The emergency memo was already on Gary's screen when Travis walked in at 8:07 AM.
He saw it from across the open floor — the red CONFIDENTIAL banner at the top of the document, the Vought letterhead, Gary reading it with the posture of a man absorbing something his body hadn't fully processed yet. The kind of stillness that preceded whatever Gary's version of a reaction looked like. Travis had learned it over five weeks: Gary processed bad news inward first, then outward, with a delay of approximately three to four minutes.
Travis sat at his desk and opened his own inbox and found the memo waiting.
ALL-STAFF — SECURITY TIER A — CONFIDENTIAL
It is with deep regret that Vought International confirms the death of Translucent, valued member of The Seven. Cause of death is under active investigation and no further details will be released at this time. All Seven members have been advised to limit public appearances pending review. Staff are reminded of their NDAs regarding any internal communications pertaining to this matter. Security protocols at all facilities are elevated to Level 3 effective immediately. Any anomalous observations should be reported to your facility security contact.
— Office of Internal Affairs, Vought International
Travis read it twice at a pace that matched the reading pace of someone encountering the information for the first time.
He let his face go neutral with the specific quality of neutral that was not performed neutrality but the genuine blankness of a man who had known this was coming and had pre-processed the emotional response days ago, leaving only the clean functioning of observation and data intake.
The facility around him did not stay neutral.
The Vought Queens supply chain floor had fourteen employees. In the next four minutes Travis watched all fourteen of them register the memo through the sequence his Archives automatically began cataloguing: three showed fear — body tightening, reduced eye contact with colleagues, the particular stillness of people reassessing their safety. Four showed the professional shock of managed adults encountering bad information at work — brief, contained, rapidly covered by the return to task. Two showed something that read as relief, which was interesting and worth filing. The remaining five showed the specific energized attention of people who were already calculating how Translucent's absence reshuffled the available power structures, which was the most informative category.
[ORGANIZATIONAL CHAOS EVENT — ACTIVE]
[TRANSLUCENT DEATH CONFIRMED: INTERNAL CLASSIFICATION ONLY]
[WITNESS RESPONSE LOGGING: 14 SUBJECTS — BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS ARCHIVED]
[PERSONNEL PROFILE UPDATES: GARY CHEN — FEAR-DOMINANT RESPONSE. NOTE: HIGH LOYALTY INDEX, LOW SELF-INTEREST IN POWER VACUUM CALCULATIONS.]
[+40 MP — WITNESSED ORGANIZATIONAL CHAOS: HIGH-VALUE DISRUPTION EVENT]
[CURRENT MP: 502 | CORRUPTION INDEX: 8.5%]
The System moved past five hundred for the first time. Greed Tier 2 was at the edge of his peripheral operational awareness now — not close, but visible, like a building you can see from the freeway that hasn't resolved into anything you can enter yet.
Gary appeared at the cubicle entrance at 8:22. His face was the gray of someone who'd slept poorly and then been given a reason to feel that the poor sleep had been prescient.
"You saw the memo," Gary said.
"Yes."
Gary looked at the floor for a moment, the particular downward gaze that meant he was accessing something he was deciding whether to say. "I knew he'd been flagged. Internally. I didn't know — I didn't think it was this." He exhaled. "Security's coming through this afternoon. Standard protocol sweep. Level 3 means they check access logs, visitor badges, inventory anomalies." He looked up. "Just — if they ask you anything, answer straightforwardly. Nobody thinks anything happened here. It's procedural."
"Of course," Travis said.
Gary nodded and went back to his desk.
The security sweep started at 2 PM — two investigators working through the floor systematically, badge readers, database access logs, a brief conversation with each employee that lasted between three and six minutes depending on the person's role. Travis had his conversation at 3:15 with a man named Chen — no relation to Gary, the name on his jacket read Chen D. — who had the practiced flatness of someone for whom these sweeps were professional routine rather than crisis response.
Travis answered seven questions. All seven answers were true. He had not accessed any Tier-A data outside of Gary's explicit authorization. He had not communicated with anyone outside the facility about internal Vought operations. He had not observed any anomalous activity in the shipping bays.
All true.
The acquisition photos on his burner phone were in a folder labeled Warehouse Inventory - Personal, not accessible to anyone who didn't physically hold the unlocked device.
At 4:40 PM, Travis volunteered to file the afternoon's outgoing manifests because Delray — the warehouse contact who'd first hired him three months ago — had briefly crossed his mind and the habit of knowing what moved through the building remained functionally useful, and the manifest room was where the afternoon's new records were being filed.
He found it in the Vought forensics waste disposal .
The manifest was two pages, attached to a disposal routing order for the New Jersey sub-facility. Third line item, listed under waste category TC-001: Carbon Composite — Anomalous, Biological Classification Pending Review — DISPOSAL PENDING — 72-HOUR CYCLE.
