Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

'Now to just align the receiver plate up, and get it tuned in to the network...'

Taylor peered intently down at her device as she delicately manipulated one panel with a pair of tweezers. It was hard working with something so small, but she didn't have much choice: a lack of materials meant she couldn't really make her bulkiest resonators, and if she wanted them to be well-hidden, it was better to start small anyway. That way she couldn't be-

Her hands were shaking. Carefully, she set down her creation and slumped back in her seat. One hand wiped the sweat from her brow, while the other pulled out a phone to check the time.

12:36

Taylor's lips tightened; he'd left before 9, and still wasn't back? Good for her, it meant she could work uninterrupted, but that didn't means she was happy about it. He was going to miss lunch. Shaking her head, Taylor pressed several buttons on the phone, bringing up a secret menu with a single app labeled 'Scanner'. She pushed aside thoughts of how her father might react if he knew she had a cell phone, and opened the app.

On the phone screen, a dark map of Brockton Bay blossomed briefly, before zooming in on her house automatically. There were no portals near her house. A flick of the interface and it shifted, now displaying her resonator network. A dot appeared over her house, with the number 23 floating above it. She could almost swear she felt them burning a hole in her jacket, but that was just a trick of the mind.

This was the moment, she knew. Up until now, all Taylor had really made was the scanner - unequivocable TinkerTech, but purely a way of detecting XM and portals. It had the theoretical ability to monitor and maintain a resonator network, but as of yet, no resonators had been deployed. because creating a field required twenty-four.

She stared down at her latest creation, both her and it surrounded by the debris of shredded phones stolen from the lost-and-found, as well as a number of tools and appliances that had been gathering dust around the house. This was the last one she needed. When Taylor added this one to her network, she would be capable of twisting minds to suit her purposes. Cross that rubicon, and she would be labeled a villain if she were ever discovered, no matter her good intentions, no matter how much better the Bay would have become for her efforts.

Canary was almost certainly getting the Birdcage over nothing. If Taylor was discovered, she might not even be that lucky. But that was only if she took the plunge, here and now. That was only if she pressed this button.

Plip.

It wasn't a choice, not really. With power comes responsibility. Taylor could see the path towards a better future, how close Brockton was to renewing its former glory. It just needed a little nudge, and she could get it there. Who was she to stand in the way of progress? To deny her community the chance to be its best self? Oh, the people would never thank her, never hold her up as a hero, but that's fine. She wasn't in it for the glory.

She zooms out on the map, revealing a multitude of grey dots spread throughout the city. Natural portals. She'd nearly run herself out of pocket money on bus fare, but it had been worth it to get most of the Bay scanned. There were a number of viable locations, but one in particular stood out to her as the right place to start: a cluster of three portals close enough together that she could link them, with the field falling under a small apartment building.

Taylor pocketed her latest creation and began hiding the evidence of her work. The tools were returned to their toolbox, all the bits and pieces of tech scrap that were still useful got ziplocked and stuffed away behind some luggage, and the useless detritus was taken upstairs and buried in the kitchen trash. She took a quick shower and changed to try and purge the smell of burning plastic from her person, throwing the olds ones in the laundry immediately. No grease stains, no dusty knees, no weird smells. If anyone catches wind of what she's been doing, she might disappear. And it's not like she can go hide behind the Protectorate. They'd never want a Tinker like her.

Taylor took a look in the mirror. It wasn't really a cape costume exactly, just normal clothes and also a hospital-style facemask. It wasn't too uncommon to see someone walking the streets of Brockton wearing one - it was mainly an Asian thing, but the Bay had a sizeable Asian community, and it was a useful way to go about living your life without getting others sick, so it had caught on. It would allow her to go almost entirely unnoticed, and without anyone seeing her face (just in case). Finally, a backpack, where a couple basic flower bouquets were tied and waiting.

As she made her way to the front door, she paused by the kitchen for a moment. If he returned and she wasn't here, he might make a scene when he came looking for her, and she didn't need undue attention right now.

