Touch: A survival story. - 115. Interlude: Peter

Washington DC: In conference with the National Security Council.

In Peter Toranaga’s considered opinion, the worst thing about having to change the world was the weight of the decision. It had a shroud to it. A gravity. Almost an anxiety, if one could condescend to call it something quite so small. A keen, unbiased awareness of the impact of one’s actions.

He found, in such moments, that it was best to stay on task.

He waited while his escort keyed in the elevator code, pretending to read through the notes he had already fully memorized.

“You’re the linguist, right?”

Peter grunted an affirmative. The agent seemed unimpressed.

“How many do you speak?”

He frowned at that. Not irritated. Just perplexed.

“All of them.”

The agent might have said something further, but the door chimed open before he could. The room on the other side was bustling. Full of faces he recognized from his brief, but had never seen in person. Generals. Admirals. Politicians. It was odd, realizing he wasn’t out of place here. All heads turned to the new arrivals.

Peter reminded himself to smile.

“Good afternoon,” he murmured, pulling his ID card from his pocket by reflex and vaguely flashing it. “Peter Toranaga, Department of Metaphysical Affairs. Thank you all for coming.”

This was met with silence. Not entirely surprising. While everyone present had been briefed on DoMA’s existence to some extent, he suspected at least half of them believed him to be the remnant of some failed cold war CIA offshoot. The level of need to know varied by department. He would need to account for that. He could tell from the faces of some that they thought he was, at best, a spoon bender, and at worst a sanctioned con-man. He did his best to differentiate them out. Separate the looks of quiet contempt from those that would know better.

He continued.

“I’m here to brief you all on the state of metaphysical secrecy on a national and international level, in the hope of setting out a plan of action.” He stepped forward in the direction of one of the display screens at the far side of the room, took out a USB, and plugged it in.

"Can anyone tell me how much you already know about the state of secrecy in the modern day?"

More silence. The shuffling of a few papers. Then one of the generals spoke up. Good. The military would be some of the ones who took him seriously, he hoped. They'd had to deal with this before.

"Metaphysical secrecy is broadly unsustainable," the man said reluctantly. "We've known that much since the Benson report in the nineties. The slow growth of deviation abilities in the population will gradually push the strain of maintaining secrecy towards a state of critical overflow. Left to the current system, the masquerade will collapse internationally within the next ten to fifteen years."

Peter nodded.

"Succinct summation, General. Unfortunately, it is no longer correct." He plucked a remote from the conference table, clicked a button, and the display screen lit up with a data spread.

"We began a follow up study a few years ago. According to the results, which I am bound to say I agree with, the tipping point will be reached within the next twelve to eighteen months, if not sooner."

There was some consternation about the room at that. Peter let his gaze drift from face to face.

"Mobile phones," he murmured. "The Benson report did not account for phones. Digital cameras. Near universal wi-fi access. Secrecy is a dying art." There was a flurry of murmurs and hushed conversation as the group began to process the new information. Some looked worried, others skeptical.

After a few moments, the general raised a hand for silence.

"Your containment plan, Mr. Toranaga?"

Peter took a breath.

"Sir... We can't contain this. It's too late. We would have to demolish individual freedoms of information beyond the level even the big brother nations are capable of. Our only option is to get out in front of it." He paused, letting his words sink in. The room was quiet, the only sound the hum of the projector and the shuffling of papers.

"To my mind, our best course of action is a controlled release of information. We need to choose the time, the place, and the manner in which the public learns about the metaphysical. If we do that, we can minimize the fallout, and prevent panic."

He clicked the remote again, and the display screen flicked over to a low resolution image of a smiling elderly couple. Peter gestured at the woman on the screen.

"A dream walker in Smolensk had a stroke last week. The brain damage short circuited her abilities, and she severely traumatized seventeen people in her apartment complex before she died. Two of them are comatose, including her husband, who was sleeping next to her."

He clicked again. A smiling eight year old with a gap in his front teeth.

"A boy in New York manifested his latent biokinetic abilities during the incident last year. His panic attack induced stage four liver cancer in the agent who retrieved him. She is still recovering."

He clicked again. A grainy frame of security footage showing a colossal tiger, formed of bark sheathed wood, its jaws clamped around a young boy’s leg.

"Last month, one of my own agents encountered a berserk forest spirit in a nature reserve in Oregon. It attempted to eat two children at a local movie theater."

A sharp intake of breath around the room.

"Did they survive?"

Peter smiled. He couldn’t help the note of pride that snuck into his voice.

"One of them was my son. They were fine." He cleared his throat. "The point is that these events are happening more and more frequently, and every single one of them has the potential to be an absolute clusterfuck. Do we want this-" he gestured at the screen, the wooden tiger still halfway through biting down on his child’s foot. "-to be how the world finds out?" This was it, Peter knew. The big moment. They all agreed, right? They couldn't not agree. The problem would be getting them to act. Who wanted to be the person to bring magical secrecy crashing down? It would be career ending. The silence stretched further. They were quiet, all searching, he knew, for a way out, just as he had.

An older woman broke the silence first. "What would a controlled release look like, Mr. Toranaga? How do we ensure the public is ready for something like this?"

Peter hesitated.

"Unfortunately, Ma'am, I don’t think they are ready. I do not think they ever will be. But we can make it seem normal. Moreso than the random catastrophes that would break the news otherwise. If we handle this right, we can make it a novelty that sometimes gets out of hand. A few decently powerful metaphysicals get spots on talk shows. Maybe a couple teenagers suddenly get popular on twitter. If we handle it wrong…" he shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

"Don't you think you're being condescending?" asked one of the agent-types. "The public can handle a spoon bender or two." Peter simply looked at him.

