Behind the Scenes: AP Fiction - Outsourcing

For the first Behind the Scenes blog post, I'd like to open with some fiction based on a Base Raiders one shot, The Vault. http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2014/07/genre/superheroes/base-raiders-the-vault/OutsourcingBy Ross Payton“It’s a matter of byproduct. Waste, whatever you want to call it. That’s what it boils down to, paying for it.”“I thought the point was not paying for it at all.”“Even dumping waste illegally still costs. It’s a matter of degree. This is far cheaper than the alternative.”“Alternative? What’s that in this case?”“A hundred year project that uses up most of the resources in our solar system. Involves macro scale architecture in deep space and a black hole.”“You could do that?”“Not if we want to keep the lifestyle to which we are accustomed.” She turns the tablet off and looks up at me. I glance back at her through the reflection of the copter’s passenger window. Pretty, but efficiency runs through her like she grew up on ISO standards. Not that they have the International Organization for Standardization in this world. “Waste, huh?” I say as I look over the city. It’s an engineer’s vision; nothing but factories, power stations, and industrial infrastructure as far as the horizon. There is a sharp demarcation between the core and the outer perimeter of the city. Every structure within two miles of the center is newer. Less grime, cleaner architecture, brighter paint. “You keep saying waste, but waste doesn’t crater a city like this because of a vendetta. It’s a creature, not a barrel of toxic sludge. It thinks, it hates.” I say, pointing at the center. They had rebuilt it completely in only 15 years. “It’s the nature of progress. Societies make value judgments about what they want and what they’re willing to pay to get it. After science gets to a certain point, progress generates…anomalies like the creature. Most societies consider advances like clean energy or interstellar travel worth a creature or two.” “What’re a few million worker bees good for anyway?” I say with a smile. We sit in silence for the rest of the trip. Super-villainy paid peanuts compared to what the fine citizens of alternate Earth 39C were offering to house ‘waste’ from one of their experiments. Of course it had to be held on my Earth in a covert facility built to their specifications. Good thing I had reverse-engineered the Ideal’s Build-A-Base technology. This meeting’s goal was to finalize the details of the transfer and my payment. Currency between alternate Earths isn’t exactly convertible, but nuclear fuel and fabrication technology sells pretty well in my earth. Villains like Omega and Dr. Pangloss always pay on time for merchandise like that. I can sell some, keep the rest of myself and expand my organization. The helicopter lands on the roof of an anonymous looking factory. A moment later, the landing pad descends into the building. It takes twenty minutes before we reach the bottom. She guides me through the maze-tunnels of the level until we arrive at the containment chamber. There’s an elderly scientist waiting for us and he has this distracted but anxious look on him. He’s seated at a control panel and swiveled his chair towards us but his hand is still on the panel. One finger is near a button labeled “SECURITY OVERRIDE”. I can tell he’s the project lead and he’s been at it too long. The nervous twitches, the sweat on his brow tell me he’s a burnout and should have been replaced by someone saner a long time ago. Secret projects don’t exactly lead to good human resource practices though and he’s probably responsible for my windfall in the first place. Their loss, my gain. He starts droning away about the technical details and I nod in time, pretending to pay attention. I’m wired for sound, in case I need to blackmail them, so I can go over his speech later on. I’m more interested in the view screen. It shows the creature inside a bare metal chamber. It’s humanoid and not much larger than a standard human, which surprises me. Pale blue leathery skin, a mangled face, big claws and teeth. Nothing special. I’ve seen worse stumble out of a clone vat in my own lab. Hardly an extinction level threat. Then I see it. There’s a slight but visible aura around it - a slate blue gray that radiates out in a fractal pattern. I know certain forms of teleportation have the same kind of visual distortion as an aftereffect. Those kinds of teleportation take a massive amount of energy to generate. The amount of energy that could power a city of this size or teleport it into orbit. “When we found it survived the destruction of the city, we decided to rebuild its prison on the same site and opened our borders to refugees and immigrants. Business came to exploit the cheap power and with them, jobs. No one complains about living over a ticking time bomb,” she says as he hands over the tablet to me. It has the contract. “So I’m not taking this guy? Why bring me here?” I start to skim the contract. Pretty dense for an illegal contra-dimensional deal. They are sticklers for detail.