A woman strides through stark white tiled hallways, with white ceiling tiles, and harsh, fluorescent lighting. She wears a white lab coat over smart business attire, and her heels click on the floor with every step. She carries a thin laptop computer and a storage clipboard stacked on top of one another and held against her chest. Her long, dark hair swung behind her in a high ponytail as she walked up to an unmarked door in the hallway. Turning the handle, she stepped inside, and the door closed itself behind her.

  Inside was an immaculately tidy office, with a large table, a conference phone in the middle, and a screen on a nearby wall to facilitate meetings and video conferences. The woman took a seat at the table, setting her laptop and clipboard down. She opened the laptop and powered it on, pulling a cable from the table and plugging it into the side of her computer.

  A few minutes later, two others entered the room at nearly the same time: a fair-skinned, dark-haired woman wearing a black suit with a fedora, and a blond man wearing a white button-down dress shirt and black slacks. The man had a pair of glasses perched on his nose, and like the woman in the lab coat, was also carrying a laptop and a folder.

  The two new additions took seats at the table, and the lab coat-wearing woman nodded to both in turn, then leaned forward to punch in a number on the telephone. The tones rang out as she dialed, then the phone rang once, and a prerecorded voice played.

  “Thank you for using CollabTech Solutions. Please enter your conference ID, followed by the pound sign.”

  A seven dial tones later, the voice came back on. “Please enter the ten-digit security code, followed by the pound sign.”

  While the woman in the lab coat handled that, the man with glasses opened his laptop and tapped on the keyboard rapidly. The woman in the fedora simply leaned back in her chair and waited.

  At last, the call connected with a beep-beep and the sound of dead air.

  The woman in the lab coat looked at her watch. “Good evening. Are we the first here in the call?”

  “No, I’m here, I just had my phone muted while everyone dialed in,” a softly spoken man’s voice came over the speakers.

  Although this was end-to-end encrypted, out of an abundance of caution, nobody who joined these calls ever identified themselves. Which wasn’t any obstacle, as they all recognized one another’s voices easily enough, having worked together now for many years.

  A beep signified another call connecting in. A woman’s voice this time, with a slight Hispanic accent. “Hello, I’m here now.”

  “Thank you, we’re just waiting on two others,” the woman in the lab coat said.

  Another beep, this time a man’s voice with a strong, easily-identifiable New York accent. “Evening, everyone.”

  Greetings were exchanged, and the last person dialed in, a man with a Bostonian accent.

  The woman with the lab coat spoke up once everyone was present. “Good evening, everyone. We have several matters to discuss, so let’s go ahead and get started.”

  The woman tapped a key on her laptop, and the screen displayed an aerial map of Brockton Bay. Various items were pointed out and notated, with multicolored rings centered in various parts of the city and extending out to varying diameters. Everything was marked and keyed with impeccable detail, including dates listed next to the keys matching the circles.

  “First things first. While we initially considered Project Terminus a failure with the capture of Coil and the subsequent flipping of many of his assets, we’ve done further review, and we believe that we can continue with the experiment, provided we adjust for some things and introduce some new variables,” the woman with the labcoat stated.

  “Color-coded in these rings being displayed, you can see estimates of reconstruction efforts, and then expected areas of expansion. We are still closely tracking this migratory behavior, but suffice to say, there’s going to be a dramatic population and size increase projected over the course of the next decade. This is backed by both community-driven, bottom-up organizations, as well as the U.S. Federal Government, allocating very large sums of money to the reconstruction effort.”

  The woman in the lab coat looked around and asked over the phone, “Any questions so far?”

  No response was given. She moved to the next slide, which was a large list of cape names in two columns, with the larger list on the left side and a smaller list on the right side. A number of the names on the right side were struck out, and a number of the names on the left side had arrows pointing to the right in different colors.

  “Here are the confirmed capes we have so far who are relocating to the city. Black arrows indicate formal relocation requests, red arrows are villains who are known to be moving there, and green arrows are people whom we’ve requested to move. There are many more who we are tracking closely, but these are the ones we know for certain are moving. As you can see, it’s an appreciable number, so the Bay will once again be one of the most parahuman-dense cities on the continent.”

  The softly-spoken man spoke up, asking: “What have the research findings discovered so far with Leviathan’s corpse?”