Went out for lunch

Taylor stuck the note to the fridge and left. That should be enough to keep him from hunting her down for a few hours...assuming she didn't get back before him and trash the note, that is. She huffed and steered her train of thought in a more useful direction. There was a bus that came by around 13:15, she could still catch it if she didn't dawdle.

She paid her fair and made her way to the back of the bus. There was more room back there, and it meant people were less likely to see her fiddling with her scanner app. As she took a seat, the bus wheezed its way into first gear and started trundling down the road. Taylor took out the scanner and looked over her city and its many portals, contemplating her newfound abilities.

There's a weird thing, stretching over the whole universe, made up of...well, it's not dark matter. Dark matter only exerts gravity, but this isn't even really doing that since this doesn't have mass exactly. Taylor had been calling it 'exotic matter' in her head, for lack of a better name - it's not quite matter, but just calling it energy wasn't accurate either.

So this exotic matter stretches over the world, and all it really does is interact with brain waves. Thoughts and ideas, thinking minds of all sizes, cause very slight wells in the exotic matter, the way that gravity causes wells in space-time. Minds influence the exotic matter, and it influences them in turn. In places where a lot of minds gather, thinking similar thoughts, considering similar ideas, they create bigger wells that seem to spew out new exotic matter at a rapid pace. The more minds, the more similar the thinking, the deeper the well gets, and the more the exotic matter influences them. The wells aren't creating exotic matter, since you can't really create something from nothing, so it's more like it's being brought here from elsewhere. Call these deeper wells portals'.

Now, calling this some kind of natural Master effect would be hyperbole. In most of the universe, exotic matter is technically interacting with any minds in the vicinity, but it's far more noise than signal. You could say that someone who spent their life living in Brockton Bay has been influenced by the unique harmonics all Brocktonites make in the XM, and that this is subtly different from the unique harmonics around New York or Philly or Boston, and you'd be correct. But the XM simply isn't strong enough for its influence to even be detectable compared to the massive social weight people put on being from one city or another - it's doing the same thing as civic pride, but the influence it has is a rounding error compared to the bonds of community.

For XM to have a noticeable effect, you need a much stronger idea, held by a lot of people, who join together frequently. In theory, the best place for something like this would be something like a military base or a the secret lair of some shady cult, but trying to sneak her tech onto either of those sounded like a recipe for disaster. There's other places where people regularly gather in real life, but for most of them, the kind of thoughts they're having just aren't similar enough to influence the field. Schools, apartment buildings, and office complexes...it's all too chaotic, a jumble of humanity as opposed to a unified front.

Taylor, with the aid of her scanner, had found portals at public art, statues, historical plaques, and even gravestones of particularly famous individuals. People didn't intentionally gather at these places, exactly, but a sufficiently steady stream of people thinking sufficiently similar thoughts made them a small portal. Theatres were shaky, but could do in a pinch; they gathered large groups of people regularly to think about 'the same thing', but what that thing was changed too frequently for it to be dependable. The strongest portals she'd scanned so far were churches - which made sense, when she thought about it. Regular meetings, large groups of people, similar thoughts...

And the effect? You could maybe detect it by observing small children. Those too young to truly grasp the importance of a church, who haven't lived long enough to have that reverence instilled in them, will still behave ever-so-slightly better. The harmonics around them dictate such places as sacred, and while the XM can't actually force a behavior change, it's just strong enough in such places to influence them in a more manageable direction, even absent any adults to chastise misbehavior.

Taylor put the scanner away, nervous that someone might see. She cast a glance around the bus, but predictably nobody was paying any attention to a teenage girl on her phone. She sunk back into her thoughts.

The concept of her tech was simple enough: while the XM was flat-ish in most places, portals were deeper, and had a kind of mental pseudo-gravity. Taylor's devices could be placed such that they piggy-back off the depth of those natural portals, connecting a few of them together, and create artificial pseudo-gravity in the area between them. Now, instead of a small portal around such a gathering place, the field between three such portals would become noticeably deeper than the lowest point of the three.

