Duumvirate is copyright © 2011 Slicer.

Chapter 1

The problem with ruling the world is that everyone else wants your job.

The Dominator oversees the Illuminati Levels, the Levels own servants, and servants manipulate public figures, the men and women who sit atop normal hierarchies. Most of the power-hungry Levels envied their Dominator, but until now it was limited to a few scowls and sighs of frustration. Because of this particular Dominator's abilities, it was thought highly unlikely that anyone would try to rebel or usurp him, and utterly inconceivable that anyone would somehow manage to have hidden action-control implants in his head or turn his soulless biological-robot Enforcers against him, driving him from his paradise island and forcing him to hide.

Someone had.

"All right, guys, here's what I think will end up happening," Sarah said, her light blue, bioengineered eyes scanning the dingy, seldom-used basement of the industrial building, lit only by the flashlight globe she held. "There's only a limited set of possibilities. The most hopeful one is that the ones still on your side will use their forces to block or kill the forces already trying to find you, meaning that the cavalry will come and we'll be rescued. The least hopeful one is that the enemies are able to find some more missiles to throw at us. Big shit this time, Mach 7 right on our heads, so even if we do shoot it it'll still kill us."

"And you've said that staying here in this building is the best thing to do," Howard Dominus said casually. Over the two years he'd ruled the world, he'd learned to delegate responsibility.

"Something like that would blow us up whether we were on open ground, in a car, or down here. This is actually one of the least likely places where we'd be found, and considering what just happened out there- all the bodies, somebody's probably called the cops- it's one of the safest. Even if these guys are willing to break secrecy, they might have to fight normal forces, and that will definitely attract the attention of whoever the island guys haven't called, assuming they could call anyone." That was the ugliest unknown that the twins had to face. It was very possible that their home had become a series of craters.

William Dominus, formerly William Bohecker, raised an eyebrow. "So how do we get who they called?" He had been proclaimed Dominator alongside his brother not more than five minutes ago, after the ugly battles following the group's unimplantation. Howard had chosen to free his servants along with himself; the decision had saved his life and probably the rest of theirs as well, and there was no place for his twin but by his side.

Sarah shook her head. "Before everything went to our network, we had phones for this. Shit, ten years ago, I could just make a hang-up call to the right number and not risk exposure." She was speaking theoretically. Ten years ago she was being educated in the freshly-built Northberg Educational Facility, being taught at the age of four and a half about how the Illuminati works and how it deals with the normal world. She left there in less than six months after that and was taught her role as the princess of assassins. "But right now we're out of contact, not counting that the whole local phone trunk is probably bugged right now. So there's no way of knowing or affecting who's coming." She sighed and thought for a moment. ('Keep it didactic, keep it simple, don't think about all the possibilities because most of them are unlikely and very bad...') "I think the most likely possibility is that the bad ones, without super weapons, will come first; but a good one, probably an engineered, can move fast enough to rescue us before the enemies can bring everything into play," Sarah said in a breath, rare stress seeping into her voice. "Speaking of which.. how much ammo, guys?"

"Half full," Dominator Howard, often called Howie by his dearest friends, said. His fusion-powered microwave weapon, which slammed neutrons into hydrogen and slammed deuterium nuclei together, ran on water. The fission neutron/energy source would last for another three years, and although he and his brother have an indefinite lifespan and can never grow old, he'd be happy just to outlive his weapon, despite his confidence in the group's ability to deal death.

"Shit.. just six more shots," Dominator William said. He didn't think of himself as 'Dominator William', though. For two years he was 'Billy' in friendly company. He'd used most of his atomic shotgun's shells in the last firefight, blowing the enemy's Enforcers away with abandon and glee, proclaiming his unimplantation and the massive, unexpected quick-thinking boost he'd gained from it with an amazing display of fissile destruction along with fist-bladed death. He'd ended up firing some of his ammo into the floor of their mansion after it easily passed through the bodies of his foes; they'd go so far down that they'd be hell to dig out. Oh well; after the missiles destroyed the roof and the Micro scorched a burning hole in the carpet (and the floor, and a good chunk of the rock under the floor), the whole place would need to be rebuilt.

Sarah looked at her main weapons, a pair of bullpup-styled submachineguns, which fired mini-missiles, bullets with constant propellant and miniature warheads. Although her training enabled her to use an enormous variety of weapons, she seldom had reason to kill a lot of people or Enforcers at once. The events earlier that day had proved an exception. "I'm about.. a third full, no reloads," she replied, shaking her head and her long, light blond hair back and forth, her hair nearly matching that of the twins, theirs stark, pure white, engineered to symbolize their absolute Illumination. Even their eyes were white in the same place that normal humans would have blue or brown, and why not? They were born as power incarnate, the apex of Illuminated bioengineering ability. As twelve-year-olds they were each five foot ten and a bit under two hundred pounds, thick bone and dense muscle; if they lived long enough to reach maximum age in another six years, they'd be sixteen inches taller with another hundred and fifty pounds. Every ounce of effort and care was taken into making the Dominator what he is, a superhuman with the ability to out-think practically anyone, lift and throw humans around like dolls, and dodge bullets.

Only there was only supposed to be one. There were never, never supposed to be two of them.

"I've got.. holy crap. If what I'm looking at's right.. I've got jack shit," Paul said, looking at the meter on his rapid-fire spread-cannon and frowning. Paul Smith, a basically ordinary boy approaching his thirteenth birthday in a couple of months, was nothing like his vastly superior twin friends, who at ten months younger than him- their twelfth birthday was tomorrow!- could kill him with a single mistaken arm movement, if it were even conceivable that they could make that kind of error. Only by a miracle of luck and the enemies' targeting has he survived this far. The terror of deadly combat had halfway shut down his mind, and he followed his bioengineered friends' lead almost automatically, answering their questions almost by rote. "No wonder I thought it was getting lighter. I've got about fifty shots." Fifty shots on that assault cannon would last roughly seven seconds.

Fido barked as if he'd been asked, too. At least the engineered dog wouldn't run out of teeth.

There was one more member of their group, but he was a bit too dead to participate in the fighting. A sentient Enforcer calling itself the Anarch had gone haywire, started fighting Illuminati for attempting to control him (only his Master may do that), and came to the Dominator's island mansion to warn his Dominator of the control implants attached to his brain. The Dominator chose to unimplant his friends along with himself, pulling out the dime-sized bits of circuitry and connecting their brains together in a successful attempt to survive the lethal effects of implant withdrawal. The Anarch was in that, but disconnected early to fight real-world enemies and died for it. The twins did not mourn- he was still just an Enforcer- but they regretted the death. He might have known something he never told them.

He still had a fully-automatic assault rifle- normal-looking, Sarah figured it was some sort of customized AK variant- and a few magazines of armor-piercing bullets. The group looked at each other before Paul shrugged and took them.

Paul was about to mention something about just waiting for things to happen when Sarah put her finger to her lips sharply and pointed down into the sewer with her other hand. What he didn't hear that the engineereds did were the sounds of very muffled footsteps and bodily thumps.

The twins didn't want to run, but they accepted Sarah's tactical advice and scurried back into the sewer like rats, Paul and Fido following. Sarah dragged the Anarch's body in, wiped the dust and grime in an orderly way, put a seventy-pound box on top of the manhole cover, and deftly lifted and closed that after her with almost no noise at all. Then she crawled over and past the rest of the group, turning the globe of light off.

The twins and Sarah could have killed their pursuers very quickly, but Sarah didn't want to do that, a suspicion growing in her mind. Everyone had seen the third Inheritor's Test (and what a joke that was, she thought ruefully), in which the three engineereds- the twins ten years old, Sarah twelve and a half- had slaughtered ten Enforcers in melee combat. Everyone knew that you'd need a lot of current-model Enforcers to get through the twins without excessively heavy hardware or atomic weapons; if they had the latter, there would probably have been six charred corpses about half an hour ago, one of them canine. But the enemy did have surface-to-surface missiles, and all it took was one call...

So they waited. Was the Enforcers' command "Search for them in this building", "Find out where they are", or "Do a full search of the area"? Enforcers, having thoroughly modified brains and no will of their own, were entirely literal-minded and followed commands exactly, with implants giving later commands priority over former ones. Commanding them, therefore, was its own skill, and hopefully in the heat of the moment someone had given wrong orders.

The orders, unfortunately, were thorough. Peering through the storm drain, she saw more than one agent (normal-dressed, not fooling her for an instant) on the sidewalk, an Enforcer or two, one of them in the upper floors of another building. And if even one of them looked with infrared towards that sewer...

She reached into a pocket for a silenced weapon- nobody bothered asking what corpse she pulled that off of- and aimed for a far target. The twins watched her, trying to figure out what the hell she was doing. There were far closer enemies- Enforcers were in the building they had just come from! With subsonic bullets, the Enforcer could almost certainly dodge, especially at that long range. Also, it was almost certainly wearing armor, which meant that she'd need to hit near the center of the brain for a definite kill.

She took a single breath and fired thrice.

It saw them coming- probably saw her fire, as the muzzle flash was limited to directly at it- and dodged the first two easily, in such a way that it put its head directly in the path of the third one. The twins watched, startled, before the incoming supersonic missile appeared as a black speck, the engineereds jerking their heads down as fast as inhumanly possible before the enormous explosion. Paul covered his ears, wincing. Fido whined thinly. His sensitive canine eardrums might have been damaged by that, but that didn't matter much as they'd swiftly regenerate.

"That's what I thought would happen," Sarah said very softly, almost inaudible after the massive boom.

"That was.. magnificent, Sarah. Just.. amazing," William said just as softly, awed by both her firearm skills and her knowledge of the enemy's plans. He'd seen her pull off impressive feats before, but nothing like that.

"That was perfect. I've never seen anyone come close to that. Not even us," Howard said in the same tone, completely amazed. "How the hell did you predict all that?!"

"The Enforcer was from experience. The missile is a longer explanation. Now shut up and stay hidden until you hear shit start to happen." Her tone was serious and the group did exactly that. She wasn't just the twins' top expert in killing; she was also their lover and had borne them a child, the four-armed Quadrus Dominus whose fully-formed abnormality was a true stroke of genetic luck. Sarah quietly promised herself that she and her lovers would get to see the boy grown up, no matter what happened here today.

Shit did not immediately start to happen.

The sewer was cold and clammy, but not dirty; this was a storm drain in the rainy Pacific Northwest. In the cramped confines, William badly wanted to lay down in a comfortable position, and found a nice spot to rest his head: on Howard's back. That was fine with Howard- he'd laid on his brother quite a few times. Having complete control over people can lead to some seemingly bizarre practices, particularly when social rules are almost nonexistent. He hadn't been all that mean or nasty, and that had saved his life. If he had been, he could never have dared share a connected unimplantation with his servants, and he would have died from implant withdrawal alone. He realized he was reminiscing, losing awareness.. resting his head on his arms.. but that was to be expected. Following the brain-taxing, supposedly impossible act of defeating the implants, they had endured what felt like hours (it was really only twenty minutes in the danger zone) of frantic bullet-dodging combat while making their escape. Their bodies were overloaded with metabolites and their muscles sore from fatigue. They had a lookout they could rely on, so it didn't really matter.. zzz.

Paul would be astounded by it if he didn't know their biology; his metabolism was a candle, theirs a raging furnace. Despite the fact that it might be quiet right this second, all hell was still breaking loose! Unknown enemies with unknown resources, and they could actually sleep! Not for the first time, he felt like he was caught in the middle of something he didn't belong in. The only reason he was still alive was because he was a low-value target to Enforcer combat prioritization. All sorts of things had exploded, he recently watched people die left and right, and who the hell knew what was going on now?! He figured that his next sleep was likely to be under a headstone.

Sarah was trained for this. She hated every moment of it, but she remained fully awake. She considered trying to keep Fido awake as well, but decided against it. She couldn't risk a loud agitated bark (nobody knew exactly how smart the dog was, not even the Operator that created it), and strange smells and sounds would likely wake him up instantly.

She went back over her options, staying down and completely out of line of sight, listening to but not seeing the Enforcers swarm around the explosion. The problem was that there was no way out. The way they came in- a different pipeline, to the ocean- was surely guarded by now. Use the Micro's five hundred megajoule/second output to dig a hole? Too damn noisy, superheated air exploding as a lightning strike. Fight out the hard, traditional way? Get owned by a missile, which is what the enemy was hoping they just did. They would not be left for dead, however. They would also not be shown mercy on, left to fight another day, or captured with any hope of escape.