  The Hispanic-accented woman responded to the question. “Confirmation of the data that was reported to us by the Thinker, Tattletale. The Endbringers are entirely inorganic and are composed of crystals with different material properties, based on where they are located. The appearance of the creatures is entirely cosmetic in nature. They grow progressively denser the further from the surface you proceed, and it’s on an exponential scale, which is why they’re so durable. Based on projections with existing data, they’re denser than neutron stars approaching their innermost layers.”

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  “Shouldn’t that make them comically heavy, like, to the point of warping gravity around them?” The man with the New York accent asked.

  “If they obeyed the known laws of physics, yes, but they don’t. In fact, they’re lighter than even their size would indicate if they were just normal flesh and bone. Leviathan isn’t even ten tons,” the same woman replied.

  “How is the research coming along on anti-Endbringer weapons?” The woman with the lab coat asked.

  “Good,” the Hispanic-accented woman replied. “We’re hoping to be able to field two competing prototypes before the end of the year. Defiant has been providing research that’s been very promising.”

  The woman with the lab coat steepled her fingers and cleared her throat. “That brings us to the issue of the Nine.”

  That drew a sigh from two people on the call simultaneously. The Hispanic-accented woman spoke first. “Listen, I know that their presence was increasing the odds of mission success, but you haven’t been out here, having to deal with the messes they’ve been leaving around. I, for one, am not going to lose any sleep about the loss of Jack Slash or the Siberian, although I will say that I was surprised to see them fall in Brockton Bay, of all places.”

  The chair under the woman with the fedora creaked as she leaned forward and rested her forearms on the edge of the table. When she spoke, her voice was smooth, with a rich timbre. “Well, that’s where things start to get odd in ways we’re having a hard time explaining. The death of Leviathan moved the timeline up. Then, when the Nine were killed, the timeline moved back, but not in the way that we would have expected.”

  “How so?” asked the softly-spoken man.

  “It moved back, from two years to twenty-five. The size of the jump wasn’t what was previously predicted; it’s off by a factor of five. Furthermore, it’s strongly in flux, and we don’t know why,” the woman with the fedora answered.

  The male voice with the New York accent cut in, saying, “What about Apex?”

  The man with the glasses adjusted the frames on his face and tapped on his keyboard. He responded with “What about her?”

  “Well, obviously, she’s dead, but what I meant was what if the flux is related to her?”

  The woman in the fedora frowned. “I think you’re correct. I’m getting… oddities in queries related to her.”

  The woman in the lab coat brought her eyes up from her laptop to look at the woman in the fedora. “Odd in what way?”

  “Some things are in flux, or are giving conflicting results when queried. But not everything? Only certain things. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it before,” the woman in the fedora said.

  The woman in the lab coat tapped a nail on the tabletop as she thought. “But not a blind spot, so you do get answers, but the answers themselves aren’t consistent or make sense?”

  The woman in the fedora nodded and leaned back in her chair, rubbing her thumbs on her temples. “It’s brewing up a headache, so I’ll have to be very sparing with insights as to what’s going on there.” She pulled out a flask from her jacket pocket and a metal can the size of a small battery, twisting off the top of the can and tapping out a white tablet, which she popped into her mouth and washed down with a drink from her flask.

  The woman in the lab coat gave her a concerned look, and the woman in the fedora waved her hand in response. “No, it wasn’t, it’s just tea, don’t worry about me, please.”

  The woman in the lab coat nodded her head once and turned back to her screen.

  “Speaking of Apex, there’s the matter of her revival,” the Hispanic-accented woman brought up.

  “Has any progress been made so far?” The woman in the lab coat asked.

  “No, not yet. They’re still doing preliminary research to establish the ground rules for what they’re working with,” stated the Hispanic-accented woman.

  The man with the New York accent murmured, “I can’t believe that this is even a discussion we’re having, to be totally candid with everyone.”

  “You’re saying that because of your personal feelings,” the softly-spoken man responded.

  “It’s not the only reason I’m saying it. Yes, that’s certainly part of the reason. But the bigger reason is that she’s the first person who’s actually done something that all of us couldn’t accomplish, no matter what we tried, or how hard we fought. That has to be worth something,” the New York-accented man shot back, sounding testy on the subject.

