Three days after I ruin the Bellweather Founders’ Parade, a soybean farmer in the eastern part of the county goes on television and calls me surprisingly considerate.
He doesn’t know my name. He doesn’t know I exist. He’s sixty-two, standing in front of a field that was dying last week, looking relieved and a little stunned, too grateful to feel guilty about either. He says, “I don’t know who did that to the parade, but whoever made it rain like that — we been in drought two years. Wells were goin’ dry. That person is surprisingly considerate, is what they are.”
Surprisingly. Considerate.
I watch this on my phone, on the floor of Storage Unit 417-B, where the door sticks at 73% and my Infamy — it peaked at twenty-one, the highest it’s ever been, the first time the number moved like I needed it to move — has been sliding in a direction I didn’t authorize.
The coverage has been running for three days. Not coverage of me. Coverage of the rain. Every local station, two regional affiliates, and a human-interest segment on a national morning show that spent four minutes on the drought and thirty seconds on the parade and zero seconds on the possibility that the weather event was engineered by a registered villain with a provisional classification he’d rather not discuss.
Nobody’s looking for me. They’re looking at the reservoirs.
The segments follow a pattern. First the reservoir data — graphics with blue bars climbing, the word RECOVERY in a font the station reserves for good news. Then the human-interest angle: the farmer, or someone like the farmer, standing in a field or next to a well or outside a feed store, saying some version of the same sentence. We needed it. Then, at the end, thirty seconds on the parade, which has been recast from a disruption into a charming sidebar to a weather miracle. One anchor called it “an unexpectedly wet start to a welcome change.” He was smiling when he said it. He was reporting a villain attack on a civic event and he was smiling, because the reservoir numbers were up, and the numbers are always the thing that matters.
Nobody’s mentioned a device. Nobody’s mentioned a thermal gradient inversion or condensation nuclei or the fact that natural weather patterns don’t produce six inches of rain across a fourteen-block corridor in eighty-seven minutes. The meteorology department at the university published a paper within forty-eight hours — I’ve read it; they’re wrong about the mechanism but correct about the impossibility, and nobody’s reading it, because the paper is seventeen pages of atmospheric modeling and the reservoir graphic is one blue bar going up, and one blue bar going up is worth more than seventeen pages of evidence in every system I’ve ever encountered.
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NOTICE OF CIVILIAN ASSESSMENT
EVENT: Bellweather County atmospheric event
PERIOD: 72 hours post-event
Civilian sentiment (plurality):
“Harmful/frightening” — 12%
“Neutral/unexplained” — 19%
“Beneficial/welcome” — 69%
Dominant descriptor (civilian-generated):
“Surprisingly considerate.”
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Sixty-nine percent beneficial. I built a device that ruined a parade and frightened two thousand people and the net public assessment, three days later, is that I did them a favor.
I didn’t do them a favor. I didn’t design for drought relief. I designed for disruption — maximum precipitation over a defined corridor for a defined duration with the specific goal of destroying crepe-paper floats and making licensed heroes look wet on camera. That it also broke a two-year drought is a consequence of the fact that rain is rain, and I didn’t think about what rain means when there hasn’t been any, because I was thinking about the parade, because the parade was the scheme, because the scheme was the point.
I didn’t check the agricultural reports. They were in the same folder as the operating budget. I didn’t read them.
I should’ve read them.
No. That’s the wrong lesson. The lesson isn’t that I should’ve predicted the drought impact. The lesson is that I should’ve designed around it — a different precipitation type, a targeted downpour over the parade route only, something that wouldn’t register as beneficial to anyone within a hundred-mile radius. The engineering failure isn’t that I built something that worked. The engineering failure is that I built something that worked too well, across a service area I didn’t scope.
That’s a new kind of failure. I’m going to need a minute with it.
* * *
I’ve had a minute. I’ve had three days. Here’s what I’ve done with them: I’ve watched twelve separate news segments about the rain. I’ve read the county’s updated reservoir projections. I’ve eaten cereal for nine of my last eleven meals, not because I can’t afford food — Capital is stable at $1,760, the medical draw isn’t due for two weeks — but because cooking requires using the hot plate and using the hot plate requires standing up and standing up requires having a reason, and the reason I had was Infamy, and the Infamy is going the wrong way.
Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen as of this morning.
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INFAMY ADJUSTMENT (ONGOING)
Contributing factor: Civilian sentiment (revised).
Bellweather County atmospheric event continues
to be assessed as beneficial by civilian plurality.
Current Infamy: 18
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Eighteen. The number is shedding points the way a roof sheds water in a storm I didn’t mean to make useful. I’ve checked it four times today. Checking it doesn’t change it. Checking it doesn’t slow it down. I keep checking it because some part of me believes that watching the gauge carefully enough will stop the pressure from dropping, and I know that’s irrational, and I’m checking it a fifth time while I think about how irrational it is.