The only good sign was that the enemy didn't have enough available force to simply carpet bomb or immolate the entire area. If they had access to an orbital microwave satellite, they would have already used it. ('Or maybe they do, but it's just one and it's on the other side of the planet right now... another bad unstoppable unlikely, forget it') Which meant that they might resort to indirect force. Lots of Chinese bombers, starting World War III as a side effect? Some misinformation fed to naval destroyers? Normal soldiers wouldn't be a problem- they'd just die like roaches, 'all they could be' a stain on the concrete- but all it took was one lucky artillery hit and, presto, game over.

Sarah concentrated on her breathing, an absolutely silent rush of air, Paul trying to imitate her. He thought of her as a killing machine who happened to possess female genitalia and a mind. Most people did, and they were mostly accurate. He had no idea how scared she really was.

Because this was the first day in her life when she felt like she could actually die. She had been killing people since she was a child, all of them genetic normals with little or no ability to stop her, simply targets. The vast majority hadn't had time to see her coming; the others couldn't do anything about it in time. In every situation there had been a safety net of sorts, a place to fall back to. She had used it, before she became the Dominator's servant, only thrice, but the rest of the assassins' organization- even, properly speaking, the rest of the whole Illuminati- was there if things went south.

Now, the rest of the Illuminati was either inaccessible or trying to kill her. Whoever the enemies were probably wouldn't even leave her alive if she walked out the door with the severed heads of the Dominators in her hands. She never could, though. In fact, if it came down to it, she would probably die for them.

It was a symbol of her stress that she found herself asking why. Howard had owned her completely, body and soul. He had done everything that a pubescent boy would want to her, and she had even borne him a child from it. She was literally a gift to him, shortly before his tenth birthday. And yet now, more than two years later and with her no longer under technological control, he trusted her implicitly and absolutely, to the point of accepting her tactical advice immediately as the right and proper thing to do, because it was unthinkable that she would ever speak anything else. Morals were a joke to her, she could not be Pavlov-conditioned in any conceivable lasting way, and she had whatever code of ethics she wanted. If she wanted them dead, they would be dead- now, or later. Was their trust stupid, fatalistic, or simply common sense?

She turned and looked at their curled-up forms, the rulers of the world sleeping, seemingly comfortably, in a clammy sewer while Illuminati tried to kill them with death from above.

The twins, after their physically-connected nightmare, were having similar dreams again, William's dream more intense than Howard's as if in repayment for two years of nightly screaming in terror.

An angel came down upon him. Golden in color and indistinct in size and shape, it opened its gleaming lips and spoke in words that were not words, the concepts forming themselves as powerful emotions. Absolute love, altruism, power used to constructive ends. A shining future of hope and nearly unlimited prosperity, an eternal idea of happiness and inner peace, a general end to evils of every sort. The kind of thing that so many demagogues and dictators had promised, and none were able to accomplish due to flaws which the twins did not, could not, have. An indefinite future of unity without oppression, freedom without the tragedy of the commons, trust without tribalism, a post-scarcity utopia that they could eventually make happen, assuming they survived this and many other battles.

And he felt the angel move to his brother, and his brother somehow got up and that pushed his head.. what? He looked up into near-darkness. He was expecting to be woken up by gunfire- or possibly an explosion- but all he heard was a few sirens, car engines, general commotion, and a lot of loud voices going back and forth in agitation. "How long?" Howard muttered in Latin, the language he had first known.

"Bit over 25 minutes," Sarah whispered back. She needed no clock. "All hell's broke loose." The way she said it was in relief, that hell breaking loose was better than the alternative.

"In what way?"

"I'd say about five different Illuminati are trying to take charge, and I don't think any of them trust each other. Servants bouncing off each other, alphabet-soup normals screaming about overlapping jurisdiction, the works. This is the biggest clusterfuck I've seen in my life. The only thing that could be worse is if the news media got here, but nothing like that yet."

"Yet," Paul noted. "I'm surprised I haven't seen any dogs." Sarah looked back at him sharply- their smell was something they could control even less than their body heat. "I was thinking if Fido reacted to one, or smelled one, but I haven't seen any."

Fido, for his part, was simply imitating his masters in this situation which, to him, was bizarre beyond all compare. Unimplanted with the rest of them, but he had no idea what that meant- he had no idea he was even implanted in the first place and took his instant obedience for granted. The impossible world, of violence and no logic, the dread-thing, then back home into a situation no different. (Fido had no conception of what it meant to dream. To him it was all equally real.) Enforcers exploding the loud fast things at Master- attempting to harm Master!- which he had answered with speed and teeth, the ripping of flesh. Explosions, violence, loud fast things of every type, Master using the extremely loud fast thing-shooter and the loud-hot light. Now off the island, with many strange smells, more violence and another ear-hurting boom. Masters in metal hidey-hole, protective, fear-smell, use voices small. Must be quiet! Even if twelve bitches in heat had paraded past the sewer entrance, Fido would have made not even the thinnest of yips.

"You're right. Not a canine unit in sight. It's all controlled, then- if you can count a five-asshole schizophrenic fuckdance as controlled." Sarah then stiffened up slightly, going dead quiet and signaling the rest to do the same.

"I think it might be white supremacists," a man was saying.

"Like in Oklahoma City?"

"Probably, but my guess is that these guys are a lot more serious. There's no truck left behind. I'm going to go ahead and guess we're dealing with a couple of very brutal, dogshit vicious killers with a history of violence."

"You think?" the other man asked sarcastically, but then the first man hadn't been directing his comments towards him. Sarah thwacked her fingers against the sewer pipe once, which would go unnoticed except to those listening for something like that, and led the rest of them out of the sewer back to the basement whence they came- gingerly wiggling around the pile of smelly dogshit Fido had left behind, as well as the dead body. They were all used to corpses.

Salvation or death? They only had to wait five minutes (a whole five minutes, Sarah thought- the coordination really must be a mess) before an Enforcer in a SWAT uniform came down, carrying a bag with five uniforms with full facial helmets and a dog-sized vest. Sarah gestured to the dead Anarch and the Enforcer reported it to its commander. They inspected the uniforms before they exchanged them with their dirty, blood-smeared clothes; explosive or drugged garments would be a stupid way to die.

The way the Enforcer moved made the bag with their clothes look like it was full of explosives, or evidence; they followed it up the stairs out the door into a motley sea of alphabet soup, and no one questioned them as they jumped into the back of a waiting van. They didn't have time to inspect it- if the damn thing blew up, that was it, but they had no real choice..

"Arthur Rosene, fourth level," the driver introduced himself. His passenger, an Enforcer, was radioing in some complete bullshit to some normal about who they were and where they were going with what. A suspicious electronic device, yeah, that was it.

Sarah then did something completely unexpected; she leaned forward and sniffed him, checking to see if he was what he appeared to be.

"You can smell Illuminati?" he asked her, grateful for the spot of humor in what was a parade of confusion. Actually he was grateful for the confusion, as well; one of his men had slyly managed to get Sarah's attention and he had been the one to get the Dominator out of there without undue alarm, as no one knew who they were or what they were doing.

"I can smell 45 year old men," she replied. "At least when they're not wearing Eau de Decay cologne." They had just come out of a storm drain, too. Arthur decided to change his brand.

"Dominator, this might be an uncomfortable question right now, but just what the hell is going on?"

"A whole lot of people are trying to kill us, so pardon us if we choose to play our cards a bit close to the chest right now," William said. The use of 'us' and 'our' confused the hell out of Arthur, who was rather an absolutist when it came to masters and servants. Howard wished his brother didn't do that, because it gave away something he didn't have to just yet.

"Open rebellion?" Arthur asked, trying to hide his incredulity. Open rebellion in the year 2000, and against this Dominator? There were more obvious recipes for disaster, but he couldn't think of any that anyone had actually tried..

"Worse," Howard said, and pointedly closed his lips for a moment. Then he continued, "Who is controlling what organizations in this clusterfuck?"

"I've got the local police and SWAT, but the National Guard is getting pulled out from under me by Bruce Pratt, who's got the military," he said, gesturing to some Army trucks going the other way. "Donald's got the FBI, and-"

"Donald?" Howard interrupted him with.

"Simpson. Clinton's his servant." Arthur was surprised Howard didn't know him, but then again there were six thousand Illuminati and Howard might not have even met him, or remembered if he had. "He's almost got the ATF, but two other guys are trying to use it, no I don't have their names. CIA's worse, last I heard even Gates is trying something with them. NSA was there, but Donald managed to pull them out of it. And from what I hear, it's hell keeping a total media blackout." This would never be reported. The dead people would be random killings, possibly spread out in time and space; the missile hit would be a natural gas leak or something else they could explain away. Anyone who said otherwise would be either mistaken or full of shit.

Arthur made a turnoff onto a dirt road, hardly even slowing down, looking around and behind him. Good. He focused on the road for a few minutes, collecting his thoughts, watching his mirrors and listening to the engine. This really was an 'appropriated' FBI van- he didn't have time to mock up an Illuminated one. He did, however, have time to order his own car hidden nearby. "We have to switch cars. And... we're being followed." At about thirty car-lengths away, a vehicle sped towards them. "Curious normals, or.."

"No!" Sarah shouted. Enforcer driver aside, that car was coming way too fast. "Open the back!" she shouted behind her- but the back was already open, and there was a horribly loud boom, the van jerking forward a bit, as William fired a fission-propelled shotgun slug into the following car's engine, tearing a hole clear through the body and the trunk, and a tiny fraction of a second later there was another, even louder BOOM as it exploded with the force of many hundred pounds of TNT, sending the hood flying into the air and bits of shrapnel at them. Sarah flipped over past the ducking Enforcer. Fido stayed behind Howard, who pushed Paul down and blocked him with his body, crouching and letting the gloves, face shield, and vest take the few tiny flecks of metal. William blocked the back of Arthur's head similarly, and dodged a larger chunk that was going for his leg. The following vehicle now looked like a splattered, smoking junkyard. Atomic shotgun slugs penetrated- they didn't do that. Someone had tried to use a car bomb on them.

"I'm going to lose my hearing if this shit keeps up," Paul said blithely. The twins smiled at him. Arthur pulled over by the black luxury car he had hidden, and pointed to his ears, shaking his head. He did, apparently, lose his hearing, at least for a while.

"Enforcer, call Donald, tell him what happened, and that he should clean this shit up," Arthur shouted in the voice of people who can't hear themselves talk. "Son of a bitch!"

"Think Donald's in on it?" Howard asked as they jumped out. Hey, if Arthur couldn't hear him..

"It'll take some analysis, but it's plausible," Sarah replied, as she gave the car a careful look before tossing the bag with their clothes in the back seat, then putting herself behind the wheel, Arthur gratefully moving to the passenger's side. He really didn't think she'd let a deaf guy drive, did he?

There was a viewscreen built into the dashboard. Sarah sighed with relief and almost reached for it... before she realized she had no idea what orders to give to whom. Was there anybody in the assassins' organization she trusted, now? Was there anyone she could call who could respond in time, and who didn't have spies? Any orders she could give had to let the receiver know what she was doing and where she was, and who did she want to tell about that? 

"It doesn't prove it," William said as he got in, followed by Paul and Arthur's Enforcer. "How many vans were coming in versus going out? What's the odds of four agents getting in the same van with a white dog?"

"So an enemy servant was watching," Paul said.

"One guy in a sea of cops? Probably like five," Sarah replied. "I'm just surprised secrecy's still mostly intact."

"Mostly?" Howard asked pointedly. That was like a balloon mostly not having holes.

"Is there or is there not an atomic shotgun round somewhere in the ground out there?" It would be buried deep, but anyone walking around with a Geiger counter in that mess would know something was up.

"That only matters when all the local emergency services aren't under direct control."

"Direct direct, or more like normals at three removes?"

"C'mon, Sarah, asshole with Geiger counter, or one of the dozens of Illuminati focusing on this place, which do you think will get here first?" William asked. She nodded. Another basic assumption of operations, defenestrated.

"Ssss-- AAAAAHH!" Arthur suddenly screamed, clapping his hands over his ears. "Where is that coming from?"

"Your head," Paul replied. Now would be a great time to tell him that the atomic shotgun was a heavily sound-suppressed weapon, in addition to the massive recoil dampening and radiation shielding.

"My turn, where are those coming from?" Sarah asked, gesturing to two black specks in the air. Helicopters, a great distance away.

"Mine, mine, they're mine, Enforcers!" he shouted, still clasping his hands to his ears, apparently trying to drown out the ringing in them.

"And that one?" she asked, gesturing at a larger flying object, a military transport helicopter moving in their general direction, considerably faster than those normally go. Was that.. yes, it was. Sarah wondered who was brazen enough to use an Illuminati-upgraded MH-47, of all things. It could be full of explosives...

The viewscreen came to life. "Arthur! Dominator! It's me!" Arthur smirked softly at 'It's me'. He'd hoped one of them would recognize his face and voice, and not only hadn't they known who he was, they had barely cared. Good thing Jack Guernsey's name was at the bottom of the screen.