“This is the only secure place we can talk in our world and we wanted to see if the presence of our ‘waste’ would intimidate you.” I laugh. “I fought Avalon twice and I’m still here. I’m as good as you can get.” I don’t mention that you don’t really fight Avalon, you survive him. The first time I threw some gas grenades into the ventilation system of the bank to keep him distracted while I escaped and the second time I faked a coma so I would be put in a hospital instead of prison. Both times, he dismantled every robot, super-powered goon and death trap I had, but that’s as good as it gets for operators like me. “But you failed to kill Avalon. We should have contacted Omega like I said! This fool can’t stop the subject if it escapes,” the scientist hisses to the woman . She looks at me impassively. I need to sell myself a bit. I crack the gauntlets in my power armor. Going suited was the right decision. Black spikes, a modulated voice, and glowing red eye sensors are a bit ostentatious but it reminds normal people that they live in my presence because I have decided not to kill them . I take a step towards him and jab my finger into his chest. One little poke and he gasps in pain. His hands slide off the panel and clutch at his chest.“Look, it’s very simple. You have to trade off between raw power and mental stability at a certain point. Too much power and you lose your grip. You give Omega a creature like that and he’ll use it in a scheme. You can’t trust him. Me, you can trust.”“How do you figure that?” The woman is holding herself together, to her credit.“I already built the prison, to your specs. That cost me dearly. I come here and he threatens to cancel the deal and insult me? Omega would kill for a slight like that.”“And you won’t?”“Pay me and you won’t have to find out.” I pause. Awkward silence between us as the scientist recovers from my love tap . Guy needs to go on a vacation.“Who am I taking anyway and why? If you’re using him for power, sounds like they’re a valuable resource, not waste.”“Would you want to live in a city like this?” She asks me. “Looked like a lot of people don’t have a problem with that”“The workers are too poor to move but the factory owners don’t live here. There are dozens of cities like this around our solar system, but many would like to see them gone. They are an ugly reminder of the true costs of our civilization,” she says with a sigh. The scientist finally stands up.“Yes, politically speaking, we are in a deadlock. The existing cities are too profitable to restructure, but construction of a new one is impossible.” “Why? I thought there wasn’t a practical alternative.” I want this deal, I need it, but I need to know what I’m getting into.“There is, if you’re willing to stop conducting research in certain fields so no more anomalies are generated,” she says while the scientist looks away, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “So you have a dirty monster that you can’t destroy and can’t admit to your own people that you made. Nice.” I nod with a grin. “The tablet has a transmitter. Activate it when your base is ready to receive the anomaly and we’ll transport it directly. You will receive payments on an annual basis as long as it is contained for the next 50 years.” The woman folds her arms and looks at the view screen for the first time.“Fifty years? Is it going to die after that?”“We have no idea.”“You don’t care if I turn him loose when time’s up?”“Do what you want to your own Earth. I plan to be out of reach from the law by that point,” she says with a smirk.“I don’t expect to be alive.” The scientist says, more to himself.I nod and walk back to the copter. I memorized the layout of the level on the way in. Being a mutant genius has a few perks like eidetic memory . The portal site is on the other side of the city, so it will take hours to get back to my Earth. Plenty of time to read over the details of my new prisoner.So I do.By the time I get back home, it’s too late. The bastards sent him to me before I could reject the deal. The robots are all on autopilot, thanks to my client’s very specific requirements. That’s the real reason they took me to the prison. So I wouldn’t have a chance to say no once I had read the full details of what this ‘anomaly’ could do if it got out. I’m not a good person.. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve killed, in battle and in cold blood. I’ve lied, stolen, betrayed, and tortured. But there are limits. I want power and wealth. But, I want there to be a world filled with people, not an ashen wasteland. If it gets out, it will be the end of everything. I doubt even Avalon could stop it.I go to the prison, down to the deepest level. I stand outside its containment chamber, the one I built. Then I flip the view screen on so I can see what the nightmares I’ll be having for the rest of my life will look like.