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REMINDER: ATTRIBUTE POINT AVAILABLE
Source: Level 3 advancement
Status: Unallocated (7 days pending)
Current attributes:
MIGHT 4 / FINESSE 6 / VITALITY 5
INTELLECT 17 / PRESENCE 3 / FORTUNE 7
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Allocate within 30 days of level advancement or
the point will be assigned to your lowest attribute.
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There it is. One point. Sitting in the amber like a line item on a budget that nobody wants to approve.
I’ve been carrying this point for a week. I’ve been carrying it the way you carry a part you know fits exactly one machine and you haven’t decided which machine deserves it — except I have decided, several times, and then I’ve un-decided, because the decision is obvious and the obvious decision is the one I don’t want to make.
Presence.
The math isn’t complicated. I’ve run it. I’ve run it on paper and I’ve run it in my head and I’ve run it at two in the morning lying on the floor of this unit staring at the junction box on the ceiling that I rewired last month because the original wiring was a fire hazard and nobody else was going to fix it.
Infamy multiplier equals 1 plus Presence divided by 20. At Presence 3, my multiplier is 1.15. Every point of raw Infamy I earn, the system credits me 1.15 of it. That’s what I’m working with. That’s my conversion rate.
Vantage (and I don’t know why I’m thinking about Vantage specifically, except that I know his Presence is above 20 because his Approval numbers don’t make sense otherwise) runs a multiplier of at least 2.0. Probably higher. Every act of heroism he performs, the system doubles it. Every rescue, every press conference, every moment of eye contact with a grateful civilian — doubled. He earns at twice my rate for doing half the work, because the work isn’t the point, the perception is the point, and Presence is the stat that governs perception.
If I put this point into Presence, it goes from 3 to 4. Multiplier goes from 1.15 to 1.20. That’s a five-percent increase.
Five percent.
Five percent on the parade would’ve been — let me calculate — an extra point of Infamy. Maybe one and a half. Instead of peaking at twenty-one, I’d have peaked at twenty-two. An extra point. One point. One single additional unit of the only number that matters, and I’m sitting here seriously considering whether that’s worth the investment.
It is. I know it is. The math says it is.
But here’s the thing about five percent.
Five percent isn’t a number that changes your life. Five percent is the margin on a contract nobody reads. Five percent is the difference between a passing inspection and a passing inspection with a note. Five percent is a rounding error, and I know it’s not a rounding error, I know that five percent compounds, I know that over ten schemes and twenty schemes and fifty schemes five percent becomes the difference between Irritant and Neighborhood Hazard — but I can’t feel five percent. I can feel a four-point increase in my Ingenuity ceiling. I can feel the difference between a 68-point reservoir and a 72-point reservoir, because four points is a full component’s upkeep, and a full component’s upkeep is the difference between fielding five devices and fielding six, and fielding six devices means more complex arrays, which means broader effects, which means more civilians affected, which means more Infamy at a base rate that, yes, would be multiplied by 1.15 instead of 1.20, and yes, the multiplier matters, but —
But the devices matter more. The devices are the part I control. Presence is the part I don’t.
Presence is what makes Vantage Vantage. Not the reflexes — the reflexes are his classification, his registered enhancement, but the Presence is his business model. At Presence 30-plus, you don’t have to be good. You don’t have to arrive on time. You don’t have to verify whether the thing you’re taking credit for is the thing you actually did. You just stand in front of a camera and let the multiplier do the work, and the audience feels whatever the multiplier tells them to feel, and they call it trust.
I don’t want to be that. I tell myself I don’t want to be that. I tell myself that putting a point into Presence would be admitting that the gap between doing the work and being credited for the work is a gap I should bridge from my side instead of pointing at it from a rooftop in a storm I made myself.
Devices don’t need to be liked. Devices work, or they don’t. There’s no multiplier between the input and the output. I build a sensor and the sensor reads structural data, and the data doesn’t care whether I’m charming while I read it.
I pull up the Intellect projection. INTELLECT 18. Max Ingenuity goes from 68 to 72. Blueprint tier stays at 2 — I’d need 24 Intellect for Tier 3, which is seven more points, which is seven more levels, which is a problem for a version of me who’s earned his way past the word “provisional.” But four more Ingenuity is four more Ingenuity. That’s a sensor suite I can’t currently field. That’s a monitoring array that would let me read a building’s structural integrity from a hundred meters. That’s better intelligence, better targeting, better schemes.
There’s an alternate clause. I find it three cross-references deep in the Tier 3 requirements: Tier 3 access: INT 24, or one Signature Invention certified by the League Technical Division (Benchmark 8). I note it and move on, because Benchmark 8 requires the Technical Division to classify what you’ve built, and the Technical Division has never had a classification for anything I’ve built. Can’t certify what you can’t categorize.