And instead of this field's influence being a natural extension of the reverence for a graveyard, or the quiet contemplation of the past when observing a historical monument, how the XM influenced the minds that fell within it was up to Taylor. Her artificial resonators would let her dictate the new harmonic, to aim people in a more intentional direction. It still wouldn't be strong, but the area it covered would be far greater - and people would be living within it, instead of only visiting occasionally. But if she could layer multiple fields over each other -

Taylor shook her head. She was getting ahead of herself again. She only had enough resonators crafted to make one field, and even then a very small weak one. With the limited materials available to her in her house, she'd just barely been able to make the minimum necessary for constructing a field. If she could put more power into the resonators, she could make the fields larger - much much larger - but for now the furthest she could manage between existing portals was about 500 ft. A triangle 500 ft to a side does not exactly make for a vast domain. Still, it was a first step to something greater.

Part of her ached to put the field around Winslow, but Taylor had ruled that out almost immediately when considering possible field locations. If she couldn't get several layers to the field, it wouldn't be strong enough to solve her bully issues. And if it got that strong, it was likely the authorities would notice before too long, and that would narrow down the suspect pool too much. Anonymity was the name of the game, and she was playing to win; if that meant suffering at school to hide her identity, then so be it. Besides, if she kept at it, one day the whole city would be under many layers, including Winslow. Maybe even before she graduated. If she graduated.

She pushed that dark thought aside when she heard the driver call out the name of her stop - there was no room for moping, not when she was on the cusp of greatness. She took a step out and cast a quick glance around, but she needn't have worried; while this might have been a rougher neighborhood, and not one she'd want to walk at night, it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Church hadn't let out all that long ago, and so there was a dearth of lurking ne'er-do-wells. Taylor walked along until she came to a decorative bench with the statue of two soot-covered men sitting on it.

Graham Pierson

Michael Rogers

Almost a century prior, the housing here had been set ablaze by the Empire's predecessors, but those two men had saved over thirty lives before succumbing to the flames and smoke. The men had been well-respected in their own communities, and laying down their lives sparked a fire in those they left behind, leading to a wave of pushback against those that had set the fire.

Taylor removed a bouquet from her pack and set it in a little concrete urn built beside the bench...and slipped in a small group of resonators when she was sure nobody was looking. In theory, a city worker would be in charge of maintaining things like this, but the dead flowers and cigarette butts that filled the urn were old and crumbled. Her flowers would wilt, and bury her Tinkertech as yet another layer to never be cleared away. And if some day, people cared enough to clean it...well, she wouldn't begrudge them. That rejection of the apathy choking her city was exactly the kind of attitude she was hoping to reinvigorate in her fellow citizens, after all.

A quick check of her scanner, and she tied the resonators to the portal. Eight confirmed connections, harmonics steady, XM levels rising. A quick check on the batteries confirmed that the XM being generated was easily enough to keep the resonators charged. On the scanner, the portal turned green to signify its conversion into a part of her network.

Taylor breathed a sigh of relief - it worked! it actually worked! - and stepped around the corner into an alley, heading towards her second target. Once again, a place like this should've been a recipe for disaster in the night, but with the sun bright overhead it was just a convenient shortcut. At the far end was a gate that opened up into an expansive cemetery. She walked carefully towards the back, ensuring she didn't trod on any graves, until she stood before a particularly large, fancy, old headstone.

Cecil Smith

A veteran of the Civil War, hailing from Brockton Bay. It had barely been a small fishing port at the time, but he'd spun his service into a political career, and the work he did helped put the Bay on the map properly. The stone was crumbling, the words of his epitaph weather-worn to the point they were barely legible. She cast her gaze to the church at the far end of the cemetery; they were charged with the duty of upkeep, but there was always more work to do than hands to do it.

A quick glance confirmed there was noone here to care but her. And so she knelt to place her second bouquet, but also dug a small hole next to his grave. The resonators went in, the dirt and flowers went on top. Once more, she took out the scanner and connected the resonators - but this time, she also cast a link between the two portals.

