I’ve held the Kessler Street water authority control room for eleven minutes and I’m four minutes into the best monologue I’ve ever written.
Nobody’s listening.
That’s not a complaint. Complaints are for people who think the system’s broken. I think the system’s working exactly the way it was designed to work, and I’ve prepared fourteen minutes of material to say so, and I’m going to deliver all fourteen minutes even if the woman in the third row won’t stop asking about the water.
“Is the water safe to drink?”
“Ma’am. I have seized this building.”
“Right, but the water.”
“I am holding you against your will. My device” — I gesture at the array, bolted to the main feed line and doing its job flawlessly, because my devices always do their jobs flawlessly, which is the entire problem — “is altering the municipal water supply for this district. Four hundred and seventeen households. I have demands.”
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NOTICE OF REGISTRY EVENT
CATEGORY: Seizure, Municipal (minor)
LOCATION: Kessler Street Water Authority
REGISTERED CIVILIANS PRESENT: 9
STATUS: In progress.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Nine registered civilians. That’s good. That clears the five-civilian threshold for an Act of Consequence. That’s XP. XP isn’t Infamy, and Infamy is the number that matters, but XP is XP, and I am Level 2 and have been Level 2 for longer than I’d like to discuss in front of an audience that already doesn’t respect me.
“What demands?” says Helen.
This is Helen. Helen works in accounts receivable and introduced herself when I came through the door, which is not how a hostage situation works. I know how a hostage situation works. I’ve read the guidelines. The League publishes a forty-page best-practices manual on hostage scenarios and I’ve read it twice and highlighted it and the first thing it says is that the hostages are supposed to experience “acute civic stress,” a phrase that means fear and one I can’t say out loud because it sounds like something from an insurance brochure, which is what it is, because everything in this business is an insurance brochure if you read it long enough.
Helen is not experiencing acute civic stress. Helen is experiencing mild curiosity about the water.
“My demands,” I say, and I’m using the voice I’ve been practicing, the low one, “are that this city publicly acknowledge the systematic failure of its municipal water infrastructure, commit to a full remediation schedule within eighteen months, and — this is the important one — publish the internal correspondence proving they knew about the contamination and tabled it because the affected district doesn’t generate enough tax revenue to justify the repair.”
That’s a good demand. That’s a specific, actionable, documented demand with a clear public-interest justification and I spent two weeks writing it.
“That sounds really reasonable,” Helen says.
It does sound reasonable. That is the problem.
“Can I have a granola bar?” says the man by the fire extinguisher. I don’t know his name. He didn’t introduce himself, which is technically more appropriate for a hostage scenario, except he’s also not frightened. He’s been checking his phone every thirty seconds and the phone has service, which means he could call for help at any time, and he hasn’t, because being kidnapped by me is not a sufficient departure from his Wednesday to warrant interrupting whatever he’s reading.
“There are no granola bars.”
“There are. Break room. Behind the coffee filters. They’re the kind with the chocolate chips.”
I look at Six. Six is a — well, Six doesn’t exist yet. I’ll get to Six. Right now what I have is a device bolted to a water main and nine people who think I’m running a community workshop with above-average production values.
“No one is getting granola bars. This is a seizure of municipal property. I am a registered villain. My provisional class is Petty Nuisance, which — yes, I’m aware how that sounds, and no, I didn’t choose it, the Registry assigns provisional classes, and I have filed three separate requests for reclassification and all three came back stamped NOT A FORM.”
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SKILL ACTIVATION: Monologue (Lv 1)
AUDIENCE STATUS: Not listening.
INFAMY GAIN: 0.
NOTE: Monologue requires an audience that is
attending to the speaker. Current audience attention
is directed at: break room supplies, personal
devices, and a question about the water.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Level 1. It’s Level 1, and the tooltip says “requires an audience that is attending to the speaker,” and I’ve activated it eleven times and it has never once found an audience that qualifies, and I’m beginning to think the problem isn’t the skill.
I finish the monologue anyway. Not because anyone’s listening. Because I wrote fourteen minutes of material and I’m going to deliver all fourteen minutes, because preparation is a form of respect and I don’t care that no one in this room is returning it.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
The last four minutes are good. They’re about how the Registry has never once audited the difference between what a licensed hero does and what a licensed hero is credited for, and how that gap, the one between the ledger and the truth, is the gap my father spent his life trying to measure. Nobody hears it. The fire-extinguisher man is eating a granola bar he got himself during minute eleven while I was making a point about municipal bonding requirements.
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NOTICE OF ADJUSTMENT
EVENT: Kessler Street Water Authority, Seizure Of
DURATION: 14 min 08 sec
CAPTIVES: 9 (registered civilians)
Captive satisfaction rating: 4.6 / 5.0
Title awarded: [CONSIDERATE CAPTOR]
Description: Awarded when captive satisfaction
exceeds 4.0 during a registered hostile action.
Effect: None.
INFAMY ADJUSTMENT: -1
Current Infamy: 2
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Four point six.
Out of five.
I have held nine people against their will for fourteen minutes and eight seconds and they have rated the experience four point six out of five, and the Registry (a law of physics that classifies the entirety of human consequence with the emotional range of an automated toll booth) has determined that this makes me less frightening than I was when I walked in.
I stare at the amber for three full seconds.
“Did you just get a notification?” Helen says. “Your posture changed.”
“I’m wearing a mask.”
“Sure. Your posture still changed.”
“I’d like the record to show that I am holding this building hostage and no one in this room has expressed concern about that even once.”
“We’re concerned,” she says, and nobody in the room stops what they’re doing. “It’s just — you seem like you have a plan, and the plan seems well thought out, and honestly this is the most interesting Wednesday I’ve had in months.”
