I was like a sore tooth, she simply couldn't help but keep poking at me, not just because I didn't fit into her twisted world view, but because she wanted to prove to herself that she was immune to my bullshit thinker powers. As far as she was concerned they were just smoke and mirrors, and she wanted to prove to herself that she was the one who was strong enough to fight.
I'd noticed the flinch when I'd talked about her mother protecting her sister. I suspected that these days it was probably true, but less so when Sophia was smaller. She'd likely be wondering why she hadn't been protected when her sister was. What was less worthwhile about her? It was possible that some of her obsession with dominance was a bit of little dog syndrome. Little dogs barked the loudest, because if they could convince the other dogs they were bigger than they were, it effectively became true. They were aggressive because they were always afraid.
Or maybe I was just buying into the old stereotype that bullies all had bad homes. Emma certainly hadn't, even if her parents had been overly permissive.
All I had to do was let her come to me, and I'd chip away at her. It'd give her time to think about the things I said, and give her time to stew over them. She had to believe that she was making her own conclusions or nothing I did was going to stick.
On my way out of the testing area, I was joined by two PRT agents in full outfits. They both lifted their face masks to show me their faces.
I thought face masks that covered the face were a bad idea for henchmen; first, it made it easier for people to infiltrate your base. Second, it was easier for others to gun down people who were faceless; it was harder to kill someone whose terrified face you were looking at.
Normally I'd be able to go down on my own, but the Director had already discovered ten different moles. Most of the Empire moles were going to jail, but a couple of them and all of the ABB moles were being left in place. The information that was available to them was being carefully manipulated. Sometimes it was better to let the enemy think they knew things they didn't rather than create a blackout that would just encourage them to keep trying to add new spies.
That being the case, I was being escorted by agents from different departments just in case whatever moles hadn't been found yet had been given orders to capture me. It was believed that the Empire still didn't know I was a parahuman. The rumor that had been put out was that Rune had been in my house and had killed several of their agents before being escorted to the PRT and sent immediately to Los Angeles to be interrogated by Alexandria.
"You guys catch the game?" I asked.
They didn't even bother to provide terrible music on this particular elevator.
One of them looked at me and said "What game?"
"I don't watch sports," I said. "I just assumed that's what dudes said to each other. Isn't there always a game?"
The secret was to get them talking. It didn't have to be anything remotely like what you really wanted to talk about, but once you got them to talk about anything, they'd be more likely to continue.
"Well, there was an MMA fight last night," one of them said.
"Isn't that just a bunch of guys on the ground trying to choke each other?" I said.
"Whoa," one of them said. "It's obvious that you never actually watched a complete fight."
"A complete fight where sweaty guys roll around on the ground and barely do anything," I said dismissively. "At least boxing, you get to see something."
I listened to their protests as we entered the elevator, and I barely paid attention. The important thing was to make them feel like I was a teenage girl instead of some gang destroying monster. I was going to have to do it to the agents one at a time, but eventually I'd get there.
"Well, if I ever have to roll around on the ground with a guy, I'm in trouble," I said as the door opened.
Hannah was there in her civilian outfit, and I could see the guys beside me standing at attention suddenly. She was their superior, even if they weren't technically in the same chain of command, and it was likely that they were worried that my last statement had sounded inappropriate for ta fifteen year old girl to be having with two adult men.
"I'll stick to kicks and punches," I said. "And laser pistols if they ever let me have one again."
"There is some utility in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu," Hannah said, "And Sambo, but I'd imagine you'd need to be in better shape before you even tried boxing. I can take you to the range if you'd like."
The two men behind me relaxed.
"You're driving me?"
"Today, yes," she said.
"All right," I said. I turned to the agents behind me and gave them my most brilliant smile. "That's for the help guys."
Hannah led me to her vehicle. It was a black Toyota Camry, with a newish model. It wasn't so new as to raise suspicion in my neighborhood, but it wasn't the beaters that I usually went to school in. The windows were tinted enough that nobody would be able to identify me anyway.
