They Found Me

[Connor Kent]

This was one of many reasons Connor loved his wife. She listened to him. Like she really listened, rather than just go off on what she had decided, regardless. She respected his feelings. This was a real partnership.

Because Connor felt the same about her. Because she was actually right. This wasn't about Atharim. This was about America, about its government. 

Connor wouldn't deny that he'd kept his head in the sand since they'd left Moscow. The....world shaking events he'd found himself in the middle of- ancient societies killing people with god-like powers, creatures of mist, being brought back from near death- well, to say he wanted to leave all of that behind and just live a simple life with his wife and family, was a massive understatement. 

That feeling had also bled into politics. He didn't pay much attention. As far as he was concerned, whomever was in charge, he figured it was best to just lay low and just try to keep his family safe.

Still, even with all that, he knew he wasn't a big fan of the current administration. He didn't have any better ideas, not really. But neither did he like the current crop. He was old enough to have seen almost a dozen elections. He'd seen the difference between words and actions, the frivolous stupidities, the waste of people and money and resources.

But neither was he ok with things like assassination. The law was set them apart, equally and fairly applied to all. Principles, he knew. And despite those ideals, America had always struggled in applying them equally. History, as he had both seen and learned first hand, portrayed an America that had always been aspirational; that continued to struggle to live up to those ideals, to make them apply to everyone. The ever widening of those principles, though, applying them to more and more people, was why he still loved this country.

And he cared. If Nox was going to kill the president or anyone else, that couldn't be allowed. He had liked the kid. But he wasn't gonna let that kind of thing happen.

It was simple as that. His face hardened and he nodded. "OK. We see if he can explain. But if he isn't going to stop...."

He paused. Ayden was a weapon. But she was also his wife. He looked at her. "I can meet with him. Talk to him. Find out....what we need to know. If he does need to be...stopped, well, you can be the surprise." A smile formed there at the end.

He knew it was a simple plan. More like a suggestion. But if she was game, she'd flesh it out.

[Ayden]

Ayden laughed. It was almost like she had been asking for that exact solution. She hadn't been but one might think she was. "That's perfect. You talk to him. I'll set up some distance away on top of a building. We can choose where to talk to him so it's all set up. We'll get some comms and you can tell me when to take the shot."

Ayden's mind went a thousand miles an hour as she thought of all the things they would need to do. "You still need to pack. We need to find a new home." She paced back and forth. "I'll have to figure out where would be best to do this. If he's coming here to kill our way of life he has to have plans. I will need to talk to my contacts." She said searching her pockets for her wallet. Not that it would do much good. "I need to dig up some old things. I don't think we'll be able to give 2 weeks notice. I don't have any stashes near by."

[Connor Kent]

Connor smiled because....what was he gonna do? It was them, together. That's all that mattered. And they were on the same page. It sucked, leaving this place and life. 

Truthfully, a part of him thought things might work out so that they didn't have to leave. It depended on a lot of things.

He sighed and looked off for a moment. "OK. So we set up a meeting. Me and Nox. I'm not sure how or why, but let's assume he agrees. You will be a ways away, right? Watching through a scope?' He paused as he thought out loud. 

He wasn't exactly sanguine about what Ayden might hVe to do. But if- IF- she had to, he wanted her to be safe. "Is there any way he could hear you shoot and retaliate at where you are? The report of the gun might give you away."

They had planning to do.

[Ayden]

Ayden was glad that Connor hadn't complained about her setting up to take the shot. She was pretty sure she could hold her trigger finger long enough to get Connor's word. But this kid had partially ruined her life. She didn't like him one bit. And he was upsetting her world again.

"I'll be aways back. No one will find me, they'd have to have cameras on the roof. I'll be fine. Besides, what's a kid like that going to know about snipers?" He was Atharim, but he wasn't used to being hunted -- he was the hunter.

She stopped in front of Connor. "No one is going to know it was me. They won't even see me."

Ayden drew upon the power inside, embraced it's light and wove a simple weave she'd perfected over time and vanished from site. It kept all sound inside, all sight from outside away. She was essentially invisible.

She released the weave and smiled at Connor. "I will be fine. We just need to get him to meet with you. Maybe you just heard he was in town and wanted to meet up. You caught his viral video." She nodded towards the video they had watched, there were a few from the looks of things. But the gorilla being beheaded that had been something. Ayden wondered what the fuck was up with it too, that's not how animals behaved. But that wasn't her concern. This boy who was going to kill the president was. "You could ask him for help with something. Say you found a monster or something. He'd believe that."