But the twins did recognize Jack, as they had to deal with him more than once in the Dominator's official capacity, William playing as his brother now and then. This was not a good thing- it meant he had intra-Illuminati problems, usually related to his myriad holdings in various militaries and contractors, owning several normal arms dealers from China to the US. 'Great,' William thought. 'Another game of Can We Trust This Motherfucker.' Then he had a flash of genius and leaned forward, pressing buttons extremely fast. "All right, Jack- I've just recorded that.. and sent it to several different engineereds. Now our safety is your responsibility," he said. He ignored the frantic replies, as he wasn't sure if he could trust all of them. Other Illuminati surely had ideas about who should be Dominator instead. Another engineered kid would be perfect...

Jack's eyes went wide. What William had really said was If anything happens to us, someone is guaranteed to kill you. He barked a command to someone offscreen, and the helicopter's ramp extended as it landed directly in front of them. Sarah slammed the brakes just as it got up the ramp, sending it to a screeching halt inside the helicopter. The ramp closed back up and the craft forced its way into the air.

It was pitch black inside. Paul almost asked why it smelled like burned rubber before he mentally kicked himself. Just being in this was taxing as hell. Forget 'sleep'- he needed a hot bath, a tall cup of strawberry milk, and a good twelve hours in a comfortable bed. Preferably one guarded by turrets, heavily armed sentient engineereds, and space-based defenses. Before that, he needed to take a shit, in a hermetically sealed vault somewhere deep beneath the earth where he could not possibly be interrupted. Most normals' bowels evacuated under intense fear and stress. Paul had the reverse, but whether he was born like that or it was a lingering effect (of something he would not tell anyone about, ever), he didn't know.

Then the lights came on and a man in his mid-fifties looking like he'd stepped out of a Republican party fundraiser approached the vehicle, almost running. The man weighed more than three hundred pounds, and Paul found his refuge in humor again, looking at the man's lard slosh to and fro in his whitish-grey business suit, his brown wingtips flap-flap-flapping against the steel floor. This guy had enough power for his own personal military transport aircraft, enough presumable willpower to control a huge swath of global power players, and he couldn't afford or be bothered to use a gym?

"Dominator? Dominator! Oh, thank God you're safe." 'Well that was off on the wrong foot,' William thought. Religion was the Illuminati's bitch. Perhaps he redeemed himself at night with his bedtime prayer: 'God! God! Thank the Dominator you're safe!'

"We're not safe. They have missiles," Sarah said bluntly, expecting to have to prevent Jack from landing immediately in panic.

"That may be, but there's nothing air-to-air for at least fifty miles," he replied.

Sarah rolled her eyes. Arguing with the twins in this situation was one thing- they had insight and leadership and wits- but dealing with this assclown's stupid shit was something she was not prepared to do right now. "And ground-to-air doesn't count, because you know of any Stinger anyone might possibly be carrying," she spat out. "Where's your viewscreen?" He gestured to a few seats near the cockpit and she started moving. "Where's your base?"

"Thirty miles south." Then he should have been here much, much sooner. "I was going to take you to it, but if you want-"

"No, that's good." At least he had some sense.

"Thank God it was you and me, Art." It took an act of will for Howard not to roll his eyes. Guys like this comprised the majority of Illuminati: old, Caucasian, disproportionately American by birth, authoritarianism as a fundament of their existence, usually narrow-minded and vain, merciless, mean, and manipulative beyond all. Arthur and Jack at least had the balls to come out here themselves, a step up from the majority, which solely used Enforcers and regular servant agents. "Dominator," Jack said, looking at the twins and sizing them up. It was common knowledge that the twins had pretended to be each other on occasion, and since he had no idea that they were both the Dominator he played what had become a guessing game, made doubly hard by the fact that he had no idea what to say in a situation like this.

Howard did know what to say. These guys were adrift and needed something familiar, such as verbal abuse for their latent masochism. Normally he didn't play that useless game- he had much more effective techniques when he really wanted to get his point across- but he had to dispense some psychological validation right now. "Jack," he said with contempt. "Thirty miles? You have military control, a fast helicopter, this is your area, where the hell were you?" The twins had a doubled larynx; if they used both at once, their voices gained an echo effect very useful in intimidation. "Did you feel that you could go and get your Dominator after a quick jerk-off? Or maybe you just wanted to stick your toe in the water- ooh too cold for you- before you decided you would actually do what needed doing, where it needed doing? Maybe you just thought you just had a fucking Pause button for real life, is that it?"

"I did what I could as fast as I could with the information I had!" Jack replied in a rush.

"Yeah? Then you need to practice doing more, faster, and get more information!" Jack felt a great deal of relief. The Dominator was talking about him doing things in the future tense, which meant that he would have one. Okay, psychological validation moment over. "Which is what I need to get. And lots of it." The information he was interested in consisted of things like whether or not their island was still a hot zone and whether or not Jack had a faster, safer, less conspicuous form of transportation, questions Sarah had already started asking. No, the island was no longer dangerous; the Enforcers had unsuccessfully pursued the twins and the local sentient servants being trained on the island were loyal. Jack didn't have a faster helicopter (he never needed one, and was mentally kicking himself for it now) but a man named Ted Vu did, he lived very close by, and Jack swore on his life that his second-level mentor was loyal.

The chopper landed on Ted's front lawn, and once the group was out, Jack took off in haste. 'Poor guy,' William thought. The middle-aged manipulator was terrified out of his mind.

But what did they expect? He was only human.

Chapter 2

The twins and Sarah didn't even wait for the helicopter to fully land before jumping out the side door, hitting the ground running, rushing into Ted's mansion as if on a raid, watchful for traps. Ted was at the door waiting for them and leaped five feet back in surprise.

"Dominator! Um.. uh.." He looked back and forth between the twins frantically, trying to understand why the hell they were both wearing white and deciding it didn't matter. The Dominator wanted something, therefore he would have it, particularly since the Dominator's dog smelled his fear. "I can have an Enforcer fly you back."

"No, you can't," Sarah said decisively. "Follow me." Ted reluctantly followed Sarah into his own hangar, the contents of which were three fast cars (one of Illuminated make) and his rather ordinary-looking helicopter.

"This is your only helicopter," Sarah said, not a question. She watched his face carefully in an attempt to see if he was lying.

"Yeah..," he said, uncertainly. She gritted her teeth- had to trust something at some point- and tried the door. It was locked, a rare thing with Illuminated aircraft (the rationale being that if someone can get that close, you're already fucked). "Keys," she demanded instead of simply breaking in. The man fumbled in his pocket for his key ring, spent fifteen long, embarrassing seconds trying to get the key off, and threw it to Sarah. She opened it instantly and immediately went for the controls, turning the rotors on. "Testing it first." The hosting Illuminatus signaled to his Enforcers to open the top of the hangar, and Sarah lifted off a few feet before lowering it again. "Hop in," she shouted, under the surprisingly quiet whirr. The twins, smiling at the intimidated Mr. Vu, entered.

Paul decided to take the opportunity to make a friend and be formal, figuring he'd need the practice. "On behalf of our Masters and their operations leader, I apologize for the paranoia," he said, bowing to Ted slightly.

"Don't mention it," Ted said. "They have a damn good right to be spooked." He'd almost said 'scared', but figured that would come out as an insult. (It wouldn't- the twins would have openly admitted that they were scared out of their shit, had anyone the courage to ask.) Paul waved as he hopped in the helicopter, and blinked as he looked at the complex instrumentation on it. It had none of the standard display screens, just a wide variety of switches and gauges.

"Normal?" he asked. The twins left the sliding doors open, sitting half-out of the helicopter, weapons at the ready as if ready to do a Vietnam-style strafing run. This was a decisively secrecy-negative action- any twit with binoculars could see them- but the only missile defense system they had. At least they were already by the coast.

"Illuminated inside," Sarah responded, taking the helicopter up and angling the nose downward for speed. "It's on carbohydrate power, but half of this stuff isn't really necessary." Good thing, too- Sarah was trained on Illuminated craft, with their standardized, simplified, intuitive control mechanisms that were heavily computer-controlled and resembled a video game more than anything else. Although she could probably get a purely normal craft going with engineered intelligence and common sense, it wasn't advisable.

Being in a fast-moving vehicle with the doors open generates a lot of airflow, and the twins shivered against it, holding on tightly to the helicopter's interior with one hand and holding their weapons with the other, as their clothing's fabric constricted against the temperature drop. The motor was relatively quiet but the constant wind battered their ears. Sarah ignored the turbulence and kept the speed down to a mere two hundred and fifty miles per hour because of the open doors, using a circuitous route to avoid potential enemies. She only took a look at the GPS a few times; she intuitively knew the island's location, a single, secret green dot a hundred miles from the Oregon coast. Paul again tried to take the opportunity to rest, and again failed. He felt like he could stay up for days.

Watchfulness and paranoia ruled the rulers for forty minutes before the message came through on several air-traffic and emergency frequencies, sounding for all the world like a nervous but very serious radio operator fresh out of boot camp: "Attention craft..." Sure to follow was a litany of various threats related to prohibited military airspace, before an immediate countermeasure involving long-range surface-to-air missiles.

Sarah reduced speed and rapidly pressed buttons on the transponder, opening the hidden functions and directing an encrypted broadcast back to the source on a very specific frequency. "You try anything on this copter and you'll have a couple of very pissed Dominators raining death on your ass." Actually, they'd have a fair chance of succeeding, but she didn't want to say that.

The group was half-expecting him to gasp in surprise, but he didn't. "Acknowledged. Welcome home."

"Is the area secure?"

"Yes." ('Yeah, well, that's what we all thought it was before.')

"Good. We're coming in." Sarah's high, beautiful voice rarely hit a note of pure satisfaction. For everyone listening, it was a comforting thing to hear.

Even from the air, the island looked different from most. It looked more lush and verdant than regular islands, like a movie producer's fantasy of an untouched paradise. Multicolored birds were dots flitting from the trees. The beach was a bright swath of whitish-yellow sand. From near the central cliff- the island's volcano was long dormant and collapsed- came a steady flow of clean water. Approaching from the east, with the mansion out of view, one would think that all 101.25 acres of it (depending on the tide) was entirely unspoiled by technology.

This was hardly the case. To the Illuminati, technology and nature were not a dichotomy. The ecology was completely managed, with canine predators and porcine prey kept in balance. Advanced bioengineering techniques- child's play for the people who engineered the Dominator- were used to keep everything healthy. The island was filled with an unnatural variety of fruit-bearing plants and colorful animals, a living work of art, the ultimate vacation spot and the perfect home. Here was life, here was love, here was hope. If you caught the aesthetics right, the trees whispered of friendship and joy; the short grass (where the twins had started brutally murdering a hundred people, some with their bare hands) seemed a somehow-infinite plain, not surrounded by water but uplifted by it. Many people have trouble imagining a place like this; were they to see it for themselves and not know the occupants, they would likely think it was the font of all good in the world. The Illuminati had little trouble making it, and upgrading it as their techniques improved, treating it like a living movie set. More than a few of them had visions of doing something like this to every spot of land on Earth.

The visible was only a small part of it; like most stages, it was what was hidden that was the true production. The Dominator's mansion had its own basement filled with collections of entertainment and valuable items, and a self-purifying pool; but that was small compared to the servants' underground complex, a byzantine multi-layered training facility of living quarters, firing ranges, and simulations, with a geothermal power generator as backup for the fusion. The Dominator never went down there on principle, nor did his former personal servants; it was, after all, the backstage area reserved for the professionals. The cultured area, with its verdant perfection, was made for him.

The illusion was shattered once the helicopter approached the western portion. The ruined mansion was abuzz with heavy machinery and black-clad operatives, the movie set undergoing stark renovations after a massive catastrophe, the eye of Gaia stabbed. It was as if someone had started building a factory in the middle of Disneyland, only with less pollution and more of the generic, super-strong, generally non-reflective metal that the Illuminati piece together molecule by molecule. Howard started to develop a troubled look as he watched some of the workers.

Sarah set the helicopter down directly next to the reforming mansion and let everyone else get out of the way, acting as a nine-hundred-pound gorilla.

The moment the helicopter touched the brown, heavily-worked soil, Howard leaped from it, looking wary, rushing with engineered speed towards the leader of the reconstruction. William was startled by his brother's sudden movement- 'what does he see that I don't?'- and similarly rushed to his side, head whipping around, looking for threats.

The leader of the reconstruction was the usually anonymous servant who took care of the island and trained a sizable group of new recruits in stealth, parts of their training consisting of serving the Dominator without being seen. Normally he would remain unseen himself, but these were special circumstances. He welcomed the twins with spread palms. "You require assistance, Dominator?"