I slipped into the passenger side door.
"I'm taking you to a safehouse," Miss Militia said, slipping into the driver's seat beside me. "Your father will be there too. The location is being kept secret from anyone but me, Armsmaster, and the Director."
"Who arranged for this?" I asked sharply. "Financial records are pretty easy to track, and I'd bet the Empire has people in city government."
"It's just a precaution," she said, ignoring my question.
Personally, if I was a gang lieutenant and I discovered that the PRT was buying property I'd want to look into it. Presumably they'd been smart enough to use shell companies, but presumably the Director hadn't been the one to manage the work, which meant that whoever had would be a potential leak.
"The property belongs to an old... ahem... "friend" of the Director," Hannah said. She carefully backed out of the parking spot and began driving through the lot.
"An old friend as in?"
"I didn't ask."
"Right."
I was having trouble imagining it. Maybe it was another person from a military unit she'd served in.
"But she had a key and didn't have to ask permission, so I'm assuming it was a good friend."
Miss Militia was keeping her eyes on the road. I didn't make a juvenile comment about how it was impossible that she'd been in a relationship. I'd seen pictures of middle aged people when they were younger, and almost universally they were thinner and hotter, with a much worse sense of style in terms of dress and hair. If the Director had been in the military, then presumably she'd been in excellent shape at one time.
She probably had only told me the information to keep me from worrying about the friend betraying us. The obvious implication was that the Director had an old lover who had lent her use of his house. That didn't really track with me. While I was sure that there were some ex-lovers who got along well enough that they could continue to share house keys, it seemed like most of them ended up hating each others guts.
It seemed more likely that it was an old friend from the military who had offered her a safehouse in the event that she needed a place to hide. If the place had a dialysis machine, it would almost confirm that it was meant for her. Otherwise, it might be a safehouse that had been set up by political allies.
We pulled out into the darkness, and Miss Militia said.
We continued to drive for a couple of minutes. In the darkness of the car, only the light from the dashboard, and the lights from the streetlights and passing cars lit her profile. She was tense and her muscles were stiff.
"This isn't one of those Old Yeller moments, is it?"
She glanced at me.
"What?"
"Old movie... kid gets dog, dog gets rabies, kid shoots dog. That old story."
She was silent for a moment.
"Why would you think that?"
"Well, there's a lot of stories about how Masters get "killed while escaping" a lot, kind of like cop killers, or guys who have sex with cop's wives," I said. "Or they get killed on the way to prison in attacks where the guards all mysteriously seem to be unhurt."
"That's not what this is," she said.
"You seemed pretty uncomfortable with what I did the other day," I said. "When I was a kidnapping victim."
"You had the whole thing planned out," she said. "If the ABB hadn't attacked the Empire van, everything might have gone exactly the way you said it would."
"Pretty racist of me to think that the ABB couldn't threaten white guys into working for them just as good as Asians."
A pragmatic racist was the worst kind, you couldn't just
There had been some confusion when the gunfire had started; some of it had been moles intentionally trying to help the kidnapping along, but it had also been agents who'd genuinely believed that the gunfire was due to us being under attack. There had been more of them than I'd anticipated, and they'd managed to pull forces out of line. They were going to prison, but it could have easily gotten me or Panacea killed.
"Precogs aren't that good. You knew they were coming."
"It was obvious," I said. "It's kind of like transporting people to the Birdcage. You know that if they have any friends they're going to try to break them out. Why don't you just teleport them, unless it's a sting operation to catch their friends. Even if it was, why not have them teleported AND have a big flashy transport set up."
"Why didn't you have yourself teleported to school?"
"I didn't think that was an option," I said. "I mean, teleporters who can move other people don't grow on trees, and most of the ones out there tend to be villains anyway. Try telling Congress that you just spent a half million dollars transporting a Ward who hasn't even shown any results to school and back every day for a month. Birdcage transports are important, and they don't come up very often."