Heart pounding in her chest from excitement, Taylor made her way through the graveyard towards the church. A quick tug on the handle confirmed it was locked, and she cursed quietly to herself. She could probably hide it outside somewhere, but doing weird stuff in plain view of people around the neighborhood wasn't a good idea. Too easy for her tech to get discovered...or worse, her. She took a steadying breath and rallied her thoughts. It hadn't been that long since service let out, so there was probably still people inside, cleaning up or doing administrative work. She just needed to find someone near a door...

It only took a couple tries before she got lucky. A knock on the right door, and a tall besuited man answered. "Can I help you?" he asked, smiling politely.

"Sorry to bother, sir. Can I use your restroom real quick?" she asked, weight shifting from one leg to the other. Ironically, the anxiety she felt was probably helping sell the illusion.

His smile changed subtly, growing more natural - almost amused. "Down the hall on the right," he said, before stepping back to hold the door for her.

She hurried on through, throwing a "Thank you!" over her shoulder. She got in and locked the door, before taking stock of her surroundings. There weren't a lot of good hiding places in here. Some already-loose ceiling tiles, which meant she wasn't the only one hiding things in here; putting her tech next to some church-goers stash was just asking for trouble. The toilet tanks were barely even considered; her resonators would be discovered the first time there was a plumbing issue.

In the end, Taylor settled for leaving the resonators in their small bag and putting that in the cabinet beneath the sink. There was a mishmash of cleaning supplies underneath, and hopefully the clutter would see her devices go unnoticed. Nobody ever went looking in these things to just do an audit, they were always after something specific. With any luck, she wouldn't have to worry about this portal deactivating for quite some time. Once more, she took out the scanner, suppressing a tremble of anticipation. She connected the resonators to the portal of the church, just barely in range from their hiding place. And then she linked it back to the two other portals.

If she hadn't been on pins and needles anticipating it, she would never have felt it, but as the scanner displayed a green field coming into being between the three portals, an almost-imperceptible wave of peace swept over her. It was confidence, contentment, civic pride, all rolled into one. It was a small flickering candle in her chest urging her to make the world a better place, one small act of kindness at a time. She could scarcely recall the fledgling doubts she'd felt earlier, before finishing the last resonator. How had she ever wondered if this was the right thing to do?

Taylor finished using the restroom (what? it wasn't a complete lie), washed her hands, and made her way out of the building. She nodded to the man as she passed, smiling, and he returned her smile. Once outside, it was just a few minutes' walk back to the bus stop. This time, she wasn't alone, and the bench was already full. But that was fine - they were all older folk, they needed the seat more than her. She made idle conversation about the weather while checking her phone.

The field unseen by any but her stretched over the apartment building across the street. A couple hundred families would be living, eating, and sleeping under a green blanket of enlightened sentiments. For how small of an area she had to work with, Taylor had done her best to maximize the number of people affected; even if it was only a small effect, they would bring that slightly-better attitude with them throughout the city.

She spied three people moving towards the building: an older woman carrying a small child, with a scowling teenager in tow. She'd seen the woman at school on rare occasions, but she could recognize Sophia Hess anywhere. 'And if the field so happened to make my life better,' Taylor thought to herself as the family entered their apartment building, 'that would just be a happy coincidence.'

Chapter Text

Monday

1st period. Sophia pushed me into the doorframe on the way out of class.

3rd period. Chair fell apart underneath me after several minutes. I think Madison distracted Gladly before I got here, while someone else loosened the screws.

4th period. Chelsea kept sticking gum in my hair. Getting it out made me late to 5th period.

7th period. Emma and Sophia blocked the path into the gym and made comments about my weight being unhealthily low.

Taylor had taken note of a couple Winslow students who lived within the boundaries of her field, but she didn't see them often enough in a day to know if they were acting better. Certainly Sophia wasn't acting any differently that she could tell. She'd just kinda stared as Taylor picked herself up from the floor. Later, she'd said she would have to try harder hunting Taylor down at lunch, that it wasn't good to miss meals. Was that just the usual taunting about how they'd been ruining her lunchtime for over a year, or was it touched by genuine concern brought on by XM interference?