"Whose Enforcers are these?" Howard asked, annoyed and paranoid.

"Dr. Morris Flatland's."

"And who is this Dr. Flatland, and why are they here?" Howard asked, even more annoyed. William understood the emotions but didn't feel them nearly as strongly.

"He's an architect; I don't know much about him. The previous Dominator recommended him to us as trustworthy." That mollified Howard slightly; despite the acute possibility, he doubted his "Daddy" and teacher would be part of the plot. "They're here to rebuild. There is no evidence of them doing anything else." Which either meant that they weren't laying traps, or they weren't leaving evidence.

William was looking around at the construction, watching the mindless laborers at their work, invisibly weaving metal together using bulky, strangely quiet machines. "Did you start the rebuilding before you knew we were going to be all right?" he asked.

"Yes. If you weren't all right," the servant pointed out, "we'd all have a lot more to worry about than the waste of some servants' time." William tacitly acknowledged the point. "Given the extent of the damage, we recommend a complete redesign." From scratch. Howard held up a hand and the twins walked past him, using the door instead of squeezing through any of the holes in the wall, observing the repairing machines at their work from the inside.

It was a complete wreck. The roof was open to daylight, bent and twisted metal hanging from the jagged hole, the superior material having absorbed a missile impact. Fragments of a similar missile were embedded all throughout the walls and doors. Almost all the furniture was melted or bullet-ridden. Deep scorches in the carpet- much deeper than they looked- marked the path of the Micro. Some of the holes in the wall were almost perfectly circular, and blown outwards; that would mark the places where the atomic shotgun had splattered an Enforcer and continued on. A few other, more jagged holes were blown inwards; one particularly ugly-looking one was being sealed up as they watched.

And it reeked like an unclean butcher shop. The servants had evacuated the corpses but hadn't yet gotten out the smell. The twins didn't mind raw meat and had dined on long pig before, but it had been hours and the other dogs and a couple of the pigs on the island had been by while it was still fresh. They left in a hurry.

"Where the hell did those come from?" William asked the servant, gesturing to the holes he didn't make.

"After you left, there were a couple of artillery strikes." Just part of the general SNAFU, then, some enemy having come with heavy firepower a little too late to the party. "Here are our working plans. Do you approve?" The servant held out a laptop. William took it, looking it over with his brother. The servant- William didn't even know if that guy had a name anymore- had displayed an uncanny prescience in knowing the twins' future personal habits. The overall shape and outer shell was very similar. Privacy from each other was silly as a concept, so they shared a large bedroom adjacent to Sarah's on one side and Paul's on the other. A small auditorium would be grafted onto the side for meetings and the like, although they had no idea if they'd ever allow enough people to fill it. A large skylight would cover the living room ('so we can see the missiles coming', both of them thought but didn't say), and a few unused rooms were to be eliminated and the space reworked. The servant, probably along with Dr. Flatland, had likely rubbed his hands together in glee when given the chance to redesign the Dominator's mansion; any substantial repair almost always meant substantial improvement.

"Yes.. although, we need better defense systems," William said. Need to phrase this one right... "If your plans don't already call for them, I want some heavy anti-everything all around us. Anti-missiles, better anti-ships, nothing outdated, nothing that anyone knows how to counter, no more fucking around pretending secrecy keeps us safe, because we now know it doesn't. Fusion cannons on the roof of the house, and the whole thing controllable from the inside or at good spots around the island." The servant's only reaction was a blink and a nod. An idea struck William, one that could possibly save all their lives. "And mirror armor. Mirror the whole fucking house." The servant nodded again. To him that last request seemed childish but it wouldn't hurt and so he wouldn't object.

"Speaking of weapons, when I'm inside I don't want to be more than about ten feet from one," Howard said. "Pound on the wall once, get a weapon. Heavy caliber, suitable for killing Enforcers and punching holes. Am I clear?" The servant nodded again.

"All right.. now we just need an implant resetter. I don't like Enforcers that aren't mine being here," Howard said. Of all the useful things he kept, an implant resetter was not among them. (It could have been another possible avenue of escape for a young Dominator's implanted servants.) The problem, of course, was finding someone trustworthy enough to bring one.

"How about this?" William asked. "Let's go to Northberg in person. We can have a good, long talk with the Operator and bring it back ourselves." Howard's eyes brightened at that. He hadn't forgotten he meant to interrogate his creator about the implants that somehow ended up in his fucking head- he'd simply put that on the back burner until he knew he was relatively safe.

When they climbed back into the helicopter, Paul said, "Damn. You win the bet, Sarah. Good thing there wasn't anything at stake."

"So that's why you didn't get out," William said. The only one who had gotten out was Fido, eager to let the the Dominator's three other dogs, Chocolate, Negro, and Magma, know that their master was alive through fresh scents. Better to leave the dog behind; if Fido felt that his master and someone else were getting angry at each other, it was a very good bet that the someone else would have his neck ripped open in one bite.

"I just knew you two weren't going to sit on your ass. Where to?" Sarah asked.

"The Day Operator," Howard said, using his extra set of vocal cords for the echo effect. There were several Day Operators of various facilities, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, a labor of love for each one of them, almost always a combination of miniature benevolent dictator and a bastard from hell. They devoted their lives to their facilities, building and maintaining systems, logistics and plans, developing technology and sometimes entire branches of science and engineering, with a corresponding, usually lesser-statused, Night Operator for the remaining time. But for an engineered, 'The Day Operator'- or even just 'The Operator'- meant by default the one who had led the process of developing them.

The twins relaxed their alertness somewhat, although their eyes still scanned the ground. They let themselves think, really deeply think, now that they had some semblance of safety and the gist of a plan. William had finally allowed himself to truly realize something:

He is co-ruler of the entire world.

Answerable to no one, and all except one are answerable to him. Unimaginable power, both destructive and creative, at his fingertips. His whims becoming law with a few keystrokes. The ability to have any physical item possible within the bounds of technology and science, simply by saying 'Create it.' His ability, his control, his sheer majesty paralleled only by his brother's. This is not the socially limited power of a president, nor the technologically limited power of a medieval king. Lightning-fast communications make it possible for him to send anything down the chain of command any time he wants, without most of the people on the chain having a clue he exists.

'Leaders of nations grovel at my feet if I so command them. Entire continents can be made to succeed or fail depending on my desires. I can have anything I want, create anything I want, do anything I want. If I want servants to build a temple to my own honor, it will be done. If I want to declare my birthday tomorrow to be a global holiday..' It would have to be done next year, require way more control than it was worth, and the normals could never know what they were actually celebrating. William's powertripping had run into the realities of Illuminati governance.

Howard, on the other hand, was not thinking such pleasant thoughts. He had been raised with the knowledge that he would one day rule the world; when he finally took the position of Dominator, it was simply part of his growing up. His thoughts were dire, terrified, now that his hold on planet Earth was threatened. The enemy Illuminati- whoever they were- were willing to break secrecy to attack him, but that was to be expected; he considered, but discounted, the idea that they would really break secrecy en masse as a way of removing him from power. The current cover-up would be massive. Anything much larger could destroy them, as well. No, what he worried about was his control over Illuminated facilities; the headquarters in Bavaria (but not the true capital, no.. that was here, and always would be), the weapons and electronics manufacturing facilities, the research and development labs, and above them all, Northberg Medical Facility in the Canadian wilderness.

If Northberg was in enemy hands, they were fucked utterly. Northberg was, to the twins, more important than any other Illuminati base, even including their own island. Northberg was where all the Illuminati's most innovative medical procedures were carried out, where its genetics experiments were done, where its...

"I was just going to do this but I figured I'd run this by you guys first," Sarah shouted over the rushing winds. "There's another military airfield with secrecy a few dozen miles from Northberg. We should land there instead."

This statement was so coincidental to Howard's thoughts that he answered instantly, his echo overpowering the noise: "If Northberg is taken- or if the Operator really is one of them- the enemy has control of all new Enforcers, all biologicals, a lot of serious weaponry.. and the kids." The bioengineered children of Northberg Educational, future controllers of the world. For both rational and emotional reasons, the protection of the educational wing of the facility was the top priority. They weren't just children, they were superintelligent, highly diverse in abilities in a way that normals could never be, and all of them had genes directly derived from the Operator's previous creations, most notably Sarah and the twins. Although only one of them sprang from Dominator sperm and Sarah's eggs, they thought of the children as normals think of close relatives. They were more than just future leaders; they were the future. Come the End of Secrecy and the direct rule of the Illuminati, it would be the engineered children, most of them likely adults by then, who would create the new order.

"Northberg doesn't have to be taken", she reminded him loudly, "for some asshole to be waiting there with an assault cannon or an antivehicle sniper rifle. And even if it was, our primary responsibility would be to take it back, no matter what." She was right, of course, and they all knew it. To lose was to die; better to die trying to win.

"No, Sarah, this is political. Take an indirect path, and order a security check near the landing zone, but we're going to Northberg," Howard replied. Damned if he was going to slink in there and show that much paranoid weakness. William just smiled. Political appearances were important, and going to Northberg first would have a great symbolic significance of what they value the most, but he had suggested it not wholly because of that. He and the Operator had.. business to discuss.

Chapter 3

There was no assault cannon or antivehicle sniper rifle waiting for them. Had Northberg's hangar been staffed by regular humans, there would have been an outpouring of surprise and relief, or simply the sense one gets when a VIP has arrived. These were Enforcers, and they continued their fast, methodical process of moving supplies and other Enforcers to and from other masters, only acknowledging the Dominator's presence as another flight-capable object in the hangar.

The tram was the only available transportation from the hangar; they took it and relaxed, beginning to warm up from the chill blown into their faces over the last few hours. Afterwards, they strode down the long hall to the medical section side-by-side, with a maximum of presence and a subtle hint of menace. Enforcers continued not to care; a couple of human servants got well out of their way. Both twins were glad the Operator hadn't done something like meet them at the entrance. This initial meeting was best done in private.

The Operator's office was a fairly formal affair, for receiving guests and general intimidation; he would surely be there now to meet the Dominator and perhaps his doom. "You first," William growled as they reached it, his voice with something mean, hateful, and altogether brutal behind it. Paul found himself cringing. Howard gave his brother a glance, understood that he might not have a chance to talk to him at all if he went second, and entered, leaving the door just a tad ajar. Anyone who wanted to could hear this- although with William and Sarah standing outside, eavesdroppers not in the ventilation system were unlikely.

The Operator stood and gave a subtle bow as Howard entered, offering no greeting but inviting his Dominator to speak first. As the master of medical technology he could change his appearance almost at will. He let his face keep its natural wrinkles, his hair full and greying, tinging towards white, the result of intentionally hypooxygenating his own scalp. He was naturally heavy-set, but had taken care to minimize the effects, removing lipids from his body by a variety of means. His suit looked akin to a standard doctor's outfit and coat, all in white and with a sheen of heavy stain resistance, with elements of the Dominator's suit design. Despite his workload he had always found time to cultivate his image. What it did for others was secondary; the prime reason he took such care was to remind himself who he was, to prevent his mind from retreating to normal habits under pressure.

The pressure right now was testing his sanity. He could read Howard's face very well. He had created that face. More than a dozen years ago, he had seen variations of it in a great many fluid-filled tanks and even more in simulations. To perform his job properly, the Dominator needed a face with unmistakable expressions; one of those was menacing rage. The Operator's cultivated persona never experienced fear, but that persona only existed when the Operator was certain that the monsters he had created would never turn on him, particularly not this one.

Howard looked around for a moment before speaking, not for observation but to prolong the tension. The Operator looked nervous and confused. This boded well for his survival.

"Do you know.. what I found.. in my head, Operator?" Howard asked, deliberately slowly, holding out a pair of implants in his hand.

"Those.. those can't be.. Howard?" the Operator asked, stupefied with the roiling of his thoughts. What he was seeing was impossible, and yet there it was.

"Yes, Operator. Howard."

"There's no way... I have no idea.. Howard, I swear I don't know.. maybe the Night Operator, but even he couldn't have..." The Operator put his head in his hands and shook it, then looked back up, his face red and persona broken. "I swear. It doesn't even make sense. You.. were implanted.. this is like a nightmare.." Were those tears? Was the Operator capable of faking it, or was this genuine shock and personal weakness? Howard's instincts told him it was the latter. "How did you survive?" he asked softly.

"One of the implant removal devices actually worked. How the hell did I get implanted?"

"How the hell should I know?!" the Operator blurted out. He was, now, calculating his responses- he had no intention of dying to a false suspicion.

"And how did more than three dozen Enforcers living on my island turn on me?"

"The- the Enforcers- what?!" He was exaggerating his very real surprise.

