Over the next several seconds, messages fly from Hammonds to dispatch, and from dispatch to the phone network, and from the phone network to a secure datacenter near Hudson Bay.

A screen flickers to life at the side of the meeting room. On it, a Canadian woman in a tinkertech mask appears, looking tired.

"As it happens, I don't have the ability to run continuous keyword searches on all internal P.R.T. surveillance," she informs Andrea. "Although I admit it's very tempting to write a program that searches for 'Theresa fucking Richter', if you're going to out capes instead of making a phone call."

“I don’t have a phone! And this is urgent! Also hi, big fan, best cape of all time, you are actually a good person in pretty much all ways while everyone else is significantly flawed if probably still trying their best. Anyway thinker bullshit! I know the next planned target but maybe telling you makes her change her target? But also one of my powers is fiat backed randomness that cannot be predicted by precogs so thats why I’m acting power backed randomly to throw off any future simulations. So can I give you a bunch of suggestions for weird non harmful stuff to do to see if we can’t muddy the future and blind the Simurgh? She’s not all knowing I just don’t know exactly HOW. I can’t just not tell you because then a city dies. But if she changes targets then it’s not useful!” He is rambling and out of breath by the end of that. But seriously the maximum amount of information needs to be shared in the minimum amount of time.

What does RNGeesus say about the consequences of telling dragon? Big change? Little change?

Lots of potential effects, depending on exactly what he tells her. More effects than ... anything else he's done so far, actually.

"Right. Okay,"

She flicks through some digitized forms too quickly for the human eye to perceive.

"Andrea. That's called 'the problem of prophecy', and it's something a lot of powerful precogs have to deal with. We have procedures for how to deal with it. Now, before you tell me anything else, how urgent is this, time-wise? Do we have seconds, minutes, or hours to deal with this? Don't tell me. Just think about that and let it inform your future choices. With that in mind, do you want to hear about Protectorate procedures for dealing with precognition like this?"

And then, as she's waiting for the humans to catch up with what she's just said, she checks her Simurgh tracking software, just in case.

In low Earth orbit, a malign alien intelligence calculates the worst possible thing.

Slowly, she turns to face Dragon's upwards facing camera. Then, with deliberate slowness, she makes an "I'm watching you" gesture.

“Uh yes procedures is probably good, also wow my power thinks you can fuck up the future alot, fuck up in a good way where it changes predictions. Like why was I even moving tables when literally every word I say to you probably has insane ripple effects. Take that YOU STUPID SHITBIRD!” It’s not like the Simurgh can want to kill him more, isn’t she maximally terrible at all times, as long as it results in civilisation slowly collapsing, anyway?

”If it’s not a big deal, fuck with traffic lights by like a second or two everywhere you can. That’s some good future ripples right there.” He just needs to think of what he might say, see if it would have real big effects, and say it if it does. He can go through dozens of stupid future effecting ideas in a second and pick out the best one. What a good power he has, that he is sorry for underestimating.

You know what, he probably doesn’t need reaction control or location danger sense powers anymore right now. Dropping those. Let’s double down on future prediction denial, can he have a power to sense what actions are personally dangerous to him? Spidey sense? He is struggling with ideas for the second power to grab but he gestures vaguely more towards something that will fuck up predictions again.

Now he knows he can drop and grab more powers, minmaxxing for the current situation makes sense.

The reaction control and locational danger sense sparks drift out and away from him, before vanishing. A more personal danger sense blooms. Then the sparks hesitate for a long moment, giving off a sense of uncertainty.

But Andrea seems busy, so they do their best. The result is a fourth spark that does ... something obscure to gravity in a small area around him. But the strange impressions from his sparks suggest that it will help. The two new sparks seem to like each other.

"Interfering with functional traffic control devices in the absence of a clear and present danger is against the law," Dragon informs him. "But I can take a rolling hash of your video image and xor it into the seeds for the CSPRNGs on computers I control."

On another world, a woman in a fedora pauses in the middle of messing with a crimescene, one hand going to her head as the path jumps wildly.

"Path to eliminating this new source of interference," she mutters. And then "Door to conference room 3, Brockton Bay P.R.T, 3 by 3, to my right."

She fires a bullet.

Andrea's new danger sense spikes wildly, about two seconds before a shimmering 3-inch square hole in space opens beside Dragon's camera.

Well Andrea has been doing pretty well at randomly stepping around the room. So the bullet should miss? Obviously he freaks out and leaps out of the way also. “ALREADY?! FUCK YOU BOOGEYMAN! FUCK FUCK!”

