Chapter 160. Three Hours to Prove Myself

The pale gray digits in the lower-right corner of my monitor read 2:00 p.m. Exactly three hours remained in my first official shift at the Federal Bureau of Awakening.

That simple, unremarkable time stamp suddenly pierced my carefully maintained composure, washing over me in a heavy wave of nostalgia. In my previous life, when I was just an accountant in the private sector, this stretch of the afternoon was known as the dead zone. It was the time after a hearty lunch when you could spend hours pretending to work without anyone batting an eye: waiting for the procurement department to get back to you, making endless cups of tea while a database refreshed, or scrolling through the news and minimizing the window at the slightest sound outside the door. A safe, predictable rut with a steady paycheck.

But I was no longer a clerk, and I was a long way from the private sector. My employer was the United States government. More precisely, the Awakened Corps.

The terms of the contract they'd forced on me were absurdly generous: just six hours a week in the FBA's analytical department for a fixed salary of fifty thousand dollars a month. And what had I done on my very first day to justify that vote of confidence?

First, I'd arrived an hour and a half late, thanks to Dillon's outrageous behavior and the destruction of my high-performance sport bike, which I'd bought specifically so I'd never have to worry about being late again. Then I'd spent another hour and a half openly taking care of personal business, browsing the files of Awakened individuals to satisfy my own curiosity. A complete waste of the agency's time. The Corps' bureaucratic machine was ruthlessly pragmatic. Of course, they wouldn't discharge us from service altogether. Awakened individuals were far too rare and valuable a resource, a limited commodity on the government's books. Besides, people with supernatural abilities were much easier to monitor and keep under control within the system. But that applied only to our primary assignments. In any of the additional elite departments, such as the FBA, a slacker could be thrown out at the snap of a finger, with no right to appeal.

It wasn't even about the money. My primary income was already close to half a million dollars a month, and I barely had the time or opportunity to spend it. Another fifty thousand was just a number on a bank statement. This was about strategic advantage. Losing access to the FBA's classified databases because of my own negligence would be an unforgivable, idiotic mistake. I couldn't afford it. I had three hours left to produce something that would prove to the Corps' analysts that I wasn't just sitting around collecting a paycheck.

I brought up the main interface of the archival software. The federal registry of Awakened individuals in the United States filled my screen. The list contained 3,412 personal files, including operatives who had been officially dead for decades after disappearing into Portals under fire from alien plasma blasters. An ordinary person would have needed months of intensive study to memorize that much information. I had one hundred and eighty minutes. Less, actually.

But I wasn't an ordinary person. I had resources of my own.

[Special Command: Memorize the personal files of all Awakened individuals. Direct the information stream into the short-term, superficial memory sector.]

I deliberately avoided storing the database in the deeper levels of my memory palace. My subconscious reserves were far too valuable to waste on something like this. Down there, everything was organized with absolute precision: combat reflexes, ballistic trajectories, tactical patterns, and foreign languages. Information that needed to be available on instinct, kicking in within fractions of a second when survival was on the line. Superficial memory required constant mental effort and depleted quickly, but for now, it was the only reasonable compromise. I simply didn't have enough time to organize thousands of files into a fully structured, long-term archive. I decided to transfer the data into permanent storage later that night, back at the P-SWAT base, after lights-out.

My awareness narrowed, shutting out every external distraction. Hyperfocus kicked in.

The world around me lost its color and seemed to speed up, while my body became a perfectly tuned, high-speed machine. It was as if I were watching myself from the outside, in fast-forward, observing the flawless mechanics of my own movements. My index finger hammered the left mouse button with a dry, machine-gun rattle. My eyes followed a fixed path across the screen, scanning each entry. A flash on the retina: photograph, name, call sign, ability class, combat status. Click. Next file. Each confidential dossier took exactly 1.2 seconds to process. The alphabetical index raced downward.

