Reaper - Made to be Broken

Marie and David were stuck locked in a laboratory guarding a group of D-class that had fled the carnage of a containment breach. Marie had just finished checking in with MTF command, letting them know that an Asimov’s Lawbringer and a Maz Hatter were sheltering in place in their specific spot. “Orders are to guard the D-class and stay put. They aren’t allowed to wander, period.”

“What’s gotten loose?” One of the D’s asked worriedly. He was much younger than the others, with short dirty blonde hair and dark green eyes, and scrawny too. Marie wondered if he were in on drug charges, cocaine could produce that skinniness. Drug use or dealing or gangbanging were the charges on most of the D-class coming in these days, with the occasional daring thief or silver tongued conman to round things out.

Murderers were a minority, and sex offenders never fessed up when put in the system, especially when Clef was working at a particular site. The man was violent towards anyone on the registry, to the point where the HR department kept two copies of every sex offender’s file. One fudged so Clef wouldn’t find out what they were really in for. Bright would look the other way too, and though Marie could understand it, given the rumors surrounding their pasts, she couldn’t condone it. Regardless, most of this group looked like they were gang members or addicts to Marie. The latter always had a sickly vibe you could sense when talking to them. She couldn’t afford to be introspective right now though, regardless of the topic.

“Six eight two, and he’s damaged three other cells, we’re going to have to put him somewhere isolated again. I keep telling people to station the Tickle Monster here so we can use its powers on him. But noooo, let's coddle the psychic ball of goo that snuggles enemies into submission. Worse, they had to stick the Plague doctor near him, and fucking Peanut!”

“So no call for us yet?” David asked hopefully.

“No, which is why we’re to stand guard. They don’t want the Plague doctor turning the D class into an army.” Marie gazed out the window of the laboratory door, sealed up very well.

“Who’s the other one that broke out?” An older Dclass with gang tattoos and a shaved head asked. He had a teardrop tattoo’d at the corner of his eye, in some gangs the mark of a murderer. He was cracking his knuckles and neck, eager to fight the breached anomalies.

“The mask, but it's not going anywhere on its own. More it's the goo it creates, the corrosive crap, and the negative psychic juju it spreads. That's going to make a mess and make cleaning up a pain. This is the fourth time they’ve had to build it a new cell from scratch and move it to a new location while the work is done. The fewer people ultimately that move around this breach, the faster it will be over. But it's nothing the Foundation hasn’t faced before. I will be over in a couple of hours.”

“So we wait then…” The tattoo’d D sounded restless and disappointed, maybe she should use the cuffs at her belt. Marie was pretty sure she could take this guy in a fight. His center of gravity was too high, she could sweep his legs out from under him quite easily.

“Yes, unless you want to wrestle a lizard the size of an APC, a statue that can break your neck at the speed of a car, get turned into a zombie puppet or be the victim of a psychic parasite.” Marie sighed in exasperation. “We’ve been here for over a decade, we know these guys well, you’re not missing very much.”

The gangster D-class laughed, trying to hide his disappointment as he sat back down. “Yeah Superman I’m not chica. So what do we do? No books in here just lab manuals, and I don’t understand a word of that crap!”

“I could tell the story of how I came to the Foundation.” David chuckled. “I’m in for life dude. I came when I was twelve. My choices were work for them as a hacker or go to federal prison.”

“Damn dude thats hardcore.” The youngest D chuckled.

“How’d you get in here kid?” Marie asked him worriedly. He looked a little young, and a little soft around the edges for an addict now that she thought about it. And he didn’t have the weathered look. Smoking illicit substances tended to cause blemishes due to diminished healing speed and tightening up and drying the skin.

“Did some shit for the Serpent’s Hand. You should have seen the mess I made of an MCD warehouse, place was well on its way to burning down just as the MTF pulled up. Didn’t have a fucking chance, but at least we saved a bunch of anomalous humans from getting sold as sex slaves. I told the HR guy at intake, the one with the massive burn on his face, if the Foundation puts me through college I’ll gladly work for you guys. He said he’d talk to people for me, but don’t hold my breath. I don’t really have anywhere to go, and I did what I did because I believed it was the right thing, not because I wanted to be some big hero or shit.”