"That's right, Operator! Every last one of my Enforcers suddenly decided to kill me. Looks like they weren't really implanted for me after all. Now do you mind telling me how that happened?"

"I can tell you it didn't happen here," the Operator said, quietly. "I've reviewed those commands myself. It's your face. Your voice. And the only other person with access is the Night Operator. And I will stake my life that it's not him." The current Night Operator was handpicked by the Day Operator himself. The previous one, however... "You haven't been keeping Enforcers more than two years old, have you?"

"The rotation is in months. I don't keep past that."

The Operator was silent for a bit, trying to think of how a transport full of loyal Enforcers could be turned aside and replaced with duplicates, or suborned before they got there- things they were commanded never to allow, with immediate deadly force.

Howard studied him. An extended interrogation would be completely fruitless so long as the Operator could continue with flat denial. Truth drugs could do damn near anything, considering how many times the Operator modified himself and what his occupation was. Torture would make him eventually say yes whether he actually had or not, and that would not make the Dominator any friends. Implants were the only real way to be sure, but that would make him a great number of enemies the moment any Illuminatus learned what he had done, and he had enough of those, thanks.

"All right. You don't know anything. I choose to believe you, Operator, because if you really were behind this, nothing makes sense. I command you to find out. And I command you to personally reset the implants of every Enforcer in this building, if you're still alive."

"If I'm still..." But Howard was at the door.

The glance that Howard gave his brother said it all: We need him. William did not reply, simply throwing the door open, slamming it behind him, and fixing the Operator with a stare and a snarl, breathing heavily as a mad bull. In his hand he held out two pieces of metal, just as his brother had.

The Operator opened his mouth, realizing immediately what had occurred, trying to find an apology or something to placate the beast in front of him, mentally cursing himself for not cogniting that Howard had intentionally been vague about removal, and then suddenly his favorite set of genetics was upon him.

William grabbed him by the throat, spun a quarter turn, and threw him into the side wall, applying torque so he hit it at the base of his spine, followed instantly by two swift kicks to the abdomen. He barely had time to think 'Oh thank God he's not doing this full force' before William popped out his shoulder joints with a snapping bubble-wrap sound, jerked them downwards, and slammed his dislocated arms into his side. The Operator screamed, a high, bloodcurdling shriek audible through the closed door.

"TWO YEARS!" William screamed, air blasting through both of his larynges, still pressing the Operator's arms into his ribs, on the thinnest edge of self-control. "You made me.. into my own brother's fucking servant.. for TWO WHOLE GODDAMN YEARS!! And it would have been the rest of my FUCKING life, you motherfucking asshole! That was your plan, decided in a whole three seconds!" That was something the Operator had confided to Howard, figuring the boy would tell his servants, but never expecting to be called out on it. Not like this. William released his arms and slammed him back-first into the wall, forcing white-hot rage down enough to remember not to damage the Operator's valuable brain. "TEN YEARS as a normal! No real education, no real anything! Just bullshit and servitude! Give me one good fucking reason why I shouldn't just blow your fucking head open!" With his fist.

"You don't want to." Pain had sent the Operator back to his traditional refuge, simple logic. William had not killed him already, ergo he would not kill him.

And with that, William laughed, and laughed more with echo, and released the Operator, who slumped down quickly, his legs curled up into his chest.

"That's right, you son of a bitch! Because I don't want to." William yanked on the Operator's legs, splaying them out, and put his foot on his balls. He almost pushed before saying, "No. You gave my friend back his testicles." He then simply dragged the limp man back in one smooth motion and pushed his thighs outwards, one after another, the previous bubble-wrap sound combining with something squishy and wet.

"Put yourself back together, if you can," William told him, before turning and walking out, closing the door behind him to cut off the flow of sniveling.

Howard gave him a indescribable look, not quite reproachful, not quite dismayed, not at all surprised. Paul was mechanically silent, intentionally nonchalant, the thought coming despite himself: 'Wow, I hope I never get him that pissed.'

"Sounded like fun," Sarah said. "Although that might slow down his investigation a bit."

"After twelve years? He's not going to discover shit. And if these Enforcers were going to turn they would have done it by now. Do you want him?" William asked. She shook her head. "Come on. Let's go talk to the kids."

The older kids came first, the 6-7 year olds, chattering among themselves as they saw their heroes- they would have met them at the door had they been told of a Dominator visit- and the first thing any of the kids said to them was from a little girl: "You did let him go!" she squealed. A few of them clapped, including ones with servants, and Howard grinned at the irony. William smiled wryly; would any of them be so happy if they knew the Operator was probably still trying to get his thighs and his hips to meet up? There were a great many questions, all of which were answered truthfully, even the incredibly awkward ones.

There was a whole lot of absolute terror when they mentioned the Enforcers. A couple of kids looked wildly around at the Enforcers surrounding them. A few sat up straighter, intentionally refraining from such behavior- they would be leaving the building soon, to get holdings of their own and become Illuminati themselves, and they felt they had to act like it.

The 4-5 year olds were next. These kids, as young children will, recognized the twins but didn't stop what they were doing. Most of them had no personal experience with authority, save the one with a pair of twin servants of his own; he was still in the make-them-do-funny-stuff stage. Wait, there was a girl with one, too- but she'd concealed hers a bit, letting only the black gloves give it away. They asked questions as well, foremost among them being why both twins and Sarah were wearing white; the answers they got shocked the hell out of them.

When they were told about the rogue Enforcers (the idea of hiding critical facts from growing minds was unthinkable), they went nuts; a few started screaming, touching off an instant wave of panic. Three of them ran from the room. Several froze up. The boy with servants hid behind them, who managed not to try to hide behind him. The twins, chuckling to themselves, waited the few minutes it took for them to calm down when they realized their own Enforcers hadn't started attacking them. The three who had ran trickled back in, one by one, a bit sheepish. "Thanks for the nightmares, Master!" one called out in Latin. "You're joking, right?" one asked in the same language.

"Nope. Not joking," William replied in English, nearly touching off another panic wave.

The two to three year olds were almost universally asleep, not in bed but napping in a puddle like puppies, sleep apparently contagious between them. The twins left them in silence.

In the youngest children's room they saw Quad, not quite a year old, doing a strange crawly-walky thing reminiscent of the insects from a cheap space movie, with quadrupedal motion of his legs and lower arms, his upper arms in front of him, grasping whatever objects they could find. There were a great many toys in that room, with quite a few babies Quad's age learning how to explore their environment.

"Du braaaki!" he squealed as he saw the twins enter. Engineereds learn language quickly, from birth- instead of "Daddy", Quad called his father "Two arms!"

"Do you even know I'm your mother, Quad?" Sarah asked, in a strangely soft voice, picking him up and holding him close. While she was still a servant she didn't dare go ahead and do this. "Do you know what you've been drinking? Do you know where it comes from?"

"Ah-ah!" Quad said. Whether or not he actually understood any of that was anyone's guess.

Sarah pulled down the zipper of her suit and nursed him from each teat right there. She'd been lactating since he was born, sending the milk to Northberg in batches; it was better than synthesizing it. He burped on his own, loudly, and Sarah looked at his throat, seeing what she didn't notice before. "No doubled larynx."

"No echo?" William asked. That got the attention of most of the babies in the room. 'Someone has just done something very weird! Let's stare at him and see if we can figure it out!' "Yeah.. I don't think he'll miss it." Sarah hugged him again and set him down. She then quietly led the twins out of the room, and once they were in the hall she got between them and put an arm around the thick chest of each one, the three of them walking down the hall together in silence.

'Damn, left out again,' Paul thought to himself. He shook his head and smiled. Fuck, he was lucky to be alive. Of course he was watching their backs. Somebody had to.

The implant resetter itself was the size of a watermelon. Using similar technology to the experimental implant-remover they had used before, it cut a hole into the skull, found its mark, and ran a microvolt of current through a certain circuit, rendering the implants' indirect connection to the facial-recognition part of the brain invalid, forcing them to accept a new one. This model worked on both humans and Enforcers, with their drastically altered frontal lobes. The twins inspected it carefully for sabotage, pondering enemy plots. What if it was a fake, Flatland was in on it, and they were going to not-really-reset Enforcers who would proceed to blow the place up while the twins slept?

Sarah was tempted to tell them that there was no way, that if the enemies could think that far ahead or move that fast, the twins would surely already be dead. She let them come to that conclusion themselves after exhausting possibilities, some she didn't think of. The twins' gifts were already screened for explosives by servants of the island's steward and servant trainer, and if he had turned against them they'd all be dead. It was screening the screeners' screeners that was important now. A handful of spies in the right hierarchy, and something explodes. The fact that they were in an organization whose main focus was secret plots was both a blessing and a curse- curse for obvious reasons, blessing because everyone competent would also be on the lookout for plotters.

They agreed that the worst part was that there were no precautions they could take to ensure absolute safety. Events were fundamentally out of their control. There had to be allies they could at least somewhat trust.

"There are," Howard said. "And we should be making more of them. Speaking of which, we still haven't decided what to do for our birthday this year," Howard said. Sarah slowly looked at him. He got like this sometimes, but he couldn't be this childish, could he?

"Same as last year? I'm sure the basement's still fine," William replied. Their basement was a hundred meters straight down, through magma-formed rock. Nothing short of a nuclear direct hit would faze it from the surface.

"And have them walk back and forth through a bunch of swarming servants, and wait for the elevator constantly, and have them worried about getting blown up over the ocean where we can't secure it?" Howard looked at his brother: C'mon, you're me, you're supposed to be smarter than this.

William's look in reply was equally wry. "You know of a place more secure than our island? There hasn't been a moonbase this whole time you haven't been telling us about, is there?"

"No, but that's a great idea. We'll have to build one sometime." It was impossible to know if he was joking. "Actually I was thinking of staying off the Western Hemisphere this year. I think we can enjoy some curry tomorrow. There's a young man named Hadji-"

"I REMEMBER HIM!" Paul suddenly blurted. "He was trying to get me to marry his sisters. They were like.. little girls, too."

"I remember that," William said. "They were his servants." He looked at his brother askance. There had to be a good reason for this one.

"This sounds like a great idea!" Sarah exclaimed, sarcasm dripping and patience finally gone. "Even though we're being hunted by a variety of people whose identities we have no idea of, let's have your twelfth birthday party anyway, in a third-world country not nearly fully controlled, in a culture where women are treated so badly that the sisters of Illuminati are implanted, while a third of the attendees are female and more than half are engineered! I can't possibly imagine what could be wrong with this plan. Now, you were going to continue with some intended consequences?"

"There's a young man named Hadji Rajadhiraja", Howard reiterated, unruffled, "whose father, Sumar, is the creator and distributor of special-purpose, small-scale nuclear weapons." Ah. This wasn't childishness- this was politics. Sarah was one of the few people in a position to tell the difference. "His father does have more than his fair share of quirks. For example, he's probably the single person keeping the currency system alive, and he also doesn't strictly sell or give his developments to engineering teams; he licenses them. And he keeps very careful tabs on what he licenses to who, when."

"So careful, in fact, that nobody he's sold to has ever actually used one," William pointed out.

"I think he's only sold about a half dozen, actually, but it's what he's famous for. At least it was until microfusion. He has an entire line of his own stuff, most of it not nuclear. Since he demands tangibles instead of recognition and possibly another couple of levels, he's.. respected, but not exactly well-liked."

"Tangibles would be what, units?" The only currency the Illuminati recognized as valid, a sort of transferable IOU for uneven transactions. Illuminati generally didn't trust money, being the masters of it. "If people aren't taking those as seriously as they used to then he better start cashing in his chips," Paul noted.

"He is, and does constantly, taking things that other Illuminati don't need or want. He's been giving most of them to his son. Nominally Hadji's the governmental overlord of India but he has an amazing catalog of resources."

"So the pawnbroker of the Illuminati is a Brahmin Hindu. Makes sense," William said. "Strange, he's got his fingers in everybody's pot and we've never talked to him."

"He's actually a reason we don't hear more arguments. We hand out justice; he makes deals," Howard replied.

"I'm surprised you know all this without looking it up," Sarah said.

"The rules of the Inheritor," Howard reminisced. "No one could approach me for any reason. Most of the restrictions weren't on me, they were on everyone else. A lot of them wouldn't answer my calls, and everything was monitored. So, Hadji. He was unique, exotic, and too young to be scared. Long-distance only, though." Paul had an impulse to reply with something involving either an unresponsive pity meter or nanoscopic violins, but chose not to.

They called Hadji from a Northberg terminal, and he was ecstatic about the prospect; by the time the twins could get to him in a Northberg jet, he'd have everything set up and ready to go, and dozens of other young Illuminati would drop everything for a chance to see their Dominator in person. The twins smiled. Allies, they had.

