Perfect had dug out a big overcoat and a hat, which she made Ray throw on before they headed outside. The traffic was light and the skies were clear as they headed up the sidewalk in the direction of Harbor Hill Park.
They’d only reached the second cross-street when a black van screeched to a halt in the crosswalk in front of them. It had seemed, quite literally, to have come out of nowhere. The side door slid open. Ray braced himself for a hail of bullets, but there was only a single man in the van’s back compartment, sitting on a rear-facing bench. He was wearing a dark suit and mirrored glasses.
“Ms. Jones, we’re with the FCC, and we’d like a word,” he said. His voice was slow, with a viscous quality.
“No, you aren’t,” Perfect said, shaking her head.
“No, we aren’t,” he said. “We’ll still be having that word, though.”
She gave a “what are you going to do?” look to Ray, who’d pulled the collar of his coat up over his face and was trying to slouch low. He let go of the coat and grabbed her arm when she actually started to go forward.
“Perfect, you don’t have to…”
“Shh, relax,” she said. “This kind of thing happens to me… well, once. Kind of. But I’ll be fine. The kind of power I have isn’t under their jurisdiction.”
“Darkwell?” Ray asked.
“Daddy,” Perfect said. “No government spooks are going to disappear Senator Jones’s youngest daughter without an inquiry.”
She climbed into the van, and the 4B agent slid the door shut behind her. The van started to move as she settled into a seat across from him. He had picked up a file folder and was thumbing through it, not looking at her.
“Your father’s campaign going well?” he asked after a while.
“You know, as oblique threats go…”
“Just making conversation, Ms. Jones,” the forby said.
“It’s going fine,” Perfect said.
“Good, good,” he said. “Now, I wonder if you could clarify something for me, Ms. Jones… just what is the nature of your involvement with Mr. Raymond Vallenzio?”
“You’re investigating him?”
The man took off his glasses, blinked twice, and then folded them and slid them into his jacket pocket.
“Ms. Jones, before this conversation continues, there is one thing you should know about me,” he said. “I have a powerful and congenital dislike of cliché. It would be fair to call it, in fact, a loathing. When I took a job with a government agency that sends me around in dark-colored vehicles wearing a dark-colored suit, I accepted that my patience for such things would be tested, often severely. Nevertheless, Ms. Jones, I think you will find that this conversation will go much more pleasantly for both of us if you do not force me to say ‘I’ll ask the questions here.’ Do you understand?”
Perfect nodded, biting her lip to stop from answering with a question.
“When the daughter of a prominent U.S. politician begins playing around with telecommunication channels, that interests us,” he said. “When she begins hanging around with superheroes… albeit marginal ones… that worries us.”
“There’s no law that says a Senator’s daughter can’t wear a mask,” Perfect said.
“I don’t believe we are the only ones who would find this development worrying,” he said. “How’s that for an oblique threat?”
“You’re kidding,” Perfect said. “The men in black are going to tell my father on me?”
“First of all, Ms. Jones, we don’t wear black,” the forby said. “This is in fact a very dark gray. Second of all, we could go to your mother.”
“I’m an adult,” Perfect said. “You don’t have any right to…”
“The public has a right to know about rogue activity,” he said. “Sometimes that means putting out a press release. Sometimes it just means a whisper in the right ear. You may not have any powers, but if Mr. Vallenzio were under investigation, you could very well find yourself swept up in it… in which case, the FCC could hardly fail to notice your numerous violations of federal laws and regulations. Under those circumstances, you might appreciate the kindness of a quiet word to the senator instead of a front page headline. Do I have your attention now, Ms. Jones?”
She nodded again.
“You, along with two registered superhumans, were involved in an altercation with a series of low-level exotechnological drones on a Star Harbor rooftop,” he said. “My office tracks exotech chatter in the tri-state area, which is how we became aware of your spectrum-hopping phone… we thought you were them. The exotechs’ communication bandwidth has shrunk dramatically as humanity’s technology level has risen. They would love to be able to hide their networks among our own.”
“They probably should just use voice over IP,” Perfect said. “Or some kind of packet… sorry,” she said, putting a lid on the line of thought when she saw the look on the agent’s face. “Helping the alien overlords brainstorm is bad.”
“Yes, well, fortunately, the drones lack that kind of imagination,” he said. “But you, Ms. Jones, have it in spades. We track their chatter, but we can’t begin to understand it. Linguists, cryptographers, xenobiologists… nobody on earth can wrap their head around the code they use. We’ve worked out the basics of the trinary encoding, but in terms of understanding the language… nothing. The consensus has been that there is simply no chance it can be translated. It’s an alien language, used by computers devised by alien minds. There’s simply nothing on earth to compare it to.
“Then last month, our office in the Midwest picked up a transmission, It lacked the normal… efficiency… of an exotech transmission, and it was also much longer. The drones operate as a hive, relaying information in small chunks. There are no monologues in the hive. The conclusion of the head office: somebody was talking to them.”
“A fifth column?” Perfect asked. “Human collaboration? Wait, Midwest… Rhyme was released from incarceration by…”
“We have our suspicions about the identity of the correspondent,” the agent said. “That is not our concern at the moment. What this incident proves is that it is possible for a human mind… the right kind of human mind… to break the code.”
“You mean a Darkwell,” Perfect said.
“Not just a Darkwell.”
“I’ve never even been tested,” Perfect said.
“Don’t be naive, Ms. Jones,” the forby said. “Now, there is more than one candidate for this little project, but of them, you are…”
“The most promising?”
“The one who falls within my territory,” he said. “Whether or not you’re the right person for the job is not my concern. Because your success or failure will ultimately be written down in the ledger as my success or failure, I’m invested in your success. I don’t expect a miracle, Ms. Jones, but I expect something. A repeating pattern that can be understood. An identification of some numerical principle. Progress of some kind.”
The van stopped.
“So, this is the part where you make me the offer I can’t refuse?” Perfect asked.
“I warned you about cliché, Ms. Perfect,” he said. “And we’re 4B… we don’t make offers. Think about what I’ve said.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” she asked.
“Just think about it,” he said. “With a brain like that, I’m sure that’s all it will take. We’ll be in touch.”
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