“Dr. Ramanathan,” said the woman to me by means of a greeting. “It’s such an honor to work with you, sir.”

I gave her a warm smile. “Welcome to the Parahuman Studies Initiative. PSI is glad to have you.” I stood up and shook her hand. I wasn’t usually a very formal guy, but the new kids always seemed to want their first meeting to be a momentous occasion, so I dressed up in a fancy lab coat and made lots of sweeping proclamations and they got a kick out of it. Cost me nothing and kept them happy. The secret to management.

“Care for a brief tour?” I asked, continuing to act the part. She nodded excitedly, and I led her out of my office and across the building floor. “You’ll have a desk somewhere around here, I’m certain, but most of your time will be spent,” I paused for dramatic effect as we neared the other end of the building. “In the labs.”

She gasped, right on cue. The window we approached separated the offices from the other three-quarters of the building, serving as a sort of viewing deck for the laboratories sprawling on the floor below.

The labs existed in a space like an enormous warehouse, easily the length of a football field and twice that in the other direction. A repurposed blimp hangar, I think it was. Within this cavernous space, there were many smaller buildings erected, contained areas for each group’s work, looking like a suburban sprawl built entirely of glass and white polymer panels. A city within a building. All dedicated to science.

Many buildings had indoor connections to others, glass tunnels so that a controlled environment could be shared between two areas, or just to provide convenient access between rooms without having to go ‘outside.’ Other groups had need of larger spaces, and their structures had multiple stories, or were unusually-shaped, standing out like church bell towers above the squat, circuit board-like sprawl.

Down the middle and every so often on either side was a road of sorts, a straight strip with no rooms down the entire length, where a small fleet of service vehicles and trams constantly shuttled materials and personnel in and out.

“It’s like an entire city down there,” she gasped. She wasn’t wrong, we were technically zoned as an unincorporated district with our own water, electric grid, and sewage. Part of that was for monitoring and controlling how much we were using in here. Part of it was security…this was a secure government facility after all.

“Care to go down?” I asked, rhetorically, gesturing to the elevators.

There were only two entry points to the labs. The offices, on one extreme end of the building, and the main entrance on the other. I always had new hires come in through the offices so they could have this dramatic view. This entailed going up elevators to the top floor (where my office was of course) from one set of elevators outside the building, and then descending using another set inside, straight down into the labs.

We descended in the elevator, watching the sprawl rise up towards us until we were on street level. The woman with me was still looking around in bewilderment.

“Doctor Jayne, you are working with Jimenez’ team, I believe?” I asked, checking a personnel list even though I knew full well she was. I’d talked to Jimenez the other day about the new data analyst he needed, and so we’d picked up Jayne. “Jimenez group is in block D, it’s about a block away, I hope you don’t mind walking, this is all the exercise I ever get in a day.”

Dr. Jayne of course had no complaints. They never did at this point. Too much glitter in their eyes. That would change once they got accustomed to the lifestyle here and got into their work, but I relished these brief moments of charming, fully-absorbed innocence.

“So tell me,” I said, keeping the tone light and conversational. “Do you know what you’ll be working on?”

“Only in the most general and least general sense, sir,” she said. “I know I’ll be doing multilinear regression analysis in R. And I know that what you–we all study here is the parahumans.”

“But not so clear on what datasets you’ll be working with? That’s fine. You’ll get your feet under you soon enough. Ah, here’s Jimenez now.” I saw a larger man backing out of a lab, in conversation with the occupants, offering a last few words of advice to the occupants as he departed.

“Jimenez!” I called out. He looked and caught my eye, giving a small wave, some final parting words through the door, and then trotted over to join us, out of breath.

“Been running all over the place trying to get the new instruments set up,” he wheezed. “Damn Carlos was sampling at too low a resolution and we wasted a whole week of data.”

“Dr. Jimenez, this is Dr. Jayne, your new data scientist.” Jimenez offered a friendly handshake and a smile despite his current dishevelment.

“A pleasure, truly. Apologies, things just get so hectic sometimes.”

“Oh, no need to apologize,” Jayne tittered. “I think the work you’re doing down here is very important, and the discoveries it brings about could give us understanding into the parahumans like nothing before.”

“A little bit of brown-nosing on the first day eh?” Jimenez laughed. Jayne blushed and awkwardly laughed along.

“I’m sure Jayne is just new and excited. As were we all when we first started. Why, I remember Jimenez’ first day…you had the most atrocious mustache…”

“My wife adored it!” Jimenez belted in his defence. All three of us laughed.

“But in seriousness, you’re right, Dr. Jayne. Some of the discoveries we’ve already made are incredible breakthroughs, really groundbreaking stuff. In fact, though you may not be aware, we walk in the presence of greatness.”

“Jimenez, stop,” I said. I gave him a stern glare, but his eyes flashed impishly as he gave me a broad smile.

“Oh, don’t be so modest, Dr. Ramanathan. My girl, have you ever heard of Ramanathan’s Laws?”

“I…have read most of Dr. Ramanathan’s papers, but I have to admit…”

“You wouldn’t have,” I said, shooting Jimenez another glare. “They are classified information and not published for public consumption.”

“Oh. So perhaps you shouldn’t tell me about–” she began, but Jimenez jumped in.

