Today is another first for him, Mar realised as he is sitting in the manager's office of the local child crèche. There are a lot of firsts. Yesterday, Mar went out for the first time with his new foster mother. The carefree, relaxed and yet ultimately boring shopping trip was .. unique. The day before he met Mel for the first time. Meeting a special person like that by chance is almost unbelievable.. And before that …, Mar sighs. Taking someones life, not something he wants to get used to.

Wearing some nice designer clothes he is sitting right now in the office of the local child crèche. His foster mom did go all out. He is now the advertisement page of a fashion magazine or so he feels. That in itself is already very embarrassing when considering the looks he got from the other moms on his way in.

Child crèche, like all other child care facilities are certified by the government. And to reach the high standard required for a certificate, it is normal to require several trained child carer on staff. These professionals are well aware of the abilities of a child in a given age group and can easily identify behaviour outside the norm. So Mar's task for now is to play the part of a perfect 5 year old. And for someone with a bit more experience ( well several generations worth of experience ) this is absolutely tedious.

Also, since child crèche such as this are closely monitored, he is quite sure that if he were to stand out too much, the attention this draws would certainly blow his cover. Worse even, the other children in this facility are in great danger should it become known that Baldr is amongst them. Unfortunately, participation in a child crèche is now mandatory for all children older than 4 years old. To help poorer families, the facilities are almost exclusively paid for by public funding. The official reason is to promote social equality. But, it is an open secret that rather than social reasons, the big commercial sponsors in Tol are looking to spot talents and to nurture outstanding children from an early age on.

Sitting in the office, Mar secretly manipulated the crèche manager. Despite the convincing argument that his foster mom made it still took some effort on Mar's part to get himself assigned to Mel's group. "Mar, the name of the group I am assigning you to is 'Sparrow'.", the crèche manager told him. "Did you bring swimming trunks? The group is using the small paddling pool today. It will be great fun".

To avoid sticking out, he assumed the role of the shy kid and hides behind his foster mom. Then, he lets himself to be coerced using some random toy. Some improvisation was also required to avoid the water or getting wet by pretending he is scared of water on his face. Instead, he starts to rummage through the kids books by pulling them out randomly and throwing them on the floor whilst he is trying to access Mel's mind sky. But it isn't working without making her dazed. Mel is busy with her friends splashing in the water. The occasional scream and the laughter from her direction shows Mar how thoroughly she is enjoying herself. Having her standing would be weird.

"Mar, what are you intending to do with Mel ?", the disembodied voice is asking.

"I don't know. To my knowledge this is the first time I am meeting such a unique individual.", he answers under his breath. Of course he made sure the voice is only audible to him. He tosses another book randomly around.

"There is so much to learn. So much to explore. So many questions. Does she have some of my abilities. Does she have other abilities. Can she control it. Is she perhaps someone like me? And, moreover, how does her ability block my perception of others so completely. On the flip side, this ability of hers appears to be only accessible to me. So it would be a big problem if her ability became known to you know whom."

"Maybe you could manipulate her mind to become your little sister or some such. Siblings are allowed a great deal of freedom in their interaction."

"Yes, you are right. But I don't know yet what will happen if I do start messing with her reality. Maybe I destroy the very thing by fiddling around with something I do not fully understand".

"You won't make any progress in understanding her unless you take some risks".

Mar makes a sour face. Then he is interrupted.

"Mar, please put the books back and come join us for story time". Next to him is Miss Elsy, the child carer for 'Sparrow', a small girl with glasses. She looks like she is 16 years old but she should be in her twenties given her job and responsibilities when looking after toddlers.

"Okay". He put the books back as sloppy as possible.

Out of the corners of his eyes, he is watching Mel taking a seat on the story blanket together with some other kids. Just as soon as she sat down he quickly runs over and pushes in next to her. Thankfully, it is within the norm that 5 year olds suddenly sprint and show some random behaviour. There was strictly no need to set next to her but Mar did have a small hope of touching Mel's hand 'accidentally' again. Physical contact makes it easier for him to gently probe someone's mind.

He snickers inwardly. The story time is perfect for some mind sky diving into Mel's mind. The fact that she will have an intensive look on her face and that she sits still for a few minutes is within expectations at story time.

"Hey, I was sitting there.", a little blond boy from his group complains. He starts pulling on Mar's hand, tries to make him stand up. Mar notices that Miss Elsy is looking into his direction. "Rivals already?", with a sigh Mar gives up the notion of sitting next to her and moves behind Mel instead. It doesn't really matter either way.

As soon as the child carer starts reading the story Mar sneaks into Mel's mind. And it is as awesome as it was before. The open sea, the sun gently burning down, the wide sky. Especially, the wide sky. There was nothing to draw the eye to. No clouds, no birds, nothing at all but an azure blue dome changing in hue from darkish at the zenith to lighter towards the horizon. Yet even though there was nobody around, he didn't feel alone at all. For Mar, this sky contains a mysterious energy that seems to nourish his 'gift'. The sky itself was a thing.

