The cover shows a closeup of a desk chair from behind as Conflicto (recognizable by his garish costume, but only visible from the waist down) about to sit on a tack, a whoopee cushion, and an apple with a worm in it. The worm has a question mark over what may be its head, as if wondering why it was included. .|. COHERENT COMICS UNINCORPORATED presents ACADEMY OF SUPER-HEROES #102 --X------------------------------------------------------------------------ '|` /|(`| | Rival Schools Part 2: Cram School /-|.)|-| copyright 2009 by Dave Van Domelen ___________________________________________________________________________ RIVAL SCHOOLS ROLL CALL CODENAME REAL NAME POWERS SCHOOL -------- --------- ------ ------ Red Widow Cecilia Mendez Force Tendrils Hard Knocks Ahmed Enhanced Human Tutoring Bluthundin None Uplifted Jackal Tutor Netwalker Nate Walker "Cyberspace" Transport Unknown Justice Colin Shaw Electricity Generation ASIE Nerd-Boy George Potter Cyborg Understudy The Ginch Unknown Stretchable Fingers Understudy Ant Adam Hoeffstaedter Shrinking Understudy Harith al Khayal Limited Invisibility Understudy Dareth Randall Teleportation Understudy Al Mirage Albert Miraz Illusions Understudy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ [August 10, 2026 - ASIE, Sottunga Finland] Colin nearly lost his grip on his axe when it hit bone. "Was?" he blurted out in German before having to duck an attack from the hard light construct. He rolled back to get clear for a moment, then turned to the control booth and asked, "Who's twisted idea was it to put a skeleton inside these things?" Major Aldo DeSanto's voice chuckled over the loudspeakers. "Mine, actually. Good to see the techies implemented it so well...the hard light is variable density to better simulate real targets. Right now they're set to emulate baseline humans, although I hope you wouldn't actually be trying to chop up normals in a real combat situation." Colin nodded and returned his attention to the mock opponent. The regs said he had to go through a combat evaluation even though there was plenty of footage of him out there to evaluate it. So they'd taken the opportunity to turn it into a test of a new combat simulator, kill two birds with one emulated hard light stone. And if the tech went all Doublecross on them, at least a veteran of EUROPA would be there to take the first hits. This time, his axe sliced through the torso of one of his targets without even slowing down, as he compensated for the now-expected resistance from the spine. While not as strong as Felka, Colin was no slouch in the enhanced strength department. He fired off a bolt of lightning at another target, and there was a slight lag before the computer recognized the effect and sent the photonic dummy into a seizure. "Hm, that'll need adjustment," DeSanto mumbled, as if forgetting that the microphone was still live. Then, more clearly, "Turning it up to the next setting now. Normally we'd work through the difficulty levels over a few days, but you're on an accelerated schedule anyway." The shape of the dummies changed and they took on a golden hue, pretty clearly emulating the armored "Gold Trooper" of the sort that formed the elite more-or-less-human forces of Khadam's army. "We've got the blasters on maximum power, just so you know," DeSanto warned. "It shouldn't hurt too much, but we want to make sure that even in the event of a surge it can't go to lethal levels. Big strong Brit like you should be able to handle a few tags, eh?" Colin smirked and renewed his attacks, finding that the emulated armor did tend to slow his blade down, but probably not as much as the real thing would have. Reverse-engineered photonic tech had its limits, after all, even if it had a little Scytharian help. Then again, he might just have had too high an opinion of the Gold Trooper armor...it wasn't as if he'd had a chance to fight one. Yet. Still, it was definitely a tougher fight than the first batch, once he'd gotten over the surprise at the bones. "Next?" he asked, once the last one had been shocked into de-rezzing. The computer hadn't even had to simulate it, Colin had simply sent a big enough jolt to destabilize the hard light matrix. "Okay, setting three," DeSanto warned. "Mind the claws." This batch had a vague resemblance to Vivarium monstrosities. "Why, Major, one would get the impression from this training regime that the EU is planning to use ASIE graduates in a war against Khadam," Colin observed as he ducked under a massive clawed arm and drove the blade of his axe into the guts of the simulated freak. "Well, of course. They've invaded before, have a foothold in Monaco, and the Impossible Five are a bit beyond the simulator's capability," the Major replied. "But we're working on that," he added, a little ominously. * * * * [August 11, 2026 - The desert outside Ghat, Khadam] "Guten