I build a spreadsheet.
Three columns — Date, Method, Result — and a formula in the Result column that calculates Infamy-per-attempt, because if I’m going to learn to terrify people I’m going to do it with data. Nobody’s asked me for anything in weeks, which is roughly half the problem, but the spreadsheet exists now and it’s color-coded and I’ve already entered a header row, and the header row is formatted in bold, and I’ve spent more time on the formatting than on any of the actual attempts, which tells you something about me that I’d rather not examine.
Infamy 11.
I’ve been looking at that number for two weeks. Eleven is not a villain’s Infamy. Eleven is the civic-threat equivalent of an unsigned petition. Eleven means the Registry has cataloged everything I’ve done since registering and concluded that I generate roughly the same amount of public unease as a pothole that’s been reported but not yet scheduled for repair. It isn’t inaccurate. It’s insufficient. I live in the distance between those two words.
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NOTICE OF PERIODIC ASSESSMENT
Theodore Calamity
Provisional Class: Petty Nuisance
Current Infamy: 11
Threat Classification: Irritant
NOTE: Infamy has not increased in 14 days.
Consider filing Form 11-C (Request for Menace
Consultation) with your regional League liaison.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Menace Consultation. The Registry thinks I need a tutor.
I close the notification and type ATTEMPT 1 into the spreadsheet.
The plan is simple. The plan is always simple. I’m going to go out into the city and be frightening, on purpose, with intent, until the number moves. I’m going to approach this the way I approach everything — as an engineering problem with measurable inputs and a desired output — and if Marisol were here she’d say that treating human fear as an engineering problem is exactly the kind of thing that guarantees I’ll never produce any, and Marisol isn’t wrong about most things. She also doesn’t have to file quarterly progress reports with a classification system that considers her emotionally negligible.
I’m going to be scary. I’ve made a spreadsheet about it.
That’s as ready as I get.
* * *
Looming doesn’t work.
I try it four times — alley behind the pump house, the sidewalk outside the bodega on Trent, the second level of the Decker Street parking garage where the motion sensors haven’t worked since the infrastructure budget got reclassified, and a park at dusk near the overpass on Ridgemont. Four locations. Mask on. Arms folded. Posture maximized.
The woman in the alley asks if I need directions. The man at the bodega says “Evening” and holds the door. The parking garage is empty. The park attempt ends when a jogger slows down, pulls out an earbud, and says, “Hey — you doing okay? You’re standing really still.”
I was looming. I’d rehearsed it. Six watched the whole rehearsal in the pump house and offered a single word of feedback — “Big” — which is technically diagnostic, though not in any direction I can use.
Method: Looming. Result: Concern.
Whispering goes worse.
I corner a clerk at the hardware store on Greenleaf — not the good hardware store, the one that never has the right washers — and I lean across the counter and I whisper my demands, which are that this city acknowledge the structural negligence of its eastern water grid, and the clerk leans in too, because apparently whispering is an invitation to collaborate, and he cups his ear and says, “Sorry, what?” and I say it again, lower, and he says, “Buddy, I’ve got tinnitus in both ears, you’re gonna have to project.”
I project. He gives me a phone number for the city’s infrastructure complaint line. It’s the right number. I’ve already called it. They put me on hold for forty minutes and the line disconnected.
Method: Whispering. Result: Customer service referral.
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NOTICE OF ASSESSMENT
SKILL: Intimidation (Unregistered)
ATTEMPTS LOGGED: 6
CIVILIAN FEAR RESPONSE: None detected.
RECOMMENDATION: Current methodology is generating
concern and/or sympathy rather than apprehension.
Consider adjusting approach.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
On Thursday I buy a cape. I buy it at the costume shop on Arbor Street, polyester, black, floor-length, and I wear it for eleven minutes in the pump house while Six hovers at ceiling height and watches, and I look in the mirror and I see a man in a half-mask and a cape standing in a decommissioned municipal water facility next to a drone that calls him Dad, and the cape bunches at the shoulders, and I look like a substitute teacher at a convention he only attended because he lost a bet. I return the cape. The woman at the counter doesn’t ask why. She processes the refund with practiced efficiency; she has probably seen this exact arc of ambition and defeat twice this week.
Method: Cape. Result: Refund.
* * *
Friday, I get one right by accident.