Right. They had no sense of scale. So much for tact, he supposed.

"I left something in my office," he said flatly. "I'll be right back."

The man began to reply. Peter vanished with a quiet pop.

For a moment, the assembled figures all just sat there, glancing blankly at one another.

“Isn’t his office in Manhatt-”

When Peter reappeared, he was aiming a handgun at the agent's face. The man flinched. He wasn’t the only one.

Peter’s escort swore, unholstering his own sidearm and firing a pair of shots directly into the back of his head.

Peter didn't even react.

"The president of the United States is currently in the Oval office, a few floors above us,” he murmured. “I could kill him. Right now. Extremely easily."

He lowered the gun, pulled out the magazine, and removed the chambered round.

"Honestly I wouldn't even need this."

He held the handgun flat in his palm. It began to melt.

"We're not talking about spoon benders, here. We're talking about people like me."

New York: Toranaga Residence.

Peter Toranaga had never been quite so tired as he was when he trudged into his kitchen at one in the morning, looking for something to eat. He tugged open the fridge door and stared inside with unseeing eyes.

“Check the microwave,” came a voice from the dining room. “Casper made honey-chicken skewers.”

Peter stopped. Turned his head ninety degrees to peer through the gloom. Spotted his wife at the dinner table, picked out by the faint glow of her laptop screen.

“Didn’t see you there.”

Sarah smiled.

“Christ. You must be wiped.”

He closed the fridge back up on autopilot, started up the microwave, and leaned himself against the kitchen counter.

He did not close his eyes. He doubted he would have been able to open them again.

“You’re up late.”

Sarah shrugged.

“Solidarity.” She hummed. “That, and I had papers to grade.” She leaned back a little in her seat, gazing at him. “How’d it go?”

He tried to bully himself into remembering anything about his day, then groaned.

“About as well as you’d expect.”

“So, nothing.”

He shook his head.

“They’re too chickenshit.”

His wife swore quietly, then set her computer to the side.

“What did they say?”

“They’re taking it to a higher authority,” he muttered. “Saying it’s an international issue. Gotta bring it to the President. The U.N. Make sure Russia and China are on board. All that spice.”

The microwave beeped. He extracted his chicken sticks, and mooched across to the dining room to join her.

Sarah was considering, her lips pursed.

“I mean, they’re not wrong,” she pointed out. “Magical secrecy can’t break in just one country. It’s all or nothing. This is absolutely an international thing.”

Peter groaned, halfway through burning his mouth on a bite of chicken.

“I know,” he muttered. “Question is how long it’s gonna take. We have a year and a half, at best. How much of that time are we about to lose co-ordinating this internationally?”

Sarah sighed.

“You’ve done your part, love,” she murmured. “The rest isn’t up to you.”

He ate one of his skewers in silence, trying to internalize that fact. She wasn’t wrong.

“... It’s going to be a fucking disaster.”

Sarah sighed, and lay a hand on her husband’s arm. She knew her man. No reassurances would help here. He didn’t need that. Better to distract him with a problem they could solve.

“I flew this morning.”

Peter chewed slowly, recalibrating.

“Flew as in-”

“Like James, yes. I think so, at least. Tripped over that pot plant in my office. Didn’t quite manage to hit the ground the way I should have. Just kinda hung there.”

“Right,” Peter murmured. “... Well. I guess that answers one thing. You’re definitely where James gets it from.”

Sarah half-smiled.

“Your dad flies too, you know.”

“Not when he’s human, he doesn’t.”

Peter sat back in his chair, his half-eaten chicken sticks forgotten on his plate, and directed his gaze at the dining room wall.

“We can get you booked in sometime next week, I think. One or two sessions. Just like last time with your shockwaves, figuring out how it works and how to hide it when you’re in-”

“I don’t think I want that this time,” she replied, her voice quiet.

Peter would have blinked, had he the energy.

“Oh?”

“I think I’ll ask James to teach me.”

Peter actually did blink at that. And here he’d been thinking Sarah would refuse her magic until the day the sun went out.

“Why the sudden turn around?” he asked.

Sarah shrugged.

“You’ve seen how James is taking Charlie. Kid’s been practically dissociating since Friday. This could be nice. A distraction, you know? Something just me and him.”

Peter considered that a long moment, then chuckled.

“So that’s all it took, huh? Find a way to make your magic the positive parental move?”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Why not? Did your parents ever try that?”

Peter winced.

“Why is it that you hold more of a grudge on that than I do?”

“It’s called love, dear. You might have heard of it.”

They both glanced toward the stairs at the sound of a door opening and closing, the conversation dying in its tracks on the offchance that any of their cohabitants overhear it. A few moments later, James appeared, headphones clamped on over his hoodie, Rise Against blaring loudly in his ears, looking like death warmed up.

He didn’t notice them, simply mooching through the dark in the direction of the kitchen, fumbling in the cupboard for a few seconds, and slouching his way back towards the stairs, pausing only to grab a spoon from the pull out drawer on his way by.

“... Did that bitch just steal the peanut butter?” Sarah asked quietly.

Peter chuckled. “We have raised a criminal.”

They didn’t resume their earlier conversation. Either conversation. Peter trusted his wife, and regardless, he was too burned out to think. He took a final bite of chicken skewer, and followed her to bed.

In retrospect, Peter had to reconsider his earlier perspective. The worst thing about needing to change the world wasn’t the weight of it. No. The worst thing was when you failed.