The kid’s sitting on the conduit when I come up the stairs.
“I told you to leave.”
“You told me that yesterday too.” She’s eating an apple. Where she gets the apples I don’t know — she shows up with one every time, like she’s got a produce supply chain more reliable than anything in my entire operation. She hasn’t learned yet that enthusiasm is a resource you’re supposed to ration. Give her time. “And the day before. And the three times before that.”
“Four times. I told you four times.”
“Five, if you count the one where you just pointed at the door.”
She’s right. It was five.
Birdie Lunsford is sixteen years old and has been present at three of my operations in the last month. Not participating. Present. She was on the sidewalk during the Kessler substation redirect, she was in the parking lot during the fiber-optic junction assessment — which isn’t even something I’m counting for scheme purposes, it was diagnostic — and she was sitting on a retaining wall eating an apple during the water-main survey that I’m still pretending was a hostile action.
I didn’t invite her. I didn’t recruit her. I don’t know how she keeps finding me, because I operate at four in the morning in condemned infrastructure under active surveillance, and she’s a sixteen-year-old with no enhanced abilities, no Registry classification, and no apparent reason to be forty feet under the Croton Aqueduct in a pump house that fails three of fourteen lair standards.
She keeps being here.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
INFAMY UPDATE
SOURCE: Accumulated civilian perception events
(Neighborhood Hazard territory, ongoing)
Infamy: 78 → 82
Threat Classification: Neighborhood Hazard (25-249)
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Eighty-two. That’s up four from the intake, which means my background activity’s been generating enough civilian perception to move the needle, which is progress, which is the first time I’ve used that word without irony in approximately six months.
“The pump house isn’t open to the public,” I tell her.
“It’s condemned.”
“It’s my lair.”
“It’s eleven out of fourteen on lair standards. You’re missing conference room, lighting, and thematic furnishings.” She takes another bite. “I read the League manual.”
“You read the—” I stop. I count to four, which is not a calming technique, it’s a load-distribution interval I use when I’m testing whether a structure can take one more thing before it fails. “How did you get a copy of the League manual?”
“It’s on their website. Behind a credentialed portal.” She says this as if credentialed portals are a mild suggestion. “Their password reset emails go to a shared inbox. I didn’t hack anything. I just asked.”
She looks genuinely proud of this. She shouldn’t be proud of this. She should be at school, or at home, or anywhere that isn’t a condemned pump station occupied by a registered villain, his thirty-one-year journeyman plumber, and a surveillance drone with a 340-word vocabulary who’s been saying “HELLO” at random intervals all morning because I muttered it in my sleep three nights ago and Six decided it was conversation.
“Hello,” says Six, from the far corner.
“Hi, Six,” says Birdie.
“HELLO.”
“He says that a lot.”
“He says everything a lot. He’s got 340 words, no volume control, and the conversational timing of a smoke alarm.”
She grins. I don’t want her to grin. I want her to be frightened, or bored, or at minimum slightly concerned about the structural integrity of the ceiling, which is concrete and rebar and hasn’t been inspected since 2014 and I’ve checked it myself and it’s fine but she doesn’t know that, and not knowing should produce some version of caution in a normal person.
She doesn’t have caution. She has an apple and she’s sitting on my primary conduit line like it’s a park bench.
Wendell comes up the stairs with a basin wrench and a cup of coffee. He looks at Birdie. Birdie waves. He looks at me.
“She’s still here.”
“I know.”
“You going to keep telling her to leave?”
“Until it works.”
“How long’s that going to take?”
Nobody raised that objection, so I’m raising it on their behalf: yes, I’m aware that telling a sixteen-year-old to leave has a documented success rate of zero percent across five attempts. I’m aware that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is a cliche that people apply to situations exactly like this one. I don’t care. I’m going to keep telling her to leave because telling her to leave is the correct thing to do, and the correct thing and the effective thing haven’t been the same thing for me in a long time, and I’ve made my peace with that.
I haven’t made my peace with that.
Wendell sips his coffee. He’s been working in the lower level for two weeks now, doing things to the plumbing that I didn’t ask him to do and that are improving the lair’s operational capacity in ways I can’t afford to acknowledge because acknowledging them would mean I hired him and I didn’t hire him. He showed up. He assessed the infrastructure. He told me my pressure differential was “an embarrassment to pipes,” and then he fixed it, and he’s been fixing things ever since, and the Registry has been watching.
The amber fires.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF REGISTRATION
SUBORDINATE: Wendell Parr
CLASSIFICATION: Registered Subordinate
ORGANIZATION: Theodore Calamity (Neighborhood Hazard)
Subordinate registered based on consistent
operational presence and mutual task coordination
within a registered lair environment.