He want’s to jump behind the table for cover but that would limit his choices and being unpredictable is the only thing saving him from precog assassination. He is hyped up on adrenaline so he says some pretty stupid shit instead of cowering in fear like would be reasonable. “HAH! THE RANDOMNESS IS AFFECTING PRECOGS! YES!”

If it works against Contessa, it probably works against Simurgh. If he dies in the next few moments it’s probably still a good thing for the chances of the world because of what Dragon just did.

The bullet hits the corner of the table. Trooper Hammonds squawks a panic on her radio because there are not supposed to be random shootings in the P.R.T. base.

The P.R.T. dispatch triggers a lockdown of the base — incidentally cutting off certain types of remote access as an anti-stranger measure.

Contessa finishes scribbling a note and drops it through a second portal.

Dragon's image freezes on the screen.

The note wafts gently to the conference room table, flipping upright at the last moment.

Yes. What you're doing is working against the one precog trying to hold this entire fucking system together and prevent the world from collapsing into anarchy, killing billions.

Hope you're happy.

Hugs and Kisses, Contessa

Okay, you know what, let’s pre commit to maximising randomness if Contessa doesn’t open a portal to talk right now, since dragon seems to have lagged out that is probably safe-ish for her. That way path to victory will tell her to talk to him. And also it will tell her how to perfectly manipulate him. Thats…. Fine, Cauldron might suck but they do in fact want the world to not end. Andrea can rely on RNGeesus for some future choices to fight at least some effects of manipulation.

If he sees a portal he will immediately blurt: ”I have knowledge about your blind spots! Your precog paths end up pretty bad actually because of them! You can’t do Endbringers, I can! Or could… I know what happens if I never acted. Your planned future sucks and kills trillions not billions! It can definitely be improved. Come on if I know who you even are then It’s gotta be real knowledge right?” Come on path to victory, future knowledge is a good thing to have, don’t tell her to kill me.

... and 30 seconds ago, that might have worked. But Andrea wanted the sparks to help him be immune to precognition, and they've done their best to help.

The fourth spark has an effect on gravity — not a traditional or obvious precognition counter — but in this case, it renders Andrea opaque to tachyons. Meaning that certain types of shard-based temporal precognition can no longer directly glean information about his future thoughts. This wouldn't be too much of a hindrance to Path to Victory under normal conditions. However ...

Andrea has spent almost all of his time on this planet with a source of true randomness and multiple non-shard based extrasensory powers dumping information into his head. Path to Victory could build a neural model off of the scans of Andrea's arrival, simulate it forward, and see what he just committed to. But it's already stopped him from feeding more randomness to Dragon, and it's juggling multiple concurrent paths. Simulating Andrea's brainstate isn't energy efficient, when there's no particular indication that it needs to.

Step 43: Knock the candle onto the desk.

So Contessa continues about her business.

And high above them, the Simurgh laughs.

Hnnnn….. fucking with the Simurghs precog is probably still better for the world even if it is accidentally foiling whatever dastardly deeds path to victory is up to. If Contessa doesn’t want to talk, she will just have to deal with it. The golden morning happens soon following Cauldrons paths anyway, just denying shards accurate simulated futures in general seems like a net positive. 

Also he just almost got shot. Where is the PRT? “I’M STILL ALIVE BY THE WAY! The bullet missed!”

The PRT hasn't moved, mainly because it's been less than a minute. The particular part of the PRT that is Trooper Hammonds makes a judgement call and tackles Andrea.

"I have no idea what you're doing, but whatever it is almost got us shot," she says, trying to pin his arms so that he stops moving. "Let's calm down, stop yelling, and discuss this like rational adults before it happens again."

“Get off me dude! Me moving around is what keeps me safe! A precog didn’t like that I was messing up the future, so she tried to shoot me and probably missed because I wasn’t where she predicted I would be. So hey that’s one point towards my anti Simurgh measures being real right? If what I did doesn’t unpredictably change the future why would a precog try and shoot me.” Man it would suck if he got shot now that he can’t move. He hasn’t even saved Canberra yet. 

“Also can we get Dragon back. She was gonna tell me about prophecy procedures and I need something to focus on because I almost just died and this is a terrible time for a panic attack. Things are still urgent.”

Hammonds rolls off him and get into a low crouch.

"Okay. Well, if people are going to be shooting at you, stay low to the ground and behind cover," she advises. "And we can't get Dragon back because the base has been put into lockdown. We need to wait for that to clear. Now, obviously stopping the Simurgh is very important. But you cannot do that if you get shot, and I do not want to be shot myself. So stop making precogs shoot at us and come up with a plan. Is getting read in on PRT prophecy procedure still the most important task, at this point? If so, we can make our way to a secure terminal and I can pull it up."