“That's a deep sentiment kid, but it takes a lot more than good intentions to make it in the Foundation. In fact good intentions can get you killed here.” Marie told him sternly. “I work in the Maz Hatters, yes it's a pun, point is to us D class get in the way… maybe it’s better we drop this shit before I start waxing darker. Actually David, I don’t think I ever asked you about it. How did you end up in the Foundation?” Keep them occupied and there probably wouldn’t be any trouble. But if anything busted in here the kid would be useless.

“Well, you know why I like Asimov’s three laws of robotics?” David smirked, his face lighting up with mirth.

“Why?” Marie rolled her eyes, his smile was infectious. That was part of what she loved about him. He was so childlike and sunny, even in the darkest of days.

“Because they were made to be broken, just like the Foundation’s servers.”

David slouched into his bedroom in Rockaway, listening to his parents fight. He called up his e-mail and found another rejection letter, this time directly written by the college recruiter. “You’re too young” despite having straight As and a couple hundred volunteer hours since he was ten, plus extracurriculars in mechanics and robotics normally reserved for older boys, he still wasn’t getting into college.

“So I’m supposed to just sit here for another five years and twiddle my thumbs?” David had demanded of his teachers.

“Our school does not allow the skipping of years based on course work. We feel it leaves students open to bullying and thus becomes a liability. What if someone is teased to the point of suicide?”

“That's why you hire extra GUIDANCE counselors! I’m fucking bored teach!” David yelled angrily. “IT'S NOT FAIR! I HAVE TO WAIT FOR EVERYONE ELSE BECAUSE YOU’RE A BUNCH OF WUSSES!!!!” And he’d knocked over the chair.

He got sent to the principal’s office, and when he continued to yell he’d been suspended. That was the argument going on downstairs, who got to babysit him while he was suspended.

David had enough. He shoved his laptop, binoculars and a copy of his report card into his backpack, along with an Isaac Asimov anthology and a snicker’s bar, slightly stale, opened his window and disappeared in the busy late afternoon sunshine. There was a military contractor he liked to watch from the nearby abandoned building. They took ships in for repairs, including specialized robotic stuff.

He made his way down to a little used area of the dockyards, making it just as night started to fall on New York City. Usually he’d sit on one of the docks and watch the comings and goings. It was some kind of military contractor there, but he couldn’t find any company logo, not usually, sometimes though he could get insignias off the ships. He’d kept a notebook, figuring it had to do with military companies or something.

Tonight though, he was in luck. A big submersible meant for underwater vents and trenches and high pressure diving was being towed into dock. And it had the whole rear rudder sheared off, just like in Jaws! It was painted black, with a white insignia on it, some kind of angler fish with three huge barbed arrows aimed at it like harpoons. There was some kind of payload floating in behind it. A big fluid bladder of some kind, just looking at it made him insatiably curious, though also kind of woozy and disoriented. It looked like one of those scoops used to collect spilled crude oil. A bunch of soldiers in swat armor were standing watch on the docks. David squinted, and could just make out an M on the back of their armor. MPs maybe? Military police?

David had had it, he seriously had. If nobody was going to acknowledge him for his hard work, he was going to see if the army would let him enlist. He didn’t care how young he was, surely they needed mechanics. Maybe he’d even get to work on the infamous “Big Dog” pack robot.

David straightened up, and marched right up to the gates of the facility. He was going to do this. If only to try and get the attention of someone that could alleviate his boredom. The guard was wearing some kind of black swat armor, and his partner was wearing a black suit and a bullet proof vest. Both of them carried nasty looking carbines. “Whaddyou want kid?” The guy in the black suit was cradling a travel mug with something fragrant and steaming in it. He had power sunglasses on, like the men in black, despite the darkness.