(That’s worse. She’s being kind, and I have no defense against kind.)
The 0.4 is encouraging. Somebody in this room doesn’t entirely like me. I’d identify them and thank them, but gratitude would probably push the score up.
* * *
I escape clean.
Also a failure. Nobody chases me. No hero responds, no enforcement arrives, the alarms are off because I disabled them twenty minutes before entry and nobody’s called because calling would require someone in that room to have felt something other than warm approval of my civic engagement.
I walk eleven blocks. The mask fogs my glasses when I breathe through my nose, so I’ve been mouth-breathing for the entire operation, which does not project menace. I switch back to nose-breathing now. Nobody’s watching. What’s the point.
Storage Unit 417-B is non-compliant on nine of fourteen League standards for a registered lair. I know which nine. I’ve memorized them. Number six is “adequately intimidating conference room,” which is a standard I didn’t know existed until I failed it. The space is 140 square feet. The rolling door sticks at 73% open. I’ve measured. It sticks at exactly 73%, every time, and I’ve tried lubricant, shimming, and a complete track rebuild, and it sticks at 73%, because the universe has decided my door will work almost completely and never all the way.
I sit on the floor and pull up the device readout.
It’s all there. The before-and-after on the feed line. Chemical composition, parts per billion, full spectrographic breakdown, because I build things that work, and I build them with redundant monitoring, because I don’t trust a single data stream.
The device didn’t contaminate the water supply.
It stripped forty-one years of lead out of it.
Four hundred and seventeen households. Lead levels that haven’t been this low since before the Registry arrived, since before the infrastructure budget got reclassified and the maintenance schedule was tabled and the affected district stopped generating enough tax revenue to justify the repair I just did for free, at personal cost, while wearing a mask and delivering a monologue nobody heard.
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PENDING VERIFICATION
EVENT: Kessler Street Water Authority, Seizure Of
OUTCOME: Under review.
XP AWARD: Pending (48-72 hour verification window).
Acts of Consequence affecting 5 or more registered
civilians are subject to verification. You will be
notified.
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Under review. I’ll get the XP. XP is morally blind. The Registry doesn’t care that the consequence was good. It cares that there was a consequence, and 417 households with clean water is a consequence by any metric, and the XP will land in two or three days, while I’m eating cereal or staring at a wall or doing anything other than the thing I did to earn it.
But XP isn’t Infamy. And Infamy is the number. The only number.
I’ve been explaining this to people who aren’t in the room. I do that. I explain things in empty rooms, at length, and I think if I just say it clearly enough, if I just lay out the logic one more time, with better transitions, someone will understand.
Nobody’s here.
I know the chemistry. I checked it twice. I knew what the device would do. I built it to exact spec, and the spec I designed would strip heavy metals from the feed line, and I built it and I tested it and I deployed it, and I told myself it was a weapon because calling it a weapon is what makes it a scheme and a scheme is what I need, and I told myself I didn’t know, and I’m sitting on the floor of a storage unit that fails nine of fourteen standards, and the door is stuck at 73%, and my Infamy is two, and I checked the chemistry twice.
I don’t move for a while.
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CURRENT STANDING
Theodore Calamity
Provisional Class: Petty Nuisance
Level: 2
Infamy: 2
Threat Classification: Irritant
League Standing: Absolutely Not
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Absolutely Not.
I’ve been Absolutely Not since I registered. Most provisionals start at Under Review, or Pending, or Conditional if they’ve got legacy status and a lawyer who returns calls. I got Absolutely Not. It isn’t even a standard classification. The Registry made it up for me, which is the closest thing to personal attention it’s ever shown anyone, and I can’t even be flattered by it because flattery requires someone to have noticed you enough to be generous.
My father was Commodore Calamity. He was the most feared arch-villain of his generation, and twenty-one years ago, a hero killed him, and I don’t know what level he was, because his file was sealed, and I don’t know what he was building at the end, because my mother won’t say and the League won’t answer and the Registry logs it as RECORDS PENDING VERIFICATION, which is what the Registry says when it has decided, in its infinite bureaucratic patience, to wait you out.
I was eight. I was under a building. Not his building. A different building, three blocks from the last documented deployment site of the Tidal Catastrophe Engine, which is what the press called his invention. The building came down. Not because of the Engine. Because things come down when nobody maintains them, and nobody maintains things the Registry doesn’t classify as Consequences, and infrastructure decay has never once been classified as a Consequence, in forty-one years, because the people who live with decaying infrastructure don’t generate enough civic attention to cross the five-civilian threshold for a registered Act.
I was under the rubble and I heard him. The hero. I heard him on the other side of the collapsed wall, and his hearing was enhanced (that was his thing, enhanced senses and a brand deal and a face you’d trust with your pension), and he heard me. I know he heard me because he stopped walking. I heard his footsteps stop.
And then I heard them start again, going the other way. Back toward the cameras.
He came back. Forty minutes later, with a crew, with lighting, with a photographer who knew his angles. He came back and he pulled me out and it made the six o’clock news, and he saved my life, and I’ve spent twenty-one years trying to explain to anyone — my mother, the one therapist I saw once and never went back to, the inside of this mask — why I’m not grateful.
I know why.
He heard me and he walked away. And then he came back when someone was watching.
That’s what I learned, at eight. Being seen is the only thing that saves you. I’ve been trying to make the world look directly at me ever since, and today nine people did, and they gave me four point six out of five, and my Infamy went down.
I reach up and close the rolling door the rest of the way by hand. It doesn’t want to go past 73%. I make it.
Some things you’ve just got to force.