That night, Taylor took stock of her remaining materials. She had enough for another eight resonators, or a power cube, but that was about it. If the field was working properly, she would need these materials for making something that would help her get more. If it wasn't working properly...well that would suck and require her replacing whichever resonators were glitching.

Without knowing if they were even failing, let alone how many needed replacing, Taylor opted to avoid starting construction on anything just yet. Best to wait and see, instead of testing the depth of the river with both feet.

Tuesday

2nd period. Emma heard about the chair incident from yesterday, and now she's calling me unhealthily overweight. Then she implied I did it to myself, to try and get attention.

4th period. Julia and Chelsea talked in front of the classroom door about how terrible it was when a family's so poor they can't keep their children fed. They wouldn't let me pass until after the bell rang. All three of us were marked tardy, but I got admonished because it's my fourth one this month. For this class, anyway.

7th period. Weather's starting to warm up, so Coach Thomas had us run a mile around the track. Sophia lapped me twice. The first time, she made a comment about how slow and out-of-shape I am. The second time, she timed it so she'd pass me while Coach was dealing with some other kids for walking, and she tripped me.

Taylor still wasn't sure where she was going to get the materials from after this. Two small layers in the middle of the city weren't going to be enough to heal the rotten sentiments it was drowning in. But any manner of getting more was simply too risky. The lost-and-found was about out of unclaimed phones she could pilfer, and nothing short of the school computers would have the parts she'd need. After that she'd either need to buy stuff properly, or resort to more serious theft. Either way, the odds of her being noticed went up drastically, and that more than anything else was utterly unacceptable.

Wednesday

1st period. Greg was out sick, so Sophia took his seat behind me, and spent the period bouncing her leg against my chair. I asked her to stop but she denied doing anything.

2nd period. My homework disappeared from my backpack before it could be turned in. I know it was in here this morning, but Emma doesn't sit close enough. Must've been Sophia earlier.

6th period. Madison went to sharpen her pencil and dumped the shavings over me as she passed.

7th period. Running the mile again. Tried to go fast enough I wouldn't get lapped twice again, wheezing by the end of it. Sophia asked if I even knew how to breath right.

For pity's sake, what bug crawled up her ass and died there?

It wasn't working. Something must have gone wrong, it was the only thing Taylor could think of. The field was weak, but it should still be having influence; instead, it was like Sophia was getting worse instead of better. There was an outside chance Sophia was just unnaturally-resistant to XM influence, but far more likely is that there was a glitch with the resonators she'd deployed, so the field was still displaying on her scanner, but it wasn't actually there in reality.

Unfortunately, the only way to determine the difference would be to go in person - Taylor couldn't run a proper diagnostic from across the city, at least not without a serious scanner upgrade that she also didn't have the parts or money for. She could try and scan Sophia, test her hypothesis to see if the other girl was particularly XM-resistant, but that wasn't acceptable either; bringing the scanner to school was just asking for trouble.

Her fingers itched to be building something, but she rallied her focus and held off. Not until she saw the field in person. Not until she knew what she needed to be building. Just a few more days...

Thursday

3rd period. My homework disappeared from the turn-in bin. Luckily, I did it twice just in case, and turned in the second one without getting more than a frown from Mr Gladly.

4th period. We were put in groups, but Julia distracted the others with stupid gossip the whole time. She smirked at me every time I tried to get us back on topic. It has to be on purpose.

7th period. It's raining today, so we played dodgeball. Sophia was on the other team and kept nailing me with the ball. Then Emma, on my team, would catch one and get me brought back in. This happened seven times.