Nobody ever built a career on five percent.
That’s not true. I know that’s not true. Every actuary who’s ever lived has built a career on five percent, and insurance is literally the industry I draw my metaphors from, and I’m ignoring my own figurative language because the figurative language is making the wrong argument.
Presence is the correct allocation.
I tap INTELLECT.
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ATTRIBUTE ALLOCATION CONFIRMED
INTELLECT: 17 → 18
Derived statistics updated:
Max Ingenuity: 68 → 72
Blueprint Tier: 2 (unchanged)
NOTE: This allocation is permanent.
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Permanent. The system tells me this every time, in the same font, with the same grammatical construction, and every time it sounds like a door closing. INTELLECT 18. Four more Ingenuity. Better sensors. A bigger reservoir for the one thing I’m already good at, which is building things that work, in a world that doesn’t reward things that work, in a career that’s measured not by function but by perception, and I just spent my one point on function.
The rational choice.
I close the interface.
I don’t think about Presence. I think about the sensor suite I can build now — a structural integrity reader, something that maps load distribution in real time, something I’ve been wanting to build since I first walked through the Rubble Coalition’s neighborhood and saw the hairline fractures in every third foundation. INTELLECT 18 lets me build it. Presence 4 wouldn’t have let me build anything.
That’s the argument. That’s the whole argument, and it’s airtight, and I’m not going to think about the 1.15 multiplier or the fact that Vantage earns double or the fact that five percent compounds.
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NOTICE OF INFAMY REASSESSMENT
EVENT: Bellweather County atmospheric event
Contributing factor: Civilian sentiment (revised).
Civilian plurality has reclassified this event
as beneficial. Prior Infamy gains are subject to
retroactive adjustment.
NET ADJUSTMENT FROM PEAK (21): -6
Current Infamy: 15
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I stare at the notice.
Minus six. The system didn’t even wait for the coverage cycle to finish. Sixty-nine percent of registered civilians have decided that what I did to them was a gift, and the Registry has revised its assessment accordingly, and my Infamy — my Infamy that I built, that I earned, that I watched climb on a rooftop in a storm I made while delivering a monologue nobody heard — has dropped from its peak of twenty-one to fifteen in three days, and I am sitting on the floor of a lair that fails nine of fourteen standards, and I just spent my attribute point on better sensors instead of the stat that would’ve made this number harder to lose.
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CURRENT STANDING
Theodore Calamity
Provisional Class: Petty Nuisance
Level: 3
Infamy: 15
Threat Classification: Irritant
League Standing: Absolutely Not
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Fifteen. Irritant. Absolutely Not.
Still Irritant. I was Irritant at two and I’m Irritant at fifteen, because Irritant is everything from zero to twenty-four, and I would need to sustain twenty-five to graduate to Neighborhood Hazard, and I peaked at twenty-one for ninety minutes and lost six of it to a soybean farmer who went on television and called me considerate.
Surprisingly considerate. Not even fully considerate. Considerate with a qualifier. Considerate with an asterisk that says “we didn’t expect this from a weather-based attack on a civic event, but here we are.”
I keep thinking about the Kessler Street water authority. Captive satisfaction: four point six out of five. Infamy adjustment: minus one. Nine people in a room, mildly entertained, and the system concluded I’d made them safer.
Now two thousand people in a county, genuinely grateful, and the system’s concluding the same thing on a larger scale. The pattern isn’t new. The pattern is my entire career. I do something that’s supposed to be frightening and it turns out to be useful, and the Registry adjusts for utility the way a thermostat adjusts for temperature: automatically, impersonally, without asking whether the person who set the thermostat wanted the room this warm.
I didn’t want the room this warm. I wanted the room cold. I wanted two thousand people to feel what nine people at Kessler Street refused to feel, and they felt it — they felt it for eighty-seven minutes, I watched the Infamy climb, I earned nineteen points in an hour and a half — and then a farmer went on television and reclassified the entire experience as a kindness, and the system agreed.
I close the notice. I open the allocation screen. I look at INTELLECT 18. I look at PRESENCE 3.
Presence is a stat for frauds. It’s the stat that rewards the performance of competence over the exercise of it. It’s the stat that makes Vantage’s 2.0 multiplier possible — Vantage doesn’t do more; he’s seen more, and being seen is the thing I’ve been trying to do my entire career, and I just spent my attribute point on not being seen.
A rational decision, based on an accurate assessment of my capabilities, leading to a measurably improved device-fabrication capacity, in a system that does not reward device-fabrication capacity.
I close the screen.
Presence is a stat for frauds. I’ll keep saying that. I can feel the sentence already losing weight, like a fastener that’s been torqued once too often, but it holds. For now it holds.
The door sticks at 73%. I don’t close it the rest of the way. I don’t have the energy for that particular argument tonight.