“Do you? I was told it was a bit of a revelation that she was an A.I.”

“Not to the higher-ups,” Narwhal said.

“I have oversight too, don’t worry. Family, a colleague, protectors, a small army of loyal parahumans who’ve defected to our parahuman-only state, and the rest of Shin. I’m protected. I know I’m protected, because I know I’m inconvenient enough to your power base that you’d want to remove me.”

She sounded high. I felt agitated, deeply uncomfortable, with that dark and paralyzing cloud of panic creeping in. I didn’t think drugs were involved, but…

I approached Narwhal, but she was talking.

“That’s not how we operate.”

“They know what they’re working with when they’re working with me. Someone who doesn’t buy into the superhero stuff, who knows from personal, visceral experience what kind of things can happen.”

I indicated I wanted to speak to Narwhal, and she used a forcefield to lift a pad of paper my way. An employee handed me a pen.

“We’re running out of time to act,” Narwhal said. “Something visceral will happen if you keep stalling. Is that what you want?”

“I’m not stalling, even in the slightest. I’m laying out my points and you haven’t really answered any of them.”

Fuck you, I thought.

My hand was shaking too much to clearly put pen to paper. I hadn’t realized I was that affected.

Fuck you too, pen.

With a jagged letter ‘S’ to start, I wrote:

She’s high. Not drugs
Riding a rush of optimism, feeling powerful, feeling needed
hopeful, & above all she is at the center of family

You can knock down any argument & any individual feeling but she will fall back on the rest. You won’t stop it without knocking down all at once, but this will lead to poss breakdown.

Manipulate her.

I hesitated before handing it to Narwhal. I turned, then handed it to Darnall, because he was a step closer to me than Jessica.

He and Jessica read it, and he whispered something into her ear. She nodded.

I felt somehow more nervous about that than I would about handing the pad as it was to Narwhal.

He held out his hand for the pen, wrote something down, and then handed me pad and pen both.

He’d added a line to the bottom.

This isn’t working—WyD

I handed it to Narwhal, who was talking. “…question of control is something you have to prove to us, not something we have to prove you lack. Especially with something this grave.”

“What proof were the Wardens supplying to Shin?”

“On the core Wardens team alone, our chief members alone, we have more than two hundred years between us, of reliable public service, years of showing respect to law and order, restraint, courage, and virtue.”

“And you trusted me.”

“With supervision,” Narwhal said, finally reading the note.