"I'm sure they have their reasons."
"I'm sure," I said. "I can come to conclusions faster then normal people, but it doesn't mean they are right. Even if they are, there's always those things you can't predict. A man isn't paying attention and is arguing on his cell phone. The ABB has a mole you can't know about. No plan is perfect, right? I just do the best I can just like anybody else."
"I see a lot of you in myself," Hannah said.
"Sure. Beautiful, brown, excellent fighter, great power. The similarities are just uncanny," I said sarcastically.
"I had to kill when I was a Ward," she said. She still wasn't looking at me. "I'd killed before, but that was righteous justice against terrible men. This... wasn't that."
Now it was my turn to be silent as I studied her face. She was concentrating on the road and she hadn't looked at my face once during the entire trip. The area we were in had fewer street lights. It looked like we were heading for the outer edge of town, up toward the woods.
"The rules weren't as strict back then," she said. "We were the first, and nobody knew what to expect. There were... mistakes made. At the time it didn't bother me; I was actually praised for what I'd done and it wasn't until years later that I started to feel ashamed. I didn't feel much empathy back then; I think that to feel empathy for others you have to be able to be connected to your own emotions. I wasn't."
"You think I'm not connected to my own emotions?"
"Are you?" she asked. "I certainly wasn't. When you see a lot of horror, whether its war or abuse, I think it gets easy to detach from everything, at least for some of us."
"I see," I said. "So when you saw me in that state, it bothered you."
"I murdered the men who'd killed my family and friends, forced us to look for mines with our own bodies. Legally it wasn't even murder, and I never regretted it, not once. But the thing when I was a Ward... it was different."
"Because it wasn't a person who'd ever done anything to you? Just a... what, confused, scared kid?"
"He was a man," she said. "A man with a wife and kids. He was mentally ill and off his medications and he had powers. They gave the order, and I killed him without a second thought. I didn't learn until later that his wife had called to get him help."
So that's why she'd been so insistent on forcing me to see the victims.
"I didn't find out what happened to the family until years later, when I ended up in high school with his son. We... became friends. He'd had episodes of depression for years, and his sister had a series of relationships with abusive men."
"They didn't have therapists back then?"
"They barely have them now," she said. "Yamada is good, but the other three... aren't. The PRT picks a lot of people from the VA because they have experience with post traumatic stress disorders. What they don't have experience with is teenagers. But no. They didn't have therapists back then. We were supposed to be heroes, and heroes didn't have weaknesses. It was like they were buying into their own propaganda."
"And you didn't know to ask for help."
"I didn't know I had a problem," she said. We were stopped at a light, and she stared off in the distance. "And even if I had, I wouldn't have told anyone. By that time Behemoth had shown up and we were expected to fight and to show bravery. We were heroes, and heroes didn't fail."
I'd heard that the first team of Wards hadn't been intended to be put in dangerous situations, but once Behemoth had appeared they'd been thrown into the grinder like everyone else. There had been ten in the first class, and I really only knew of three of them who were still alive. Ms. Yamada had told me that traumatic stress was cumulative; it was a little like a boxer who'd taken a hit so hard that his legs went wobbley. If the bell rang and he had time to recover, he might be able to fight and go on. But if he kept getting hit, each hit afterwards would affect him much more than they would normally.
What had years of Endbringer fights done, not just to Miss Militia, but the other heroes who'd been to a lot of them? Seeing friends and comrades dropping around them, knowing that there was a good chance that this might be the time that they finally died.
A sense of helplessness was part of what created that stress; whether it was an inability to save someone else, or to save yourself.
"Did you think that I'd been forced into that situation, and that I wouldn't understand what it meant, like you?" I asked. "I mean, I've got Ms. Yamada, at least for now, and I'm starting to have friends. It's not like I'm planning to go rational all the time; that'd make me a psychopath."
