It was all a bit surreal. Jacob hadn't felt very nervous when loitering on the sidewalk outside the Hearst building. But on stepping into the gleaming lobby, he'd immediately felt his suit was unsuitable, his bank account too small to count, and his fly was unzipped.

The crisp receptionist knew him before he opened his mouth. A security guard hustled him into a private elevator. And now he was on his way up to meet one of New York's biggest movers and shakers.

He checked his fly, again, and brushed a crumb off the lapel of his suit. It was his only suit, an all-purpose navy blue outfit originally purchased for his grandfather's funeral and since worn to a few job interviews. He smoothed the lapels and took a nervous inventory of his pockets. Yes, he had his keys and wallet. Return ticket. iPhone. He had the debit card, in case Mr. Lee wanted it back. He took out the smartphone Mr. Lee had sent, stared at it, and put it back in his pocket.

The elevator glided to an almost imperceptible halt. The doors chimed - no brash New York ding, just a gentle tone - and Jacob stepped into an enormous space that was an office in the way The White House was a residence.

The elevator doors opened directly into a stunningly large space. The entire top floor of the building was one large room encircled by floor-to-ceiling segmented glass. There was a sunken area to the right that looked as though it was designed for sitting and relaxing complete with couches, padded chairs and a bar. A long conference table off to the left lent the room some small amount of credence as a place of business.

There was a reddish sculpture as large as five men with a fluid abstract shape to it near the center. There seemed no rhyme or reason to the form. It was as if someone stole all of the walls on the floor and the five or six rooms started to melt together, so smoothly and elegantly the decor and architecture blended the space. It worked impressively.

Across the cavernous space was a large desk, the largest Jacob had ever seen. It had a modern, almost futuristic style. There wasn't a bit of wood to the concave base that flared up from the floor to support a spacious crescent of shiny black. There was no phone, no computer that she could see on it's surface. There wasn't anything at all.

There was, however, a massive amount of wireless traffic permeating the entire space.  It was thick, almost physical, like the morning fog after a warm rain.  New York City seemed like one big wireless hot spot already, but this was more like swimming in an ocean of data that surged and flowed around him like tidal motion.  It was far too much to keep track of through casual application of his ability.  He'd have to sit down and really concentrate to hope to make any kind of sense of it all.

And then it was gone - all of it and all at once.  The ocean had been replaced by desert, completely and totally.  Jacob reached out and found no trace of a wireless signal anywhere, which was fairly impossible in a modern city.  The sudden change from shock-and-awe to zero was so dramatic as to be stunning.  Jacob realized he'd been focused almost exclusively on his unique senses as sudden movement to his left focused him back on his immediate surroundings.

Daniel Lee was standing not ten paces away from him.  He was placing something inside of his suit jacket with his left hand as he walked up and extended his right.

"Good morning, Mr. Burke.  It's a pleasure to meet you."

Jacob took a deep breath and tried to remember what the ebook he'd just lost contact with had said about setting the tone for business negotiations. Something about not being too eager? He smiled and aggressively pumped the proffered hand.

"Hello, Mr. Lee. You're a signal bully. That sucks. But it's nice to meet you."

The older man smiled just a bit as he replied, "I apologize, but I always try and avoid distractions during important meetings.  This way, please," he added as he gestured towards the comfortable sunken area. 

"I hope your travel arrangements have been comfortable."

Jacob rubbernecked as he followed Mr. Lee. Walking through this office felt like crossing a movie set. "Uh huh," he said vaguely. "Funny, I feel the opposite. I mean, about distractions. I like to maximize the potential of every moment."

"Yes, I thought much the same when I was your age," Lee admitted.  "After a while I came to value the quiet moments when I and everything around me were still, at peace."

He stepped down into the sitting area and stood next to a plush antique-style chair.  "Please, make yourself comfortable."

Lee sat when Jacob did and started right in.  "Lets start with why you're here," he suggested.  "Any thoughts?"

Jacob got a deer-in-the-headlights look. "Okay," he said. "I think you're reforming The New York Knights and you want me on The Pier's IT team."

