Monday. Two weeks since the Omnitrix. Silas was eating breakfast when Devon texted him.
Not their usual back and forth. A single message, no punctuation, which Devon only did when something had actually landed on him.
*my cousin Marcus said there's been guys with weapons going through the Southside distribution routes again. like actual military hardware. his neighbor got roughed up for asking about it*
Silas read it twice. Put his spoon down.
"Is Marcus okay?" Silas typed.
"yeah hes fine. shaken up. the neighbor got a broken wrist. police came, took a report, left. nothing happened after," Devon replied.
"How long has this been going on?" Silas typed.
"Marcus says like two weeks. maybe longer. they come through at night mostly. different people each time but same gear. nobody wants to talk about it," Devon replied.
Silas set his phone face-down on the table and looked at the camo watch on his wrist.
'Intergang. Military hardware moving through the Southside at night, same routes, nobody talking. That's Intergang.'
He picked his phone back up.
"Tell Marcus to stay away from those routes at night. Keep his head down," Silas typed.
"already did. he says everyone on the block knows to stay in," Devon replied. Then: "you okay?"
"Yeah. Just thinking," Silas typed.
He put the phone in his bag and went to school and thought about the Southside the whole way there.
....
After school he went to the Southside. Not looking for anything. Not in any form. Just walking, hands in his pockets, camo watch on his wrist, moving through streets he'd known his whole life and looking at them differently than he had two weeks ago.
He walked past Mr. Osman's store without stopping. The shopkeeper was behind the counter, visible through the plate glass. The door had a new lock on it that hadn't been there before.
'He put in a new lock after the robbery. Because of what happened. Because of something you did.'
He kept walking. Down Garrick, left on Byrne, through the small park where the benches had been replaced recently. Three older men playing chess at the table nearest the fountain. Normal Tuesday afternoon in a neighborhood that had always been his.
Except that somewhere on these streets, at night, people with military hardware were moving through. And a neighbor had a broken wrist. And the police had taken a report and left.
'You have seven named forms. You have a watch nobody can identify. You are the only person in this neighborhood who has any of that. And you have no idea what you'd actually be walking into.'
He sat on one of the new benches. Watched the chess game. Thought.
Intergang wasn't a clear shape. Intergang was an organization with logistics and supply chains and Apokolips-grade hardware. Walking into that as someone who'd had the Omnitrix for two weeks seemed less like heroism and more like a very specific kind of recklessness.
'Not yet. You're not ready for that yet. Get ready first. That's the job right now.'
He stood up. Started walking home.
....
That evening at his desk he was thinking about the Intergang problem and looking at the dial on position five. The silhouette had a proportionally large head relative to its body. That's all he knew. Just a large head.
'Big head relative to the body. Whatever that means.'
He pressed the dial.
Position five was approximately four inches tall. The desk was approximately thirty inches above the floor. He had not thought about this before pressing the dial and he thought about it now while standing on the surface of his own notebook.
'Okay. So. We're doing this on the desk.'
The form was slight, thin limbs, small body, but the head was enormous relative to the rest of it, a large smooth dome above wide eyes that saw the desk surface in extraordinary detail. He could see the individual fibers of the notebook paper below his feet. The grain of the wood desk. And his mind—
His mind was running differently.
Not faster exactly. More dimensions. He was aware of the notebook under his feet and simultaneously calculating the structural load distribution of the desk, the thermal properties of the wood, the distance to the floor relative to the form's mass. He was aware of eleven distinct shadows in the room and could identify the light source angle for each one. He was aware that the Omnitrix faceplate, now on his back at this size, the largest flat surface on a four-inch body. had a surface texture he could describe in precise detail.
'Oh. Oh that's a lot. That is a significant amount of extra. bandwidth. That's the word. Extra bandwidth.'
He stood on his notebook and thought, which in this form felt like running multiple programs simultaneously. The Intergang problem arrived without him looking for it. The form just took it and started running.
'Routes through the Southside, military hardware, organization with supply chains. Stop. Stop. This is not your thinking. This is borrowed thinking. There's a difference and you need to know the difference.'
He held that carefully. The form's processing capacity was extraordinary but it wasn't his. When he reverted this would go away. He needed to use it consciously.
He spent eight minutes doing the most deliberate thinking of his life. selecting specific questions, running them through the form's capacity with intention, committing the useful conclusions to memory before they could disappear.
The reversion came. Silas sat at his desk in his room and grabbed the pen immediately and wrote for six straight minutes without stopping.
Then he sat back and looked at what he'd written and thought about what it meant that he'd just used an alien form's intelligence to work out a problem he couldn't solve as himself.
'Useful. Genuinely useful. Also something to be very careful about.'
He looked at the dial. At the small silhouette on position five.
'What do I call you?'
The whole point of the form was the mind. The body was just transport. Everything else was in service of that processing capacity.
He wrote at the top of the page: CEREBRO.
Looked at it. Right.
Then underneath: *Position five. First use. My desk. Four inches tall. Do not do this in a small space again. the scale difference is genuinely dangerous. The thinking is extraordinary. The thinking is not mine. Remember that every time
(Image)