It was the difference between me and Sophia. A psychopath ran cold; they were untouched by the things they caused and generally it was due to genetic causes made worse by environment. Sociopaths were hot. They were always angry and they lashed out. It made them poorer criminals and more impulsive; they were a lot easier to catch because of their tempers. They were created by their environment.
She looked at me finally.
"It's not that I was afraid of your power. It's that I was afraid of what your power might do to you."
She seemed sincere enough.
"Was this whole thing an attempt to apologize?"
"It might have been bad timing," she said. "Doing what I did when you were still traumatized."
She'd had her reasons at the time that had seemed reasonable to her, but she'd reconsidered. A normal person would have tried to explain themselves or make excuses, but she didn't. It still wasn't easy for her.
We were slowing down outside a building that was actually a little outside of town. It was a long ranch style building that looked like it had been built in the sixties.
"This place was originally in the country," Miss Militia said. "The owner left when the city started expanding too close. After the crash, the expansion stopped, but he never came back."
The furnishings and everything were likely to be dated, but if someone had been here to clean sometime in the last thirty years, it might not be a bad place to hide. There were no vehicles obvious, but the place did have a garage.
"Your father is here, and we're keeping a watch on your house for the next few days," Miss Militia said. "To see whether anybody in the Empire decides to come back."
She stopped the engine and opened the door, stepping outside into the night air. It was cold, but there was no snow. Walking up to the door, she rang the doorbell.
Dad answered the door after a moment, and I stared at the room behind him.
The floor was sunk down about three feet, and the whole thing had a real Hugh Hefner look. There were mirrors on the ceiling, shag carpet and the furniture looked like it was a combination of sixties and seventies work.
Standing in one corner was a Dragonsuit.
"Hello Taylor," Dragon said. "I'm to be your bodyguard for the evening. I've been looking forward to talking to you.""It's an honor to meet you," I said as Dad closed the door behind me. "I didn't expect to be meeting with the greatest tinker on the planet."
The face of her suit was a stylized dragon; it wouldn't give me any clues from facial expressions, and the body didn't move at all. Human beings, even when they stood still tended to shift back and forth, their muscles compensating for fatigue, gravity and all sorts of things. Her suit didn't move at all. It was completely neutral and it gave me no messages at all.
I'd have expected to hear motors compensating for the human inside if it was purposeful.
"This is a remote control suit, isn't it?" I asked.
"I'm a bit of an agoraphobe," she said. "And having multiple suits in multiple places lets me switch back and forth and makes me much more effective. The suit itself takes care of most of the functions and can run autonomously if I need it to."
Her voice was synthesized, and I suspected that she wasn't seeing me at all. I'd have been offended, but it was known that Dragon didn't go anywhere outside of her suits and that she didn't reveal her face to the world ever. It made sense that she would have remote controlled suits. There were Masters known to be able to control people over the airwaves through sound modulation, so everything she saw and heard were likely filtered by computer programs before she ever saw any of it.
It made her the perfect person to babysit me. She wasn't likely to have been compromised, her suit was powerful enough to fight off most of the capes in the Bay, and we had common interests.
"The truth is, I should have been in contact with you earlier. I'm one of the few Capes who has the ability to mass produce some limited Tinkertech, and yet I find myself excited by some of the work that I've seen from you. If you ever become unhappy with the PRT, the Guild would be happy to take you."
"Dragon," Miss Militia said.
She chuckled.
Her synthesized voice was good enough that a normal person wouldn't have been able to tell, but I could. It was designed to sound warm and almost motherly, but it was artificial and it lacked some of the cues it needed for real speech.
Was Dragon actually a fat guy in his fifties, pretending to be female? Was that still a thing online, or was I confused?
"I'm not really trying to poach her," she said. "But it's the socially expected thing to do, and the offer actually is real. I expect that we'll be working together a great deal, and besides, knowing that you have a way out can sometimes help you feel a little less trapped."