The parking garage on Decker — second level, motion sensors still broken, lights still out. I’m cutting through on my way back from the pharmacy because Mom’s prescriptions don’t pick themselves up. I’m wearing the mask because I forgot to take it off. I’m carrying a bag of medication and a voltage meter I grabbed at the bodega on Trent, and a man comes around the pillar at the same time I do.
He screams.
Not a big scream. A medium scream — out before the brain’s editing function engages — and he stumbles back three steps and drops his coffee and I say “Sorry, I’m just—” but the scream already happened, and five civilians on the level below heard it, and the Registry doesn’t care that it was an accident, because the Registry has never cared about intent.
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NOTICE OF INFAMY ADJUSTMENT
EVENT: Intimidation, Incidental
CIVILIAN WITNESSES: 5 (registered)
CIVIC FEAR INDEX: Marginal
INFAMY ADJUSTMENT: +1
Current Infamy: 12
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
I didn’t mean to do that. It counts and the deliberate attempts don’t count and I don’t know what to do with this information except enter it in the spreadsheet. Method: Existing. Result: +1.
Saturday night I stand outside a check-cashing place on Vine and I recite, from memory, the exposed conduit paths for six buildings on this block — gas, electric, water, sewage — and I name the junction points and the load-bearing walls and I tell the two men by the door exactly how many code violations are between them and a structural cascade, and one of them says “What the hell” and backs up, and the other pulls out his phone, and I leave before anyone gets a picture.
+1. Infamy 13.
I walk a block and think about Tier 3. What I could build if the gate weren’t locked — something that shows a district what I’m showing strangers one at a time. INT 24 or a certified invention. Neither one’s moved. I keep walking.
Sunday at a bus depot, different block, same approach. I know these buildings. I know the seams where the maintenance ends and the paperwork begins. When you tell someone the wall behind them is three deferred inspections from a failure mode they can’t see, something happens to their posture. A recalibration. The distance between them and the nearest exit becomes a number they’re suddenly aware of.
+1. Infamy 14.
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NOTICE OF INFAMY ADJUSTMENT (CONSOLIDATED)
EVENTS: 2
PERIOD: Saturday - Sunday
CIVILIAN WITNESSES: 9 (aggregate)
INFAMY ADJUSTMENT: +2
Current Infamy: 14
NOTE: Rate of Infamy accumulation has increased.
Filing recommendation upgraded from Form 11-C
(Menace Consultation) to standard monitoring.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Three points. I count them the way you count coins from a jar — one at a time, knowing the total won’t cover what you owe. Three points from eleven attempts. Seven failures, one accident, and three that worked, and the three that worked all had the same thing in common.
The failures were performance.
The successes were me.
(I’m going to think about that later. Much later. Ideally never.)
* * *
The bus stop is on Ridgemont, near the overpass where they never finished the noise barrier. The contract was awarded to a firm that dissolved six months into the project. The bond money — $4.3 million — went into a holding account that’s been accruing interest for nine years without generating a single actionable repair. I know this because I know everything about the infrastructure failures in this city. I know them by heart, chronologically, with a low-grade anger that doesn’t dissolve with knowledge because knowledge isn’t the antidote for anger. It’s the accelerant.
There’s one man at the bus stop. Grocery bag. Jacket too thin for the temperature. He’s been shifting his weight between feet for two minutes, which means the bus is late, and I know the bus is late because Route 19 has been running a 73% on-time rate this quarter and I’ve checked, because of course I’ve checked.
I approach. Mask on. It’s dark and the shelter light is out — the panel’s been reported four times, never fixed, I’ve read the reports — and my shadow hits him before my voice does.
“Evening.”
He doesn’t look up from his phone.
I try the voice. The low one. “This city has spent nine years collecting interest on a bond that was supposed to build the noise barrier over your head, and nobody’s asked where the money went.”
He looks up.
“The firm that won the contract dissolved. The bond is sitting in a holding account. $4.3 million generating compound interest while the neighborhood underneath it files noise complaints that get logged and archived and never read by anyone with the authority to act on them.”
I gesture at the overpass, the cracked median, the bus shelter with its missing panel.
“I’ve read them. Every complaint filed for this block in the last seven years. Four hundred and nine. Nobody’s coming. Nobody was ever coming. The money’s in an account that doesn’t appear on any public-facing ledger, and the reason you’re standing at this bus stop in a jacket that isn’t warm enough is that the people who are supposed to maintain the system that gets you home have decided the system works well enough for the people it works for, and you’re not one of those people.”
He takes a step back.
