I started shrugging into my civvies: a beat-up hoodie that had seen better decades, black jeans with more emotional baggage than structural integrity, and trainers that were one good sprint away from giving up the ghost entirely. I checked my balance on Vilnet and activated the withholding software for Strategic Special Simulations, the holding company and hidden pass-through for getting paid to play the bad guy. It was a stunt coordination company based out of Columbus, Ohio, and I was the only employee. My business cards were a lie, but a very well-accounted-for lie.

  We had some links to indie video games—basically budget motion capture work—but the real income was from “private effects” commissions. In this case, twenty grand from Glacier Girl’s PR firm. After taxes, insurance, and the costs associated with making a realistic villain scheme—in this case, a failed plot to add silver nitrate to the South End’s water supply to turn everyone blue—it had been a fun but expensive little scheme. My total expenses, including the armor GG had wrecked (now floating down the drain in a melancholic slurry), left me with about twenty-five hundred in profit. Just enough to make the whole near-death experience feel vaguely worth it.

  Yes, I paid taxes. The quickest way to get on law enforcement’s radar was untraceable income. That’s also why I didn’t use my “power” to make something like gold. Not only was the energy expenditure for such a huge change prohibitive—I’d pass out from the strain and wake up to a mugger taking my gold and my kidneys—my registered ID was “Blueprint” for a reason. Sure, I’d invented lots of other identities, but when I’d first discovered I was a Class Two alpha at seventeen, I’d had hopes of being a superhero. I’d registered with a name that sounded clever, hoping it would look good on a poster. The joke was on me.

  It wasn’t going to happen. Class Twos weren’t exactly common as dirt. Sometimes they could get decent civilian gigs with their powers, but my power, microkinesis, wasn’t even strong enough to influence a roll of the dice, let alone handle superhero stuff. Unlike most supers, I couldn’t summon matter or power from the ether. On the superhero scale, I was simply one of the few males with a mostly useless single-function power. A bit like an antique icebox: both rare and useless. A conversation piece, not a world-saver.

  Two and a half grand wasn’t a lot. It would cover another month’s rent and probably my food bills, but I needed to pick up another gig soon or drop out of college and get a real job for a while. The occasional “real” commissions that SSS picked up were peanuts that could barely keep the private company insured. But since I didn’t have to worry about payroll, it was a decent shell. A very small, very fragile nut protecting a very bitter meat.

  Honestly, nearly everyone who did commission work—from graphic artists to web designers—tended to own their own minor company to run profits through. It was a way to protect themselves from legal fallout if something stupid happened, like an audit from some asshole Infernal Revenue agent trying to get a promotion by busting pieceworkers.

  Yeah, the IRS did that kind of petty crap regularly. Every IRS Agent was convinced he would uncover the next Al Capone. By the time they finished tearing apart some poor schmuck’s personal finances looking for money laundering links, the artist was ruined, their clients were permanently spooked, and they faced tens or hundreds of thousands in legal fees just to prove they were innocent. If the devil were real, he undoubtedly worked for the IRS and had a really comfortable ergonomic chair.

  That was why I was always careful to pay taxes on every dime I made at my side gig. Also, technically, as a motion-capture guy, I was a stuntman. So I paid the hazard insurance, which meant that unless I was stupid enough to get knocked unconscious and unmasked by the cops during a scheme, my legal bases were covered. If the IRS tried to dive into SSS’s taxes, all the income was thoroughly documented. If they pressed too hard, I could dissolve the company, file for bankruptcy, and start a new one with a new logo, new website, and a new payment path. The virtue of a logistics management education showing its value—my Vilnet links and reputation score would remain untouched. I was a phoenix, constantly rising from the ashes of my own incorporated failures.

  As I made my way out of the abandoned industrial park, wiggling through the big gap between the chain-link fence posts like a particularly un-athletic worm, I knew this was the most dangerous part of running any scheme: getting away. As a Class Two male alpha, even dressed in beat-up civvies, I still had the “look” of an alpha. If cops were still looking for Firetrap, my invented persona, I’d get grabbed on suspicion alone. My body was its own wanted poster.