Chapter 4

"We're here," Sarah said.

"Nng?" Paul mumbled, waking up with the twins. They hadn't stayed in full paranoia mode; they couldn't keep that up indefinitely and weren't about to try. Sarah apparently had, and how the hell did she do it? Did she just not sleep? Or, more likely, she had perfected catnapping to an art form in much the same way that soldiers in trench combat situations do. "You know, I'm still waking up and not remembering where I am."

"Careful with that. You might one day wake up and find yourself somewhere else." Which is what had originally happened to her, William, and him. She left the plane first, finding what she had expected: a limo waiting for them, and an Enforcer with a garment. "Paul," she said, handing it to him as they stepped in.

It was similar to the twins' suits- a lot like something a Northberg kid would wear, only with an older cut, a back coat, and more weapon holders. It was blue and red, but if you looked at it this way, it took on a teal tint, and if you were lucky or tall enough to see him from above, it would appear green.. Paul, even after two years, still had to consciously shift his social frame of reference on occasion. In the normal world it would engender triple takes. Here, well, it wasn't white, and it wasn't black- it wasn't even light or dark enough to symbolize either, making it an intentional non-statement. Paul changed quickly in the limo, smiling at the large weapon-holding straps, which neatly balanced the assault cannon's weight. He knew it probably wouldn't do him much good, but 'go everywhere armed' wasn't something he shifted reference for anymore, and he didn't want to be the only one without a weapon if the shit hit the fan...

But it wasn't expected to and probably wouldn't. The twins could only imagine how the conversation between Hadji and his father had gone about preparations. 'You want to set aside rooms for what?' Or, perhaps, his father hadn't been so surprised at all- Bacchian hedonism was a staple of a great many Illuminated gatherings and was supposed to be the whole point of a Dominator birthday party. A celebration of life, of joy. We do these things because we can, and we need no other reason. Sure, some of the invitees would bring politics into it, but that was a side business and didn't impact the mood. But needing to move the location to the other side of the planet, to put pressure on a nuclear weapons dealer? Howard felt like he was betraying his station. The Dominator was supposed to be above this kind of thing.

Oh well. Most of them had planned to travel already- just not to this place. The fact that the twins were having it at all, after escaping a deadly situation, made the celebration-of-life aspect much more poignant and contained an insult to their enemies.

And if the hangar was any indication- jet-helicopters, a handful of propeller planes, a unique hypersonic jumbo jet- most of the invitees had shown up, and probably had been there for some time. Leaving at 4:00 PM the previous day plus a 13:30 timezone difference and an eight hour flight meant that the twins had arrived at about 1:30 PM local time.

They had arranged themselves into a semicircle around the door, younger kids standing towards the front so they could see their Dominator as he walked in. They inhaled to cheer-

But when they saw not one but two twins wearing white, they stared. One of them subtly uncrossed and re-crossed his eyes, treating the identically-dressed twins like a Magic Eye trick. A few of the servants smiled. Some of the masters just thought Howard was being facetious, but the tension in the room was palpable. Only two of them had received information from their younger siblings in Northberg, and had decided to tell nobody, just to watch this unfold. Why doesn't somebody say something?! Why don't you say something?! I'm not going to say anything! Screw you, I'm not opening my mouth about that! A handful of them used to wonder how the 'elephant in the room' phenomenon could exist. Now they knew.

It was a poor atmosphere, and William took it upon himself to break the ice, sounding like a quiz-show host with echo. "Hey, everybody! Who wants to guess how many of the people you're looking at have been unimplanted in the past twenty-four hours?"

"Two!" some younger kid near the front blurted out. "Billy and Sa-"

"ERRRT! Wrong!"

"Three!" an older boy shouted, with many others. "Five!" some jokester blurted out. "One!" a girl yelled.

"Nope! What's left?"

The room went to silence, this time with a whole new brand of tension and an even bigger room elephant. Almost every Illuminatus in the room had implanted servants. Not a single one of them hadn't had thoughts, in some cases nightmares, about their own implantation. A servant started chuckling mirthlessly at their reaction, until his master's hand signaled to shut up.

"Four. It's four, isn't it?" thirteen-year-old Jeremy Jorgensen said, quietly. He was one of the few people there who knew the twins personally. He and his servant, Joey Freeman, had spent time with the twins, some of it interesting, some of it violently lethal as they'd helped kill an enemy of his.

"Congratulations, Jeremy!" William shouted, still in quiz-host mode. "You win!" The let's-admit-horrible-things-happened competition.

"Heh. What do I win?"

"You get to be Dominator for a day!" Some of the kids gasped. Only a couple thought he was actually being serious.

"Today?" William smiled at him. "Or..."

"The day the missiles start landing on our house again!" There were two subtexts in that. The first was 'our', which nobody, not even the seven-year-olds, missed. The second was the fact that not only had the Dominator been implanted and nearly killed, he was openly joking about it. Shock gave way to nervous laughter.

"Yeaaaahhh.. I think I'll pass!" More, easier, laughter.

"What's the next question?" a fifteen-year-old asked.

"What's for lunch?" And that was the right question, as many of these kids were engineereds whose last meal was about six hours ago and who had been active since then. He got a number of answers, but the one he favored included the location of three massive dinner tables, the head of the center one hastily rearranged to feature two seats.

There was a substantial infusion of younger kids this time around, in the twilight zone between power and puberty. A few of them had a quasi-medieval look, princes and princesses, all cute and Machiavellian. A nine-year-old geneticist (she favored animals and a few plants, leaving the Operator for the humans) looked strikingly like the Red Queen, red hearts on her expansive dress. One of the boys wore a white cape over shining armor with a scabbarded sword at his hip, with his black-armored servants packing folded spears, and these kids never carried toy or imitation weapons. Jeremy and his servant wore matching motorcycle outfits, although they hadn't rode from England to India on their teen-sized bikes; three hundred miles an hour was simply too slow for that and there was secrecy to worry about. There were also four somewhat middle-aged servants in this group, styled similarly to butlers, their combination of patience and experiential wisdom making them extremely highly prized among kids who recognized the need for it.

The pubescent ones generally flaunted their status. The older teenagers were the first recipients of the Operator's initial genetic experiments. Ergo, there were wide variations in strength and intelligence, and in some cases looks. One girl, fortunate in that regard, dressed almost like a bride and pointedly sat herself between two boys her age: which one of you wants to be my husband tonight? There was a distinct age grouping in erstwhile couples, with almost no one going beyond a two-year limit; not just because of the creep factor, but because with the upslope in genetic engineering, the younger ones were likely to be far more dangerous. The master-servant factor was simple, as servants are the hands of their owners. In the Illuminati, fucking your servants is the equivalent of masturbation, fucking someone else's servants is equivalent to that person giving you a handjob, and having each other's servants fuck is the equivalent of holding hands. (Aww, how sweet! Eddie's servant is balls-deep in Julie's! They're going to make such a nice couple!)

Some of the girls looked interested in having the Dominator's baby after a 14-year-old named Carlie had managed that by breaking the two-year rule. Carlie at 15 was there again, hoping to repeat her performance. The girls' mood quickly soured after a glance from Sarah. Don't get into alpha-female contests with me. You will lose. Even among engineereds, Sarah was threatening in a way that even the Dominator was not. With all three of them there, the presumably eligible boys didn't give her a second look.

Howard, too, knew he couldn't partake in it today. Even though these were very literally his people, he could not politically afford to get intimately involved with any of them individually and have drama interfere with survival. Not anymore. He looked to his brother, who was having similar thoughts and nodded.

Paul checked around for Hadji's sisters- ah, there they were. But they were far from each other, with completely different masters; he really went ahead and sold them off. Hadji looked nervous and alone, as most of the mistresses at the party considered him selling his sisters as eventual sex slaves to be disgusting and insulting to their gender, and shunned him for it; few of the post-pubescent boys wanted to hang out with someone shunned by the girls. Since his home had been chosen as the place for the Dominator's party, he'd try to wring out what social status he could. Nobody believed it would work. He silently cursed his father for the inherited cultural problems, which seemed to get worse every year, and resolved never to follow the old man's ways again. Sumar himself stayed well out of the way, passively observing bits of the party and making no comments whatsoever, particularly not in regards to social graces.

Because these kids had their own ideas of what was acceptable. If this had been a gathering of Illuminati thirty or forty years older, the servants would be somewhere else save for a few silently waiting on the guests, with a possibility of them being used for the evening's entertainment. The young attendees at this party had their servants sitting near them, eating at the same tables and enjoying the same conversations, comfortable and more or less happy, the sentient property often speaking on behalf of their masters and occasionally filling specific roles; one mischievious twelve-year-old had his smug servant say the unvarnished truth in a biting court-jester style, with the master insincerely chiding him for his audacity. The usual practice here was for a servant to go to the buffet table and return with two plates, one for his master and one for himself, occasionally refilling drinks for both of them. To the new generation of Illuminati, having servants by your side made you a master, having servants who loved and trusted you (and vice versa) made you an adept master, and having personal servants that you couldn't bring with you in public made you a pathetic assclown. Getting rid of your servants meant that you couldn't handle the responsibility, and beating your servants- particularly if they were implanted, which they almost all were- was worse than kicking your dog.

There were only two servant girls dressed remotely like what pubescent normals would imagine; both of them had male masters who intended to give their friends heterosexual handjobs. This, too, was looked down upon by most of the mistresses although not quite as badly. There was one boy there for the same reason; his constant sly grin gave the impression that his mistress committed Illuminated masturbation on a regular basis.

There was also no taboo against homosexuality, but it was nearly nonexistent among these kids; the Operator had discovered a way to bind the reproductive urge to the sexual one, when he had first been messing with the brain. Sexually transmitted diseases weren't even a consideration, most of the girls wanted to get pregnant and there were morning-after abortifacient pills for the ones that didn't, and so condoms were wholly unused.

Jeremy and his servant were invited to sit next to Paul, who adjusted his assault cannon to sit next to the twins, next to Sarah, who was sat next to by a young master who apparently had no idea who and what she really was. Various preteen Illuminati were crowding-but-not-crowding their side of the table. "Guys, did you get my messages?" Jeremy asked.

"We haven't had access to a screen of ours since the shit hit the fan," Howard informed him. The room became quieter as they talked, and what they said was passed along. A few kids visibly relaxed at not having been intentionally ignored. The thought independently germinated in each twin's mind: They'd have to start carrying cellphones. It wouldn't have helped with their recent situation- a beacon, 'Shoot here!'- but going off-grid for hours at a time was a luxury they could no longer afford.

"That's why you didn't get on the jet with us," an eleven-year-old near Howard said, satisfied that he hadn't been snubbed. So that jumbo jet was used as group transportation after all. Why would Illuminati need group transportation?

Howard knew, and would tell his friends later. Almost all of the ones with inadequate transportation were from Northberg. A lot of their parents hadn't expected the educational facility to produce real Illuminati in seven or eight years- willful blindness at work- and some of the ones that did return to their parents ended up in, or chose, sink-or-swim exile with no inheritance or support; due to the mutual support structure they had learned at Northberg, all of them swam, and a handful of them took their parents' holdings anyway. There was one openly-acknowledged parricide in the room, a quiet nine-year-old Japanese boy called Toshi (wearing a "Normals Suck!" T-shirt which was probably passed off as Engrish in his homeland if he ever went to normal places) who puppeteered Nintendo and about half the Yakuza. (His father had demanded what he deemed 'real honor', so Toshi had used a katana and discovered that you really can slice someone in seven pieces with two straight cuts if you move fast enough.) A couple others had one or both parents die under mysterious circumstances and didn't seem too interested in finding out why. Nobody cared, least of all the twins. Family murder was just evolution in action. The new gene pool wouldn't do that to itself.

Paul looked at the Japanese boy and his self-evident shirt- he might have seen him before, maybe not, but he recognized Akira sitting next to him- and he definitely recognized Akira's servant, Brian, who stared at Paul outright, more or less hating his guts. Paul winked back at him, smiling joyfully. Bite me, asshole!

"You heard what happened to ours?" Howard asked, snapping Paul's attention back to the table.

"We heard it blew up," a thirteen-year-old girl said. "What happened?"

"It blew up," Howard replied, disappointing her. That was becoming more and more suspicious the more he thought about it, and he didn't want to share details quite yet. "We need a new one." That was the cue for people to trip over each other looking to serve their Dominator.

Only one answered that cue, which was mildly disappointing. "What would you like it to have?" the eleven-year-old with the jumbo jet asked, confidently, leaning back with a smile. The boy's striped outfit was perpetually swept back, making him look like he didn't even need a plane to fly.

"What's your name?" Howard asked him.

