Figures out Kid Win's specialty

“You must have liked Legos as a kid,” I said.

“Well, yeah. Why do you say that?”

“Well, it's pretty convenient to just be able to put all the pieces together whenever you want to make something new, but I'm not sure why you don't just make it official and just put ports on everything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, you're halfway to having everything be plug and play anyway, why not just go ahead and make your power source slottable into your other things? The sizes are pretty much standardized already, and you've done some elegant work making sure everything fits together.”

“Slottable...plug and play....slottable.”

There was something wrong with Kid Win. I could see that his whole body had gone stiff, and I wondered why. I'd learned a lot of what I knew about human behavior of expressions from a lifetime of seeing them, of seeing Emma manipulate people, of seeing Sophia intimidate them. Things I remembered just made sense now. I'd been almost utterly oblivious before, so wrapped up in my own problems that I hadn't been able to see the problems other people were going through at all.

This was something different.

Some of it was just shock at some sort of revelation. Hadn't he known that his abilities were modular? I'd heard somewhere that powers tended to be almost intuitive in their use; how could a tinker not know his own specialization?

However, something was just off about the whole thing, almost as though he was no longer completely in control of his own body. I watched him and found my mind spinning as I stared at him.

Agent Murphy, or Miss Militia or whoever she was gestured at a camera, and a couple of PRT agents gently walked him out of the room.

“Was it something I said?” I asked.

“It happens that way sometimes with tinkers,” she said. “Sometimes they're inspired by an idea, and then it's like they are in a fugue.”

***

Family