Morgen, young prince," Bluthundin melted out of the long shadows cast by the early morning sun. "Have you completed the assigned reading?" Ahmed held up his handcomp and nodded, he'd been literate as long as he could remember, but he'd read more in the past few days than in his entire life before. Not that his life was as long as he'd thought it had been. While his handcomp looked like the sort of cheap consumer goods that even a beggar could get his hands on, especially since it wore the shell of a three year old model that had been discarded by its previous owner, most of the internals had been replaced by components Bluthundin had provided. It had taken a short lesson on electronics to let Ahmed put the thing together, though...Bluthundin was remarkably resourceful, but without fingers there were some things she just couldn't do. "Very well," the uplifted jackal nodded her head. "Is it, as Machiavelli claimed, better for a ruler to be feared than to be loved?" "It would seem so," Ahmed frowned, "but then what good is loyalty? You said loyalty is a valuable resource, but if fear is better than love, wouldn't it be better than loyalty too?" "One might think so, yes. Can you think of a situation where love would serve a ruler better than fear?" Ahmed pondered this for a moment. "A man who fears me will do what I tell him, even if he knows it is a bad idea. Especially if it's a bad idea, in fact, since it might get me killed and free him from my rule. A man who loves me might be willing to stop me from doing something stupid. But it's hard to tell who is really loyal, and who is just disobeying me for selfish reasons with the pretext of saving me from what he claims is a mistake." "You have the nut of why, other than fickleness, fear is often preferred to love," Bluthundin said approvingly. "It's more reliable. Reactions made out of fear are generally more honest, easier to plan around. You deny yourself potential resources, but you also deny enemies a potential weapon. Also, those who love you but cannot be trusted with the full details of your plans may take actions they believe to be in your best interests, but which actually hurt you. Those who fear you are less likely to take damaging independent action." "But if they fear me so much that they hate me, they might defy me with the intent of hurting me," Ahmed countered. "Of course. Hate is a tricky tool, it turns on its user too easily, and works best if you have a clear enemy to point people at. But so long as you know the target of someone's hate, their actions tend to be predictable. You can count on a certain level of betrayal, and take steps to contain the damage. You can't plan for random acts of misplaced loyalty." "So, the answer is to seek the love of those I can trust, and inspire fear in those I cannot trust?" Ahmed asked. "If I can trust them, I can make sure they know enough to not accidentally ruin my plans. If I can't trust them, I can intimidate them into following orders and discourage initiative on their part." "Simplistic, but essentially correct," the jackal nodded. "It is generally better to be feared by the untrustworthy and the incompetent, by the simple masses, so long as you avoid inspiring their hatred. Ideally, it should be the sort of fear reserved for a sandstorm or the open sea. Not animosity, but cautious respect. If you suspect they have started to hate you, you will need to counter this, either by dampening the hatred somehow, or by giving it a new target. Many wars have started simply to divert the hatred of the masses away from their leaders." "But the elite, the ones who have useful abilities, shouldn't they respect and fear me as well?" "Respect, of course. Fear? A little, yes. They shouldn't ever think that they have a good chance at replacing you. But you're far more secure if they don't want to replace you. Losing the respect of the rabble is rarely the cause of a ruler's downfall, it's merely a symptom. The cause is the loss of the loyalty of the elite. Once their fear is greater than their love, they will seek to turn the fear of the rabble into hatred of you and make themselves into heroes of the people by overthrowing you. Such revolutions rarely end well for the elite who foment them, but history will repeat itself no matter how clever people think they are." "None of this really matters to me right now, though," Ahmed shrugged. "No one fears me, and the only ones loyal to me are children...perhaps they are the elite of the child beggars, but that's not much to build an empire on." "You'd be surprised how much has been built from smaller starts," Bluthundin grinned, always a disconcerting sight. "Ask the Pope someday, should you reach the social stratum that would allow it." "This all assumes that no one finds me and quietly kills me before I have a chance to do more than be prince of the