a counter-measure to the introduction of foreign nanites."

"What kind of counter-measure, Daddy?"

"Nanites of my own, sweetheart. Guardian nanites designed to patrol the systems and hardware of the Registry and ensure that no foreign invading nanites managed to get into the system."

"So how did the foreign nanites get in?"

"That's the remarkable part." Reed goes to a monitor and punches up a schematic. On the console there's a super-zoomed-in view of a computer chip. There's a little robotic sort of a spider thing crawling along the circuit. "This is one of my guardian nanites. It's programmed to patrol a certain sector of the Registry's circuitry. If a foreign element is introduced-" He taps something in and another, differently-shaped, nanite appears on the circuit. The guardian nanite notices it, stops, and suddenly a dozen other nanites appear at the edge of the screen, swarming the new nanite. "- then it's programmed to take appropriate action. But!" He taps the screen and the scenario resets itself.

"If the foreign element is not recognized as a nanite-" Something smaller than the nanite appears on the patrol route. It kind of looks like the nanite's leg. The guardian nanite notices it, stops, then continues to patrol. "Then the guardian would not react to the presence of something that might be a piece of lint or spec of dust."

"But what is that foreign element, Doc?" Steve asks.

"Ah, you see, that's the remarkable part I was talking about. It's part of a nanite."

"Part of a nanite?" Rick says, studying the console.

"Exactly. You see, the guardian wouldn't recognize only part of a nanite as a potential threat. And as each generation of guardian replaced itself at the end of its lifespan, the data it recorded during its patrol would be passed down to the next generation. You see, I hypothesized that someone might introduce parts of nanites to be reassembled at a later date, so I programmed the guardians to react should there be too many sudden appearances of foreign elements." His fingers fly over the keypad and seven or eight nanite components appear in the patrol zone. The guardian notices one, then moves on. Notices a second, moves on. Notices a third, then guardians swarm in from the edges of the screen.

"But... If the appearance of the foreign element was delayed until the guardian nanite had reached the terminal point of its lifespan and transmitted its data to its successor, then the inherited data, due to memory constraints, would contain the information that the foreign element in sector such-and-such had already been cleared as not a potential threat to the system, and subsequently the next generation would not increase its threat awareness level should a second foreign element be introduced."

"Jesus, Doc..." Rick says, "How long would it take to introduce enough foreign elements without raising the threat awareness level of the guardians for the foreign elements to be able to form themselves into nanites without setting the guardians off?"

"Excellent question, Ace. Once I realized what had happened, I knew that we weren't talking about a sudden incursion. This was the work of several individuals, all working together to introduce nanite components into the Registry over time. I suspect that the final components were only recently introduced, and that the signal to activate them was even more recently sent. Once activated, they may or may not have triggered the threat awareness of the guardians, but I suspect the guardians limited processing abilities merely discounted the individual components conglomerating into actual nanites. The non-threat components assembling themselves into actual nanites would have been discounted as a threat. However, I've no concrete proof of that. You see, once I examined the Registry microscopically, I only found traces of the foreign nanites. I suspect their command set was something along the lines of tap into the data, transmit the data, self-destruct. Nevertheless, discovering the remains of the invader nanites, I knew my hypothesis was correct."

"Okay, so, how did the nanite components get introduced into the Registry?" Steve asks. "It's not like anyone getting registered has access to the mainframe, right?"

"Hang on, one question at a time," I say. "How long, Doc?"

"I can't be sure, of course, but given the lifespan of the guardians, the number of components in the foreign nanites, I'd postulate that at least five years would be necessary to introduce the invaders without triggering the alarm."

"Five years?!"

"Talk about patient."

"Talk about long-term planning."

"Seriously."

"Okay, so, five years," Steve says. "Still doesn't explain how they got into the Registry."

"I'm currently working on the hypothesis that each of the nanite components was introduced by an agent, someone wanting to register, through some kind of aerosol delivery system."

"Huh?"

Doc's fingers fly over the keypad again. A basically humanoid form appears on the screen inside a basic room.

"Agent A shows up at the DMA to register their powers as a law-abiding citizen. Inside their lungs, they're carrying nanites. Those nanites are exhaled during the examination and categorization of Agent A's powers. They wouldn't be particularly extraordinary powers, either, since the more powerful a metahuman is, the more rigorous the examination and subsequently the risk of discovering the delivery nanites increases. So, Agent A and his cohorts aren't particularly powered, possibly not even powered at all. Nevertheless, they are carriers of the delivery nanites. The delivery nanites are exhaled from the Agents, delivery nanites with one simple set of commands - follow the signal travelling from the examination room to the registry, deliver the nanite components, and self-destruct."

"Okay," Ace says. "First question: How many agents are we talking about here? And second, how far would the invader nanite signal go, and why wasn't it detected?"

"As per the number of agents, I've no real way of determining that, but I suspect less than a dozen, but more than four, individuals would be required to deliver enough nanite components into the system over the course of five years. Your other question, which is actually two questions, I might add-"

"Darling."

"Sorry. The signal needn't go far - a few hundred feet would be enough for it to be picked up and piggybacked out on an ordinary cell phone line. Anyone working at the DMA on the phone at the moment of the transmission would be an unwitting accomplice. And since thousands of people work at the DMA, any one of them could have transmitted the data."

"Alright Doc," I say, "you've told us how you suspect the datahack happened, even though the evidence is mostly destroyed. So who's behind it all?"

Reed's expression changes from admiration to something colder, harder. It's not a pleasant look on him.

"The media - by which I mean Marci, our publicist - has been calling me the World's Smartest Man for nearly thirty years now," Doc says. "It's not, in the strictest sense, true. There are people who are smarter than I am, but, for the most part, they're powered, or non-human, or otherwise augmented. The truth of the matter is, I'm not the smartest man in the world."

"Who is, Daddy?"

"Dr. Mastermind?"

"Professor Synapse?"

"The Great Brain?"

"Dr. Hi-Q?"

We all look at Rick.

"What? It was a joke," he says.

"Mastermind is genetically augmented, Synapse is an AI in a vat-grown human host, and the Brain is an alien lifeform masquerading as a human," Doc says. "No, there's only one man naturally smarter than me."

He looks at Julia, who puts a hand on his shoulder and nods. Reed takes a deep breath.

"Who, Doc?" I ask. Gently, because it's obvious he doesn't want to admit this. "Who's smarter than you?"

"My older half-brother," he answers, teeth gritted, hate making his voice thick. "Kosmos Konstantinopoulos."