Chapter 194: The Superpower Project
Winter had arrived in Massachusetts with the particular conviction of New England winters — the kind that didn't suggest cold so much as enforce it, blanketing the town in overnight snow that covered the river, the rooftops, and the bare branches of every tree until the whole place looked like something preserved under glass.
By morning the snow had stopped. The sky was the flat white of a world that hadn't decided what it wanted to do next.
Jake walked through it in a black coat that he hadn't bothered to button, which would have concerned anyone who knew how cold it actually was outside. It didn't concern him. The super soldier serum had recalibrated his baseline in a number of ways, and temperature sensitivity was one of the smaller ones.
He'd arrived twenty minutes ago. The transit had been clean — one of the cleaner ones he'd managed recently, the dimensional shift settling quickly without the residual disorientation that some worlds produced. He'd taken a moment to orient himself, confirmed the location against the Red Queen's pre-transit research, and started walking toward the high school.
The students coming out of the main entrance clocked him immediately, the way students clocked anything that didn't fit the established pattern of their environment. He was too tall, dressed wrong for the weather, and moving with the unhurried certainty of someone who knew exactly where he was going and wasn't particularly worried about getting there. Several of them slowed down. A few stopped.
Jake paid this approximately the level of attention it deserved and kept walking.
He spotted the girl near the front steps — blue gloves, wool scarf, the slightly distracted expression of someone whose attention was partly on the street and partly somewhere internal. She matched the description from his pre-transit file.
A nervous boy was approaching her from the left, carrying something wrapped in old newspaper with the careful awkwardness of someone transporting something fragile that also represented a significant personal risk. Jake recognized the dynamic immediately and felt no particular need to insert himself into it.
He wasn't here for the love story.
He was here for the boy.
David Rice was sixteen years old, unremarkable in most respects, and possessed of a genetic capability that had no scientific explanation within the framework of this world's understanding of biology. He could teleport. Not metaphorically, not through technology — he could move himself from one physical location to another instantaneously, the mechanism operating through some interface between consciousness and space that the Paladins — the organization that hunted his kind — had been trying to understand and suppress for decades.
Jake's two scientists had been considerably more interested in understanding it than suppressing it.
Birkin's initial assessment, delivered before the transit with the focused enthusiasm of a man who had been given an interesting problem, was that the teleportation capability was genetic in origin — a specific sequence that produced a neurological architecture capable of interfacing with spatial coordinates in a way that standard human biology couldn't. If the sequence could be isolated, it could theoretically be replicated. Not through conventional gene therapy, which was too slow and imprecise for what Jake had in mind, but through the modified T-virus integration framework that Birkin had been developing as a delivery mechanism for targeted genetic modification.
The theory was elegant. The practical requirement was a blood sample from an active jumper.
Jake needed David to have already activated his ability before the sample would be useful — dormant genes produced different markers than expressed ones, and Birkin had been specific about needing the expressed sequence. Which meant he needed to wait until after the incident at the lake.
He already knew when and where the incident at the lake would happen. He'd done his research.
He spent the intervening time at the town's public library, which was warm and quiet and had the specific atmosphere of a place that took its function seriously. He picked up a book from the nearest shelf without looking at the title and walked the stacks, reading without particularly absorbing the content, tracking the time.
The sound, when it came, was unmistakable — a sudden rush of displaced water, a wet impact, a cough.
Jake turned the corner of the nearest shelf.
David Rice was sitting on the library floor between two shelving units, soaking wet, looking at his surroundings with the specific expression of someone whose understanding of physical reality had just been revised without their consent. A book had fallen beside him. He was staring at it.
Jake picked it up and held it out.
"Need any help?"
David looked up. The boy's expression cycled through confusion, wariness, and the instinctive social reflex of someone trying to appear more normal than they currently were. "No, thank you."
"Sure." Jake set the book on the shelf and reached down to help David up anyway, because leaving a wet teenager on a library floor felt unnecessarily theatrical.
The contact lasted three seconds. Long enough.
The extraction tool was small — a spring-loaded microneedle built into Jake's ring, designed by Zola for exactly this kind of application, producing a pinprick sensation that registered as the ambient discomfort of cold water on skin and left no visible mark. The sample it collected was approximately four microliters of blood, transferred to the sealed collection vial built into the ring's setting.
David said thank you, looked faintly confused about something he couldn't quite locate, and left.
Jake watched him go, then looked at his right hand.
He pressed the ring's release mechanism. The collection vial clicked free into his palm — a small glass tube, sealed, containing a few microliters of blood from the world's only confirmed active teleporter.
First sample secured.
He found a quiet corner of the library and sat down, turning the vial over in his fingers and thinking through the next phase.