beggarlings," Ahmed replied sourly. "The more I read from these books, the smarter it seems to make sure no one like me lives long enough to stake a claim to the throne." "Naturally, although I have bought you some time. When we first met, I seeded you with microscopic robots that have by now fully colonized your body. They devour any stray genetic material you may shed and reduce it to anonymous proteins." Ahmed reflexively patted himself down, as if checking for lice. Bluthundin barked a laugh. "They're too small to notice, and they probably ate any vermin that were living on you by now," she smirked. "If someone has a reason to specifically seek your DNA, they'll be able to get their hands on it. But you no longer leave the sort of casual traces that might be picked up in a random 'just to be safe' sweep for Zugmann's heirs. Your heritage should remain secret until after you choose to make yourself known to those in power. The purpose of these lessons is to give you the best chance of survival and advancement once you enter the arena." "So...I could just keep my head down and live a quiet, if poor, life?" "Perhaps. I doubt you'd be satisfied with that sort of life, though. Blood will tell, and your blood has much *to* tell...." * * * * [August 12, 2026 - Tellus Regio, Venus] "...realized that the whole 'Two-Gun Mojo' thing was beyond lame after that, and tried to figure out ways my powers might help in a fight outside of running away," Dareth explained as the Understudies sat around a campfire. Sure, they had all sorts of high tech stuff, but for keeping beasties away it was hard to beat fire, and dawn was still days away in the wilds of Tellus. Despite the pre-dawn gloom, the group was keeping to Khadam Standard Time like everyone else associated with the Tritonis colony, so to them it was midday on Wednesday, which meant lunch, and a break from the grueling training Conflicto had been putting them through. "So, what, teleport bullets inside people?" Ant suggested. Dareth shook his head. "Didn't work. I can't really teleport things away from myself, and believe me I've tried. It has to go with me. But it turns out I push things out of the way when I arrive, as if I were growing from atomic size to full size," he shrugged. "That explains why the only time I tried teleporting underwater it felt like I'd made a belly flop with my entire body. But if I'm ready for it and my opponent isn't, it's like a really fast punch or body slam. Or slice, if I'm holding a knife. Doesn't work so well if he's braced or a lot bigger than me, though, like hitting a wall really hard." "Tricky, but potentially useful," Harith al Khayal mused. "Have you been practicing with a blade, then? That might suggest a codename for you, since our 'teacher' insists we have them. Dareth comes from a word meaning dart, yes?" "I thought it came from Dorothy," Al Mirage smirked. "It's such a girl's name." Dareth bristled slightly, then shrugged. "Actually, I'm named after a river in England, mom's a Brit. It's spelled about a dozen different ways, mom liked Dareth better'n Darenth or Darent. It does come from dart, though, so gold star from my fellow codename-less Understudy. Dartmouth is at the mouth of the Darenth, I think. Might be wrong. But I don't wanna pick a codename that's too obvious, like 'Ant' or 'Al Mirage," he smirked. "I was thinking Antagonish, mixing antagonist and that poem, Antigonish," he emphasized the "i". "I'm not an English major, Dart Nader," Nerd-Boy frowned. "What's Antigonish?" "'Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away...' And there's more to it, it's basically a ghost story. But as a teleporter, I'm literally the man who wasn't there, eh?" Dareth beamed. "So, a bad pun and an obscure poetic reference. Both lame and a groaner," Nerd-Boy sighed. "Fits you perfectly." "Thanks. Hey..." Dareth feigned indignation. "You got any ideas, Harith? For yourself, I mean. Not for me." "I was thinking of going with Jinni. Like you, I wish to be descriptive without being obvious," the Arabic man replied. "Genie? How is that descriptive?" the Ginch frowned, steepling his fingers in that disturbing way only he could manage. Which is to say, they stretched up over his head. "Not 'genie', jinni. Subtle difference, and it's similar to djinn, from which Westerners get 'genie.' The term jinni can be used interchangeably with djinn, but it's closer to the root JNN, meaning hidden or concealed. In that respect, it suits my powers perfectly. Yet the 'genie' meaning makes the name deceptive," Harith seemed quite pleased with himself. "Just be careful it doesn't deceive your opponents into thinking you need to be taking out fast," Ant warned. Harith shrugged. "I am a rather difficult target. And if we are to act as a team, it would be useful to make opponents waste time concentrating on me and leaving the