The Law of Averages

Book 2: Chapter 172: New Tactics

When Dan was nine years old, his parents took him to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. He remembered joining a tour group, a young man's droning voice, and a mass of unfamiliar bodies. He remembered walking across pale stone floors, staring wide-eyed up, up, up, at gargantuan dinosaur skeletons. He remembered the wonder and the excitement, as he roamed from display to display, watching time leap forward by millennia.

His parents trailed after him, ever indulgent. Dad occasionally raised his hand to ask a question, while mom gently shepherded Dan back into the group whenever he wandered off. The tour continued, dinosaurs giving way to mammals. Sabretooth tigers, great wooly mammoths, a sloth the size of a house. There were thick trees, shrubbery, the smell of a rainforest. And then, at long last, humanity. This was where little Dan's adventure stalled, stopped, as he was transfixed by something awful.

The museum had constructed a model of a Neanderthal, made of plastic, or maybe clay. The exact details escaped little Dan's mind, but the fear... The thing fell right inside the uncanny valley, leathery skin and a thick beard, gnarled face, big eyes, a wide posture. Its teeth were bared, arms spread, cast in shadow beneath an outcropping of rock that was meant to be a cave entrance. It towered over a pair of smaller forms, meant to be Homo sapiens. Little Dan didn't know this. He just saw a giant, dark and hungry.

He had nightmares for days afterwards, waking up crying to a fading image of dead eyes, crooked fingers, and an open mouth. His parents eventually noticed that he was sleeping with a night light again, something he hadn't done for several years. His dad sat him down, asked him what was wrong, and little Dan wailed that the Needertoe was coming to eat him. After a little bit of translation, dad explained, quite matter-of-factly, that the Needertoes couldn't hurt little Dan, because we'd killed them all.

He said this to an eight year old. Dad was very Texan.

Strangely enough, though, it worked.

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"We're tool users," his dad had said. "When our enemies are bigger, or stronger, or tougher, we build what we need to beat them."

At this point, he mimed shooting a gun. Historically inaccurate, but it got the point across.

"Besides, humans like to stick together. Friends, family. We can rely on each other." He kissed Dan on the temple, and said, "Never be afraid to ask for help from those around you, Danny-boy. That's what we're here for."

It was an old memory, and a long resolved fear. Dan had all but forgotten it. Not even facing Cannibal had roused those old feelings, the nightmares of being hunted. But the lesson had stuck. For all Dan's many flaws, asking for help had never been one of them. Relying on others, and on technology, was something he'd always been gleefully willing to accept. It made his lazy life even easier. It was only after he'd gained literal superpowers that Dan started to focus on himself, and what he could accomplish through his own means.

Dan was now willing to admit he might have overcorrected a touch.

Now, he sat in his basement, a hammerspace full of gadgets and a brain fully engaged. He held a dime in his palm, with a tiny door opened in its center. The exit portal was inside Senator Madison's window frame, except unlike the last time, it was at the bottom of the frame and facing directly upwards.

Dan didn't often consider the appearance of his doorways. It's not like he could disguise what they were; as far as he was concerned, anyone who saw one would immediately understand they were something unnatural. Creating them as small as possible was the easiest method to avoid detection. What Dan had forgotten, however, is that his portals didn't really have thickness to them. Viewed side-on, even the largest portals looked almost two-dimensional. When he created a portal the size of a thimble? Its sides were almost invisible. While Dan couldn't guarantee Madison would look at the portal from the proper angle, by facing it directly skyward, he greatly narrowed its profile.

This was just a proof of concept, besides. Madison wasn't even at home. Dan could see him, live on television, giving an interview outside the Pennsylvania State Capitol Complex. The man's face played out on the television Dan had mounted on a nearby wall. So long as he was there, Dan was free to poke around. He reached into hammerspace, grasped for one of his new toys, and withdrew his very own laser microphone. The device was massively simplified to be user friendly and idiot proof, perfect for Dan's needs.

Dan gingerly laid the dime flat out on the ground, then assembled the microphone's stand. He plugged in a pair of headphones to the device, and pointed it down at his doorway. It took some fiddling to get the angle right, but soon his headphones reported very distant birdsong. The quality wasn't the greatest, and it apparently would pick up both indoor and outdoor sounds, but it worked! Success! Dan tossed the entire assembly back into his hammerspace, where it would remain frozen until he needed it again.

On to the next. He willed his doorway closed, then re-opened it facing forward. He shrank it even more, removing layers of his veil until the opening was no larger than a needle tip. Much too small for Dan's naked eye to make use of it, but he had new options. Dan flicked through his mental catalogue, and summoned another item. A borescope camera appeared in his hand. it was little more than a handle with a screen attached to a long cable. At the tip of the cable was a camera lens less than half a millimeter in diameter.

Unlike the fiber optic cameras of his home dimension, the resolution of the absolutely miniscule lenses were actually pretty damn good, courtesy of a Genius upgrade whose obsession had fallen on the dubious subject of voyeurism. 'Peeping' Tom Johnson had a wildly successful career contracting for the military and various private sectors, and left behind a long series of open patents for different camera technologies. Summerset corp even used them in their satellites.

Dan didn't really need the length that the borescope provided; that was mostly meant for people working on ventilation shafts, inside walls, or other tight, inaccessible spaces. However, it was the smallest camera he could find, and by poking just the tip through his doorway, it should look like nothing more than a speck of dust.

The screen lit up as the device came on. Dan gently maneuvered the cable down to the open portal, and immediately felt like some sort of fumbling virgin as he tried to find the tiny hole and shove his cable into it. He succeeded after a dozen mortifying attempts, and the lens immediately bumped against the glass on the other side. Dan peered expectantly down at the screen, and watched as the camera focused on a microscopic scratch in the glass. Dan frowned, fiddled with the controls, then held back a cheer as the room beyond the window finally slipped into view.

It worked! It really worked! He could finally see things, rather than just groping at them with his sixth sense like some sort of invisible tentacle monster. And the quality wasn't bad, either. Probably better than the average person who needed glasses. Dan loved his veil, but after a lifetime of looking at things with his eyes, he felt an indescribable sense of relief to know he once again could rely on that sense. No more blindly guessing at what something might be, not for Dan!

He flicked a switch on his camera mount, and it began recording what it saw. Dan used his veil to hollow out just enough space to let the camera pan, slightly, and view the entire house. This was all information for Anastasia. Dan didn't care about what happened in this house; they'd already covered that with the dozens of cameras they had pointing at every single window. His worry was what happened out of sight. Now, Dan had a relatively risk-free method of tracking Madison as he moved around outside his fortress-home.

Dan glanced at the nearby television, noting that Madison was wrapping up his interview. The old man, despite his advanced age, seemed more alive than ever. He was energetic, engaged, emotional. He didn't look like a beaten enemy, nor one that was particularly worried. He didn't scare easily, this man. He was a pillar, a stone, someone who'd established his place in society, then burrowed into the bedrock. Dan felt he would not be displaced easily, despite all of Anastasia's reassurances to the contrary.

The man must have a plan. Dan was going to follow him around, silent and invisible, until he discovered what it was.

Like a Geist, Dan thought. How fitting that he'd circled back to the thing that had started it all.

Stealing the means of his enemy, Dan waited, and watched.