We were each following trails at this point. It had been pointed out that Power had started acting differently recently, targeting anyone moving in his vicinity. If one stopped moving, he might cease to recognize one as a threat, depending on how sensitive his definition of movement is. Another interesting thing—shortly before his first appearance, there was a power surge and partial black-out around the D.C. area. Another such event, almost identical, occurred two weeks ago.
    "Hey wait a second! That was the same one that made me!" Ezra chimed in.
    "Could be worse then, you could be obviously psychotic," Cockatrice said.
    Further probing revealed that aside from his legitimate work, Dillinger was a competent hacker. Force had been working on other projects, among them artificial intelligence systems optimized for combat....
    "Oh dear," Cockatrice commented for all of us. "Melvin, Melvin, Melvin, Melvin... ooh, we could strap these together. And then I could release the mutated wolverines into the wild, let them solve the problem on their own."
    "That's how you got those squirrels, right?"
    The last access date on Melvin's code corresponds with the date of the original power surge. It seems clear that on purpose or by accident, the two systems got linked up, and it somehow fused with Melvin's bioaura to boot. The tactical programs were designed to handle violent situations, and would otherwise be quiescent, one assumed. What was worst, the data suggested that after this second surge there might be two copies of the code running in him. And the stuff could self-modify. For the sake of thoroughness, we checked the other possibility, another Force programmer who had died two years before. Which didn't really mean anything, but it seemed unlikely.
     "So we're talking one body, two artificial intelligences, and somewhere in there some poor schmuck named Melvin? That's getting a little crowded, and coming from me that says a lot." I sighed.
    "One that attacks violence, one that attacks pretty much anything," Thunderbolt nodded. "Can we correlate the change in attack parameters with the most recent power surge?"
    Absolutely. Everyone had been shocked. They had gotten used to Power showing up, and the cops would put their guns away and back off, and if the criminals did the same thing nobody got hurt. And then a couple of weeks ago he had appeared, they had put their guns away—and he had killed everyone. During the surge Melvin was apparently in his office, working. Very close to where there had been a number of Power sightings, most recently where he beat up Legerdemain.
    "This would also seem that whatever this energy surge is, is replicable. Either it's a repeatable accident, or somebody set up something to do this," Cockatrice noted.
    So we have a self-repairing, very strong, very fast, energy-blast throwing, highly adaptable, physically nigh-indestructible creature, and it runs on an entirely self-contained energy source of a nature that so far has eluded Thunderbolt's analysis, but was somehow linked to Melvin's aura and probably can't survive long outside his body.
    "We could one-two him," I suggested to 'Bolt. "If we can figure out how. That gives us something to go on. Why didn't they throw him into the sun or something, sheesh."
    "Um, something's blinking over here," Stephanie said. "It seems as if there's some... oh, it's breaking into the security systems... it's at the hospital. It, uh. Oh. Glowing blue guy's at the hospital!"
    "Oh great, now he's replicating," Cockatrice muttered disgustedly. "It's probably spread through half the damn hospital by now."
    "So this is just like it was a hundred years ago. I guess we're going to have to go to the hospital." I sighed.
    For the first time, from the ruins, the Revolution is heading out, Ezra thought. This was cool.
    "Fun," Thunderbolt said.
    "This is some definition of the word fun with which I was not previously acquainted," I replied.
    "Sucky?" Cockatrice suggested. "Nobody here has cybernetically created force fields? Good." He looked at Ezra. "Don't get touched too hard. You are a bio-aura linked force field."
    "I'm a cloud of base particles," he corrected.
    "And you can't affect anything living?" Thunderbolt said.
    "Right. I can't affect anything with a bio-aura. If we could get rid of the bio-aura, I could disintegrate it."
    "I might be able to do that, but I think that kind of comes under the heading of killing people," I replied.
    "There was no brain-wave detected," Thunderbolt noted.
    "That could be submerged under the machine code," Cockatrice shrugged. "Or he could be dead, you're correct; it is a possibility."