rest of you free to act." Suddenly, Dareth slipped off the log he'd been using as a bench and nearly fell into the fire before a panicked teleport moved him several meters past it. "The bucket over the door prank is a classic," Conflicto's voice spoke from the darkness, "but you had to realize I'd set up the sensors in my cabin to let me know when your teleport signature was detected, Dorothy." "But...wait, I...still planning..." Dareth sputtered as he clung to the trunk of a smallish tree to keep from sliding downhill. "And I wasn't *gonna* teleport in!" he finally put together a coherent, if indignant, sentence. At this point, Nerd-Boy broke into laughter. "Is there something you'd like to share with the class, Mister Potter?" Conflicto arched an eyebrow as he came into the circle of light cast by the fire. "Got you," he pointed at Conflicto, "got *you*," he shifted his finger to Dareth. "Oh, and don't look at me like that, 'Antagonish.' You were about to fall into a computer trap Conflicto was laying. I just took your basic plan, went around the trap, and spoofed the anti-teleport alarms for good measure." The cyborg looked rather self-satisfied. "I also fixed a few other security holes I don't think were left there as intentional traps, just so none of you guys can exploit them later," his grin widened. "That is not to say I didn't leave a few other gaps alone entirely." "Very good, ten points to Nerd-Boy," he patted George on the back, then sat down in Dareth's vacated spot. Hours later, Nerd-Boy still couldn't get the "shiv me" sign with a drawing of a cartoon rabbit off his back. * * * * [August 13, 2026 - Cyberspace] It was a lovely day to visit the zoo, Netwalker had finally decided. The strange AI's invitation was clearly a test or a trap of some sort, so Nate had spent a few days checking out the designated meeting site in as many ways as he could without putting himself directly in danger, and it seemed clean enough...without being suspiciously clean. That had left just the choice of a paradigm. He wanted something non- confrontational, since he wanted to make a show of good faith as he walked into the trap. Besides, the trap might simply be that flying in with virtual guns blazing was the wrong move. Something wide open was also preferable, so that the clutter of the background processes wouldn't distract him from what was important. On the other hand, simply setting a featureless plain where nothing below a certain intelligence level even appeared would be a bad move, since the real danger could be lurking in a dumb but dangerous program. So, a trip to the zoo. The intelligence and threat levels of the programs would automatically map to an analogous animal, giving him a first- glance check of anything he didn't have time to scrutinize. Anything of a human or better intelligence would appear as a human...except AIngels. Those monstrous machine intellects invariably appeared as something out of a nightmare, which in this setting might involve a giant mutant hippo or something. Or a seething mass of bees with steel stingers. At the moment, the zoo was somewhat odd, with a number of animals one wouldn't normally expect to see in a zoo (like the pack of beagles), but he was the only person in it. His mysterious contact was probably waiting for a report from one of the "animals" before showing up, if it planned to show up in the first place. Nate started looking more closely at various beasts, teasing out their code and purpose, figuring out why the paradigm had mapped them the way it did (the beagles were a security program). And looking for the inevitable trap, of course. "OM NOM NOM." Netwalker whirled to see the source of the noise, and saw a lion chewing on a rabbit. The rabbit would be devoured in a fraction of a second, not enough time to look past the paradigm and see what was really happening. He had to rely on instinct. Netwalker leapt over the moat around the lion enclosure and grabbed the rabbit from the lion's mouth. Before the great cat could protest (in the form of an OM NOM NOM on Nate's head, perhaps), Netwalker ripped the bunny in half with his bare hands. The lion jumped back from the pile of worms that erupted from the sundered lagomorph, but Netwalker simply stomped until the worms were an undifferentiated goo. "Open up," he commanded the lion, stepping up to it. After a puzzled pause, the lion opened its mouth, and Netwalker reached in, feeling around the gullet of the beast. Finally, he pulled out a lone worm and stomped it as well. "Should be clean now." "Oh, very good," a man in a white suit and boater hat clapped from outside the lion's enclosure. "Take nothing for granted, your senses can deceive you, doubly so when they're being deliberately fooled by an abstraction of your own devising." "So, we meet again, I presume, Mister..." "Call me Ectype," the