Regardless of if the current portals were glitching and just needed a touch-up, or needed to be fully reworked because there was something drastic wrong, it had probably been a bad idea for Taylor to deploy them in a tiny neighborhood full of people just trying to get by. Really, what she should've done was find a properly bad neighborhood, one that's not necessarily safe even during the day, and set up there. Then, when she expanded it, she could take advantage of the mental influence to get people to donate money or old electronics to her. It'd still only be a couple layers, but maybe the right tweak to the influence it wrought would be enough to-

No, that was the desperation talking. Doing something like that was bound to get her more attention than she could afford. Maybe she wouldn't even have been able to get a field up at all. Better to play it safe and just make sure this one was working. Besides, hindsight was 20-20; it was going to be hard enough replacing any burnt-out resonators, let alone retrieving all of them and setting up somewhere else. No, no, no, she could get a part-time job or something instead. Some legitimate way of making money that wouldn't have her intentionally crossing paths with criminals.

Friday

2nd period. Emma chided me not to forget about homework again, and said my mother would be disappointed in me for slacking on my studies.

3rd period. Gladly returned two copies of my homework to me. One of the copies had my name erased with Sparky's name written, and Gladly implied it could be considered academic dishonesty on both our parts. He's letting it go this time but the next time Madison steals my homework I might just have to let it go.

7th period. We're inside doing push-ups. Sophia says if Emma taps out before me, I get a pass from her next week. I didn't manage it, and she trips me again on the way out of the gym.

Friday early evening was a different beast than Sunday afternoon. While this wasn't the worst neighborhood to be in after dark, it still wasn't great. Taylor took stock. She'd need to go unrecognized. Tying her hair back in a bun and wearing a sick-mask should cover that. She'd need to dissuade any attempted theft. Her current wardrobe was sufficient for that purpose - her faded tops and naturally-stressed jeans didn't scream money.

Finally, if she was robbed, she couldn't afford for them to think anything was amiss. And so she tinkered with the scanner. It was already tied to the GPS, and capable of detecting the slight wells made in the XM by people; a simple tweak, and now the app would automatically close and hide itself if the phone got more than 10 feet from her. A basic security measure she should've implemented far before this, had she been thinking.

Taylor started to head out, but paused on her way past the kitchen, glancing at the fridge. She'd beat her father home last time - by hours, actually. He hadn't returned until nearly dinner time. What was supposed to be a short errand helping a work friend out of a jam had turned into nearly a full day of effort. He'd been too exhausted, and never noticed she was gone, because how could he? She was here when he left, she was here when he returned, and he never asked how she'd spent the day on her own. What reason would he have to think anything was amiss?

Part of her itched to just leave. She was growing into adulthood, day by day. He clearly thought so as well, since he didn't mind leaving her alone for hours on end. Was her being left to her own devices a sign of trust, or just a lack of concern? She hated that the latter felt closer to the truth.

Taylor scrawled another quick note and stuck it to the fridge. It annoyed her on some level - almost certainly a waste of time, a waste of paper, a waste of ink. But on the off-chance it wasn't, leaving a note might mean avoiding an interrogation, a lecture, maybe even a grounding depending on how long she was out. A few seconds now to keep her schedule nice and open into the future. The fact it was probably unnecessary wasn't the point; it always rained on the day you left your umbrella behind.

She had to wait longer for the bus this time. This trip wasn't as well-planned as her previous one had been, but that was okay. The wait and the ride would give her time to properly think about what she wanted to do. If she wanted to maintain her independence, she needed to stay three steps ahead in a race noone else knew they were running, so it was better to overthink than to wing it. Three possibilities: the number of resonators in need of fixing or replacing was zero, one to eight, or at least nine. Within two of those possibilities, the issue was either hardware or software.

(Nine/Hardware: There was very little Taylor could do today, so she may as well head home. Her supplies were insufficient for repairing that many if they were already starting to degrade, which meant her actual problem was a lack of resources. She needed a source of income, and couldn't depend on her field to deliver it to her. That meant finding employment, which would eat into her time for very little return. If she had enough phones to make hundreds of resonators, half of them failing would matter less. In fact it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world to give each portal a handful of backup resonators going forward, to account for...)