"Do you think I'm going to feel trapped?"
"While work can be enjoyable, there's a reason it's called work. Sometimes it's going to be boring. There will be times when you don't want to look at another circuit board or soldering gun."
"I don't think that ever happens to Armsmaster," I said.
"He's a Tinker," Dragon said. "His power pushes him to want to use it. But while people call me the greatest Tinker in the world, the truth is, you and I share something in common. I can't really create original Tinkertech myself. I am able to build on the work of others, but I'm more of a Thinker than a Tinker."
Right.
So of course, she had my ability and the ability to build on the things that my ability showed her. I couldn't help but feel a little jealous.
"So it makes you a little like a Tinker Trump," I said. "You copy the powers of other Tinkers."
"A bit. My work with the Guild and the Protectorate doesn't just offer me resources, it also offers me access to the tinkertech both of heroes, but also captured tinkertech from villains."
That would be more than enough to let her build practically anything.
"But I still suffer from some of the maintenance issues that every Tinker suffers from. I'm made some minor strides toward mass production of a very few items, such as container foam technology but without the help of my teammate Masamune, I wouldn't even be able to do that much."
"Masamune can mass produce Tinkertech," I said. "Why hasn't he changed the world?"
"His power is to build the tools that build the tinkertech. He still has to maintain the manufacturing devices himself, which limits how many production lines that he can open up," she said. "Despite what the media might tell you, we haven't got anything like what you have to offer. Even the minor things you've accomplished so far have opened up ways to improve supercapacitors to only being twice the size of normal batteries."
"Is that good?" Dad asked.
"Normal supercapcitors are better than batteries in terms of how often they can be recharged and how fast they are to recharge, but they are ten time the size of a battery with the same capacity. Getting down to twice the size is a major accomplishment."
"What are they used for?
It seemed that Dragon had been here long enough for him to get over any hero worship he might have had.
"They're used to deliver short term bursts of power for things like regenerative brakes, or short term energy storage. They can be used to stabilize loads in computers and in the power grid. It can be used in solar power systems."
"That sounds like a big deal?"
"My solution would probably only cost twenty percent more for a system that is twenty percent of the size," I said. "Which means that you could get five times the power for systems where size matters more than cost."
"The government is working on exoskeletons," Dragon said. "Primitive compared to tinkertech, but all human technology. The power source has always been the main sticking point. I'd imagine that the government would start throwing money at Taylor if she was able to do the same thing with batteries that she's done with supercapacitors."
"I don't know if I'll be able to do anything like that," I protested. "Sometimes tinkers cheat. I've found materials in Kid Win's gadgets that were originally something else, but they'd been subtly changed, presumably using some kind of power interaction. There may be some things that can't be replicated simply because of material limitations. Also I'd need full factories and the machines to build the machines to make some of the things. I've just done simple things so far, but I'm not sure I could build something that creates pocket dimensions or something as equally high tech."
"Well, that's the thing about normal science. You don't have to do it all yourself. Once you show it to scientists, and show them how it works, then they'll move on with refining it, and they may be able to make other discoveries with it. Tinkertech seems to be mostly weapons, or at least related to fighting, but once it's understandable it doesn't have to be limited to that. The same capacitor that was in a laser gun can help run a bus. The laser itself might be modified to create more precise means of constructing things. If you can't build a pocket dimension, it doesn't really matter. Everything you build lets others build on what you've done."
"So it's not just about equipping every PRT agent with laser guns," I said. "Although maybe that too."
"We found your session tonight to be much more helpful than your first session. Having you explain things to Kid Win as you did them made it much easier to understand what you were doing. I was reviewing the records while I talked with your father."
Dad looked startled.
"It's one of the advantages of being virtually present," she said. "I can multitask a lot more easily. It's not that I didn't find what you said interesting Mr. Hebert, it's just that I'm usually monitoring half a dozen feeds more or less at the same time. I'm better at multitasking than most people, but not superhumanly so."