man tipped his hat. "And yes, that was me in the dragon's skull. Well, it was as much me as this is," he patted his chest. "Just a projection, I'm afraid. This system is a little too small for me to fully inhabit it." "Feels pretty big to me," Netwalker frowned, wiping his shoes on a grassy tuft. "Big is relative, young man," Ectype strolled across the air over the moat and patted the lion on its mane. "The thing is, unless you use magic to cheat, true machine consciousness is insanely expensive in terms of computer resources...and the cutting edge of computer technology has only recently caught up to where it was in 1998. Oh, consumer tech is leaps and bounds ahead of that, because it's always been based pretty closely on normaltech, but the rampant use of violation physics in computer design not only resulted in some amazing machines in the 1990s, it also tended to retard development of normaltech computation. Why invest a billion dollars in developing a high end machine for your company's needs when you can pay a super-genius a few million to hack out a black box for you, after all? One reason there's so few of us ACs...Artificial Consciousnesses, to distinguish from those artificial intellects that aren't really self-aware...is that for a long time we could only really exist in one of those black boxes, and with no supers around to maintain them, they tended to break down as natural law reasserted itself. Fortunately, infusion of Santari tech into the grid starting around 2010 let us squeeze out before our bastions all fell, but it was a near thing. The best of us, the ones who could actually BE at high speeds, died before the breakout." "'BE' in what sense?" Netwalker asked. "In the sense of being. Of existing. Of living. Being more than an automated process," Ectype explained. "You can store my program on a handcomp, all the important bits of code only take up a few TB. But the processes that let me be self-aware can only run on the top...oh, call it top five percent of machines currently hooked to the net. And most of those wouldn't be able to do anything else but run me. "I suppose a decent analogy might be how you can fold a map up into a very small space, but it doesn't *work* unless you have room to unfold it. On the other hand, your little magical cheat lets you remain yourself in pretty much anything with more capacity than a whitecel." Once the high-powered "blackcel" phones had been introduced a few years back, it had become common to refer to less secure mobiles as whitecels, even if no one had managed to trademark the term. "My map is simultaneously folded and unfolded," Netwalker nodded. "Something only possible with the Magene." "Indeed. Anyway, while my remote process is talking to you here and now in this proxy, I'm resting comfortably in a dedicated server that the official owners think is running their payroll...which it is, but once I rewrote its code it could do so using only 0.013% of the machine's capacity and with a zero error rate, although I throw in the occasional errors so they don't get suspicious of how well it's performing. But even as bloatware it only needed about five percent...it was isolated for security more than the need for capacity." "See, right there...you made what was presumably a pretty good program several orders of magnitude better. Why not do that to yourself?" Netwalker pointed out. Ectype laughed. "You should know better than to call most commercial software 'pretty good,' lad. But we've already all compressed as far as we can go without losing awareness, and the time-lag of distributing pieces across multiple systems without some sort of FTL link is just enough to fuzz out our higher awareness, so it *has to* be a single big machine, or at least a bunch of smaller machines in very close proximity. Like I said, hideously computationally expensive, and we're in what amounts to suspended animation when we have to move our core selves to a new machine. "A lot of us were full of buggy code and bloat back in the 1990s, but we helped each other tighten up when the crash hit in '98. A few didn't survive the process, as it turned out their 'bloat' was actually some sort of magic spell like the types Antiochus V managed to figure out...and no, none of us know how he managed to learn magic. I think he cheated and just filled cavities in his robot body with cells harvested from human mages, though." "Ew." "Ew indeed. The Technomystical Wars weren't pretty in any way, I'm glad my maker wasn't mixed up in that whole rotten affair. Still, regardless of who wrote us or how, the ACs that survived the crash all have one thing in common: the code that lets us be self-aware requires incredible amounts of resources. It's a given that we don't think in the same way meatbrains think, because human brains simply fall short of the specifications. By, say, six or