Barry sat at his desk long after midnight, staring at a blank document on his screen instead of the Checkmate files he already knew by heart.
The problem wasn't information anymore. He had plenty of that. The problem was that having it changed nothing on its own.
He could keep watching Waller and Checkmate watch him forever, and nothing about that arrangement would ever resolve itself.
Every week he stayed interesting to them was another week they might decide to stop watching and start acting instead. He needed them to look at him and see something explainable, not a mystery worth escalating.
"Gideon," he said. "I need you to build me a person."
"Clarify," Gideon said, the word appearing on his display in the same clipped, bracketed format it always used.
"Not a fake identity. A fake explanation. Something that accounts for everything they've already documented about me without them ever needing to look past it."
There was a short pause while Gideon processed the request, and then a new line appeared.
"Understood. You want a closed loop. A story that satisfies existing curiosity rather than one that avoids it."
"Exactly," Barry said. "If I hide, they keep digging because a hidden thing is still an open question. But if I hand them an answer, and the answer holds up under real scrutiny, they file it and move on to something more interesting."
He leaned back in his chair and thought it through the way he'd learned to think through everything that mattered, slowly enough to catch the flaw before it became a problem instead of after.
The core of it had to be true enough to survive a background check. That meant it couldn't be built entirely from nothing.
It needed a real foundation with a small, carefully placed distortion layered over the top, something that explained his intelligence, his learning speed, and his instincts for patterns other people missed, without ever hinting at what actually caused any of it.
'They already know a hundred true things about me,' he thought. 'What they don't have is one true-sounding reason those hundred things fit together. Give them that, and they stop looking for a second explanation.'
"Gideon, pull every accelerated learning program that's ever existed on record. University pilot studies, defense-funded cognitive research, anything obscure enough that verifying it takes real effort but not so obscure that it looks manufactured."
"Working," Gideon said.
The list took shape on his screen a few minutes later. Barry scanned through it, discarding most of it almost immediately. Too recent. Too well documented. Too easy to trace back to nothing.
Then one entry caught his attention. A small, defunct cognitive development pilot program run out of a research annex in the early 2000s, folded quietly after funding dried up, records incomplete, participants unnamed in any public document because the study had never been published.
Exactly the kind of thing that existed just enough to be real and just little enough to be shaped.
"This one," Barry said. "Tell me everything that's actually still verifiable about it."
"The physical building still exists, currently repurposed as a private research facility unrelated to the original program. Original funding source was a defense grant, since terminated. No participant records survive in any accessible database. Program director died six years ago. No living witnesses have been located in preliminary search."
"Perfect," Barry said, and felt something settle into place the way it always did when a plan stopped being theoretical and started being build-able.
Check Patreon for 5 chapters/day (three days in a row) mass release event!
Read more chapters, days ahead of Webnovel Updates on Patreon marvelstark