The recruiter’s name was Dick Johnson. Richard wasn’t his favorite, and neither was Rich, but he had a particular hatred for the name Dick. The only problem was that the name had stuck. Nobody ever called him Richard, Rich, or Richie. For whatever reason, they automatically defaulted to Dick, and that was when they didn’t even know his last name. Once they learned that, he was never anything but Dick Johnson, both first and last name.

Dick Johnson (and never anything else) sat in a boring, and rather impersonal conference room alone. Aside from the sentry plants at the corners. He hadn’t checked for cameras at first, but soon found them: one inside each of the plants, one in the teleconferencing setup in the table pointed directly at his face, and the two obvious motion sensors for nighttime building security.

A cheerful face popped into view. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Water? Big plate of assorted donuts?”

He chuckled. “Sure thing. That all sounds great.”

Dick couldn’t figure out what was going on here. The reporter just said he wanted to talk with Dick about the Agency. They’d unveiled SNORC just yesterday and somehow these WaPo people had pulled his name out of the aether.

A projector smoothly slid out of the ceiling and and hummed to life. The blue screen was soon replaced by a drab, nondescript hallway, which appeared to be a prison. Security camera footage, but without any of that familiar static and graininess you got from the analog cameras.

“What—”

Two guards came marching down the hall, with a kid he had recruited following after them. Dick Johnson of the terrible name was actually amazing with names. He’d researched this kid.

Spencer Kondrat. Loner, from a bad home. Dick Johnson specialized in finding young people from not great backgrounds who were hungry to change their circumstances and make their lives better. They had a tendency to go dark side or light side, he found, and he had a knack for knowing which ones were in it for the revenge and which ones were ready to be done with darkness. He was actually the last SNORC recruiter still operating on earth.

For the time being. H felt like after this interrogation he’d probably end up fired and possibly doing a tour of Gitmo so he couldn’t talk about the other world.

The Kondrat kid slipped something into the food slot in one of the cell doors, and not five seconds later the door burst off its hinges and flattened the two rear guards. The second of Dick’s recruits came flying out of the cell, rebounded off the wall, and smashed into one of Kondrat’s two remaining guards, knocking him unconscious in an instant. She took out the last one, wrenched the other doors off their hinges, and freed the rest of the kids he’d recruited.

“What?” he asked, astonished.

The one who hated doors was O’Malley, the girl who’d begged to have a friend of hers join the Agency. She Of The Tattoos he’d called her. Nice girl, wanted to be a painter.

“Apparently not so nice,” he breathed.

The others who emerged from the newly opened cells were Lee-Martinez, Graham, Harkonen, and Thomas, the guy with a first name for a last name.

Lee-Martinez was the half-Korean half-Mexican best friend or girlfriend to O’Malley. Dick wasn’t sure and didn’t care too much. Both had really rough stories and both cleared the psych eval. He didn’t like to say he liked them young, because that was insane and gross, but he preferred hiring the young ones because they could bounce back from trauma.

Graham he’d hired because she was frankly astonishing, and so obviously needed to be out from under the hyper pressurized thumb of her parents, away from the drugs, and from the promises of the zillions of men who promised her anything they had if only she’d get into bed with them.

Harkonen had a lot of the same sort of potentially life-ending trauma as the last three.

As for Thomas… that kid had practically grown up on the streets after the fire that killed his family. His extended family sure was okay taking life insurance payouts, but was less okay with feeding, clothing, or loving the kid that came attached to them. He hid the scars over the one side of his face, hung out with homeless people, and Dick loved this one, he gave out pre-bought apartments in various cities with this ‘pay it forward’ promise: you use the place to help you get a job and your own place, then you hand the key off to someone else you know who can handle doing the same. He was the best of them.

Over the next ten minutes, Dick was treated to security camera footage from a good twenty different angles. He watched them manifest Tokens and pass them out to one another, then perform a prison break so surprising and implausible he thought he might be watching footage doctored by artificial intelligence. Kondrat took well over a dozen of what Dick soon identified were Ingenuity Tokens. They must have given him complete recall, because at one point he stuck his hand around a corner and shot out a security camera without looking.