Reality hit me again about an hour later, and it wasn't gentle. A dull, steadily intensifying throb had taken hold at the base of my skull.

My head was burning as if a powerful processor were running at maximum capacity inside my skull with its cooling system completely dead. My fingertips tingled from the relentless, high-frequency clicking, and the heavy plastic Enter key on the government-issued keyboard had started sticking, no longer springing back the way it should.

"I'll put in a requisition for new equipment this evening. The agency can cover the cost," I said to myself, calmly sliding the keyboard toward the edge of the desk.

A throbbing migraine was already spreading toward my temples, making it difficult to think clearly. Fortunately, I had a tried-and-true method for dealing with the thermal overload that came with hyperfocus.

I closed my eyes and lowered my forehead onto the cool, polished surface of the desk. My skin responded instantly to the welcome contrast in temperature. Without opening my eyes, I felt for the zipper on the gym bag I always carried with me, unzipped it, and pulled out a bottle of ice-cold mineral water.

I poured roughly half the bottle over the crown of my head and down my neck. Icy streams ran over the back of my skull and beneath the collar of my uniform shirt, rapidly cooling my overheated nerve endings. I gulped down the remaining water in three swallows to replenish the fluids I'd lost during the overload, then popped three extra-strong mint candies into my mouth. The concentrated menthol hit the back of my throat and nasal passages, effectively suppressing the nausea that had begun to creep up on me.

For five minutes, I sat in complete darkness without moving a muscle. My breathing gradually steadied, and my pulse returned to normal. A couple of minutes later, the tension finally released its grip on my neck.

A clear, practical task took shape in my mind: buy a tactical cooler bag. I needed to get on Amazon and find a compact model with gel ice packs. Candy and water were a decent stopgap, but a concentrated dose of ice-cold mint ice cream dealt with the thermal shock of hyperfocus twice as fast. I decided to take care of that tonight.

I opened my eyes. My vision was clear again, and my focus had returned. I pulled a pack of paper towels from the desk drawer, wiped the puddle off the polished wood, returned the keyboard to its original position, and straightened my back.

I clicked the X in the upper-right corner of the screen, closing the federal registry. The program vanished without a sound, but inside my skull, three and a half thousand dossiers remained packed together like a mass of red-hot coals. My superficial memory throbbed under the strain, demanding constant, careful control to keep those gigabytes of structured text from dissolving into chaos.

Rather than take a break, I immediately opened the FBA's internal email client. Hundreds of unsolved criminal cases from all fifty states poured into the agency's servers every day, flagged by the Justice Department's automated system whenever there was even the slightest chance that someone with supernatural abilities had been involved. During my shift alone, another thirty suspicious reports had landed in the queue. My gut told me that even with a souped-up processor in my head, this job was going to keep me working from dawn till dusk.

I randomly opened the first archived case, dated way back in 1991. The setting was a remote cattle ranch in Kansas. The incident: a cow had vanished without a trace from a securely locked barn. In the field marked PRIMARY SUSPECT, the local sheriff had entered the ranch owner himself, displaying a level of simplemindedness rarely seen in law enforcement. The officer reasonably suspected that the old farmer, weighed down by a serious drinking problem, had simply forgotten to close the gate, allowing the animal to wander off into the prairie. No evidence had turned up, however, so the case remained unsolved, and the Corps' merciless algorithms had eventually kicked it over to me. The system flagged anything marked unexplained, churning out theories involving teleportation or covert hypnosis.

If I'd had to sift through this absurd pile of junk by hand, I'd have been ready to scream with boredom within half an hour. Fortunately, my hidden resource allowed me to streamline the drudgery.

[Special Command: Using the loaded databases, cross-reference all unsolved cases, starting with the oldest. Automatically submit completed analytical reports to the agency's main server. Force the session to terminate exactly ten minutes before the end of the workday.]

A second later, my field of awareness narrowed to the size of a pupil. I slipped back into robotic mode, watching the process unfold as if from outside my own body.