Right.
Someone like Dragon would have to be incredibly busy. She wasn't just a member of the Guild, she also worked with the PRT, she supervised the Birdcage, she worked on tinkering Tinkertech that had universal applicability and she collaborated with Tinkers all over the country. The very fact that she was here with one of her precious Dragonsuits suggested that someone at least thought that I was important.
"I probably give a lot more information when I talk while I work," I said. "A couple of hours later memory starts to fade and you forgot what you meant to say."
"I've got systems that keep notes for me," Dragon said, sounding amused. "I'm sure that we'll be able to work up some things to make your work easier once you develop into the thinker you were meant to be."
"I'm sure," I said.
"I'm also working up a proposal to start a project to at least detect these thin spots you and Wayfarer have described. I've gone over every interview and every piece of evidence provided by you, Wayfarer and Kid Win. I understand that you're willing to work with Wayfarer?"
"She saved my life," I said. "Kid Win too. I'm sure that neither one of us will have a problem working with her. What sort of ideas do you have?"
"I think it would be best to start with thin spots to safe zones," she said. "I'd like to see if we can get radio signals through an open portal, and then we can send drones out to scout the local area. It would give us a baseline without having to fight off hostile inhabitants, and will give us an idea of what we need to do to find her father... or his remains."
It had been almost a month; if he hadn't been able to return by now, then he was likely either dead or a captive of hostile aliens. It seemed strange to call creatures from Earth aliens, but there didn't seem to be any other term for black eyed shark toothed people who weren't parahumans.
Of course, Ruth had told me that he was an avid outdoorsman.
"Is it possible that he didn't reach the school?" Dragon asked. "I'd hate to think that we were searching in entirely the wrong place."
"He usually took a mountain bike to the portal in question," I said. "Since it was too small to fit his truck, and it was quiet enough not to get people to checking the area due to engine sounds. She found his mountain bike inside the area of the portal. She also found his ATV beside the school entrance on that side of the portal. There wasn't any blood or anything that would make her think that he'd been attacked by a mountain lion or a bear. Everything was left where it was, looking like he expected to make his way home."
He wouldn't have wanted to regularly leave his truck behind a convenience store. For one thing, he'd have returned to find his hubcaps missing or worse. For another thing, people would assume that he was dealing drugs or engaged in some other kind of unsavory activities.
Her suit nodded.
"That's helpful," she said. "It lets us focus on the other portals. I'll get a list of the other portals that she's explored, and how far she managed to get. If there are a lot of trees, its possible that we might not see much with the drones, especially if the foliage is thick."
"She started with the ones that were closest to her classes," I said. "Her father would have been most worried about those."
While he should have been worried about the entire school, it was human nature to take care of people you actually knew before taking care of strangers. It only made sense.
"If we're ever able to get to see the patterns she sees with technology, I hope I can get your support to see if you can work out whatever patterns there are. If we can come up with a mathematical model, then we'd at least be able to survey all portals from the outside and dismiss any that aren't due to open for fifty years say. We'd be able to focus our energies on portals that open frequently."
"I'd be happy to," I said. "But I'll want a scanner for myself so that I can check over any place I stay. I'm a little nervous about this place."
"I think the décor would make anyone nervous," Dragon said, looking around. "I keep expecting to see Austin Powers or Rock Hudson stepping out."
"Rock Hudson?" I asked. "Wasn't he...?"
"A great actor," she said. "He had places like this in some of his old movies."
Right.
"You like old movies?" I asked.
"I think it broadens your perspective to catch movies from all eras," she said. "If you can understand the media that people watched when they were younger, the media that helped shape them, then you can better understand them. Besides, there's artistic merit in Singing in the Rain and Boys in the Hood both, despite being very different movies."
Hmm.
I'd heard that musical tastes were formed by the time you were fifteen, in which case I was screwed, because I didn't listen to a lot of music.