"Daniel Westham." No relation to Ryan West, who was hanging near the back of Howard's table, ostensibly uninterested in conversation. Ryan had lost to the Dominator last year in a game of Starcraft, a game on which currency units (with no relation to any government's money) had ridden.

"You make them, Daniel?"

He gave a precise shrug. "My dad does."

"Well tell your dad that we would like it if it was fairly large, extremely fast, and brimming with weapons." Unspoken was the fact that if the jet was sabotaged in any way, there would be another openly-acknowledged parricide. "He can make use of any suitable technology he chooses in its manufacture, or in any craft that he may manufacture in the future." Only a handful of the children, including Daniel, got the implications of that one off the bat. Sumar tried and failed to hide his wide eyes. The Illuminati was one of the few places where intellectual property meant something. For the Dominator to just license it out by fiat like that wasn't completely without precedent, but... "Tell him further that there seems to be a dearth of suitable transportation among some of our younger members, and that I expect him to rectify the problem."

And that immediately endeared him to most of the room, which drew breath. They did not clap, or cheer, or holler, although a few almost started before they caught the mood. Look at this great thing we have gained! Let us not jinx it by talking about it! It was still an amazing deal for Daniel's father, who made his own material- everything was easy to get except the scandium- and whose labor was Enforcers. One supreme jet and a dozen or two smaller ones, for a limitless license and mass positive recognition? Done! Played right it could be worth a level boost or two.

"I'll pass it along, Dominator." The immaculately polite tone of someone in the middle of a windfall take-and-run. Why yes, that is my briefcase full of money, how good of you to return it to me.

"And if you liked that, what do you think we'll give if you can tell us who's behind this? Any suspicions you haven't shared, you have evidence but you can't put it together? Anybody?" William asked. There was some hesitation, some chatter, and nothing. It was worth a shot. The twins instinctively looked around, looking for fear. There was apprehension, and nervousness, and Sumar himself probably had a bit too much coffee, but nothing real. He shrugged and went for the food which had been placed before him. Actually asking was a minor faux pas- the kids would surely tell them if they knew- but it couldn't hurt. Going further could. Howard went for his food to avoid smiling ruefully. There was a lot of combined brainpower in the room, but he could never enlist it for sustained, active investigation. That was Dominator business. If he- 'no, we, dammit, we, not I.. ah fuck it'- swept the young Illuminati up in a strategic witch hunt, he'd improve his chances of finding witches, and dramatically improve his chances of full-blown civil war, as Illuminati have an over-my-dead-body approach to search and seizure. Although internecine espionage had become less of a problem over the last decade, almost any Illuminatus with all his secrets exposed was still fairly well fucked.

And he just knew some asshole would break secrecy instead of lose; he was surprised someone hadn't already. Or maybe they had. How much blackout could be done in that little piece of Oregon? It had been such a complete clusterfuck, though, that the Illuminati had lots of chances to information-slip in the confusion, and normals in various branches of government would blame each other, and gradually shut up out of fear for their own careers when it was 'revealed' to be an accident. Technically, secrecy was everyone's business, but the twins decided to stay out of that mess unless someone's cleanup crew was able to name names of incompetents or rogues.

The party continued, with dozens of questions and surprisingly few requests. The tale of their adventure was told and repeated between the guests. Two requests were for Dominator intervention; one didn't require it and the other was such a basic problem that Howard groaned at it. The owner of some regional news media didn't bother taking control of a small international news source that was ripe for it? And you can't take it now, because he already did. Wait, you actually talked to him first, because it was 'his domain'? He's not going to give you anything as a finder's fee, kid. Better luck next time! The rest of the requests were for Dominator time. 'Dominator, we would be honored if you would...' 'Dominator, please come to our...' All were gracefully declined. The personage of the Dominator is not a political tool of anyone but the Dominator. A couple of them just wanted hugs, and those were given freely; really, who would use something like that for political purposes?

Time flew. Some masters took the opportunity to start business arrangements, others sitting nearby to hear the Dominator's wisdom. Jet-lagged, most of them had no idea what time it was, until a few of them started getting tired and wanted to do things before it became too late. One by one, and then in groups, they began to make various lurid offers to one another, retreating to the room designated for the purpose. The bride's question of who would be her husband was answered by both the boys she had sat between.

The younger kids laughed at it as they laughed at everything having to do with sex, and played more childish things.

One boy stood there for a moment, looked down, sighed, and went to play with his younger friends. Next year, for sure.

The twins found Sumar at work, who had quietly left the party a few hours ago to get some work done. They took the opportunity to look at what he was doing- technical shit, nothing of immediate importance. "Sumar," Howard said. The man glanced around from his work, startled. He heard a lot of the youths moving to the sex room, what did the Dominator want? He feared for his rectum. "We" ('oh good I got it that time') "have business to discuss with your consortium."

"That surprises me," Sumar said, retreating to the familiar world of Illuminated intrigue. "I didn't think you wanted to talk to Dr. Palladstein, after what you've just done to him. Or are you going to repay him somehow?"

William's tone was carefully controlled and imperial, and he had to get into this. "The Dominator gives. The Dominator, at times, receives. The Dominator does not repay, unless you're talking about vengeance, and if we thought we needed that, you wouldn't know it."

"Very well," he said, shrugging, and sent a group message. Within a minute, a man was on Sumar's screen, looking askance at the twins.

There is a stereotype of the Illuminati being Jews, which is generally laughed at by the Illuminati, which does not discriminate on anything except intelligence and mercilessness. Palladstein brought the stereotype home with his hooked nose and smile (and was that even his birth name?). Breaking the stereotype, however, was his expertise; he did not deal with wealth or its creation. He and his servants had invented microfusion. Having disappeared from an MIT campus in 1991, he had declared his own doctorate in 1996, and no one had questioned it. Similarly, no one had questioned his meteoric rise to the first level, as his license agreements- parceled out in bite-sized doses, only to the very top- had given him great wealth indeed.

"My Dominator!" he exclaimed, obviously expecting Sumar. The twins watched his face ripple as he intentionally ignored both of them wearing white. "Did you receive my message?" Great, him too?

"No access to a viewscreen yet," William replied.

"My condolences. But you have had a birthday."

"We planned for that," Howard replied. "Just not here, and under these circumstances."

"And from the looks of Mr. Rajidhiraja's face, the news is bad, from yours, it is good. Which is true?"

"Both," William said. Again, he had to get into this. It wasn't hard, kids younger and less well-engineered than him could do it... "Mr. Westham, the jet manufacturer, as you know, uses fusion power. He will not be paying you anything to license it."

"Jets for engineereds- what else?" Paul clarified. Palladstein nodded, not liking this.

"The good news is that we trust you!" William said with a flourish. Eyeing the reaction of one of the members, he said, "Yes, it will get you more than coffee with fifty cents." General chuckling.

"How can you be so sure?" Dr. Benjamin Kravinger asked wryly, his armored orange suit and white gloves almost making him look like one of the kids. He really was a doctor, in the normal-world sense, having taught highly advanced physics for years before he was recruited. His mission in life was to attempt to outdo Dr. Palladstein's microfusion discovery. He'd made a lot of progress in improving it, but couldn't fundamentally surpass it no matter how hard he tried, and some days he just wanted to take a crowbar to someone's face to vent his frustrations.

He was also, pseudonymously, a rogue, and had roughly mushroom status in that organization: he didn't do much for them, and they kept him in the dark and fed him shit. He had heard the panicked calls for reinforcements, read the messages-to-all blaming lack of this or that for the twins' survival, and had gained the impression that the group was a bunch of fucking idiots who he should never have gotten involved with. Confronted with the twins' offer of union, he made a snap decision: he had no membership in the rogues, he would not access the rogues' highly anonymized server, he had never been a rogue, he didn't know anything about the rogues, and no one could prove otherwise.

"Because we're still alive," Howard replied.

"Don't tell me you weren't aware of your own power," William added. "Humility doesn't suit you." Some general nodding.

"All right, I'll bite. What's your trust worth, Dominator?" Palladstein asked.

"The unhesitating cooperation of the bulk of the engineereds," Howard replied. Engineereds, particularly the young ones, generally didn't trust older Illuminati, the equivalent of 'don't talk to strangers'. The paranoia was somewhat mutual; a few Illuminati had plans to swindle the inexperienced out of their holdings, but scrapped them after they considered what might happen if they carried them out, and how many pieces their bodies would be in afterwards. Or if they didn't die immediately, but later got sick and went to Northberg.. "They may also ask you for, say, personal microwave lasers, but I'm fairly sure they will give you something in return and creating them doesn't cost you much now, does it?"

That rubbed Palladstein the wrong way, as the original death-dealing Micro-2025 was his present to the then-Inheritor and he heard the comma as "cost you much, now does it?" 'Cool, now make one for all my friends, too.' was what he took it as. "From each, to each?"

"It functions much better when people have more abilities than needs," Howard replied, adding authority to his voice. The non-offer was clear: Here is the armor of the Dominator, which burdens you slightly but is extremely useful and protective. You must wear it.

"Don't tell me that you can't possibly see greater benefit to a handful of licenses not sold over the willing help of the genetically superior," William added. That didn't just rub them the wrong way, that peeled the skin off their backs and used it as a coat. "I don't think any of you have any music industry connections..." One of them laughed in the mirth of pure vindication. He had said that the licensing was RIAA-like and likely to provoke a similar, although far nastier, backlash. A supporter of his chuckled. The rest scowled, although their minds were working furiously- clearly there was some benefit here, maybe a lot of it, but...

"What does the Dominator consider support?" one of them asked, a balding man in his 50's. Names, names, the screen didn't display it, who was this guy? But in an organization a dozen times the size of the US Congress, no one was expected to know everyone.

William considered saying something about killing each other's parents, but Sarah went first: "The Dominator does not consider it. Leveled engineereds do. And certain of us are extremely talented at certain things." 'I can ask Sarah to kill people' wasn't something they had prepared to accept, and they knew she wouldn't do it at the drop of their hats, but...

"Have you ever requested a piece of equipment, labor, licensure, or a location that you needed to complete something important? And then had someone take advantage of your need because they had some idea how badly you really needed it? What kind of support do you give each other? You see no similarities between the way engineereds support each other and what you do for each other? Isn't this why you formed the Consortium in the first place?" Howard asked.

They started looking around at each other, and then fixed their stare on one individual, Kravinger's stare being the most direct. The camera-in-screen allows people to stare at each other directly, but is no good for letting people know who else is staring at whom. Clearly, though, it was Palladstein, and he was feeling it.

"Very well. You've made your first alliance in this new war of yours."

"Not a war of ours," William said. "We did not say, 'come, betray us!' There is no advantage to be had in it. And anyone who's stupid enough to partake in it will get the painful death they deserve."

"And that's what you expect us to tell anyone who may suggest otherwise," Palladstein said.

"Is it not true?"

"It is," Palladstein conceded. "But I think you would have been more persuasive had your fellow engineereds been with you."

"They're busy," Howard said. Paul made a subtle back-and-forth motion with his forefinger and clenched hand. (One of the Consortium found that to be so completely moronic that he decided to put it in a movie about retards.)

"Ah. A growing population. That, too, provides a strong argument. Thank you, Dominator."

"One more thing," Howard said before Palladstein clicked off. The man raised an eyebrow- 'oh great, more?' "You know very well what may occur if any nuclear technology gets in the hands of anyone who wishes to destroy us with it, be it a large wide beam of fusion-powered photons, or a fission explosion."

At that, he and most of the Consortium smiled. "Dominator, that is our Consortium's other purpose. Don't you think that we consider it every day? The normals don't have access to nuclear weapons." They'd been restricting them since the early fifties, finally ridding the normals of them entirely (except for certain highly controlled situations) by the late sixties. Despite what the normals believed, every ICBM on the planet was filled with lead. Despite what they achieved politically with it, India's only nuclear weapon was the one they had detonated as a test, and that was Sumar's baby entirely. There was to be no chance that the normals, being what they were, would destroy the Illuminati's planet. "We never intended to give it to those not far removed from that, either. How many people have we sold this technology to before this latest attack on you?" The question was obviously rhetorical, as Palladstein and the Consortium blinked out in rapid succession. Click. Clickety-click. Both twins nodded as they departed. Good. No plutonium surprises. Probably.

"You didn't say a word," William pointed out to Sumar. He had been using body language throughout, most of it unconscious and involving worry and fear.

"Sometimes, silence is the best course," Sumar replied, a serene look on his face.

So the twins and their cohorts left without a word, the dusk giving them all a fresh dose of jet lag.

"Billy, I was completely not expecting you to jump in like that," Howard said as they went into the limo. "Especially at first. Who wants to guess how many of the people you're looking at..." He broke up into laughter.

"Isn't that what we have to do? Just go 'Bring it, bitches'? How would you have handled it?"