  Sure enough, as I jogged toward where my beat-up 1996 Sentra was parked (a car so nondescript it was practically a stealth vehicle), I caught the red flash of a police car flagging me down. I sighed and started jogging in place as I waited for them to pull up, making sure I had a nice solid sweat going. It was weird how cops liked to wave a red flag at potential suspects and then take their lack of assent as proof of guilt. But the reality was, these guys weren’t really expecting to find a Class Four supervillain jogging through an abandoned industrial park at three in the afternoon wearing Value-Mart trainers and a girl-band hoodie from the nineties. The fashion crime alone was a lesser offense.

  The officer didn’t even open his car door as the vehicle pulled up to the curb. He wasn’t a powered cop, so he was clearly just going through the motions as he looked me over. “Alpha?” he asked, more curiously than accusingly. Since I hadn’t run, my only suspicious tell was the fact that, like all Alphas, I had an incredibly high metabolism and looked a bit like a bodybuilder. I did work out; as a male alpha, refusing to put in basic time tended to make you look… weird, like a balloon animal drawn by a sad clown. I also liked drawing the occasional female eye. It was one of the few perks that didn't come with an invoice.

  There was also a ninety percent chance that a quantum displacement meter was in the car somewhere. While I could and had fooled them on occasion by thinking very, very small thoughts, there was no real reason now. For all they knew, Diabolus Firetrap was long gone, and I was just a low-ranked teenage alpha keeping fit who happened to be nearby—not even suspiciously so. I was background noise.

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  I nodded. “Yep. Going for a run. Class Two. How can I help you, officer?” It always paid to be nice to cops, even the occasional assholes. As a registered alpha, cops were always considered to have probable cause, since it was the same as carrying a loaded weapon at all times. We were walking, talking, violations of the Second Amendment, and they never let us forget it.

  Yeah, it was unconstitutional and blatantly unfair, but I couldn’t begrudge humanity its best efforts at defending itself from people who could potentially destroy a city in the blink of an eye. Some alphas used it as an excuse to consider themselves an oppressed minority, but to me, well, it was a Tuesday. As long as I wanted to live among humans, I’d follow human rules. If I didn’t like it, I could try living among the Kaiju—and that was unlikely to end well. My people skills are bad, but they’re not ‘trying to make small talk with a building-sized lizard’ bad.

  Yeah, I know: selective morality. I was a supervillain; that’s what we did. We picked which rules to break and which to follow based entirely on convenience.

  “Registration?”

  I nodded and, still jogging in place—a pathetic display of faux-healthiness—fished out my registration card and handed it to the slightly overweight, crew-cut blonde through the open window. The government had considered, for a very short time, demanding that registered alphas get a bar-coded tattoo, but that was a step too far. Even the humanity-first creeps admitted that being forced to accept a brand would turn alphas from a necessary evil into a permanent enemy. Honestly, it was even less popular than the pro-alpha attempts to institute a mask law had been. Nobody wins in a fight over body ink.

  Although we WERE expected to keep our registration cards available—the same way a guy driving a car was expected to have his driver’s license handy. We just couldn’t put our “car” in a garage. I’d already “reset,” so I didn’t have any blood on my clothes or anything. But female alphas had it a lot easier trying to pass as a basic. A gorgeous girl was a gorgeous girl, but a tall, muscular guy with near-zero body fat stood out anywhere but Hollywood, a sports team, or a red carpet. We were conspicuous consumption, literally.

  Despite the nomenclature, “Alpha” wasn’t the same as an alpha male. Over time, a ton of different terms have been used: metahuman, awakened human, quantumite, mutant. “Alpha” was the term that stuck. We could still be antisocial and shy geeks, over-the-top extroverts, or self-absorbed nerds just like anyone else. Why? Because we were just as human as anyone else. We just had a lucky reinforced recessive in what humans prior to the Q-bomb release referred to as “junk DNA,” which somehow activated and linked to our physical form, making magic possible. My junk DNA was apparently slightly less junky than most.