"Well, the place does creep me out," I admitted. "But my recent experiences with the thinnies just makes me paranoid, you know?"
I'd had a weird sense of uneasiness since coming here, but I was finding that I felt that way in a lot of places these days. I was starting to wonder whether being repeatedly taken through thinnies created a sort of sensitivity to them, something that could be learned.
My previous feelings had mostly been when I was in a state of high anxiety, but I'd felt something at school when I was passing through the hallway that had the thinnie that we knew about. The PRT hadn't done anything about it; it would have raised too many questions for them to have stuck a random pillar in the middle of a hallway, and Ruth had apparently assured them that it was a safe, monkey free zone.
"I can understand that," she said. "Certainly one of the things I plan to do once the technology is refined it to scan my lair."
"I think that the portal where Kid Win vanished leads to a hill that's covered in portals," I told her. "I think that's why the Elk people were so alert and aggressive; they'd likely had incursions before and were keeping an eye on that location. I haven't talked to Ruth about it, but I suspect that's why she was focusing on that particular thinnie."
"I've spoken to her, and she agrees with your assessment. She doesn't know why there are so many in one location, but she thinks that it makes that place in particular dangerous. She doesn't think her father would have gone up the hill, but she worries that he might have been dragged up there by something."
"Yeah. If you have enough portals, it doesn't matter if they're relatively slow to open. A hundred portals that open once a year might end up having one open a year for a hundred years," I began.
"Or a hundred open once every hundred years," Dragon said. "Or anything in between. I'd suspect that having a hundred open at once wouldn't be a good option for anyone."
"It'd be like Jumanji," Dad said.
It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about.
"Oh, right. Wild animals running through the streets," I said. "Yeah. Except instead of just lions and giraffes, it would be six foot scorpions, dinosaurs, weird alien humanoids with laser pistols, giant blob monsters and the like."
Dragon was silent for a moment.
"I think that if we develop tinkertech able to open portals that you should not try to mass produce it."
"Oh?"
"There are villains who would love to create devices that could open all the portals in a city at once," she said soberly. "Some of them would use the chaos to accomplish whatever designs they had while law enforcement and the Protectorate were distracted."
"Who would do something like that?" Dad asked.
"The Slaughterhouse Nine," Dragon said. "The Fallen. The Teeth. There are at least a dozen villain gangs, six national governments and more than twenty individual villains who would love to get their hands on this technology to use against the United States and Canada. There are many more who would use the technology to have places where they could flee from authorities or if they were bio-tinkers, to have places where they could experiment unhindered by authorities."
"Sometimes there are multiple portals to Earth Bet from the same universe," I said. "So if they started creating things thinking they were in a universe with one entry, it could get out in places they wouldn't expect."
"I'm going to encourage that we only develop technology to detect and close portals," Dragon said. She was silent for a moment. "But I fear I may be overridden. There's a powerful allure to having access to effectively empty worlds with plentiful supplies of rare earths, petroleum, and all sorts of things that have either become rare and costly here or are monopolized by hostile powers. I could easily see members of Congress arguing that we need to start a full resettlement project as a defense against the world being destabilized and destroyed by the Endbringers."
"Would that be terrible?" Dad asked. "Just abandoning this planet and having an infinite number of other worlds to expand to?"
"Maybe," Dragon said. "There are arguments to be made that just leaving makes the most sense when faced with an unbeatable opponent. But in the short term, the technology could and would result in endless chaos. My fear is that the government isn't capable of keeping the technology to itself, and neither is the PRT."
"Well, I suppose that's true," I said. "If the the PRT had operational security, I wouldn't be sitting in the middle of a sixties sex dungeon waiting for the PRT to catch people coming to my house to kill me."
"On the bright side, I understand that all the beds vibrate and some of them spin around."
"Did we bring sleeping bags?" I asked. "I'm sleeping on the floor."