((...One/Hardware: If there were less than nine physically malfunctioning, she could use her existing supplies to replace them. Today was a matter of identifying the problems, so that she knew how many more to make, and where she'd need to bring them. That still left her with resource issues, but now she had a field to work with. A single field of unknown strength. She'd need to observe for a week to be sure. That meant keeping better tabs on all her schoolmates who lived here. Then she could reevaluate. Perhaps she could change the field's directive away from the general 'do good' and more towards being charitable to little girls who...))

(((...One/Software: Software issues were a different ballgame altogether. The scanner was already set up to be able to alter the code if she was close enough. This would be more than sending new commands to the field, but it shouldn't be more difficult. It would take time though, as that was proper Tinkering instead of just playing with her UI. She'd be standing around in a neighborhood fiddling on her phone, and likely not paying as much attention to her surroundings as she should. Still, if there weren't that many going bad, she could probably get away with it today, as long as she was done before the sun went down. Still, that didn't cost materials which meant she could still...)))

((((...Nine/Software: If there were too many, she'd have to come back another day. There simply wasn't enough time for her to sit here for hours and hours bugtesting her resonators, not without attracting the wrong kind of attention. She'd need to set a number of alarms on her phone to make sure she didn't just get lost in the job of fixing her stuff. In fact, that was something she should do now, before she got swept up in the moment and forgot the danger in the face of tinkering.))))

Taylor made a couple quick alarms on her phone, things that would hopefully interrupt any flow she got into and remind her to be mindful of the time and location. She jolted as the bus screeched to a stop in front of her. Apparently she'd been sitting her longer than she realized. She shuffled onboard and found a seat. As the bus began trundling along, she made a couple more alarms, since the problem was worse than she realized.

(((((Zero: the optimistic situation, but the least likely based on her observations at school. If nothing was going wrong with her tech, and it was just Sophia being unnaturally aggressive, Taylor still needed to know how strong the field was affecting everyone else. That meant sticking around at least an hour to observe the neighborhood to see how deeply they were being affected by the single layer - something she should've done last time. That would inform her whether her plans would benefit more from a second layer, or another approach.)))))

Diagnostics engaged. Scanning...

Zero failures at the urn.

Scanning...

Zero failures at the grave.

Scanning...

Zero failures at the church.

That wasn't to say there was nothing for her to do, Taylor noted idly. There were inefficiencies in the resonators' design and code, things she'd overlooked or dismissed during creation because at the time her concern had been completing a project. You don't want to let perfect be the enemy of good, after all. But for what they were, for their limited capacity and small harmonics and basic programming, they were operating about as effectively as she could expect them to.

In truth, she barely even needed the scanner to determine that much - it had more been for objective confirmation of her subjective experience, a reassurance that her hopes weren't biasing her perceptions. The second the bus had entered her field, she'd felt a whisper-light cloak of serenity engulf her. She could've sworn she saw the other people on the bus relax for a moment too, as if the weight of the world had been reduced by a fraction for all of them at the same time. The field was perfectly functional.

Her first step off the bus had also confirmed this to her, albeit not so strongly as her later diagnostics had. The street looked and smelled cleaner than it had not even a week ago - even just a few days of good vibes had led people to idly cleaning away some of the trash that littered their street. There were noticeably more people out and about this time, even though the workday hadn't let out yet - some just out for a stroll, but some jogging and others playing games. The community felt safer and more welcoming than it had previously.

Zero failures. The best-case scenario, the optimistic long-shot, and yet here it was, unfolding before her eyes. The proof of her effect on the world was all around her. Even her expectations of the tech weren't mis-calibrated. If anything, it was having more of an effect than she'd predicted. The underperforming outlier here wasn't her resonators or her fields, it was just Sophia's attitude. Was she immune somehow? Just such a bad person that being slightly better was more noticeable on the average person than on her? Or was she going to be just as friendly as her neighbors in a few more weeks once it wore her down?

Taylor sat down on an empty stoop and took a deep, steadying breath. Whatever Sophia's problem was, it wasn't hers - at least, beyond how the other girl brought that problem to school with her. Regardless, Taylor didn't have the spare material to test any hypotheses regarding the track star's bad moods, and even if she did it would be low-priority. She had bigger fish to fry.