“Work.” David said with a goofy grin on his face. “I have my report card and everything. I’m really good at computers.”

The two men laughed. “Get lost kid. It’s illegal to put minors under the age of sixteen to work. We could get in real big trouble you know.”

“My teachers won’t let me skip a grade, NYU’s enrollment staff laughed in my face, FOUR TIMES! I’m smarter than everyone in my class and they won’t let me use it!”

“Because you’re what, eight?” the man in the suit rolled his eyes.

“TWELVE.” David was getting angry now. “None of the adults will take me seriously! None of my classmates understand me! They make fun of me for being smart! I could finish a masters degree in three years, you can make book on it!”

The two men laughed. “Kid, the line of work we’re in people die, even tech guys.”

David took a deep breath and shouted out the equation for Landauer's principle as loud as he possibly could and finished with. “THIS EQUATION DESCRIBED BY ROLF LANDAUER DESCRIBES THE MINIMUM AMOUNT OF ENERGY TO ERASE A BIT OF DATA SIR! SIMPLY PUT THE COLDER A COMPUTER IS THE MORE ENERGY EFFICIENT IT BECOMES SIR!” He saluted the two guards.

“What’s going on here?” An older man in a labcoat came around the corner from the direction of the docks, sipping a mug of hot soup and carrying a flashlight. He had chains with a number of maritime themed silver jewelry around his neck despite the polo shirt and khakis he wore under his labcoat.

“The kid thinks knowing a bunch of equations about computers is going to get him a job!” The guard in armor laughed. “Wants to go to college even though his stones haven’t dropped yet and nobody will let him so he wants to pad his resume!”

“That so… I could hear Landauer’s equation letter perfect from a hundred feet. Got quite a set of lungs on him.” He had a southern accent and salt and pepper hair and pale brown eyes.

“I brought my report card and my extracurriculars sir!” David dug into his backpack and pulled out the folder. “Please sir! I know I can do adult programming work but nobody believes me!”

The three men poured over the kid’s papers. “Well, it sure is done up professional. But I can’t accept this…” The man in the suit sighed. “Our work is classified. Tell you what, we’ll take your information and when you manage to get a college degree we’ll talk to you again, and we won’t even look twice about your age either.” He winked at the boy.

David groaned and nodded, he didn’t want to wait… at all… he wanted out of this place. His parents argued at least once a week, his classmates thought he was some kind of alien for being smart and some of them thought he made a good punching bag for it too. Then there was his teacher’s worry about his mental well being if he went to high school (and away from the neanderthals that plagued him) before puberty.

It took a few minutes to copy the file, but the man in the suit came back. “My name is James… says here you’re David?”

“Yes sir.”

“Nice to meet you David. It's quite simple really. The stuff we do here is dangerous. And there are age limits to our work but we do make exceptions for the right college degrees and accomplishments.” James explained matter of factly. “We do top secret work, stuff that grown men with twice the amount of muscle and balls I have die doing. Because of that we have a group of people that heavily review the ethics of hiring and labor decisions and they’re not people we want to disobey without good reason.”

“Yeah the ethics committee is going to have our heads on a platter if we hire a fucking kid!” The guard in armor laughed hysterically. “Oooh when I get back to seventeen the guys are going to bust a gut around the water cooler!”

David took his papers and stormed away, face furiously red. A plan was forming in his mind. He wanted someone, anyone to take him seriously. And he was hoping that if he played his cards carefully, and put on his cutest smile, he might be able to force his teachers into letting him skip directly to high school, where he’d no longer be at the mercy of teachers too worried about getting sued and the “mental well being” of their students to let the ones with talent, (and David put himself and no other in his class in that category), actually have a shot at showing it.

He just needed a schematic, any schematic would do, the more complicated the better. And some modeling clay.

David’s mother sent him to his room, taking his laptop away until after school the next day, she’d convinced the school not to suspend him over the scene in the guidance counselor's office. It didn’t matter, David wasn’t going to do it tonight. If all went well he wouldn’t have to deal with idiot guidance counselors for much longer. He needed a good night’s sleep if he was going to even try to hack the US Military after all.