My processing speed increased several times over. My eyes worked like industrial laser scanners, taking exactly one-tenth of a second to read and absorb the initial details of each criminal case. The new information flowed straight into my brain, where the system cross-referenced it against the registry of Awakened individuals I'd just memorized. The filters were ruthless. They checked combat profiles, ability ranges, possible criminal motives, and, most importantly, each individual's location at the time of the crime. Anyone who had been stationed at a secure base, undergoing specialized training, or clearing Portals on the other side of the world that day was automatically ruled out. A deeper cross-reference and final assessment took another half second.

Then my fingers hammered away at the keyboard in a furious, machine-gun rhythm, shattering the office's silence. I generated concise, legally airtight reports, reducing the conclusions to one of two standard formulations: "Involvement of registered U.S. Awakened Corps personnel in this incident has been conclusively ruled out," or "Awakened individual [Name/Call Sign] theoretically possessed the capabilities necessary to carry out the reported actions. Requesting a targeted investigation."

My trance ended at exactly 4:50 p.m., right on schedule according to my internal timer.

This time, the heat building at the base of my skull was considerably less intense. Unlike the intense mental effort required to memorize massive amounts of data, the repetitive analytical work and sorting did not push my synapses beyond their limits. None of the criminal cases I'd processed made it into my long-term memory. I'd blocked that function at the input stage. My mental palace was vast, but its capacity still had physical limits. Wasting valuable space on the names of small-town sheriffs, drunken farmers, and the nicknames of missing livestock would have been an inexcusable waste.

I closed my eyes and sighed, lowering my forehead onto the wooden surface of the desk, which had finally cooled down. I'd managed to destroy the government-issued keyboard after all. The membrane beneath the Enter key had finally split and collapsed, but the results were worth it. In two hours of hyperfocus, I'd processed and sorted 190 criminal cases. Including the time spent compiling the final reports, that worked out to an average of roughly one and a half cases per minute. Not bad for my first day.

At exactly 5:00 p.m., I opened the email client, sent an official request for replacement equipment to the facilities department, and flipped the power switch. The computer tower had barely warmed up all day compared to my frontal lobes.

I ran into Jimmy on my way out of the office. He looked exhausted, his uniform shirt collar hanging open.

"Looks like we got a lot done today," I said as I stepped onto the front steps, squinting at the Washington sun sinking toward the horizon. I stretched with satisfaction, loosening my stiff spine. "Wouldn't you agree?"

"Yeah, sure. I've already gotten blowback for it," he grumbled, listlessly scraping the toe of his shoe against the concrete. "I finished looking into this morning's incident with Dillon and sent my report up the chain. So brace yourself. The military commission's inspectors will be showing up at the base soon."

"Isn't that standard procedure? And good news for me, if anything." I paused on the steps, studying his scowl and the nervous twitch of his fingers. "What's the problem?"

"Well, you see..." Jimmy hesitated, glancing back at the bureau's doors before lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper. "My ability is kind of specific. When I reconstruct the timeline of a crime, the vision often shows me a little more than the actual incident. Long story short, Tom... I saw Dillon go to the Pentagon in person yesterday. He walked into General Crowley's office and spent a solid hour pouring his heart out, demanding your head. From the looks of it, they're pretty close. Almost like old buddies."

I raised an eyebrow. The information clicked into place like the final piece of a puzzle.

So that was where Dillon had gotten his misplaced confidence that morning, his conviction that he was untouchable. And that explained why he'd acted like he owned the place in the parking lot. Realizing he couldn't win by the rules, he'd gone around the Corps' official chain of command and appealed directly to a high-ranking patron. Good old military cronyism.

"General Crowley, huh?" I murmured, adjusting the strap of my gym bag on my shoulder. My expression remained perfectly calm, and my pulse didn't so much as skip a beat. "Well, we'll see how their friendship holds up when it's confronted with the facts in my report."