Ingenuity upkeep applied: −2 (permanent)
Maximum Ingenuity adjusted: 66 → 64
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
“Am I in the system?” Wendell says. He’s looking at me the way he looks at pipe fittings — diagnostically, with his glasses slightly lowered and his head tilted two degrees left.
“You’re in the system.”
“Benefits?”
“None.”
“Pension?”
“No.”
“Union representation?”
“The Registry doesn’t recognize unions.”
He takes a long sip of coffee. Adjusts his glasses. Looks at me over the rim. “Worst job I’ve had since the Bronx,” he says, and goes back downstairs.
Wendell Parr has been a plumber for thirty-one years. He’s got a union card he keeps in his wallet behind his driver’s license. He can diagnose a pipe failure by sound at forty feet, and he once told me — without being asked, because Wendell doesn’t need to be asked, Wendell just tells you things, briefly, like a diagnostic readout — that the difference between a good plumber and a bad plumber is that a good plumber knows what the pipe is doing and a bad plumber knows what the pipe is supposed to be doing. He costs me two points of permanent Ingenuity and he’s worth approximately fifty.
Not that I can pay him. I’m seven hundred and ten dollars in the negative and his wages are somewhere below food and above the electric bill on a priority list that doesn’t have a top.
* * *
Birdie watches Wendell go, then looks at me.
“So he’s your—”
“Subordinate. Registered. Officially. Which means he costs me two points of permanent Ingenuity upkeep, which means my maximum usable Ingenuity just dropped from sixty-six to sixty-four, which means every device I build and every system I maintain is running on a smaller budget because the Registry decided that having a plumber constitutes organizational expansion.”
“Cool.”
It’s not cool. It’s the opposite of cool. It’s the administrative equivalent of your heating bill going up because someone moved into your building and the utility company decided you’re responsible for their unit.
She swings her legs against the conduit. It makes a low harmonic I don’t like — the mounting brackets are probably loosening, which I should check and won’t check right now because I’m arguing with a teenager who won’t leave my lair about whether the systematic erosion of my operational capacity is cool.
“You should go home.”
“I’m fine.”
“Your parents—”
“My mom works nights. She thinks I’m at Mathletes.”
“Are you on Mathletes?”
“I was. We had a disagreement about methodology.” She says this with complete seriousness, as if a methodology dispute with a high school math team is a normal reason to be sitting in a condemned pump house at ten in the morning.
I stare at her. She stares back. She hasn’t figured out yet that systems large enough to be indifferent will beat you eventually. I’m not going to be the one to explain that, because that’s a conversation that breaks something, and I build things.
“Go home, Birdie.”
She doesn’t go home. She finishes the apple. She puts the core in the pocket of her jacket — not a waste can, the pocket, which is a choice — and opens her backpack and takes out a notebook. Inside it, hand-drawn, are the schematics of my water treatment array from the Kessler seizure.
I don’t ask. Asking would constitute engagement, and engagement is how the Registry builds a pattern, and a pattern is —
The amber fires.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF REGISTRATION
SUBORDINATE: Birdie Lunsford
CLASSIFICATION: Registered Subordinate (Partial: 0.5)
AGE: 16
ORGANIZATION: Theodore Calamity (Neighborhood Hazard)
Subordinate registered based on verified presence at
3 or more registered operational events within a
90-day period. Partial designation reflects minor
status and non-contractual affiliation.
Ingenuity upkeep applied: −2 (permanent)
Maximum Ingenuity adjusted: 64 → 62
NOTE: This registration is unilateral. No appeal
process exists for unilateral subordinate
registrations.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
I read it twice.
I read it a third time, because the first two times my brain refused to process the words “no appeal process exists” in the context of a sixteen-year-old being classified as half a subordinate on the basis of being present — not participating, not recruited, not signing anything — present at three incidents she happened to walk past because she lives in the neighborhood and has no fear of condemned infrastructure.
“Birdie.”
“Yeah?”
“The Registry just classified you as my subordinate.”
She sits up straighter on the conduit.
“Partial subordinate. Zero point five. Half.”
“So I’m half a henchman?” Her face does something I’ve never seen a face do in the context of involuntary registration into a villain organization — it lights up. Full wattage. Every circuit engaged.
“You’re not a henchman. You’re an administrative classification that costs me two points of permanent Ingenuity and has no appeals process.”
“But I’m in the system.”
“You are two points of my maximum Ingenuity.”
She pumps her fist. She literally pumps her fist, and I want to explain how inappropriate that is — how being conscripted by an indifferent bureaucratic apparatus into an organization that is seven hundred and ten dollars in debt and can’t pay its existing subordinate is not a thing you celebrate — but she’s already talking.