“UUUUUHHHHH!” James fell into his office chair with a sigh of disgust. “Weird kid.”

“Yeah well I just talked to the higher ups.” His partner, Dr. Mosley from the Ethics Committee told him. “They want him surveilled, so we do a workup on him, put together a potential recruit file and they’ll decide if we let a kid who hasn’t even gone through puberty yet join the SCP Foundation.”

“They turned a bunch of those Tyler clones into D-class.”

“Yeah but that’s D-class. They were expecting those clones to die and make space for others. I hated that decision by the way. It made those kids cheaper. We still got a couple of them in janitor work that grew up. But that’s it.”

“How’s the quality of the stuff from SCP 3000?” James started flipping through his files.

“Pretty good considering he accidentally took the back half off the submersible in the process. But we got footage for testing at least.”

“You ever wonder if it really is Ananteshesha?” James asked. “Damn thing is bizarre. Its like it just… annihilates memories…”

“I think it's in the right place to spark a myth.” Mosley told him. “The best myths are like the best lies. They all have a kernel of truth. Reminded of your lost frailty my friend?”

“Yeah kind of, alright I’ll start tomorrow, get me a kit for disguising myself as a fed and a copy of the keys to the school. Oh and if there’s CCTV in the halls, get a bug into that so that we can control what the school sees maybe a couple audio bugs in the important places and the bathrooms. Shame there was only one of that newsboy hat, someone’s got to track the damn Hand down so we can get it back. That’s infiltration gold right there. Nobody would ever get caught while placing a bug again!”

At first when David found his bag had been rifled through over lunch he thought one of the school bullies had been looking for test answers. Then he realized nothing had been taken, even though his wallet had been rifled through too. He dug into a cloth drawstring bag in his locker and found a paint brush and baby powder.

Grumbling about assholes and ‘going CSI on their ass’ David didn’t notice one of the school security cameras focusing on him as he quickly daubed some baby powder on the brush and started brushing it over top of the locker. There were no fingerprints or handprints, just a big smudge on the edge of the metal. It looked like someone had leaned on the edge of his locker while they rifled through it. The mark was greasy too, hand lotion maybe? The surface was too narrow to find out if it was an adult’s print or a child’s, just a centimeter. But someone had definitely been in his locker.

Then he looked up and saw the camera focused on him, glared at it, and then flipped the camera the middle finger. “So teach, I’m adult enough for you to fuck with my shit but not adult enough for college? Fuck you meddling bitch.” Then he stormed off, his hall pass was to the bathroom, but he’d been seeing a couple of boys in the year ahead of him staring at him in what looked like anticipation that morning. He was going to get his head swirlied for sure but David had to go. And the camera watching him was driving him crazy with frustration.

James sat in his office laughing at the kid’s profanity. “Man you little brat, if you only knew.” He looked at a copy of his orders. “Got our panties in a twist… and now they want to tear down that fucking warehouse next door. Make a ruckus. Brat.” Make sure there’s nobody pulling this kid’s strings. Get me EVERYTHING on him. We’ll decide if he can join early, if he’s clean he’ll get in when he’s older but I want a reason to violate the ethics committee recruiting guidelines. - Recruitment, forwarded from Overwatch Command.

One of the bullies did try to swirlie David, grabbing him just as he finished his business. And David tried to step on their toes. The boy holding him jumped back with a taunt of. “Haha, not gonna get me with that twice.” and punched David in the face.

David spun expertly on one leg and then brought his elbow into the larger boy’s diaphragm. “Ever hear how it's rude to interrupt someone on the john?” David didn’t care who saw or heard him. There were surveillance cameras focused on the bathroom doors, but not inside. He was on his own here.

“Robots are retarded and so are books. You need to be in football to be a real man.” The bully wheezed. “I’m gonna take your sci fi crap and flush it down the toilet just to toughen you up.”

