Who: Shy When: Friday near Midnight Where: Shy's room, Fischer's compound What: Shy is dealing with his own limitations To say that Shy was a troubled youth would generally result in something of a "duh" reaction. The boy was paranoid, schizophrenic, though that particular quirk was largely due to his powers, antisocial, reclusive and had a god complex to boot. Today, however, it was not a laundry list of mental issues which was troubling Shy. He was still focusing on the difficulty he had faced in locating the mutants who had escaped a short while ago.
Locating an organic on the island was easy enough, even if they did not wear a collar. Most every human carried some kind of electronic these days, most were wireless which gave him instant and immediate access to the device. At the very least, a wrist watch let out a soft, distinct hum which he could pick up from surrounding devices. If that were to fail, the thousands of cameras stationed all around the island would give him easy access to the location of the target organic, it was not even a challenge at this point.
The collars made things even more simple. They had a distinct 'sound' to them, and Shy knew the voices the collars carried very well. Once again, it should have been no challenge to track them down. Satellites constantly circled the globe, giving him easy access to the entire planet, cellphones and security cameras were constantly in use and once again provided him with the ability to 'listen' for those voices. The problem was, Shy had underestimated the size of the globe, the sheer number of phones, of cameras, of devices and the massive time, energy and focus that wading through it all required.
The island was simple, small, compact. Thirty-six by twenty miles, and much of that uninhabited. The world was much, much larger, the population much more dense, the noise and chatter of all the electronics all talking at once was overwhelming. Shy had spent the first day tracking, managing to locate the continents the missing mutants were on, and the next day had been all but unable to move thanks to the massive, pounding headache which had shook his brain. Never in his life had he heard so much all at one, all talking, all demanding. His crazy head had fought to come up with a 'personality' to assign to each and every individual voice, which only added to the troubled state of his overheating brain.
Shy had not understood it at all. He was a god, he could control all of it with a thought, he had never had any true difficulty before in his life. He had overestimated himself and had suffered for it. He had reached out to every phone and camera he could communicate with on the planet and opened all lines for communication at once and had not been ready to deal with the mass of replies. He had known the facts and figures, he was well familiar with the numbers, he had simply trusted that his brain would be able to handle it all. He had been wrong.
He had done his best to reroute the replies to slave networks, which could not process as quickly or proficiently as Shy himself could, but it saved him having to sort every piece of data himself. With the majority of the junk data filtered out, the slave networks had then fed anything interesting or promising to Shy, who had, at long last, tracked each and every 'missing' collar down and guided guards to the apprehension of the escaped mutants. It should have been easy, it should have taken a few hours at most, the process had honestly not been that difficult. The problem had been the quantity of the data to be sorted.
That had been days ago, and Shy was still fighting a low hum of a headache. He was working shorter shifts and shutting down more often to try and combat them, but it seemed the headache did not want to leave him. Fischer had come to check on him a few times, and Shy had not been nearly as arrogant or cold as he had been in recent weeks, something which comforted his 'father.' Even with the visits, Shy was suddenly feeling alone. Perhaps it was that he was without the Internet for longer periods of time now, so he did not have the comfort of thousands of voices and trillions of bits of data at his fingertips, but he felt isolated.
For a brief moment, Shy considered lifting the wall and speaking to Computer. Computer would comfort him, it would assure him his head would settle and life would go back to normal. Computer would, but not until after it lectured Shy on his recent instabilities, and Shy was certainly in no mood to deal with that.
So the frail boy lay in the quiet, dark room, with only the silence with his aching head.