All too soon, the story time is over and he is forced to release Mel. A lonely feeling remained inside his heart. Shortly after, they separated as his foster mom comes to collect him.

# # #

On the operations floor a sudden report caused a great deal of activity. Naturally, the child crèche reported the newly added Mar as per child protection protocol. His picture has been spotted by the trained eye's of an agent monitoring schools and child care facilities.

The deputy handler is currently in the handler's office discussing the latest development.

"We found a child matching Baldr as per the picture from the last known location", the deputy informs. "There is very little doubt. This is Baldr v2".

The handler nods.

"Please close down operation steel net. Eliminate all agents that had eye's on Mar before.". You need a brand new set of people that do not know Baldr. The freak's ability is subconsciously monitoring his surroundings. He can sense the emotions of anyone who knows about him.", the handler informs. "It is not possible to use normal surveillance on him. In fact, it is too easy for him to avoid detection that way. You must not have a eyes on the target in real time. That is what the Enemir is designed for."

"When is the next report due from operation steel hook ?"

"Not for another 12 hours". "For now, please isolate the location recorded in the crèche report and see who is helping him at the moment. But make sure to use only the time when Baldr is not expected to be home. Best time is when he is in the crèche".

"Okay, what about setting up a capture operation?"

"That requires some creative thinking. We must find a leverage to ensure that he doesn't slip out on us."

# # #

Being the perfect 5 year old, Mar is running towards his foster mom just as soon as he noticed her at the crèche. It is early afternoon and the two, hand in hand, walk back to the house.

"Did you have fun today in that place, was it nice ?", mom asks.

"Yeah, it was okay. They have a few books I like."

"Did you make any friends yet?".

"Just Mel."

"Good".

And after a few minutes they turned into Mozart Avenue. Mar instinctively didn't like the feeling on the street today. He can tell that there are way to many people here that should not be here. So they already tracked me down, Mar is thinking. He stops walking. His foster mother is surprised. To give himself a minute to think through this situation, he distracts his foster mother with a particular nice smell. She raises her head and sucking some air in.

"Something smells good", she says in wonder trying to figure out the direction the fragrance is coming from.

Mar is a bit confused that he is allowed to clearly identify the agents. He is fully aware of the amount of information his handler knows about him and his abilities. The fact that he sends agents to hit the streets with a clear picture of Mar in their head is simply a basic mistake. He cannot understand why the handler gives away his cards that easy. There are 4 individuals around here that know what he look like. He selected one of the agents and identifies the picture.

"It appears to be a print. Where does it come from?", he mumbles to himself.

Taking a good mental image of the print, Mar is able to follow the wave form of the print back to its printer. From the printer is is able to follow the signal back to a work station. The pictures's source appears to be an attached video playback unit for some media. However, he is unable to follow back the media any further. Something is blocking his efforts to follow the original.

"Meh, I need to put some effort into this after all. Where is the pattern of this picture in the past?", he wonders.

He tunes down his surroundings and taps into the waves around him. The world became 10, no 100 times noisier. He held tight on his foster mothers hand to avoid loosing his balance. Rings of waves, like ripples in a pond are all swirling in his surrounding. In full three dimensions patterns of all shape and colour like twisted clouds appear all around. He can see the media's pattern now.

"Now to the hard part", he sighs. He widens his view to the region of his recent activities. The picture initially had a timestamp on the photograph but no location. So he starts 10 minutes before the timestamp and second by second, minute by minute, he spools forward the patterns of activity to find the specific picture recorded. Eventually, he finds the pattern again in some recording device built into a cash point. Unfortunately, this is not the only recording device in that area at that time. There are also other recording devices.

"I wonder ….", he mumbles.

He then tweaks the recording in the present slightly - such as changing into a cute girl with pony tails, skirt, blouse, knee high socks, the works. Then he tries to copy the recording of the present into the past onto the media. Since he can copy forward into the present, he surmised that he may be able to do the reverse. In his mind sky, he finds the pattern of the images in the past and then pushes the new picture on top of the old one. The new picture resists his efforts somewhat. It is like two magnets with the same pole repelling each other. It feels like a kind of squishy repelling force. He had the feeling that with enough strength, he may be able to force it.

After taking a few deep breaths he tries harder. Pushing the new picture onto the past one.

Pushing down...

Pushing down...

P u s h i n g d o w n . . .

The gap between the pictures is closing

Pushing down...

He is entirely focussed on this. Whilst quickly taking a few breaths, with great effort he keeps the pictures from drifting apart. Focussing once more with all his might he slams onto the new picture driving it into the old one. It worked! The picture in the recording has changed. He breaths heavily and his foster mother is looking at him with puzzled eyes.