Her train of thought was going all over the place, gunning it for a half-dozen distant projects she couldn't afford. What to make? Work backwards. Sometime next month, she's working on a new project. That means she has new materials, which have to be acquired. So either directly acquiring materials, or acquiring money to buy them. The latter was a nonstarter: regardless of whether the money was legit or not, rolling up into a store and walking out with 20 phones was going to get the wrong kind of attention no matter what. That left her with illegally acquiring the materials directly.

"Excuse me?"

Taylor shook herself out of her daze, eyeing the woman who'd interrupted her reverie. She was on the older side. Maybe she lived here, and Taylor was in the way? "Sorry, I'll move."

The woman shook her head. "Oh no, that's already dear. It's just...you look rather thin."

Taylor pursed her lips. "I'm eating fine, but thanks for the concern."

The woman didn't look convinced, but didn't press the issue. "Well, either way..." she dug into her purse for a moment, before pulling out a small pamphlet. "Maybe you'd like to come by?"

Taylor took the pamphlet, ready to politely dismiss the woman's offer, but a quick skim invited her to read closer. The church, the one anchoring her field, was doing an event Sunday afternoon. Part block party, part potluck, part charity fundraising. The funds would be donated to a charity that helped kids from low-income neighborhoods go to colleges where they'd earned a spot but couldn't afford it. an investment in the future - not just for themselves, but for kids all over the country. A drop in the bucket, but a worthy cause by any standard.

"Yeah," Taylor said, her mind whirling. "Yeah, I think I'll swing by. Thanks for telling me about this," she said with a smile.

The woman smiled back and patted her shoulder. "Stay safe, young lady," she said as she stepped around Taylor to get inside. Apparently she had been in the way, but the woman didn't mind. Taylor stood and returned to the bus stop. This time she was alone, so she pulled out the scanner and started tapping away, adjusting the field. Maybe she wouldn't need to steal after all.

At least dozens and potentially hundreds of people, all already in a charitable mood? Maybe she could blend in with the more legitimate charitable causes. A light tweak to the field's harmonics, and now instead of general well-being, it was geared to reinforce generosity. She'd bring something, just to not be a complete leech...lasagna maybe...and then she'd walk around collecting old phones from whoever could afford to part with them. She'd walk away with a pile of phones and noone the wiser because, well it's not odd if someone's collecting for charity during a charity event.

That still left her needing to build something for future resources, though. She couldn't depend on regular charity events in this specific neighborhood, there was only so many unused electronics lying around. But this would give her some wiggle room for a project or two. She would still need to steal, just...not yet.

Three criteria for a target. Firstly, a place with a good deal of appliances that could be easily transported or at least disassembled to get to the good parts. Secondly, a place with lousy security for large stretches of time, such that she could work undisturbed without worrying that someone could catch her on tape or something. Thirdly, the target needed to either be deserving of theft or the kind of place that could afford the loss. Researching all of this would take a good deal of time, and Taylor had to make time for school, Tinkering, and sleeping on top of that. But this was the kind of thing that was simple enough she could probably whip up a program to automate it.

She couldn't just run this on the family computer. For one, the power draw would be immense. But also putting it somewhere her father could find it by accident was a recipe for disaster, and there'd be times he was using it where she couldn't access her program without arousing suspicion. Plus, best to not tie it to their personal IP address. She'd need to build the program it's own dedicated computer...

Taylor yanked her thoughts back. She was getting ahead of herself. She could in theory put this on her phone, same as the scanner, but it would require a lot more power and that wasn't something she could code around. That meant her next project was obvious: a power cube. It'd take some elbow grease, but she could finish it by Sunday and bring it to the potluck. All those people milling around in an XM-amplifying field, would generate enough energy to fill the cube if she was there for a few hours. Even a small one could power the program she was imagining for...at least a week? And she could worry about making the program once she had an idea of how much power and material she had to work with.

Taylor boarded the bus, confident that she had a good plan for the immediate future.