David moved to the sink to wash his hands. “You couldn’t win so you grabbed me while I had my dick out to take a piss? That's low Doyle, really low. What’s the matter? Your dad beat you because you’re too stupid for him?”

Doyle recovered enough to grab David by his dreadlocks and swing him back from the sink. “What’s really low is how much of a pussy your dad lets you be. Meeooooww pussy pussy! Fight me bitch and I just might let you go.”

David could feel his eye swelling shut. “What’s wrong? Worried my nerdiness is infectious? Germophobe germophobe…” And then he got his head shoved into the metal wall of the bathroom stall in response. “Or maybe your dad calls you a girl because of how much you whine and you’re just taking it out on me.”

“I’m worried people are gonna see how much our school sucks and laugh at us because of you, sucker. Come on, get on the football field this year, the peewee league meets next week. You can prove how much of a man you are to the boys.”

David spun around and headbutted the boy in the mouth. “Only thing I’m worried about is getting your blood on my shoes prick!”

David stormed down to the principal’s office and sat in front of the guidance counselor’s door. “And what are you doing?” The secretary asked.

“I’m not moving until they suspend Doyle for being a shithead.”

The secretary sighed, picked up her phone, and asked the nurse to come down here, there was a student with a black eye. “Being bullied is just a part of growing up David. You have to get over it.”

“Get over my…” David stopped himself, remembering the trouble he’d been in before. “I hate you all. Doyle’s a fucking psycho. I bet you five bucks and a hershey bar that he grows up to be a serial killer. And if you don’t let me in to see the principal about having him suspended I’m going to the cops and reporting the school for child abuse.”

“She’s at lunch, wait and then you can talk.”

It didn’t get where David wanted it, alone so the principal heard his side of the story first. The principal came in with Doyle by the back of the collar. “What do you have to say for yourselves?” She demanded.

“He’s a sadist!” “He’s a wuss!” “He’s going to grow up to be a serial killer!” “My dad says all nerd wusses should be punished, real men don’t read!” “Just because your dad fucking beats you like a mule doesn’t mean I should suffer the same thing! You’re dad’s a fucking asshole!” “I’ll be fucking your asshole with a baseball bat you mother fucking pussy!” “Try it neanderthal! I’ll knock your teeth out!”

“ENOUGH!!!!” The Principal shouted. “Doyle you’re suspended and I’m calling your father and since this is the fourth time I’m calling child services about your mouth. If your father really is saying these sorts of things in your hearing… I see this behavior again and I’ll call the police and have you arrested for assault! Do we understand each other? And David, you goad him into it and you’ll have detention for a year!”

“I don’t goad him into anything! And you adults all turn your backs and let me fucking suffer and you want to know why I’m so desperate to get out of here!” David stood up and stormed out of the principal’s office. “None of you have a spine, you’re allergic to taking a risk or having faith in your students, I’m out of here! And Doyle it will be worse than your teeth next time. I don’t play your games.”

That afternoon David did his homework at lunch and on the bus home, and got off two stops too early to go to the craft store. He already had the signal repeaters he would need for his laptop to reach the base for the hack. He hadn’t noticed the man in black from the day before watching him, following his bus to school and home, and his stop.

David walked home with his prize and a gatorade in hand. The colorful packages of Fimo like little tiles of freedom in his bag. He could recreate almost anything with enough of them and the right colors. He wasn’t poor by any means, and he’d figured out how to make money on the internet that his parents couldn’t trace. Most of it was stocks, and he had some bonds he was saving for college.

David’s parents worked 30 hour work weeks to make ends meet. But they were a year away from owning their own house and David’s baby sister had a huge bed of sunflowers she’d grown herself. It always made him smile to watch her tend them while singing “you are my sunshine.” David was only really a brat with people when he lost his temper.