    "There's a possibility I could disrupt his energy signature enough...."
    "Do you think you could possibly disrupt it enough to knock the force-field down?"
    "No way to tell. It's possible; I'm pretty strong, and if we have the power source of the airship, I can do a lot with that."
    "From the looks of it you're going to have the power source of the greater Bos-Wash power grid."
    "I think the power availability will not be a problem," I agreed judiciously. Time might be short; we moved out and piled onto the ship. If we're going to keep it we ought to paint over that logo.
    Thunderbolt got on the comm. and announced to the hovering forces of the law, "Police, the Revolution is back. Get the hell out of our way." The force field protecting the base blinked out as we took off.
    Somebody else got on a channel and said, "Um, if you are the Revolution, we have a situation at the hospital...."
    "We are the Revolution. We are already aware."
    "You know, that was a really cool team name," Ezra mused. "Revolution. You guys fought for the people. Except you were working for the government, that was a bit of a sell-out. I'll have to think about that."
    I looked at Thunderbolt with raised brows. "'Get the hell out of our way?'" He shrugged. Fortunately, it wasn't that far. On the way we watched a disk of information SphinxNet provided. The crew that dragged in the TaskForce guys had brought them in for surgery; they were all wearing the little antibacterial force fields. About ten minutes into their work John Force had decided it was time for him to leave, and gotten up. There was no audio, but it was clear that he was arguing with the medics, one of whom pushed him back down. Force slapped the orderly's hand away, and the Power system that had infected the orderly through the aura-boosting force field device responded to the violence by grabbing Force and body-slamming him into the wall. Force had grabbed a chair and thrown it; it had bounced off the new Power and into another orderly, who transformed as well. A cascade effect began.
    "Oh my God," I muttered in awe. Force had burst out eventually, but a couple of orderlies had attempted to restrain him and been hit by an energy bolt from inside the room, which promptly infected their own systems. "Can they seal off that floor? Or something?"
    "Does anybody have any idea what'll happen if we shut down the force field generators?" Cockatrice asked.
    Thunderbolt theorized that it would stop an uninfected person from getting infected, but probably only slow down the infected, since it was also linked to the person's bio-aura and it was by nature self-sustaining.
    "What if you shatter it?"
    That would probably weaken them, at least for a little while. We needed to find a cure. The only good thing was that the Powers didn't seem to be linked; they were attacking each other. On the other hand, the more combat they experienced the better at it they got.
    "This is Mass General oh my god what's going on up there?" somebody was yelling on the radio.
    Somebody else said, "Yes? Who is it? This is a police line, please, we're trying to keep this open! Who is this?"
    "This is the Revolution," Thunderbolt intoned.
    "Oh." Pause. "Yes?"
    "Seal off the floor." Make that top three floors, from what we had seen already.
    "Evacuate every floor below that you can, shut down the elevators," Cockatrice snapped. "If at all possible shut down power to those floors if it won't interfere with life support."
    "Um, understood, Revolution. Seal off the floor, shut down the elevators—shut them all down!"
    We saw the lights on the top three floors go out; they were following instructions. The only light in there was from the eerie blue Power glow.
    "How many do you think are in there?" Ezra wondered.
    "I don't know, how many orderlies do you think there are in three floors?" Cockatrice returned. "Plus surgeons, plus nurses, plus..."
    "Ack," I commented. "Lots. All right." I brought us down smoothly.
    "How smart do you think they are? If I disintegrated a hole in the side of the hospital, we could heard them down and they would plummet to their deaths?"
    "There's no guarantee they would die," Thunderbolt pointed out.
    "I think unfortunately that would be a plummet down to wander the streets," the man in the chicken costume added.
    "Let's try to keep them contained," I suggested.
    The radio chirped. "Uh, Revolution? We've shut off the power up there and we've got the doors sealed and locked. We've also initiated bacterial protocols, so there's the force fields running around everything to make sure nothing gets in or out—"
    "No!" Thunderbolt yelled.
    "Turn it off," I snapped.
    "Excuse me, what?"

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