The film's narrative — David discovering his ability, encountering Griffin, being hunted by Roland and the Paladins, the eventual confrontation — would proceed without him. Jake had no particular interest in the plot's resolution. David was going to be fine, or not, based on his own choices and capabilities, and either way it wasn't relevant to Jake's objectives.
What was relevant was the Paladins.
The organization that hunted jumpers was, by any reasonable assessment, the most underexamined aspect of the film. The audience's sympathies were structured toward David, so the Paladins read as antagonists — zealots with an ideology and a grudge. But the practical question of how they'd spent decades tracking, containing, and occasionally capturing people with teleportation ability had produced technology that Jake found considerably more interesting than anything David himself had access to.
Specifically: the Paladin restraint technology. The devices they used to prevent captured jumpers from teleporting — which implied a mechanism for detecting and disrupting the neurological interface that made teleportation possible. If you could disrupt the interface, you could understand it. If you could understand it, you were most of the way toward replicating it.
The Paladins had done the hard work of empirical research on a phenomenon they barely understood and deeply feared. Jake intended to benefit from that work without sharing their conclusions about what to do with it.
Roland Cox — the senior Paladin operative, the one who had been hunting jumpers for most of his adult life with the specific intensity of someone who had made a personal decision about it a long time ago and never revisited it — was currently operating out of a field office in the city, monitoring several known jumper locations including this town.
Jake needed to pay Roland a visit.
Not a hostile one. Not primarily, anyway.
He stood, pocketed the sample vial, and walked out of the library into the cold Massachusetts afternoon. The snow on the sidewalk crunched under his boots, and his breath misted in the air, and somewhere across town a sixteen-year-old boy was sitting somewhere dry and trying to make sense of what had just happened to him.
Jake flagged a cab and gave the driver an address two blocks from the Paladin field office.
The cab pulled away from the curb, and Jake watched the town move past the windows and thought about genetic sequencing and spatial mechanics and the specific challenge of acquiring a capability that operated on principles that the world he'd grown up in didn't have a framework for.
This was the part he found genuinely interesting — not the combat, not the resource acquisition, not the institutional maneuvering. The part where the frontier of what was possible moved, and he was the one moving it.
The cab stopped. He paid, got out, and looked at the building across the street.
The Paladins had been hunting jumpers for centuries, driven by a theology that Jake had no investment in and a methodology that he found professionally interesting.
He walked toward the building.
Time to have a conversation.
The field office had two Paladin operatives on the door — not uniformed, not obviously armed to a casual observer, but positioned with the specific body language of people performing a security function while attempting not to look like they were performing a security function.
Jake walked up to them and stopped.
"I need to speak with Roland Cox," he said. "Tell him someone's here about the jumper genetics. He'll want to hear it."
The two operatives looked at him with the assessment of people deciding how much of a problem he was likely to be.
"Wait here," one of them said, and went inside.
Jake waited, hands in his coat pockets, watching the street.
Three minutes later the operative came back. "He'll see you."
Jake nodded and went in.
Roland Cox was a lean man in his fifties with the specific quality of someone who had been doing one thing for a very long time and had stopped being able to imagine doing anything else. His office was functional and spare — maps, case files, the operational debris of an organization that ran on fieldwork rather than administration. He looked at Jake across his desk with the careful attention of a man who had learned to read situations quickly and didn't trust easy explanations.
"You said genetics," Roland said.
"I did," Jake said, and sat down without being invited to. "I've been researching the jumper phenomenon independently. The teleportation capability is genetic — I expect you know that already. What you may not have is a clear picture of the specific sequence and what it produces at the neurological level."
Roland's expression didn't change, which meant something. "What do you want?"
"The restraint technology," Jake said. "The devices you use to hold captured jumpers. The mechanism that disrupts the interface." He paused. "I'll trade you the genetic research for the technical specifications. Everything your organization has learned about how the ability works, in exchange for everything I've learned about where it comes from."
Roland studied him.
"Why?" he said.
"Because you've been trying to eliminate something you don't understand," Jake said, "and I'm trying to understand something I want to replicate. Those are different objectives, and they don't conflict." He met Roland's eyes. "I have no interest in jumpers specifically. I'm interested in the mechanism. You want the mechanism gone. I want to understand it well enough to reproduce it. We can both get what we want from the same conversation."
Roland was quiet for a long moment.
"You're not a Paladin," he said.
"No."
"And you're not a jumper."
"No."
"Then what are you?"
Jake considered the question with the economy of someone who had answered versions of it in a dozen different worlds.
"A researcher," he said. "With specific interests and the resources to pursue them."
Roland looked at him for another moment, then opened his desk drawer and took out a thick file folder.
"Start talking," he said.
Jake smiled slightly and began.
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