He dropped his bag at his bedroom door and sure enough his laptop was waiting on his desk just like mom had said. He opened it up, and began to activate his signal repeater. He needed to reach about a mile… there! He could see the connection labeled DFDockyardR10. “Come to papa…”

James sat in the server room at the dockyard, waiting, eyes closed and a cup of lavender earl grey tea close to hand. Next to him sat their Ethics Committee Liaison, Doctor Mosley. Mosley ran a hand nervously through his salt and pepper hair as they watched David from his laptop camera.

“I’m getting too old for this. I thought when my kids left home I wouldn’t be chasing headstrong tweenage boys anymore.”

The keylogger was making a record of everything David did. James remained sitting in a lotus position on the office chair, with his eyes closed. David had to get into the Foundation database first, he’d do the rest. He’d had a test approved by recruitment and info security.

“Lucky you being able to reminisce about having a past. All I’ve got is an empty head, no name and a severe iron allergy.”

“Sorry.” Mosley mused, distracted by the surveillance feed. “Why a scranton reality anchor?”

“It's a machine without a real world purpose, outside of the anomalous there’s no reason for it to exist. So what does a kid with those kinds of grades and that kind of spunk do when he’s confronted with evidence of something that shouldn’t exist? Even if we don’t use him now, at this age, he’s still going on the potential recruit list. You’re here to make sure this gets done by the book, we funnel him through the system as he hacks, give him a path of least resistance to the blueprints. We don’t go easy on him, he fucks this up automated security will fry his computer with barbeque sauce.”

“And you’re able to wipe the data he takes off his hard drive?” Mosley asked worriedly.

“Yes sir… wasn’t hard to get in, his mother was watching workout DVDs that morning, didn’t realize the laptop was open to the internet and then left it on, just shut it and left it on!”

Mosley sighed and shook his head. “If Civilian security technology ever catches up to us heaven help us all.”

“If Heaven cared it wouldn’t have sent us anomalies.” James growled.

“Still salty over Abel trying to kill you?”

“Shut up. He’s just breached the first firewall.” James carefully started lowering the security level of the firewalls between David and the Scranton Reality Anchor blueprints they’d placed as part of his test.

“Not even two minutes, you were right James, where did this kid get that kind of smarts?”

“If we’re lucky he came by it honestly.” James said darkly. His hands moved with easy familiarity over the keys. “Strange thing memories, I don’t know my own name but I type like I was born at the keyboard.”

“Strange world we live in. Giant lizards, pictures and sounds that make you lose your mind, biblical figures, ancient machines and behemoths and below it all, a set of Eldritch monstrosities lurking in the dark. Makes me wonder when Azethoth will wake up and we’ll just cease to be, an amazing dream of a planet filled with life and mystery.”

The firewall and partitions on the server were set up to act like a hallway full of rooms formed into a maze. James had to reinforce the lock on places David wasn’t allowed to see while not making it obvious that he was being followed through the server.

“And there’s nothing left, not even a shred of fingerprint?” James asked hopefully.

“I’m afraid not, I’m sorry James. This isn’t what you wanted, I know… but the 05 was willing to allow you to continue to serve the Foundation as an agent. They wanted to throw you in a containment cell and classify you as an SCP.”

“Thank you for acting on my behalf Mosley.” James said darkly as he just barely managed to trick the kid, rerouting his hack in the direction he wanted. “This isn’t going to take him very long, the second firewall should breach in three… two… he’s in.”

“Determined little snot isn’t he?” Mosley asked with a snicker. “And one of the duties of the ethics committee mind, is to make sure the 05s don’t paranoidly wipe out agents who would be useful just because they become victim to an anomaly.”

They could see David’s face screwed up in concentration, the occasional curse and hiss of “yes!” acknowledging his efforts. “Finally a challenge! Okay worthy opponent, show me what you got.” He had a goofy grin on his face as he breached the third firewall. His expression was jubilant. “It's been so long since I’ve actually felt challenged by something!”