Lee's face took on an inquisitive cast and he stated, "That's a bold conclusion, emphatically stated.  What led you to it?"

"It's one of only three conclusions that seem very plausible. And..." he looked at his feet and smiled slightly. "It's the conclusion I like the most."

Jacob leaned in, forgetting his nerves, even forgetting the signal desert. They were just discussing a puzzle, turning over a problem.

"You asked me here because of my special talent," he continued. "It didn't take a jamming field to confirm your knowledge of that. Why else would you be so eager to get in a guy fresh out of college?

"I've been doing my best to keep that talent under wraps. Guess I didn't do as good a job as I thought. But still, I find it hard to believe you just stumbled across me. You must have been looking. And probably not for me specifically, because those scenarios I file under implausible. You were looking for metahumans in general."

He smiled again, getting excited. "Now why would you be looking for metahumans? When you're doing a major revamp of the old Knights's headquarters?"

"You could say that metahumans, as you call them, are something of a hobby of mine," Lee revealed.  "Given the things some of them can do it seemed logical to have someone keep track of them.  The Supreme Court ruled out a national registry years ago, so I do what I can."

"What do you know about the Knights?" he asked, changing topics.

"Um..." Jacob temporized. He wasn't a complete spaz, he knew the old man was deliberately keeping him off balance. Wasn't there a Sun Tzu quote about that tactic? But the internet was out of reach. Damnit. What was the question? What about the Knights? He reached for Wikipedia but it wasn't there. Damnit!

"Um. The Knights were founded by six metahumans in 1966. They enjoyed good relations with the city and other law enforcement organizations. In 1981...uh...

"I'm not good on details, That's what computers are for. Basically, The Knights were the gold standard for freelance superteams. It was a tragedy when they disappeared. Not just for New York City."

"It was," Lee agreed somberly.  For a moment he seemed nearly despondent but it was like a cloud passing over the sun and he brightened quickly.

"Let's play a game," he suggested as he reached forward to open a drawer in his side of the coffee table between them.  "I'm going to shoot you in the head in sixty seconds.  What do you do?" 

The question was punctuated by Lee slamming home a cartridge into the automatic pistol now in his hand.

"Shoot me?" Jacob frowned. "Why would you shoot me? That doesn't make any sense."

In response, Lee engaged the slide with a quick pull.  He looked up at Jacob with a complete sense of purpose.

"Fifty seconds."

"You're being a drama llama," Jacob grumbled. "I wouldn't play this game in the first place. My talent is for preparing for danger. Circumventing it. Not confronting it head on."

"Not everything works out the way you want it to," Lee countered.  "You're in danger, you're cut off from any useable signals, and the clock is ticking.  I'm not advocating any particular approach but I'm intensely curious as to what you'd do."

He raised his eyebrows.  "Are you telling me you'd just pretend it wasn't happening?"

"I'm telling you I'd be prepared," Jacob replied, somewhat sullenly. He didn't like this interview. He forced himself to lean back and tried to smile. "The word," he said, "Is failsafe."
 
"If I was meeting someone who knew more about me than he should," Jacob explained, "I would even the score. I would make sure I knew more about him than I should. I can build quite a dossier in three days. And I'd make sure that on a server somewhere, one of my programs was counting down to release that dossier. To The Smoking Gun, Wikileaks, Anonymous. Basically anyone with an inbox.

"Oh, and there might be another program counting down to delete all this person's bank accounts." He grinned, pleased with himself. "Deleting the accounts," he confided, "is much harder to straighten out than just transferring the funds."

The septuagenarian tilted his head and the hand holding the gun went limp. 

"Really?"  Lee sighed and put the gun away.  "You're a terrible bluffer, Mr. Burke.  We'll have to work on that.  But overall that would have been an adequate response had you truly been as prepared for the unexpected as you claim."

"You should see me play poker. I'm told it's hilarious."

Lee leaned back in his chair again and asked, "Did you happen to bring the phone I sent you?"

Jacob took the phone out of his pocket. A post-it note, covered with dense handwriting, had gotten stuck to the screen. He peeled off the note and put it back in his pocket. "This is a very interesting phone," Jacob murmured.