“Does this mean I get a designation? Like a code name? Because I’ve been thinking about—”
“No.”
“What about a uniform?”
“There’s no uniform.”
“Six has a designation.”
“Six is a drone.”
“Half a henchman should at least get a lanyard.”
I pull up the forms database. Six hundred and forty-two form categories. Not one of them covers “undoing a unilateral subordinate registration.” I draft a formal objection on a blank page and submit it through the general intake channel.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
FORM SUBMISSION REJECTED
REFERENCE: General Intake, re: Subordinate
Registration (Lunsford, B.)
STATUS: Not A Form.
The submitted document does not correspond to any
recognized form category. If you believe this is in
error, please submit a formal inquiry using the
appropriate form.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Not A Form. I filed a formal objection to an unjust registration and the Registry — which classified a sixteen-year-old as half a henchman because she ate apples near my operations — rejected it on the grounds that my complaint isn’t a recognized category of complaint.
I file it again. Same result. I rewrite it with different language and resubmit.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
NOTICE OF ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE
Repeated submission of non-form documents may be
classified as a pattern. Patterns are subject to
registration.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
If I file one more objection, the objection itself gets registered. I don’t know what that means. I don’t want to find out. I stop filing.
I open the notebook. The left column has gotten longer since the last time I looked at it, which isn’t how columns work, but the point stands. Another subordinate. Another two points.
Registry: Max Ing. 64 → 62. −2. Permanent. Subordinate (partial, 0.5).
She heard the conduit bracket. By ear. From across the room. She was right.
“What’s that?”
Birdie’s looking at the notebook from where she’s sitting. She can see the two columns and the ruled line and the word REGISTRY at the top.
“Nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing.”
“It’s documentation.”
She goes back to her drawing. She does not push. She will, later. Birdie Lunsford does not let things go — she files them.
Birdie’s drawing in her notebook. She’s added to the Kessler schematics — the actual pump house layout now, conduit lines, structural supports, load paths. Some of the labels are wrong. More of them are right than I’d like. There’s a margin note that says “check east wall mounting brackets,” which is the thing I noticed about the conduit harmonic five minutes ago and hadn’t acted on yet. She noticed it too. By ear. Without instruments.
I don’t acknowledge it. Acknowledging it would be engagement.
“Hello,” says Six.
“Hi, buddy,” says Birdie.
Six hovers closer. Six doesn’t hover closer to people. Six hovers closer to devices, structural anomalies, and occasionally food. I built Six. I didn’t program social behavior. I didn’t program approach responses to the word “buddy.” And here it is, hovering two feet from a sixteen-year-old who talked to it like it’s a person, vibrating at the low frequency it uses when its sensor array is focused on something it considers important.
“HELLO. HELLO. HELLO.”
“He likes me,” Birdie says.
“He doesn’t like anyone. He’s a drone.”
“He’s hovering.”
“He hovers near things that interest his sensor array. You’re a data point.”
She beams. As if “data point” is a compliment. As if being an unclassifiable disruption to my maximum Ingenuity is something to celebrate.
Wendell comes back up the stairs. He’s changed the basin wrench for a pipe cutter — which means he’s doing something structural down there, something I should probably supervise but won’t because I’m standing in my own lair arguing with a teenager about whether my drone has feelings. He looks at Birdie. Looks at me. Pushes his glasses up.
“She’s registered, isn’t she.”
“Half-registered. Partial. Zero point five. No appeal.”
He nods. Sips his coffee. “She’s not going anywhere, boss. Might as well pay her.”
“I can’t pay her. I’m seven hundred and ten dollars in the negative. I can’t pay you.”
“I know.” He looks at Birdie over the rim of the cup. “Welcome aboard.”
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
ORGANIZATION STATUS UPDATE
THEODORE CALAMITY — Neighborhood Hazard
Subordinates: 3
— Six (Equipment Asset + Registered Subordinate)
— Wendell Parr (Registered Subordinate)
— Birdie Lunsford (Registered Subordinate, Partial)
Total Ingenuity upkeep: −10
Maximum Ingenuity: 62
Capital: −$710
NOTE: Subordinate compensation is not tracked by the
Registry. Organizational solvency is the
responsibility of the registrant.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Organizational solvency is the responsibility of the registrant. I’m seven hundred and ten dollars in debt, my maximum Ingenuity is sixty-two and falling, I’ve got three subordinates — one I built, one who showed up, and one who was registered because the Registry decided that eating fruit near a villain constitutes a pattern — and not one of them is going anywhere.
(She drew the load paths from memory. I close the notebook and hand it back.)
Birdie puts the notebook in her backpack. She zips it. She swings off the conduit and lands on the concrete floor with a bounce. Nothing has worn her down yet.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” she says.
I know she will.