Half a step. The shift is small — the body deciding before the mind that the gap isn’t right — and his eyes change. Not panic. Something quieter than panic and harder to look at. He’s processing. He’s measuring what I’ve said against what he already suspected, and the measurement is coming back positive, and he doesn’t want it to.
He’s afraid.
Not of me. Of what I’ve said. Of the confirmation that the thing he’s felt every time the bus is late and the light is out and the noise from the overpass rattles his windows at 2 a.m. — that thing is real, and structural, and nobody with the authority to fix it has any intention of doing so, and a man in a mask just proved it with numbers he didn’t want to hear.
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NOTICE OF INFAMY ADJUSTMENT
EVENT: Intimidation, Civic (Verbal)
CIVILIAN WITNESSES: 1 (registered)
CIVIC FEAR INDEX: Moderate
INFAMY ADJUSTMENT: +1
Current Infamy: 15
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
His hands are shaking. I can see it — the grocery bag trembling, the phone screen jittering. It’s cold and the jacket’s thin and I can’t tell whether it’s temperature or fear and it doesn’t matter because I did this. I walked up to a man waiting for a bus and I told him the truth and the truth frightened him and the amber in my upper-right corner just ticked up by one and I feel like I’ve stripped a thread that wasn’t designed to be touched.
“Sorry,” I say.
He flinches.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—that wasn’t—” I stop. Breathe. The mask makes it loud. “Which bus are you waiting for?”
“Nineteen,” he says. His voice is careful. Measured. He chooses each word for what it might provoke.
“That’s mine too. It’s running late. It’s usually late. But it’ll come.”
We stand there. I don’t say anything else because silence after what I’ve said is just a longer version of saying it, and every second I stand here in a mask next to a man I’ve frightened is a second he’s going to remember, and I can’t undo remembering.
The bus comes. Route 19. Fourteen minutes late.
I walk him to the door. He doesn’t need it — he’s a grown man with a grocery bag and a jacket and he’s been navigating this city without my help for longer than I’ve been failing to scare it. Walking him to the bus is the only repair I can think of, and it won’t be enough, and I do it anyway.
He steps up. Turns, halfway through the door.
“Please don’t follow me,” he says.
I don’t.
He sits in the third row. The bus pulls away. The taillights shrink to points and then the street is empty.
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NOTICE OF INFAMY ADJUSTMENT
EVENT: Post-Intimidation Assistance (Unsolicited)
CATEGORY: Conduct Unbecoming a Registered Villain
CIVILIAN IMPACT: Reassurance (Moderate)
INFAMY ADJUSTMENT: -1
Current Infamy: 14
NOTE: Escorting the subject of a successful
intimidation to public transportation is
inconsistent with the sustained fear response
required for Infamy retention. Adjustment has
been applied retroactively.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
The amber gives and the amber takes. In a single evening, the same system that rewarded me for frightening a man has penalized me for making sure he got home.
I walk back to the pump house. Eleven blocks. The lenses fog. Same as every time.
Six’s running its patrol loop — figure-eight between the intake manifold and the generator housing, every ninety seconds, the route I programmed and haven’t changed because Six hasn’t asked and I haven’t thought to. The pump house is dark except for the workbench lamp and the status lights on the monitoring array and the faint amber glow of the notification I haven’t dismissed.
“Dad,” Six says. It says this every time I come home. I haven’t filed the form to update its designation protocols. I should. The form exists. I know the form number.
I sit down at the workbench.
I open the spreadsheet. Date, Method, Result. Eleven rows. Three points. A success rate of 27%, if I’m being generous — and I’m not, because the 27% includes the parking garage accident, and the parking garage accident was me forgetting to take off a mask, which is not a methodology.
I delete the formula column.
The data already told me the answer. The looming didn’t work and the whispering didn’t work and the cape was a loss I’m going to process on my own time, and the things that worked — the check-cashing place, the bus depot, the bus stop — had one thing in common: I was telling the truth. Not performing menace. Not rehearsing posture in a bathroom mirror while a drone said “Big.” I was telling people how things actually work, and how things actually work is frightening, and I meant it, and the meaning is what they heard.
Three points. I’ll keep counting them.
And the count says this: I’m going to have to become someone who tells the truth and doesn’t walk people to the bus afterward. Someone who lets the fear stay. Someone who stands at the stop and watches the taillights shrink and doesn’t apologize.
I’m going to have to become someone else.
I sit there. Six completes four patrol loops. The amber dims but doesn’t leave.