“He has no idea.” James chuckled and shook his head. It took about another hour for David to reach the final firewall. His expression got more and more excited as he did so. “Okay genius, lets see what you make of Doctor Scranton…”

David eyed the schematics on his screen, then dove for his sketchbook. He began to draw the item on his screen. It was some kind of machine. It looked similar enough to pictures he’d seen of the construction of particle accelerators, and he wondered if maybe that’s what was being hidden under the dockyards. “Man that would be so cool… a particle accelerator here in New York? No wonder they aren’t letting people in!”

It took an hour to finish his sketch, and by then his mother was calling him. He turned off the monitor and put his computer to sleep before running downstairs to get dinner. David had forgotten about his black eye.

“And what on earth did you do to get that?” His mother demanded with a horrified expression on her face.

“Doyle did it.” He grumbled. “Got ambushed in the bathroom by that sadistic psychopathic prick…”

“DAVID! We do not use language like that at the dinner table!” David’s father scolded. “Tell me you at least stood up for yourself.”

“Yeah, got him in the teeth.” David slurped his spaghetti noisily. “The principal overruled the teachers and suspended him. By the time I left she was calling his dad, threatening to call child services if his son’s behavior doesn’t improve. Doyle is going to be a serial killer when he grows up.”

“DAVID!” His mother was the horrified one this time. “You have no way of knowing that!”

“He’s stupid, and his dad taught him that he has a moral obligation to beat people up to toughen smart people up and turn them into a ‘real man’. He’s going to become a serial killer because a lot of them were abused as kids.” David said in a matter of fact tone, chewing as he talked. “It's not insult or exaggeration.” He swallowed his mouthful noisily. “It’s a prediction based on evidence. Anyway, I got the mother fucker in the teeth with a headbutt. I’m just mad the teachers won’t do anything. They laugh it off and say ‘oh that’s part of growing up’. I’ve seen mom’s true crime shows, if a grownup pulled that shit they’d be in prison.”

“LANGUAGE!” His father scolded. “And I thought we locked those tapes and files up behind a proxy and a good solid lock.”

“I cracked it.” David said casually. “Just like I cracked the one at school. It blocked stuff I needed for my science paper. And I wanted to see something scary. It's not like Jason Vorhees is real, or the Thing, or the Borg. And it's not scary if it's not real.”

“Hence why you screamed when you saw Jurassic park?” His mother joked.

“Hey, Tyrannosaurus was real once, and cloning could become a thing in my lifetime. So death by T-rex is a thing that could happen.” David smirked. “I’ve almost made it to your Law and Order stuff you thought I couldn’t find. Just have to finish your entire series of “Forensic Files” first.”

“My boy the detective.” David’s dad chuckled. “Okay mister detective, I haven’t been reminding you to mind your manners, but you’re wolfing through that plate. If you get sick because you ate too much you aren’t getting out of school tomorrow.”

David chuckled and tapped his leg. “I have plenty of space to store it.” Inwards he was smirking. David couldn’t wait to get back upstairs onto his computer.

James sat back in the server room, listening to the bugs placed in the home. One thing he was very, very good at was collecting intel on people who could potentially serve the Foundation’s purposes. It wasn’t common, but it wasn’t rare either, for kids to encounter and survive the anomalous and eventually go on to be agents. Approaching them directly was a new one however. And they were never taken on as children. Maybe the Brights could take David in as a Foster child, or a traveling student. Adam and Evelyn had plenty of children. Their house was big, their estate had plenty of fields out of doors for children to play in. Then James nixed that possibility. There was far too much chaos in that family for David to stand out in. Still the Ethics committee had made it clear, David was not to be an agent until he turned eighteen, though he could study at Foundation Sites and take online college classes. He’d be given plenty of tech and hacking related work, but nothing too taxing. David would also be given Doctor Millar’s Anomaly Basics course, to help him adapt to his new surroundings and some physical training so he could hide and/or escape in the event of a Breach.

That assumed David’s hacking skills passed muster. The 05 had appointed someone from the Red Right Hand to evaluate David’s file and coordinate with him on this. In fact Doctor Mosley was chatting with him right now. James