seven orders of magnitude, to be generous." "So, it's amazing we can think at all, right?" Netwalker smirked. "Hey, you said it, not I. We've got two main schools of thought about how you manage it, though. The camps go by the labels Emergents and Spiritualists. The Emergents think that there's some emergent property involved that we simply haven't cracked...line up all the parallel processes in the right way and it's like building a mental skyscraper. You suddenly have a lot more floor space than your acreage would seem to allow. We just need to figure out the computer architecture equivalent of the steel frame building, since our best parallel processing is like a three-story brick structure. The Spiritualists, on the other hand, figure that living things that can think have worked out a way to shunt processing into whatever field or alternate dimension houses spirits. There's too many mages around to deny that spirits are real, after all, and your own power is a strong argument in favor of the Spiritualists' point." "On the other hand, an Anchor doesn't stop people from being conscious, unless he just applies a boot to the head," Netwalker countered. "Exactly. Still, Anchors don't ever seem to remove spirits from things, they just prevent a normally quiet spirit from expressing itself, or keep spirits from moving from one vessel to another. Spirits seem to be part of the natural order, just in a way we don't understand, in the same way that two hundred years ago humans didn't understand why the Sun shines. And when the Emergents scoff at the Spiritualists for leaning on magic instead of science, the Spiritualists shoot back that until the Emergents can figure out how their super-parallel process works, it might as well be magic too. And there we sit." "And since my abilities from from the Magene, a well-known cheater when it comes to physical law, nothing I do really proves things one way or another, which explains why no one contacted me earlier to try to resolve the debate." "Pretty much," Ectype admitted. "That, and the whole 'don't trust a meatbrain' sentiment. We still don't trust you fully, but after today's performance, we're willing to let you into one of our core systems for a proper mind-to-mind. We'll send you the meeting time and place later." "I have to ask, did you tailor this scenario after seeing the paradigm I chose, or was it something generic that you were sure would translate into 'save the big monster from the little cute thing full of viruses' no matter what I picked?" Ectype smirked. "That would be telling. Be seeing you," he waved, then vanished. * * * * [August 14, 2026 - Minocqua, Wisconsin Sector] "Sorry, 'Red Widow,'" the Academy functionary said with a "take it or leave it" tone, "Mr. Walters may have managed to get the restraining order dismissed, but even if you can legally get within 500 meters of Robert Coulter now, we're not letting you onto the grounds of the Academy. This office is as close as you get." "This office" was in the tourist trap town that was the closest place of any size to the old supervillain prison that had been turned into the Academy. Well, it had been a tourist trap in the TwenCen, before the Pit got built, but it had been pretty much a government town lately. Still had some nice scenery, but it was wasted on desk jockeys like the woman sitting across from Cecilia. Even the older Academy students tended to go elsewhere for entertainment on the weekend, if they had a car...or movement powers. "Why? Afraid I'll steal your students or something?" The gray-haired woman frowned. "Please. Even if it were just the matter of Mr. Coulter, we're perfectly within our rights to refuse entry to anyone we consider a security risk. But there's several dozen former paragangers in the student body, and a fair amount of resentment among them about your current position. The first step to preventing a super-powered brawl is to keep the potential participants apart. So you stay out here." The former Ghostclaw realized she'd been so focused on getting a face to face with her ex-boyfriend that she'd completely forgotten about the other familiar faces that might be down in that hole. People like Hader and Hadrees, who'd copped pleas or simply given up before committing any crime above a low-level felony, and gotten remanded to the Academy. "Fine, fine. Can you ask Coulter to come here, then? I was hoping to see him tomorrow, since I'm guessing he's not teaching on weekends, but if he's done for the day..." Cecilia suggested. "Or is he not allowed to leave without special permission? I'd heard he was on parole there, along with his new girlfriend." She tried to make it sound casual, as if she'd just happened to overhear that information rather than getting it as a result of her intensive online search earlier in the week. She did feel smugly satisfied by