[Connor Kent]

Connor's jaw dropped open as Ayden just disappeared. Just like that. Gone. He knew this power was miraculous. But there was the miracle you knew- that you had somehow become comfortable with- or at least, used to. 

But to disappear like that! He laughed out loud, putting a hand out and questing. He felt the hard solidness of her. This was different that things he had seen in movies and TV. In those, the person became invisble, but their clothes didn't. At least in the more 'realistic' ones, anyway.

But he felt the fabric of her dress, felt his hand slip down to her bare leg. The dress was still there.

Idly, he wondered what it would be like to have sex with her like that. He smirked and left his hand on her leg as he looked up at what had to be her face.

Dumb, given the situation they were in. But he loved his wife.

She dropped the....whatever it was and became visible again, that smile on her face. But they had work to do. He hadn't really done more than glance at the video so he watched it again. 

Definitely a mood killer. But once they were safe they'd have time to play. He wondered what else her power could do. The idea was good, though. 

He thought about it for a moment. "When I was in the Moscow there was this mist like creature. I saw Jenson James freeze it and Aria-you remember her?- cut its head off. I saw another one in the subway tunnels." He didn't mention how he had tried stop it with a fire extingusher. It hadn't really worked.

He raised an eyebrow, slight smile on his lips "Ok. I'll get his contact and reach out. We can try to pick somewhere you can do your trick."

It wasn't that he wanted Nox to die. Not at all. But Ayden was his wife. She carried their child. They had to plan for all possibilities. If the kid really was going to try and kill the president, he had to be stopped.

[Ayden]

Ayden nodded at Conner's encounter with the mist monsters. She definitely remembered Aria. Fucking Atharim who murdered a man. He was a bad man, but still... As if Ayden really could say anything, she assassinated people for a living.

Connor would reach out to Nox. Did he even still have the kids number? She might have to get her contacts to get his number. "Do you still have his number?" They had gotten rid of everything after coming to the US. They had died in a car crash officially. It might look odd to the kid if Connor reached out directly.

"I could get my contacts to find out how best to contact him. And if he's going to kill the president that means he's going to be in DC or Alexandria. We should make our plans there. We need to pack for an extended trip if things go bad." She looked around at their home they were building. "I know you put a lot of time and effort here, but we should go anyway, find someplace else to stay, someplace no one knows us so we don't get anyone else hurt if this goes south. We don't even need to stay in the States. New names, new idents we could even stay hidden in the heart of it all. Stay out of all this political drama."

[Connor Kent]

A twinge of grief twisted his heart at the thought of moving. He had liked this place. It had been new to both of them. This house had reflected them, their new life together. Memories had been created, however fleeting their time here had seemed.

He didn't say anything to Ayden, but inside, he felt fury at these people who would so callously and casually disrupt their life. It's not like there weren't others out there who did not also....work as assassins. 

That last part, yeah. It seemed a strange dichotomy for this to be his wife, for her to have been- to be, he amended- a contract killer. It wasn't that she was all soft and weak hearted. No. Not at all. A lionness, more life. Not tame.

Which he much preferred. Milqtoast women had never interested him. He liked a woman who challenged him and spoke up, made him think, question. A partner with whom he could be completely honest.

He didn't tell her, but she knew him well enough, he was sure, to know that he very much hoped that when this was all over, the people who had come along and uprooted them found themselves a serious case of deadness.

But for that to happen, they had to get through this. To her question, "No. I don't have his number. I might have a way to find out, if I can reach a guy I used to know. But....your contacts might be better."

And then, he couldn't help a smirk. Yeah, definitely a lionness. "Yeah, DC sounds about right. We can scope it out, find a spot for you." More like she would do the scoping. Beyond the vague idea- mostly from TV and movies and such- of her need to find a spot where she clould lay out on a roof peering through a scope with some privacy, he really didn't know her process.

It wasn't like she spoke to him in detail about her missions. He was still a bit sqeamish about the rubber meeting the road, there. It was something he'd learned decades ago- why he'd never be a doctor or a nurse or even an emergency medical tech. He wasn't good at compartmentalizing things. He felt too much empathy to be able to focus on the task at hand.

Empathy was a wonderful thing. But when someone was bleeding out from a horrible wound, it wouldn't staunch the hemorrhaging. Good medical people were able to box away their feelings and focus on triaging and treating the situation.