Acquisition Sense spiked.
Not the gentle pulse it used for documents or databases or the slightly warmer register it used for cash and marketable assets. This was the category it reserved for the Queens facility's interior — the pressing, insistent golden blaze that said this thing is extraordinary and you are standing near it and you should not let it be destroyed.
Travis photographed the manifest.
[ACQUISITION SENSE — ELEVATED ALERT]
[SUBJECT: TRANSLUCENT CARBON COMPOSITE FRAGMENTS — ANOMALOUS BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL]
[LOCATION: VOUGHT FORENSICS DISPOSAL SUB-FACILITY, NEWARK NJ]
[72-HOUR DISPOSAL CYCLE: INITIATED ~8 AM TODAY]
[REMAINING WINDOW: ~55 HOURS]
[NEW SIN PATHWAY DETECTED: GLUTTONY]
[TRIGGER CONDITION: CONSUMPTION OF UNIQUE BIOLOGICAL/EXOTIC MATERIAL]
[THRESHOLD ACT REQUIRED FOR TIER 0 → TIER 1 ACTIVATION]
[TIER 1 ABILITY PREVIEW: IRON STOMACH — CONSUME ANY ORGANIC MATERIAL WITHOUT HARM. NEUTRALIZE INGESTED TOXINS AND POISONS.]
Travis read the notification through twice, standing in the manifest room with the filing cabinet still open and the disposal routing order in his hand.
He re-read the relevant line.
CONSUMPTION OF UNIQUE BIOLOGICAL/EXOTIC MATERIAL.
His jaw set.
The System wanted him to eat a piece of Translucent.
This was, Travis acknowledged to himself with the flat precision of someone cataloging a fact that doesn't improve with examination, genuinely revolting. Not in the moral sense — in the basic mammalian sense, the sense in which the human digestive system has opinions about what constitutes food and those opinions are strong and largely non-negotiable. His stomach expressed its opinion immediately and he told it to wait.
He filed the remaining manifests in correct order and left the room and returned to his desk and did not look at Gary through the partition because looking at Gary right now required a quality of face he wasn't sure he currently had access to.
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
Gary had appeared at his partition without Travis registering the footsteps — his attention had been further inward than he'd realized, which was a lapse he filed immediately as something to correct. The mask had slipped, not dramatically, not in any way Gary could interpret as specific, but enough that Gary's perceptive register had caught the quality of Travis's expression and noted it.
"The memo," Travis said. "I didn't expect the sweep to be this fast."
"They're thorough when they move," Gary said. He was carrying two mugs and set one on Travis's desk with the particular gesture of a man administering practical comfort. "It's going to be strange around here for a while. One of the Seven." He shook his head. "First time I can remember that happening."
Travis picked up the mug and drank and nodded and let the mug do the work of keeping his hands occupied while the logistics part of his brain performed the calculations the rest of him was less interested in.
Fifty-five hours. Newark. Night operation, which meant the disposal cycle started at 8 AM and the lowest-security window was around 2 AM, which was the midpoint where the overnight crew was past their second wind and before the pre-dawn alertness kicked in. He'd need bolt cutters — hardware store, cash. He'd need the disposal bay's layout, which meant a daytime scout run tomorrow as a civilian. He'd need a cover for leaving the apartment at midnight Thursday with no public transportation record connecting him to Newark.
He'd also need to actually swallow a piece of a dead superhero in a parking lot.
One thing at a time.
Back in his apartment at 7 PM, the resource map had two new additions in red marker: TRANSLUCENT FRAGMENTS — NJ DISPOSAL — 55 HRS and below it, in the small writing he used for System notifications he'd decided to track manually: GLUTTONY T0 THRESHOLD: CONSUME EXOTIC BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL.
Travis looked at the second line for a moment.
Iron Stomach was, objectively, a useful ability. Eliminating fifty percent of his food and water requirements was tactically significant — reduced the number of times per day he needed to break operational focus for basic maintenance, reduced the biological evidence trail he left in public spaces, and the poison neutralization was a non-trivial defensive capability in a world where Compound V and its side effects moved through institutions that had access to everything.
None of this made him look forward to Thursday night.
He ordered food delivery — good food, more expensive than usual, because his body was apparently going to have opinions about being asked to digest carbon composite superhero skin in forty-eight hours and it deserved one decent meal in advance — and sat at his kitchen counter and ate it in a state of deliberate present-tense attention.
The Newark facility processed waste on a 72-hour cycle. The security window was real. The acquisition was executable.
His stomach would adjust.
He opened the burner and confirmed the disposal manifest photo was clear enough to read the bay numbers, and made a note to check the Newark facility's publicly available emergency contact information for the facility's registered address, which would tell him the building footprint.
The Gluttony notification pulsed once more at the edge of his vision, patient and gold, and Travis ignored it and ate his food.
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