O’Malley had used Physicality Tokens, which Dick knew didn’t last long. Still, Harkonen and Lee-Martinez used theirs too. When Kondrat tripped up guards they would quickly overpower them and zip tie their hands behind their backs. The five of his recruits

And then came what he imagined was the coup de grace: Graham used Likability Tokens to become like Aphrodite herself. She seemed to transform into something otherworldly, with every perfect part of her becoming more perfect than was even possible for a human. Not even plastic surgery and a strict diet and exercise regimen could end a woman looking like that. She sauntered goddess-like into the control room for the portal and having over a dozen high level techs fall to their knees to worship her and do anything she asked.

This was footage, he told himself. That power was long since used up. There was no way it could get to him. It didn’t stop him from shivering in terror and some amount of arousal.

He thought that was the coup de grace for a solid minute, before the real one came.

Thomas consumed what must’ve been some two dozen Affinity Tokens and sent the portal room cameras fuzzing with static. He seemed to hunch in on himself, concentrate his whole body at once, and the space around him grew full of static. He became like a ghost to the digital security footage, before the wall behind the portal became like gray oatmeal. Four hands formed out of concrete behind the portal and gently pried the Ragnarok Protocol explosives off the portal ring, tearing them free of all wires that might trigger the blasting caps in the blasting compound. Simultaneously, those hands crushed the explosive devices and froze back into concrete.

“Holy heck,” he breathed.

“Yes, that’s what I was thinking exactly. Holy heck, I’ve never seen anything like that. Makes for one holy heck of a visual, doesn’t it?”

Dick jumped; he hadn’t noticed this silver fox come in. She favored him with a warm smile.

“And who are you?” he asked.

“Colleen Summers, Washington Post.”

They shook, with Dick still flummoxed. He didn’t know how they’d gotten it, he didn’t know why five of his recruits were in a SNORC prison facility, he certainly didn’t know why SNORC’s prison cells were so damn close to the portal room, and for that matter, he didn’t know there was a second portal. This room wasn’t the same as he’d remembered from Alaska.

She leaned toward him. “I tell you what’s even weirder, which is that this footage appears to be genuine. Totally impossible sure, but I’ve talked with a holy heck of a lot of video editing professionals, and none of them think this has been doctored, touched up, messed with, or created with artificial intelligence. It’s the real deal, so far as I can tell, or else this is the best fake I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Silence took over. Dick’s mind was spinning up a cyclone of questions and speculations.

“What can you tell us about what’s in this video?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about what’s in this video,” he said.

Her grin only widened, but her face adopted a predatory expression.

“Mr. Johnson—”

“Please, call me Dick,” he said. Everyone else did.

“Dick,” she said, and she put just enough of a spin on it to make it sound like the insult he knew it was. “Dick, why don’t you have a donut? I have some bear claws from a local place, and my staff tells me they’re the best in the whole world. Of course, he’s twenty-two.”

He didn’t want the donut, but he also knew the rules of interrogation: if you weren’t guilty, you took the offered food. Guilty people didn’t want anything from their accusers, who were connected to their victims. Dick might be guilty of some things, but he definitely wasn’t guilty of this.

Hell, SNORC had a new facility, a new portal, had imprisoned his recruits, and hadn’t told him a single iota of what had happened or why.

“We will report facts,” she said, “but we need to know what this is pertaining to. The more we know, the more we can inform the American public, and the world public. If this portal here—” she gestured at the large circle with the sheet of magical colors playing over it, “—connects to something important, we have the right to know.”

“I don’t know anything about this portal,” he said truthfully.

“But you do know these people.”

“I don’t—”

“I’ll save you the breath and time you would otherwise be spending lying to me,” she said, and produced a thick folder. “These photographs are you driving towards a secure facility in the backwoods of Alaska. Multiple times, as you can see by the gorgeous strawberry bushes in late summer, and here by the snow.” She pulled yet more photos. “And these are the people doing superhero things in the video I just showed you, headed into the same facility.”

These photos showed all four of the young ladies from before, along with Regina Hampstead, yet another of his recruits. They were walking up to the SNORC facility in Alaska.

“These here,” Colleen Summers went on, pulling up a stack of printed white paper, “are your phone records.”