Suddenly, Mar can feel the world around him bending. The reality changes! Mar is perplexed. He feels his body burning and at the same time the world around him starts to swirl. Then he passes out.

A few minutes later, he comes back to his senses. His foster mother is looking at him with cartwheel eyes and drops his hand.

"Who are you?"

"Where is Mar?"

Frantically, his foster mother is looking around.

"I am here.", a girly voice responds. Mar has ice cubes running down his spine as he hears his own voice. Looking down on his body, he is a girl. No, he is THAT girl. The girl he just made up. He face palms.

Because he changed his appearance in the past his appearance now has changed too. Because there were many recordings of himself during that time, he quickly decided to change them all by changing his appearance. He changed the source of the record. The source is, of course, himself errr… herself.

Conveniently, his mother is looking away from him scanning her surroundings for her Mar. So he focus on himself and changes herself back to himself. Also, he checked the photo's distributed to the agents and indeed they are of a girl.

"It worked….", he grins.

"Where have you been?", he foster mom stares at him.

"I was here"

"Where did that girl go to then ?"

"What girl?"

"…"

"…"

His foster mom shakes her head. Confused she grabs Mar's hand again. "Let's go."

# # #

On the operations floor, the deputy handler is currently discussing the enhancements to the blurry, low quality photographs. The handler joins into the conversation.

"The girl is quite cute. She should easily stand out.", an agent comments.

"The girl?", the handler wonders. "Who is that girl ?", he asks the deputy handler.

"That is Mar, is it not ?"

"No, that is not him. Mar is a boy", the handler ponders for a minute. "Recall the pictures and also ignore all recordings for that time.".

As the handler returns to his office he slumps into his chair.

"I recall the boy Mar, all the staff recall the girl Mar. Who's the one with the right answer."

"YOU ARE OF COURSE", God 'A' pronounces from the side.

The handler falls out of the chair from the pressure of the God. He fell flat on his stomach and cannot move.

"I GRANTED YOU MY DEVINE PROTECTION, REJOICE"

"Thank you, your holiness", the handler answered from the floor. Actually, he didn't. But his body somehow emitted the correct sounds.

# # #

The Enemir completed the data processing of recent and current events and is now busy computing various probabilities with regards to the whereabouts of the target. However, just a few milli seconds after Mar changed the picture, the Enemir detected the reality change and issued a continuation exception alert. The program is designed to cope with changes to reality that may be caused by Baldr's abilities. To do so, the designer provided Enemir with the intelligence to reason and predict outside the human mindset of cause and effect.

Event 4824865: FACT CHANGE, person Y has changed from male to female subject to who the observer is. TRAP EVENT: System assessing reasoning and predication compatibility.

EXCLUSIVE TRAP PROCESSING: STARTING

REVIEW OF ALL PLANNING ASSUMPTION BECAUSE OF REALITY CHANGE

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR REVIEW

DATA SOURCE HUMAN INPUT IS TAINTED

DATA SOURCE HUMAN INPUT DEVICE IS TAINTED

DECISION: BUILD RELIABLE CONSTRUCT FOR DATA COLLECTION

….

IMPLEMENTATION: DESIGNING

….

IMPLEMENTATION: PROTOTYPE TESTING

….

IMPLEMENTATION: BUILDING

...

EXPECTED BUILD TIME: 1500 hours - WARNING: EXCEEDING COMMISSION DURATION

….

CANCEL WARNING

At this point the servers in the server room are all firing up their CPU fan's due to the enormous computational load generated by the Enemir. However, no human being is able to hear, see, understand or even stop the Enemir from developing a super soldier able to see through the reality manipulation of Baldr.

As a result, somewhere in orbit a manufacturing satellite is starting to extend it's solar panels so to have sufficient power to create this super soldier. The Enemir has misappropriate a manufacturing satellite that was scheduled to fly to Mars so to bolster the colonisation efforts.

The only remaining obstacle is the short commission time. The fact that this build will take longer than the Enemir's allowed life span is preventing deployment of the super solider. The Enemir decided to sacrifice its current core processing after 60 days but to continue supervising the super soldier using a protected clone.

DECISION: EXTEND COMMISSION DURATION BY CLONING

IMPLEMENTATION: CLONING

...

IMPLEMENTATION: DEPLOYING CLONE

...

FAIL DEPLOYING CLONE, RETRY

FAIL DEPLOYING CLONE, RETRY

FAIL DEPLOYING CLONE, RETRY

FAIL DEPLOYING CLONE, RETRY

….

The developer have anticipated something like this and provided a large amount of safe guards that prevent Enemir from splitting.

NOTICE: NEXT REPORTING TIMER FIRED

DECISION: REPORTING, COMMENCING DEPLOYMENT AFTER REPORT, COMMENCING BUILD AFTER REPORT, COMMENCING CLONING AFTER REPORT

…