"Oh?  How so?" Lee asked casually.

"Well. It's bleeding edge in its hardware, its OS, and its ability to spy on the user."

Lee was unfazed.  "Go on."

"Uh, well, all activity on the phone is logged in a secret cache that the user can't even access. Plus activity in the proximity of the phone can be recorded, which is pretty neat. The phone has an impressive amount of storage, obviously, but what's really cool is that it maxes out the memory with revolutionary new compression algorithms that, well, make it really good at secretly gathering data on the user."

"Think of it like a smart smart phone," Lee explained.  "The OS is semi-adaptive so it can continually alter itself to better serve the user as defined by the stored data.  You can't access it because it's only used by the OS.  Nothing quite so nefarious as spying, I'm afraid, although I concede the potential for abuse if one could access the data."

Jacob thought about that for a good minute. "That's good," he said finally. "I'm ambivalent on the idea of spying. I could have spied on you, but I didn't. And if you want to hire me for some corporate espionage dealie, I'm almost certainly not interested."

"So you're an altruist," Lee said more than asked.  "Have you ever considered using your talent for doing good in the world?"

Jacob looked at Lee with frank curiosity. "How much do you actually know about me, Mr. Lee?" he asked. "I was working on...a project along those lines last summer. It didn't go as well as I'd hoped."   

"Tell me about it," Lee prompted.

Jacob glanced at the smart-smartphone in his hands and shrugged. "I tried to dismantle the Juárez drug cartel." He crossed his arms, summoned the full sagacity of his 23 years, and added, "It was kind of naive."

"I'll say," Lee declared in strong agreement.  "It was real work keeping them from sending half a dozen hit squads into the US to hunt you down."

He shook his head as if trying to shake an unpleasant memory before he refocused on Jacob.  "Where do you think you went wrong with it?"

"I completely underestimated the problem." He smiled ruefully at the inadequacy of that statement. "It was like fighting a hydra. You know, the monster that grows two heads when you cut one off? And I was fighting blindfolded with a rusty butter knife. Every time I thought I was ready to deliver the next coup I discovered some factor I hadn't considered, or a contingency I hadn't prepared for.

"Were there really six hit squads?"

Lee made a face and stood up, picking up the phone as he did.  "Come with me," he said and he walked to the large desk at the far end of the floor.

"There's always rogue details, unforeseen consequences, or things you don't consider," he explained as they walked.  "Risk management is a big part of the game.  You can't just act without thinking.  That's how hit squads happen."

When they arrived at the desk he gestured for Jacob to sit and placed the phone down on the desk's smooth featureless black top.  The area around the phone glowed light blue and a keyboard-like touch interface appeared by Lee's chair.  He issued some commands and brought up a menu of what looked like application icons.  From this he selected a couple and flicked them with a finger to the phone, whose screen digested them along with the others it possessed.

The blue glow and touch interface vanished and it was done.  "You can have that back," Lee said.  "Assuming you do want to be a Knight."

"What?" The deer in the headlights look was back.  "I mean...what? What exactly are you offering me?"

Lee gave a patient sigh and replied, "You're absolutely right.  I'm exercising my powers as trustee of the New York Knights to recruit a new team.  But I don't need you for the Pier's nerd herd.  If you think you can temper your youthful impulses and work hard at the training we'll set out for you, I think you've got the potential to be a formidable Knight.  What do you say?"

Jacob pursed his lips and stared at the desk. He nodded slightly several times, as if listening to an internal conversation, then looked back up at Lee.

"Why me?" he asked. "Like you reminded me, twice even, my powers are pretty specific and don't include immunity to bullets. I'm very squishy and killable."

Lee nodded.  "Fair point.  You remember Mantis?  He was one of the founding Knights and one of only two founders to still be on the team right up until the end.  It might surprise you to know that Mantis didn't have any powers at all - none - and many people thought he was the most dangerous Knight there ever was.