He'd killed before, but it was in anger. And he felt no guilt over that. And when Hayden had died, he had begun drinking himself to death. He was mostly all in when it came to things. It was a limitation, to be sure. But he really didn't know what to do about it. 

The flip side, of course, is why he was so good with people and with making friends. He had never been at a job or in a place where he didn't form friendships quickly. 

It was a tradeoff, but one he was content with.

"What else?" He was sure they would be planning for a while. Planning was good.

It kept him from fantasizing about how he'd love to kill these fuckers who blew up their lives.

[Ayden]

They continued planning and Ayden started packing. It wasn't their entire life she put in the bag, just the important things and clothes. It was easier to travel light and buy new when they got where they would end up. She knew Connor was upset and he should be, but for Ayden this all felt like her old life. Except the blackmail.

"You reach out to your guy and I'll reach out to mine. We'll see who can get his information the quickest. Might even be able to find the originator of those viral videos and use them to find him. They obviously know him well enough to video him."

[[ ooc: I kinda like the idea of Connor reaching out to however he was going to. See where that goes. So up to you if you want to do that reaching. let me know one way or the other. I can have Ayden's contacts get it going. Or we can just totally assume they got the number and you can reach out the Nox. We can do it in this thread or you can start a new one. Totally up to you. ]]

[Connor Kent]

Connor had a buddy from back at UNM who he decided to reach out to. Todd Crowther now worked for the NSA, as part of the LLM Handler committee. The beauty of Large Language Model AIs, of course, was their ability to process trillions of pieces of data. This processed data was used to create an N dimensional vector space shaped by every concept,  category, fact method, images, sound, and every other type of information that could be expressed digitally.

This vector space could then be queried to analyze and extract any kind of pattern based on that data formed it..

What people didn't realize was how important the initial training data actually was. The AI LLM was literally formed from that data. Any suppositions or predictions or analyses it gave was based on the "shape" of that space, a shape that was created by the training data.

AI, at the end of the day, was just performing vector multiplication, dot products, of the questions given it against that space to find an answer. It didnt, yet anyway, have any detectible volition or self awareness. It was purely algorithmic, even if it was beyond human analysis.

Managing such a beast, understanding how it came to its conclusions, assigning statistical liklihoods to its predictions or analyses and recommendations was complicated. It was known as the black box problem and it had only become more intractable.

Connor was aware that some were trying to use AI pattern analysis to figure out how another AI LLM might have come to its decision- and how likely it was that the recommendation was correct. But then you had to ask how did THAT AI come to its decision?

Truthfully, other than the concepts, that was all way beyond Connor's understanding. But Todd was on the team that basically babysat the NSA's AIs. 

Overkill, he knew. But Todd would be able to track down Nox- if he wanted to. But he was a friend and he trusted Connor. So it was only a day later that he had a contact number.

So there they were, Connor with a number (and even location- Todd was always thorough), wallet in hand and ringing as he and Ayden sat on the bed.  "Here goes," he said as he squeezed Ayden's leg affectionately.

It had begun.

[Nox]

It felt weird without the prosthetic. He'd gotten used to the sensation, and the ability to use the arm as an extension of himself. He now relied heavily on the power to do the most mundane things, like putting on his pants. It pissed him off. But there was a tiny bundle of joy strapped to his chest. Lily didn't like when he put her down. She didn't like when anyone else held her or fed her or just about anything. She tolerated Liam best, and he'd offered to come, but Sage was here and he could be an extra set of hands. And Sage was more useful than just a babysitter, more so actually. Nox had also taken to keeping his wallet in his kangaroo pocket underneath Lily and that meant he couldn't get to it easily enough, so as much as he hated the warrior lens Sage had originally offered him, he began using them. With a flick of his eye, he could answer his calls, change music and so much more. The only annoying thing was he had to touch his eyeball every morning and every night. He still preferred the land warriors, but Lily didn't like them.

She only a matter of days old when the call came. Now he sat in the middle of an airport terminal waiting for their first class flight back to the US to stop some fucking assassins and they waited for Nox's so-called partner to show up. They were several hours earlier than they should have been, mostly due to Nox's utter fear of flying. He had Lily to take his mind of off most of it.

A strange number rang across his wallet, and Nox looked to Sage, who shrugged. They were both keyed into the wallet. When Sage nodded, Nox answered the call. "Hello?"