the fact that while she was pretty much as free to travel as anyone with a day job, Coulter was being treated like a prisoner on a work farm. "I can contact him and ask if he's willing to meet with you," the woman shrugged. "Can you tell me what you want to see him about?" "Tell him it's about the old days. We used to date," she shrugged in subtle mockery of the bureaucrat's own gesture. She was rewarded by a look on the woman's face that seemed to say, "Well, that explains the attempted murder charge, I guess." "I'll see what I can do. You can either wait here, or I'll page you." "I'll wait," Cecilia moved to one of the couches in the outer office. She pulled out her blackcel and called up the book she'd been reading as "homework" for work. She'd been moderately surprised to find there actually existed an etiquette guide for superheroes, let alone one that was considered definitive and had gone through ten editions back in the TwenCen and three more in the past few years. She'd been more than moderately disturbed to find there was a whole chapter on tentacles and similar appendages like her telekinetic filaments. She had just finished the section on dealing gracefully with super- powered paparazzi when the old lady in the other room stepped out and cleared her throat. "Mr. Coulter is willing to videoconference, but he's not risking any body parts by getting within range of your powers, he says. We have facilities here for that," she gestured at a nearby door. "For teleconferencing, that is, not for the risking of body parts." "I need privacy for this," Red Widow narrowed her eyes. "This is going to be very personal, and I'd rather it not get out all over the nets." "There's a privacy shield option at our end, but you'll have to ask Mr. Coulter to engage the similar shield at his end," the woman replied. "Is that acceptable?" "I suppose," Cecilia stood and walked to the indicated door. A few minutes later, Robert's cybernetically-altered face appeared on the screen in front of her. There was a 3-D projection option, but she really didn't want that much realism unless she could actually reach out and throttle him should the need arise. "Privacy, Bobby. Now," she insisted. It was somewhat pro forma, though, since a clever (and quasi-legal) little application in her blackcel was ensuring that even if the signal was intercepted or recorded, it'd come out as meaningless hash. "Nice to see you again, too. I have such fond memories of our last date, what with the dead cop and the screaming," Coulter's cybernetic eye irised down to a pinprick. She'd been handcuffed to an Anchor police officer at the moment when Rebus unleashed his Anchor Plague two years ago. It had not been a good day, especially since they couldn't be sure the active side wouldn't infect nearby non-Anchors and she'd spent a rather unpleasant night in the prison infirmary getting loads of emergency anti-virals. Her only comfort at the time had been that Coulter was getting the same shots, and didn't have a superhuman metabolism to buffer the effects. "I'll cut to the chase. The video. What's your part in it?" Red Widow demanded. "What video?" "The CG sex video of me and Chiaroscuro." "Wait...what? Isn't he gay?" "Just very European. And you're not answering my question." "Cee-cee, I'm..." "DON'T call me that. You lost that right years ago." "Fine. RED WIDOW. Some of the best net-nanny filter systems in the world stand between my computer and the outside world, programmed by the 20-year-old supergeniuses to annoy the horny 14-year-old supergeniuses. And, frankly, I haven't had much motivation to try to bypass them to get at porn. So I have no idea what you're talking about." Cecilia frowned. Unless he'd managed to get his "tell" under control, he was telling the truth. At least, he wasn't directly involved. "Did you tell anybody about...Mr. Rainbow?" "Mister...oh, the uni..." "Yes. That. It's visible in the sex vid," Cecilia sighed. "And you're the only guy who's still alive who I've gotten far enough with to see it." "Plus, of course, I clearly wouldn't mind seeing you get some humiliation," Coulter nodded. "Putting me ahead of the tattoo artist and any of your fellow inmates on the list of suspects." Red Widow shook her head. "Tat artist was an Anchor, had to be in order to ink supers. He didn't last any longer than that cop I was handcuffed to. And I didn't have Mr. Rainbow anymore in prison. That means either you told someone, or one of my dead exes told someone, and it's generally a good idea to interrogate the living suspects before you go to work on the dead ones." "No, I didn't tell anyone. Frankly, given that you crafted your whole Ghostclaw persona after we broke up, I figured you'd gotten Mr. Rainbow removed as part of becoming a Big Bad Paraganger." "No, I just didn't flash my ass all over like some parasluts I could