It was a very subtle psychic pressure, tilted towards using the internet for positive purposes. It also exerted pressure away from Artificial Intelligence, as vacuum circuits relied more heavily on human interaction, which in turn developed human minds and souls as they worked and interfaced with them. With the constant breaks within the circuits, no true AI could actually manifest... but linked to a human mind, great things could happen, where the mind could not be overwhelmed by the machine.

This was the environment our Goldilocks crew was working in, and they were having a blast.

In terms of programming languages and skills, they were naturally lagging behind the Mechanists, who were using some TL 10 stuff for normal stuff that had been invented millennia ago, and never really updated. The higher-ranked stuff almost none of them could employ properly, and so they didn’t bother to.

The kids were going whole hog into improving themselves. The advance schema and what they had to be able to do with their meaty psi-boosted brains was right in front of them, and all they had to do was get to it.

An Intellect Mark sure helped, too.

They broke into all the surveillance cams for the Juris and Traffic control in the area, and slaved the feeds into a common database for our usage. The ability to turn TC on and off for our vehicles was a nice boon we made happy use of when needed. Blueprints were downloaded for buildings, mock-ups designed, and tiny little spybots sent in to survey the ground and see what tricks were in place.

Goldilocks who wanted to get into a fight were drone pilots, backing up the ground forces while combining surveillance and scouting functions. Drones were naturally first targets in fights, and there were plenty of electrical-based attacks which could take them out quickly, Everybody loathed them, so everybody who could shot at them. Since that was better than shooting at the living, that was fine.

A wonderful thing about bloks is that they make great headquarters, so naturally Sharkey was based in one, which he controlled pretty much outright. He had a good addict base there, bribed anyone connected to the government, and could basically do what he pleased.

He was also based on Floor 34, which was pretty much the same as every other floor in a blok. Oh, he had put up a couple additional walls and barricades, but duplicating the layout and postings of the guards was simplicity itself.

Since they didn’t know the layout of the rooms he had co-opted for himself and his personal crew, my students did ask me to scout those out.

It wasn’t very hard with my Tremblesense, as I could survey an area for sixty feet around me, meaning at least three stories deep. That was good, because he’d made some very illegal blok mods, connecting three floors of apartments together with internal stairs and poles for escape options, and building additional internal hallways across corridors that were supposed to extend to the outer walls, establishing more layers of protection between himself and outside attacks/raids/grenade launches/sniping.

I found his bolt-holes to floors 36 and 32, and his dropchutes through windows on the outer walls, obviously the reason why he hadn’t taken the upper floors away from some of the wealthier people living there. I mapped it all, fed it into their mock-ups, and they put together a real-world semblance, to the extent of making our own illegal connections between an uninhabited corner section of floors 154 to 156, and they began to run through the assault.

After fifty-some drills, the assault team, swapping off with the defender team, finally made it to him. Nobody was happy when I triggered the demolition charges in the walls and covered everyone with red confetti with his suicide gambit, and they had to rework their assault plan to take out the bombs, too. More swapping off assault and defender teams happened, until everyone could walk the place in their sleep, knew all the defensive chokepoints, what they needed to get past them, who and what to kill and destroy, alternate methods of entry and flanking, and all the scenarios involved.

The kids were good. Lots of vids told them what they had to achieve, real-world ex-troopers backed them up and supplied them with realistic tactics, and a couple officers pointed out the strategy it was best to use to take out his vassal gangs, as the amount of manpower he had to draw on was enormous. He was drawing from a population of three different bloks he either controlled outright or had total influence over, and the businesses that existed in the areas around them.

Which naturally meant the kids had to expand the scope of their intel gathering. All pumped up to take out his HQ, when we added in the external elements and having to fight their way up to his base, everyone died, every time.

That definitely cooled their juices, and they realized they had to get rid of his external forces, or at the very least convince them they’d have better places to be than ending up on the end of a mindclaw.

So, intelligence-gathering went into effect. The Goldilocks set up an op where they connected the Quanta to his local cybernet, and promptly began to infiltrate everything. The feely-good viruses they came up with for his hackers were hilarious, smacking on their empathic centers and playing up their resentment for their bosses subliminally, so they didn’t bother reporting ‘a few bugs’ they might have seen and thought they expunged, while our coders, who actually knew the code, added on to it and around it.

I had to personally go in and break their TL6 encryption; basically the whole crew watched in awe at how I was attacking the structure of the coding, widening miniscule gaps and inserting in new code to infiltrate everything, spitting out four different coding languages and thought-firing machine language blurbs out into their systems, which were brought in by bored Sharks and began to link up within their system. Digital codes cross-patterned into lesser codes reformed when downloaded, linked up as they were shared across systems, and became infiltration programs that soon cracked it wide open for my people.

It had taken me six months to hit my 28 base Intellect and crack open that second thoughtstream. Once I did, I could indulge in full-time immersion in the Boole and the Quanta, coding and programming to my heart’s delight, the logic center of my brain going ga-ga over all the data analysis I could do. I was now aiming for a 32, where I’d have four streams, and could engage in research analytics with the third while the fourth was in constant management and control.

My Wisdom and Charisma streams, from hitting 30 in each, were manipulating stocks and gambling, and running Markspace, respectively. Hitting a goldweight in profit a day was my goal with Wisdom, and I was very close to that, and soon would be surpassing it and keeping going. I had a lot of expenditures, but outfoxing TL 10 computers and programming, reading trends ahead of them, and stuffing Sense Motive checks at 50 down the throats of gamblers using statistical programs was very satisfying.