“Nonsense. If you’re in here, you have clearance enough already. These laws, widely regarded to be authoritative principles determining the nature and extent of the parahumans’ unique abilities were written by none other than this brilliant man walking beside us. They are also widely regarded as the pinnacle of his research, but I personally liked his early work on parallel world theories better myself.”

“What are the laws exactly?” Jayne asked, her curiosity now apparent. It was no surprise, sometimes it felt like the only people who took these jobs were those obsessed with the parahumans.

“A short list of trends which Dr. Ramanathan observed that all parahumans, no matter how varied their powers had obeyed. Some of them are not so interesting: all parahumans were once normal people; all parahumans fully developed their entire power-set in one single event; all parahuman events happened while they were asleep, and so on.”

“But the really interesting one…if we don’t understand the others, hoo boy, can we not explain this one at all. When a parahuman first emerges, there’s a window from a few hours to a few days, and anything which would threaten the parahuman in that window, their powers will have some specific ability to defeat that threat.”

“So…the powers are not set in stone for a while after manifesting? They can adapt to new threats?”

“No, not quite. For example, there was one case of a parahuman who could place himself in a sort of stasis bubble and be safe from harm, and could also fly. They were seen doing both of these things immediately on manifesting powers. They caused some calamity and caused a large explosion which would have killed them, except as the explosion reached them, voop! Right into the bubble he went. The explosion went on to rupture a dam nearby, flooding the town. Everyone in the city died, except the parahuman, who could, of course, fly.”

“Next day, there’s another calamity and the parahuman dies trapped beneath a skyscraper they knocked down on themselves. Their window ran out, and their powers didn’t account for that one.”

“Not to second-guess you, sir, but how do you know it wasn’t just a coincidence?”

“No offense taken,” I added. “We must always question our preconceptions, it’s the only way to find the truth.”

Jimenez continued as we reached block D and he turned into his building. “We’ve seen it over and over. The parahumans that go on a rampage, they just can’t be stopped for a time. The military tried throwing more and more firepower at them, but this just created stronger and stronger powers. The very worst parahuman we’d ever seen, I think the news still talks about him sometimes, called him ‘Ultraman’, some comic book reference. That man was bulletproof, bombproof, missileproof, nukeproof, gasproof, couldn’t be crushed, restrained, stabbed, or bludgeoned…the army threw everything they had at him, and all it did was mean all they had couldn’t touch him.”

“In the end, they came to Dr. Ramanathan here for help,” Jimenez said, proudly clapping my shoulder. I stood there awkwardly and waited for him to finish. Once Jimenez started talking, there was no stopping the man. Probably why he needed to rush around so much in setting up his instruments. Too much story time.

“And do you know what he told them?”

“What?” Jayne asked, her eyes wide, fully absorbed in the story.

Jimenez leaned in close to deliver the punchline with panache. “Nothing.” He paused to let it sink in. “He told them to do nothing. They had to wait out the power window before they could try anything, or else he would be immune to that as well. So they distracted him with soldiers and drones, lured him to desolate areas so he wouldn’t cause as much damage, and after a week, they hit him with something completely new, a sonic bomb. Blew his head right open.” Jimenez laughed full-bodied. “Bye-bye Ultraman! Ha ha!”

Jayne smiled and shifted uncomfortably. I stepped forward. “I still have some forms to go over with Dr. Jayne,” I said. “But thank you for walking with us, Dr. Jimenez. Good luck with the instruments.”

“Wish me luck with the facility staff, that’s where I need it,” he grumbled. “But sure. Nice to meet you Dr. Jayne, I will be seeing you soon I imagine.” Without any more story to distract him, he finally entered the doorway he’d been standing in and closed the door behind him.

“He may like to talk but he is a good man and a great scientist,” I apologized.

“Oh, it was fine. Was it true what he said though?”

“Yes, unfortunately, all of it. The parahumans are as strong as we make them, it seems.”

“Why can we not just…not do anything to them?”

“Well, first off, there’s the social panic. People need to see the government doing something otherwise it’s assumed we’re doing nothing. And we can’t go around telling people about the laws, or else every parahuman who manifests and wants a bag of powers will try to harm themselves in as many ways as possible.”

“I see,” she mused.

“Second, have you ever noticed how people with exceptionally boring lives and no troubles tend to stir up drama constantly?”

“Sir?”

“I’m being serious. The fact is that absent any actual difficulties, people will imagine up their own. Just because a parahuman doesn’t have guns firing or bombs dropping on them doesn’t mean they won’t manifest dangerous powers. One of the first ones — before parahumans were even broadly known of — she was testing her powers and missed her bus. No surprise, she manifested with super speed.”

“How can they be stopped then, if the window makes them, by definition, unstoppable?”

“I can’t really say. I’m a scientist, not a policy maker, but what I think is that we need to adopt change from within. We need to make these people want to stop themselves. We need to offer mental health courses and improve social awareness. What powers they have wouldn’t matter if we worked with them instead of against them.”

Jayne looked at me like I was bringing her stone tablets from the mountaintop. I sighed and realized I’d gone on pontificating just as badly as Jimenez.

“Anyway, that’s just my thoughts. Please come this way and we can get you a badge and get you set up.”