"I can train you and equip you and we can work on the squishy-killable thing.  What I can't do is replace one of the most unique and potentially powerful metahuman powers I've ever seen.  Mr. Burke, I strongly believe you have only barely scratched the surface of what you can do.  In today's world, someone with your abilities can practically go anywhere, find anything, anyone, anywhere.  With training you could be one of the best detectives in the world - you just have to work hard and take it seriously."

"Take it seriously. Because I spent months trying to kill a drug cartel on a lark." There was no sting in his words. He was lost in his thoughts again. His fingers twitched. He frowned. "It's like Archimedes said," he mused. "Yeah."

He shook his head as if to clear the cobwebs, reached into his jacket, and pulled out the post-it covered with sloppy handwriting. "I had some ideas for a superhero name," he announced "What do you think of-" -- he read from the note -- "-Ping? Or Brian O'Blivion? Glitch Modulator? Hub? Trojan?"

"I think it requires more serious thought," Lee replied dryly.  "I added an app to the phone with all of the details of your retainer agreement - salary, benefits, etcetera, and some basic protocols you'll need to know.  Learn them.  There's also a costume designer app.  Send me a few ideas by the end of the week, although I shudder to think what a Brain O'Blivion looks like."

"Brian O'Blivion. You know, from Videodrome?" He laughed. "Wow, this is really happening. I have like a million questions...."

"Such as?"

Jacob ticked off points on his fingers, his voice rising with enthusiasm. "When do I start? Do I have to take a drug test? What kind of gear are we talking about? Who else is on the team? How hands-on are you going to be with the team? Am I in charge of cybersecurity? Because I'd like to be. I should supervise the nerd herd too. What agreements do you have with other law enforcement, particularly regarding data sharing? Have you defined the legal parameters for use of my ability?"

He clapped a hand over his mouth and smiled sheepishly. "I'm just really excited," he said. He picked up the smartsmartphone. "All of that's probably covered in here. So I guess what I'd really like to ask is...

"What happened to them? The last Knights?"

Whatever humor or lightness that might have occupied Daniel Lee's face ran for the hills at the question.  The man suddenly seemed all of his seventy-plus years, the weight of them all seeming to land on his shoulders all at once.  He studied his reflection in the black mirror-like surface of his desk for a moment before he spoke again.

"The short answer is... I don't know.  They left on an emergency call and never came back.  The long answer is... well, the long answer is a discussion for another time."

"Are we...gonna look into it?"

"Not immediately, no," Lee replied.  "There's a lot to do before anyone does anything official.  You'll have to meet your teammates, of course, and get settled in.  Then there's training - lots and lots of training.  I won't lie to you, it's a lot of work.  But the work pays real dividends when you need it.  You'll see."

Jacob drew himself up to his full, if not impressive, height. "Mr. Lee," he said precisely, "I know I can come off a little...goofy. It's just because my mind is always racing. Doesn't mean I'm not serious. I can be serious as a heart attack." He held Lee's gaze.

Then he giggled. "Do we hug now?" he asked.

Daniel Lee sighed heavily.  "Go," he said.  "Study the protocols and get to work on a..." He gestured haphazardly up and down Jacob's direction.  "...costume.  I'll contact you and let you know when to report to the Pier."

"Right. Awesome." Jacob practically skipped his way to the elevator. "And that was a no on the drug test, right?" he asked over his shoulder. He didn't wait for an answer.

"Give me strength," Lee mumbled to himself as, once more alone, turned to his desk to see what files had downloaded.  His brow furrowed as he found only one, a video file.  It hadn't tripped any security flags so he played.

"...Never gonna give you uuuup, never gonna let you dowwwn, never gonna ruuuun around and desert youuuu..."

Lee slapped his hand down on the desk and killed the playback, and if he had been in a cartoon there might have been steam escaping from his ears.

"Dial Umberto," he said curtly and hidden speakers throughout the office space replied with ringing.

**Dis ees Umberto,** said the heavily-accented deep voice that answered.  **Oh, meester Lee, how may I help you?**

"I am in need of your services, are you free at noon?"

**For you, meester Lee, I am always available.  I will see you then.**

"Thank you," Lee replied before disconnecting.  "This is going to take some serious planning," he added to his empty office.