  Yes, I said it: magic. It really WAS magic. Scientists kept trying to quantify it, but so far they couldn’t even figure out what part of the DNA housed the gift—if it was the DNA at all. Certain physical gifts came with measurable physical changes to the individual who had them, like density increase or improved physique, actually changing the way an alpha’s body was put together. But some girl who could fly without wings or shoot lasers from her eyes? Her eyes were just eyes, and her brain was still her brain, behaving like any other brain. Eyes can’t shoot laser beams, and yet some eyes did. Thus… magic. It was the academic community’s way of throwing up its hands and saying, “We give up. It’s pixie dust. Happy?”

  “What the hell is microkinesis?” he asked, looking at my card.

  It was a question I’d been asked a lot. I had stock answers, but I wouldn’t give anyone a rundown on what it could REALLY accomplish. That would be stupid. That was how you went from ‘mostly harmless’ to ‘immediate detainment and vivisection.’ “It’s a non-ether form of telekinesis. I can’t pull power from the ether or matter, so it’s a super weak type of telekinesis. It’s mostly useful for shoving around dust and stuff.” I was a living, breathing can of compressed air with a slightly better fashion sense.

  He looked at me curiously. “And that’s Class Two? That sounds more like Class One.” Class One powers were considered so focused or specialized that they were basically what a normal human could do without powers, or just generally useless—like changing your hair color at will or having preternatural balance without enhanced strength or hyper-perception. The kind of powers you’d use to become a world-famous magician or an unbeatable bartender.

  Obviously, with training, you could leverage those abilities to incredible levels. But a normal human with enough training could break a stack of bricks with his bare knuckles, too. Class Ones were generally not required to bother with a registration card because they were less threatening than a human with a gun or a knife. They were annoyances, not threats.

  I shrugged. “Technically, it’s strong enough to push a button at a distance or interrupt an electrical circuit, so the government in its wisdom decided it’s potentially a threat. Mostly, it’s just about strong enough to spell out words in my breakfast cereal or affect a coin toss on a bar bet. But I am definitely NOT on the invasion alert list.” I was on the ‘mild nuisance’ list, right below telemarketers and just above door-to-door missionaries.

  To be completely honest, if they ever reassessed my abilities without me lying to the assessors, they might rank me as a Class Four or Five. While my individual telekinesis was really, really weak, I could affect a LOT of things at one time. Microkinesis allowed me to affect little things—like, say, the vibrational speed of a couple quintillion molecules or flipping a proton and a neutron’s polarity a few hundred million times. It’s not about the strength of the push; it’s about the number of pushes.

  I also had the ability to reset or rebuild molecular and atomic structures based on things I had sampled. It was like having an image database and was the reason I called myself “Blueprint.” I couldn’t fly, but I could rip apart my own molecular structure, shift it to another location with my microkinesis, and reassemble myself based on the blueprint I made when I decomposed my original structure. It was the most stressful way to travel ever conceived, a method of transit that made a root canal look like a pleasant afternoon stroll.

  After looking at my registration card and calling it in, he nodded and handed it back. “Yeah, you should probably head out of here. I already let the station know you were here, and as a Class Two, you clearly aren’t who we’re looking for. But there was an alpha fight near here, and the cowl in question barely escaped. It’s not safe at all in the area.”

  I smiled, accepting my card back as I nodded toward the parking lot where my chariot awaited. “Yeah, I was already pretty much done with my run. I appreciate you guys and might consider joining the force when I’m done with school. I’m in 3G housing, and you have my number if you need anything from me. I hope you have a good day, sir.” Lay it on thick, that’s my motto. Politeness is a cheap and effective shield.

  He nodded, looking a little relieved as he pulled out. I ran over to my car. I couldn’t blame him for being relieved. It was his job, but interfering with someone who was clearly an alpha was dangerous, especially so close to a known incident. He’d just had a perfectly pleasant interaction with a potential human WMD who was polite and sweaty. A win for everyone.

  After all, I might have been a supervillain.