  “What if we provided her ability to someone else who could utilize it?” The woman in the lab coat asked.

  “No, that wouldn’t really matter all that much, in my opinion,” the Hispanic-accented woman said. “It wasn’t an ability, at least, not as far as we’re aware, that made it possible. It was the person herself; the ability just facilitated and smoothed the rough edges, allowed her to remain in the fight past what most people might have been able to do.”

  The woman in the lab coat looked over to the woman in the fedora. “Forgive me for asking difficult questions, but can she be revived?”

  The woman in the fedora nodded. “Yes, she can be basically fully restored; it’s not terribly difficult, and, given who’s working on it, it would just be a matter of time before they reach success. That’s not a hard question.”

  “And does her being revived help or harm our mission?”

  The woman in the fedora frowned and closed her eyes. “That is a difficult question. There’s a lot of flux if she’s revived as planned.”

  “So not precisely good or bad, but chaotic? Harder to predict things?” The woman in the lab coat asked.

  The woman in the fedora nodded.

  “And what about if we don’t allow her to be revived?”

  “There’s still flux,” the woman in the fedora told the woman in the lab coat.

  “How does that make any sense?” Asked the softly-spoken man.

  The man in the glasses cleared his throat. “My hypothesis would be that she’s someone who causes significant change, either dead or alive. It’s probably different kinds of change, but for some reason, it’s hard to predict what the outcomes of that change might be.”

  A female voice hummed on the conference call. “So, either as a posthumous icon, or in the flesh, changing things directly,” the Hispanic-accented woman said.

  “Likely, yes,” the man in the glasses replied.

  The woman in the lab coat leaned back in her chair, a thoughtful look on her face. After a moment or two of thought, she said, “I think that given the outcome is similar in both directions, I don’t have any comments on that undertaking. Use your best judgment on how you want to handle the request that’s been put forward.”

  “There are strong opinions on the matter, in both directions. We’ll see how things go, but right now, I would say that there’s more resistance than might be expected. A lot of ruffled feathers within the political sphere, and a recurring issue of the term ‘matter of national security’ cropping up,” the woman with the Hispanic accent said.

  Lab coat spoke again, moving the agenda for the call onwards. “Next matter of discussion, how are relocation efforts proceeding on our end?”

  “Good. I’ll have everything wrapped up and be moving right on schedule, so a bit under three months,” the man with the Bostonian accent said. “It is likely I will need to make a few additional purchases after that is done. There have been some difficulties in other areas, unrelated to this business.”

  “Of course,” the woman with the lab coat said. “Whenever you’d like, simply let us know. What else do we have to cover here today, before we finish?”

  “Shatterbird and Bonesaw,” said the man with the New York accent.

  “Shatterbird has been compliant so far, and Bonesaw has been put into an intensive rehabilitation and therapy program.” It was the man with the soft voice speaking this time around. “Do we want to try and approach Shatterbird, or are we thinking more of just dumping her with the rest?”

  “Depends on what her feelings about Jacob Black are,” the man in the glasses said. “If she’s loyal to him on a personal level, then I think it’s probable that she’ll be more trouble than she’s worth. Has she undergone the full assessment?”

  The New Yorker responded. “Narcissistic personality disorder, which probably doesn’t surprise anyone. Feels personally betrayed by Jack, who she had strong personal feelings for. The narcissism is probably going to make her a total pain to try to deal with, if that’s the route you want to go. Probably would need a full-time babysitter.”

  “Hmm, perhaps. There are other options, too. We can’t discount some of the things that Toybox has been working on lately, not to mention some of our own in-house solutions,” the woman in the labcoat said. “Do further testing, and see about extending a feeler. It would be very easy to arrange for her death and replace her with a double.”

  She continued, saying, “As for the girl, she’s likely useful if she can be deprogrammed. If she can’t be, then I don’t particularly care what happens with her. That’s everything I had to discuss for this week. Anyone else?”

  The room and the other people connected to the call were all silent.

  “Okay then, let’s meet back at the same time in two weeks. Thank you all for attending.”

  The call ended, and everyone packed their things to leave. There was a little bit of small talk, as one might expect in a mundane office setting, just another day’s work.