Chapter 150 Tricky.

Chapter 150: 150 Tricky.

God damn.

I already respected Steve as a professional, but we were suddenly reaching entirely new heights with that tidbit of information.

The lazy, perpetually hungover slacker was secretly running a one-man, city-wide intelligence agency strictly to keep his sister safe.

But my quiet admiration could wait. If Steve was this worked up, his spy network had just tripped an alarm.

"What do you have?" I asked.

Steve grimaced. "Had one of ’me’s’ henching for a group of mad scientists. Real bad guys, ya know? They all pooled their resources to build somethin’ massive. Real bad, man."

"How bad?" I asked.

Steve glanced nervously around the bar again, then reached deep into the folds of his rumpled jacket. He pulled out a crumpled sheaf of papers and laid them flat on the sticky table.

"My ’me’ musta slipped up with them, because I ain’t felt his memories sync back up for a while. But I did get a vague vibe right before he checked out. Pretty sure they made him take an acid bath."

"Sounds about right," I said dryly. Acid baths were pretty standard HR practice for evil geniuses.

I had little doubt, though, that Steve’s copy had managed to hold out if they interrogated him. Steve’s duplicates only lasted twenty-four hours before they destabilized and went poof.

I hadn’t really considered it until now, but Steve was the literally perfect mole. Even elite shapeshifters had physical tells that any villain or hero worth their salt could pick up on if they stared long enough.

It was like AI art; if you were familiar enough with the medium, you could spot the weird artifacts. But Steve had something even better than being able to look like anyone.

He could look like no one.

Though Steve’s lazy mannerisms and fashion sense off-duty were instantly recognizable, he was a savant at suppressing them on the clock.

And if he shaved, he really just had one of those faces. The kind of completely forgettable, aggressively average face that you couldn’t pick out of a police lineup to save your life.

Steve was a master at being a background character. Henchmen weren’t supposed to draw attention—hence the anonymizing tactical gear. I was honestly in awe of his ability to become ’just some dude.’

But clearly, I hadn’t considered the massive espionage potential of that ability. Luckily, Steve had.

"So what’s the scheme?" I asked, leaning forward over the table.

Steve nodded, tapping the papers. "There’s a group. Used to be five of ’em, now they’re down to two. A cabal of mad scientists who called themselves the ’Brain Trust.’ They inevitably started backstabbing each other a little while ago, but before that, they worked together to build a machine. Something that’s supposed t’ be able to broadcast across the whole world, man. Get into everybody’s heads. Override their free will and make them perfectly obedient to the masters of the machine. They called it the Override Array."

A massive mind-control broadcast device. Pretty standard trope, as far as evil schemes went. They never actually worked out, of course—at least, not so far.

Otherwise, Steve and I wouldn’t currently be having this conversation over cheap beer. But it sounded like this one was about to become a very personal problem for us.

"Let me guess," I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. "They need a powerful psychic to act as a living battery to power it."

Steve shot a finger pistol my way and clicked his tongue. "Bang on, my man. Bang on. I stole some of the schematics before they melted my ’me.’ Here’s everything I could get out," Steve said, sliding a sleek black USB stick across the table.

I took it, holding it up to the dim bar light. "Hm. I’ll get Rhea to look at this," I said, pocketing the drive. "See what she can figure out. If it plugs into a wall, she can usually break it."

"Cool, man. Cool. Dunno which of the two survivors has the machine proper, though," Steve said grimly, with a heavy shrug of his bony shoulders. "None of them trusted each other. And since they’re currently busy bumping each other off, sounds like that was smart of them. But I got a list, my man. Got their faces. Sorta."

I looked down at the dossiers Steve had spread out.

The first photo showed a guy who looked like he’d been photosynthesizing under fluorescent laboratory lights for a decade. And I don’t mean he just had a sickly pallor—his skin had a literal, faint green undertone to it.

His eyes were wide and manic, staring into the camera with the kind of unhinged intensity you usually only see on guys holding cardboard signs about the apocalypse.

"Doctor Green. Craaaaazy bastard," Steve said grimly. "Used to be a high-end botanist, until he figured out it was easier to get funding for his weaponized pollen if he just robbed banks instead. Reeeeeal weird, man. Obsessed with plants. Talks to them. Feeds them people. Big into bio-engineering and genetic cross-pollination. It’s a bit over my head, but he ain’t too tactically smart, my man. I got a solid lead on his main greenhouse lab."

"I see," I said, staring at the green-tinted maniac.

I was a little surprised to find a genocidal botanist on a team called the ’Brain Trust’. Your usual supervillain tended to drop out of med school or robotics labs. You didn’t see a ton of botanists making the jump to world domination—though when they did, things usually got incredibly messy. Weaponized vines and hyper-aggressive, man-eating flytraps were an absolute bitch to clean out of your armor joints.

"And the other survivor?" I asked.

"Ah, that one’s gonna be tricky, my man," Steve said. He moved Green’s photo aside to reveal the second dossier. The picture didn’t show a face.

It showed a massive, pulsing brain suspended in a high-tech jar of glowing blue fluid. "His human name used to be Abbie Normal, but he just goes by ’The Mind’ now. Reaaaaal bad stuff, that one. He’s the brains of the organization—literally. I think he’s the one who actually has the Override Array, but I’m not sure. He’s done a hell of a job hiding from my clones. Switched up his lairs, and I can’t figure out where he moved his primary servers to."

I took the photos and the documents Steve had neatly stapled together. They were incredibly thorough, detailing guard rotations, potential lair locations, and security codes. I had to admit, I was seriously impressed. The industry was sleeping on Steve.

"Good job," I told him genuinely.

"Whatcha gonna do, man?" Steve asked.

I glanced up and saw him nervously twiddling his thumbs, his mismatched eyes staring hopefully up at me from under the brim of his ratty cap.

I shrugged casually, shuffling the papers together and tapping them against the table to straighten the edges.

"Well," I said. "First, I’m going to track these two down. Then, I’m going to calmly and politely ask them to cease their evil ways and leave Psyren alone."

"Cool, man. Cool," Steve nodded slowly. "And, uh... if they say no?"

"Oh," I said, taking a final sip of my beer. "Well, if they refuse, I’ll shove an iron pole so far up their asses they’ll be able to hang a flag out of their mouths."