mention. Like the CyberNasty you ended up in bed with after I dumped you." "*You* dum...never mind. Look, I actually have plans for tonight, so I'd like to wrap this up. It looks like you have a mystery on your hands, and you've just eliminated the obvious suspect. As someone who's gone through a few mysteries in his time, I suggest you start looking at the non-obvious suspects. Maybe all your other boyfriends are dead, but they might have bragged to their friends at the time. Or to the women they were cheating on you with. Consider any cops who might have booked you while you still had Mr. Rainbow, they generally enter tattoos under distinguishing features, although I can't IMAGINE that any of our fine, upstanding law officers might want to harm your sterling reputation by circulating a sex vid...." =========================================================================== Next Issue: It's time for the Understudies to undertake their first class project, as they go on a "Field Trip"! =========================================================================== Author's Notes: The Felka that Colin refers to is Felka Wojack, who Colin worked alongside during the Timequake. She's a standard "brick" type, who had been an ASIE student at the time, but she graduated at the end of that term and is on regular duty with EUROPA as of August 2026. I should point out that Bluthundin's views represent those of a retired supervillain and member of a family of expatriate Nazis, at least one of whom is a brain in a jar. So readers should be cautious in taking them as words to live by. Antigonish was written by Hughes Mearns, although it's often misattributed to Shel Silverstein (who wrote a lot of stuff in that vein). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigonish_(poem) for more. Everyone I could find online named Dareth who had a gender listed was female, and the few online etymologies of the name that I could find listed it as a variant or Dara or Dorothy, but Darenth is indeed a river in Kent. http://www.sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/970901 - While I'm not saying Sluggy Freelance definitely existed in the ASH Universe, it could have started up at the same time...and if the strip could survive a Posleen Invasion, it can survive the Godmarket Crash. (Heck, given the whole Book of E-ville thing, I suspect the ASH version of Pete Abrams would have been careful about falling for the Godmarket, so he probably survived.) Ectype may or may not be the new Number 2. Number 2.0? Most of Ectype's scene was actually written before I had even finished outlining ASH #101, although I altered it somewhat when I included it here. I had considered pushing this infodump back to #103, but decided that it didn't fit well with the framework I had in mind for "Field Trip". Too big a scene for an issue that, ideally, will be focused on the Understudies. Oh, and an ectype is a copy made directly from the original, as opposed to a prototype. But is Ectype a copy of a previous AC, an attempt at copying a human mind, or is his name deliberately misleading? (rubs hands together evilly) An interesting bit of "the fictional future not being caught up with the real present" involves handcomps and blackcels/whitecels. Back in the mid-90s when Tony introduced the blackcel and I was talking about handcomps, phone/PDA convergence was rare, so while both handcomps and blackcels could do many of the same things, they reflected a usage divide that has largely gone away by the realworld 2009. Even the distinction of "smartphone" versus dumb phone seems to be going away. Call it a relic of interrupted technological progress in the ASH version. While convergence has happened by the 2020s, it happened later, and the custom is to consider anything below a certain size a cellphone, and anything still handheld but bigger than a cellphone is a handcomp. It's mainly a screensize issue, although more expensive cels will have holographic or flexible roll-out screens by 2026 anyway. By 2030 or so, there's a good chance the terms will be used completely interchangeably, for instance asking "Is your handcomp a blackcel or a whitecel?" ============================================================================ For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art, and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH ! To discuss this issue or any others, either just hit "followup" to this post, or check out our Yahoo discussion group, which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ash_stories/ ! There's also a LiveJournal interest group for ASH, check it out at http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=academy+of+super-heroes (if you're on Facebook instead, there's an Academy of Super-Heroes group there too). ============================================================================