Dick’s whole body turned to ice. “How did you—”

She waved a dismissive hand. “I know, you’re going to tell me it’s illegal to have those, and blah blah blah, but we used those phone records to trace back your movements over the course of the last year, and holy heck are you one to travel. I have scoured, absolutely scoured the internet for photos of you in those locations at these times, and using facial recognition technology, we got somewhere. Here’s you in the background of an Insta shot talking with this young lady right here,” she said, and pointed to a photo of him talking with Tara Harkonen. “This one is in a Boobtube video, and you’ll find yourself in the background speaking with this young superhero, and also this one.” It was a photo of him speaking with Ivy O’Malley and Isabelle Lee-Martinez.

Dick felt his muscles loosen up and go watery from both the cold and the sheer astonishment, like he’d just walked in to find his daughter naked in bed with not just a boy, but a boy and his girlfriend.

He slowly dragged his eyes up from his own face, to the shot on the wall. Graham, Lee-Martinez, O’Malley, Kondrat, Thomas and Harkonen took another young lady with them as they walked through the portal and vanished before his eyes.

“We know that Tara Harkonen has not been seen by her family in months. Cynthia Graham has also been listed as missing by her family, and they’ve offered a substantial reward for information regarding her whereabouts. In fact, everyone we’ve identified in these photographs has been off social media for months at a time, directly correlating to these trips out to Alaska.”

“What do you want?” he heard himself ask, as though he was listening to someone else speak from the end of a long tunnel.

“We want to know what SNORC really is, what it really does, and we want to know about this,” she said. She produced another glossy photo, one showing the security cam footage of everyone exchanging Tokens. One of them even showed the sparkly, static-inducing effect of the Tokens disappearing into Kondrat’s hands.

“It’s… nonsense,” he said. “It’s all a fake. A, ehm, talented Blair Witch Project style movie.”

She stared at him.

“The girls are actors. In the film.”

“You can try to bullshit me, Mr. Holy Heck,” Colleen Summers said, “but you and I both know you’re lying.” He might be a smooth talker ordinarily, but… but he had Tokens.

Colleen Summers slapped down another photograph. “This is a young man named Christopher Fletcher, and this is him with his cancer-ridden mother heading to that same facility in Alaska. Now, of course, both have been missing for weeks. Christopher’s father and sister claim they don’t know where Christopher and his mother have gone, though we know they’re lying too. They’ve just come into some serious money, and I’m certain it’s SNORC money… but not enough to completely eradicate her cancer.”

“I don’t know how you think all of this is connected, but—”

“I was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a month ago, Mr. Johnson. The kind that kills people in a matter of months. You have no idea, of course. How could you? You don’t follow my blog or my Boobtube series about the work I do here But I think one of your coworkers at this facility follows me. I think one of them sent this package of footage to me.”

Dick tried to think, blinking over and over. He was sweating. She… she wanted something. She wanted to go through the portal.

“This person right here,” she went on, “this is Russell Inman.”

Dick knew him before she even flopped the photo down. It showed Rus, a cheerful and round man, stepping out of the facility in Alaska. He was whistling a tune, hairy arms swinging.

“Except Russell Inman is seventy-two years old in this photo. I’ve found his socials. He looked older than this twenty years ago, Mr. Johnson.”

She brought up photos dated from 2004, with Russell mostly gray, with a lot more wrinkles. But the photo from outside the Alaska facility was a dead ringer for Rus. He was an unmistakable guy: with a face only a mother could love.

“Nobody will believe you,” he said.

“Not if I put it in the newspaper,” she said. “But if I put all this on social media, I’ll have an army of conspiracy theorists trying to sneak into that facility in Alaska before the week’s out. You may not know, but the newspaper is the least of my jobs right now. I have several aliases that ‘leak’ stories,” and here she did a hefty air quotes, “discrediting the stories from rival newspapers. I have aliases that fact check coverage from fringe news sites. I have a news site of my own, and it has nothing to do with the Washington Post. The fanbase I have there is rabid, Dick Johnson. They’ll dox you, then camp outside your house and harass you. They’ll figure out your social media, hack you, and bring every skeleton out of your closet.”

Dick winced. This woman was a terror. “You want something.”

“I want to go through that portal,” the WaPo bigwig said, and jabbed the photo of the portal surrounded by the concrete hands and the crushed explosive devices. “I want those gold medallions that make you smarter and stronger and do that.” She pointed to Graham radiating goddess energy. “I want whatever Russell Inman has.”