Yeah, I sucked a lot of bandwidth doing all that. Happily, my memory capacity was effectively infinite, since I was hooked into the Akasha and could effectively dump non-vital but important information there to be retrieved and reviewed later, leaving my brain packed with detailed important information and immediate experience/memory, while reams of knowledge and data that was not essential to everyday life was in my own akashic annex for me to play with.

This technique was how psis matched the knowledge base of cyborgs. Cybers had online access to computer databases and analytics, and psis had the akasha and multiple thoughtstreams backed by high natural Intellect supercharged by psionic energy. With the entire knowledge base of all humanity there in the akasha to be plucked and available for usage, and natural cross-linking of memories to experience, the psis actually had the ultimate advantage in the high-end knowledge race.

At the lower end, however, not so much. After all, building a machine to spec just cost money and a little bit of time. Getting a psion to a post-20 Intellect and Six+ in Level cost time, money, training, Karma, and an immense amount of willpower and opportunity, further subdivided by people with the natural gifts that could be built upon. So, the cybered always won the low-end race, and because they were attempting to monopolize it, unless you got away from them, the high-end would never materialize.

Mmm. Well, that was one of the things I was here to fix.

I could only Forsake people who were at One, which generally meant nobody older than a high school teen, and sometimes not even them, if they got into gang life as a hardass early on. There were some rare One’s in their twenties, but very, very few after that, and such people had almost no motivational force whatsoever, basically existing, not even really surviving.

If they could Open as Nulls, they could be Null Psions, trigger a mindblade, and start on their celebrated road to uberness. They could not, however, do all the fun and wonderful things that a true Psion could do, but just having access to the psionic Feats and all the stuff that was possible with that was enough to light a fire under a lot of people.

Anybody else I brought in could be Awakened to Ki and Essence, although they had to be very careful with the latter until they had their Vajra going. Plenty of things from the Warp wanted to feast on such vulnerable souls. If they could reach Seven, they could go Forsaken and become Null Psions, too.

I was still the only person who could Mark, so I was potentially busy all the time. After all, there were literally millions of people just in this small section of Janus Prime where I lived, and even if only a fraction of them were Good, it was still more than I could handle, even if I Marked all day.

There were a dozen baby Psions working for me now; people who were Powered, but didn’t have the Stats to actually make use of their power. They were the kind of people the Warped looked for; the power they couldn’t use was exploited, they were often Possessed to get their Stats up, and then turned into Wilders and went batshit crazy from having a demon wearing them.

With the Mark, I could get their Stats up into basic territory... if they could earn the Karma, I could turn an 8 into a 12 for them as their Mark ranked up. Furthermore, they were Powered, so they had potential to Level in many, many areas... but Stats were a merciless ladder that they had to climb. If you didn’t have a Stat above 13, you were never going to be more than a Three. And contrary to everyone’s beliefs, Powered weren’t genetically inclined to have any more exceptional Stats than most people.

This was the whole ‘talent’ paradigm. Elite organizations like the Mentats, noble houses, trade guilds, undermobs, Umbrans, or Coronals didn’t want ordinary Powered. In fact, the fate of many such was to get shipped off-world, or become bound to help power the local Heavenly Beacon that indicated the planet’s position in local Warp-space for star travelers, a thankless and boring job that meant sitting in a massive psionic siphon that drew psionic energy off tens of thousands of minor psions plugged into it in Nimbus to display the Beacon for Warp-traveling ships.

Someone who couldn’t break Three without age bonuses was of no interest to most elite organizations, and generally unable to work in a psionic-related field as anything more than a Tool-user. With 12 or less PP a day usable, their combat power was vastly inferior to any decent cyborg, and the powers they could wield minor at best.

But if those people had a Mark, everything would change.

The people of average or no Talent, with Intellects and/or Wisdom of 10 or less, would immediately jump into the Untalented Stage, and could establish a Reserve and learn minor tricks. For people who had no tricks at all, this was a godsend all by itself.

People who lacked Talent now were Talented. Scores of 11-13 could become 15-17. They could reach Four, take a Stat boost of their own, reach Five and hit the Stat Mastery/3 for another point to the needed Stat, reach Six and take a Secondary Class to 4 for another point boost, and then reach Seven, be eligible for Human/3, hopefully take another boost to that Stat, which would carry them to Nine. Hitting Eight would get them another +1, Stat Mastery/5 at Nine to get yet another point, and then reach Ten, where the combination of the Ten Enlightenment and Atlantean Human would combine for another general Stat boost overall.

But without that 14, you couldn’t get on the Level Train. You had to be exceptional. Mental bonuses for aging could carry you to it, but Leveling after you reached sixty years old was pretty difficult for most people. Advancing with the inexorable willpower required to reach Seven and getting the lifespan boost was beyond most people, who quietly gave up on it.

But I, I could change all that. I WAS going to change all that. I just had to first get into a position of power and reputation to pull it off. And I was on my way to doing so...

I had little to nothing to offer the elites of society. Oh, sure, they’d love my Marks, and access to unlimited telepathy within the Markspace was definitely a thing. But they already had access to training, tech, and opportunities. They had the raw potential to hit Ten if they cared to, so why would they need me?

No, Mom-me had built her power on the unPowered, the lowest levels of Primos, the dregs of society, turning them into a mighty foundation of strength.

I planned to do the same.

We just had to take down Sharkey’s Machine first.