"I don't know. I would have winged it too. I was hoping for the same kind of reaction we got from Northberg."

"The little ones haven't gotten their first taste of politics. That's the difference," Sarah replied, looking out the window into the distance as the car pulled into the hangar, the cool air fresh on their faces as they stepped out.

Sarah began takeoff procedures, not worried about ATC in this neck of the woods. The only one controlling air traffic around here was Rajadhiraja himself. She looked back at the boys, who had already begun to doze off. "You know what they didn't have, though?" she asked, and got an uncommittal grunt in response.

"Fear. Sumar was scared out of his shit at me wearing white, I don't know if you noticed. Them? Most of them aren't even scared of enemies who managed to implant you. Not even scared of rogue Enforcers. They're more worried about their social lives." Shock? Plenty. Real fear? Some among the youngest, some among the less-engineered or unengineered older ones (although Jeremy, to his credit, wasn't scared one bit), but among the bulk of the engineered Northberg kids, none at all.

"Envy," Howard replied, and it was enough. Damn him. She did envy them. Her differences were right down into her cells. A lot of the younger engineereds were close enough genetically to be the Dominator's brothers and sisters, and they shared the easy familiarity of a tribal family. Her? Fifth cousin at best with some major differences, not really a freak, someone who'd be worth talking to if she wasn't so standoffish, but... not one of the emerging group. Not even close. Not in her mind, where it counted. She had the instincts, yes, but what they had... she shook her head. Perhaps there was a reason there was only one Sarah. Maybe she should have beat it out of the Operator right after William had finished. "Speaking of which, we refrained from the festivities. Turn on the autopilot."

"Not entirely safe, but..," she said, climbing into the back.

"Don't worry," Paul said, as he took the pilot's seat and put on the headphones, to block out the not-quite-human noises coming from his friends, and decisively not looking back at what they were doing. "I got this."

Illuminated jet-helicopters were not altogether immune from rocking, after all.

Chapter 5

The twins returned home to paradise restored, the warzone effectively unhappened. The mansion looked much the same as it did before, only slightly revised and expanded, the beach clear and inviting, the landing zone a grass lawn. There was a newspaper at the front door, as if some paperboy had biked across thousands of miles of ocean to throw it there. In an era of instant communications, the Real News was a joyous throwback to a time when things were written down on paper and distributed in physical form if not by ear. It wasn't printed on ordinary newspaper anymore; unless someone deep-froze or stored it in argon, editions of the Real News would oxidize to dust in three days. This was today's paper, and fresh, the twins noticing the headline immediately:

Duumvirate!

"That's exactly what we are, isn't it," Howard said, smiling, flipping through it. The editors of the Real News knew who buttered their bread, and tried for an appearance of impartiality while strongly supporting the twins.

"Rule by two," William said, smiling as well. "I guess that's our new title." Even if they'd still be called 'Dominator' from tradition and statute. He walked in with his brother, reading over his shoulder. The inside of the mansion was redone and cleaned entirely, the plush red couch in the main room even larger, inviting them to sit on it and relax. Which is exactly what they needed right then.

What they did not need was the island's steward and servant trainer already on the screen waiting for them. Now what did he want?

The group sat down together in the usual way: twins in the middle, Paul on the right, Sarah on the left. "Dominator, I have a confession to make," the steward said as if it was the last thing he expected to ever say. He had lived for his Dominator for a very long time. Now he was prepared to die for his Dominator as well. The twins raised eyebrows at him: Then make it. "I allowed a timed explosive to be brought to the island. An Enforcer placed it in your aircraft, under my supervision. Because I did not want it to hurt you, I gave it an audible warning."

"Why did you do it in the first place?" Howard asked, aghast. If he weren't already pale he would have become that way. This guy, above all others, was not allowed to betray him.

"They had my family, Dominator," the servant replied, still in his formal tone.

"You're not supposed to have or care about your family once you join us," William reminded him.

"They're in the Illuminati. I'm married, with a little boy and girl, both at Northberg." A subtle, wry expression appeared on Sarah's face, but nobody noticed.

"Why are you telling us this now?" Howard asked, paranoid.

"I didn't know if you'd survive. I thought if we all got nuked or something, at least my family would survive."

"Then why tell us at all?" William asked. It was probably a bad question, even if valid. A good servant didn't hide things from his master. Then again, this guy could hardly be called that now.

The servant's tone softened dramatically. The hard, formal edge to it was replaced by something else entirely. "Howard.. do you remember the time you lost your shoe?"

The twins looked at him askance. "The time I lost my shoe?" Howard asked skeptically.

"Yeah. This was around the time you turned seven. You were playing around in the water, out on the beach near the cave. I don't know what happened exactly, but your shoe came off and you couldn't find it." Howard did remember- he'd stepped hard in some very soft sand and it disappeared at once. He had looked and dug around for five minutes before walking back to the mansion in frustration. "You were yelling, making up new swear words, hopping on one foot half the time- and you were halfway home when you found your shoe just sitting on a rock, dirty outside and clean and dry inside, with a towel right next to it to wipe all the sand and grit off your foot. You were looking around in amazement. I think it might have been the first time you really wondered or cared just who was doing all those things for you. It was me, Howard. I caused that to happen."

For far from the first time in his life, William felt envy towards his brother. Over the course of the past two years, the steward and his stealthy crew had done somewhat similar things for the other personal servants as well; any mess was certain to be cleaned up, clothing laundered and even upgraded in size, all sorts of consumables replaced the night after they were used. He'd simply accepted it, along with a whole lot of other things, as the way the Dominator and his chosen servants live. But William was looking at it from the point of view of the seven-year-old Howard, having someone so inhumanly loyal that he would do seemingly miraculous things for you and ask nothing in return; you wouldn't even know it was him doing them. Insoluble problems for even the Inheritor, instantly solved by some anonymous force. Although the young Billy's normal life was far from hard, he could have definitely benefited from a thing like that. And even though a lot of his problems were solved by the young Billy, Paul felt a similar envy. Sarah felt nothing; this was what servants were for, after all.

Howard remained silent. He knew the others' envy and understood the servant's rationale. The servant continued anyway. 'He shouldn't even be talking to me about this stuff,' Howard thought as the servant started speaking again. 'But he's always wanted to say this to me. Considering everything he's done I can grant him that and a lot more besides.' "Dominator, even before you were six years old, my students and I have cleaned up after you, made your bed, even turned off the lights when you slept with them on." That was an easy one: they did it remotely. "How could I possibly betray you after that?"

But all four of them knew exactly how. He could simply get sick of picking up after his young master, envy and growing frustration reaching a crescendo, as he decides to join the enemy in a final act of spite. They doubted that- tone of voice, circumstantial evidence, and knowledge of the man's character all contradicted it- but it didn't outweigh the fact that he did betray them.

"If we're all done the maudlin bullshit," Sarah asked casually, "how did they make you believe they have your family?"

"There was video, recordings, they had someone on the inside, there was a substant-"

"Oh, spare me," Sarah cut him off with. "Forget loyalty, I ought to kill you for incompetence." The others looked at her. "Between stealth training and babysitting Howard and his controlled friends, how long has it been since you actually had to think operationally? If ever?"

The servant reverted to his hard, formal tone, but he wasn't fooling anyone. He was scared out of his shit. "Slightly more than twelve years. I was chosen as the new leader when Howard was born."

"If you had even bothered to check technological updates, you'd know that any amount of video could be faked no matter what they did. Even twelve years ago, actually. Yes, I'm sure they had a lot of other crap too. I'm not interested. Maybe you've been in a fantasyland of your own making for the past twelve years, but I have to deal with reality," Sarah said. "Are you really stupid enough to think the educational directors or the head operators of Northberg are going to just let any of those children get killed by a 'man on the inside'?" She looked to her right at the males. "Pathetic. Loyal as a dog and about as smart. You all can go back to playing kings and knights now. I have other things I need to do." And with that, she was gone, and there was silence for three seconds.

"They actually managed to convince you that letting something important get blown up was the best thing for you to do? Of all the things you could have done, including, oh, I don't know, telling us, you chose that?" William asked. 

He took a breath, the real amount of trouble he was in finally dawning on him. "Dominator, they had been showing these things to me for more than a year. It was supposed to be as part of some kind of 'insurance policy' and I didn't know what it was insurance for until recently. I continually tried to track them down and failed. I was.. not aware that they could fake that much video in that little time." That was amazingly retarded. Faking video in real time was a skill mastered by the Illuminati years ago. "It was just meant to be the destruction of an object, then you would wise up to the plan, then you would kill them. I don't know how the Enforcers were taken!"

Howard looked at him coldly. "I'm not sure which is worse- having servants with incomplete loyalty who are intelligent, or having servants with complete loyalty who are stupid. What I do know is that having servants with incomplete loyalty who are stupid is no good." Normally this would be a flat death sentence, but where the fuck were they going to find somebody else they could trust at all? Implants were tempting, but with the enormous variety of independent tasks that servant had, it would be nearly impossible to give orders covering all the bases. "You mentioned your family. Should you screw up or betray us in any way ever again, guess what I'm going to do?" The servant's face went almost as white as the twins' before Howard clicked off. He would later feel relief. The twins gave him something they seldom give anyone: a second chance. Or even a first one.

"Wait, you're not going to.," William started.

"His kids, of course not." They were somebody else's property or going to be. "Him and his wife, corpses." It wasn't like anyone gave prizes for mercy.

"Wait. Where the fuck does his wife even live?" William asked. The twins looked at each other and started pulling up schematics of their own island. They hadn't had to care, before. Not caring was the nice part of being Dominator; you simply lived there and let the unseen servants worry about details. Now they had to care, especially about things physically close.

"Should have known," Howard said. The Dominator's area was a rather large home, the surface of the island, and an expansive basement. Everything else- tunnels, barracks, systems, a small training course all its own- was used by the servants. The entire underground, all the way to the magma and the geothermal power units, was utilized in some way. His wife lived with him; she was a sort of maid matron, never directly serving the twins but making life easier on the unseen servants who did.

"And servants owned by most Illuminati come from here," William reminded him. "And they know our habits."

"Want to change that?" Howard asked. William shook his head. "Me neither. If their first master is us and they've seen us in action, who knows how much stupidity they've talked their masters out of? C'mon. Let's go give them something to see." No disagreement; it was a great day to enjoy their private heaven, with frisbees flying and dogs fetching.

As if they could afford to do that today. The screen buzzed almost immediately, and the twins subvocalized a groan. 

"You know that we still haven't checked our email once since hell broke loose?" William asked.

Howard sighed, a long puffffff of escaping air, feeling harried like some normal. At least now the various idiots requesting Dominator intervention would have more wrath to fear.

You have 2,123 messages from 1,250 sources.

"Wonderful," William said sardonically. A bit more than a fifth of the Illuminati. A nice, round number, and they probably all wanted replies. And thanks, guys- that comma makes all the difference.

Howard shook his head slowly. "I hate having to do this." He entered some commands for a pre-connection message. "If you're going to call me up with relief or happiness, don't. There's six thousand of you. If you have advice for my plans, submit it in writing. The only things I should be directly contacted with are the usual disputes and emergency information, such as the names of traitors." He entered the message and exited out of the window. The caller dropped and the screen did not buzz again.

"My? I?" William asked, eyebrows raised.

"Although there may be times when I use it, I am never going to get used to the first person plural. You should do the same. It doesn't matter which one of us is speaking." A smile grew on William's face and he nodded. "And with that out of the way, I am going to bed. Paul! Clean this shit out and let me know if there's anything valuable in it."

"What? How am I going to know what's valuable and what's not?" Paul was otherwise motionless, still subconsciously expecting implants to force him to act.

"You have to use your judgment. You want to be an Illuminatus or not?" William asked with a smile.

Paul gawked, making no attempt to hide his surprise, even if he knew he should have seen it coming. His brain flooded with contradictory emotions. He knew how awesome it was, to have a true hand in the control of the world, to modify a section of society as he saw fit, to be one of the final elite. Of course he wanted it, anyone with an understanding of power would. But not for the first time, he had the intense sensation of being in way, way over his head.

"Paul. Even the basic nature of this conflict is a mystery to me, as I'm not quite sure what the enemy truly wants and what they have. All I'm sure of is that to defeat them, we will need to root them out, discover and destroy their infrastructure, discover future attacks and prevent them, and overall out-guess and out-think them. The raw information gathering can be done by servants but analysis, consideration, and most of all counterplotting, are the provenance of a master," Howard informed him.

"B-but I'm not as smart as you guys! Not even close, dude! I mean, I want to be one, but.. if I fuck up, if I miss something.."

"If you don't think you're up to this and related tasks, I'll simply find someone else or do it myself." The first person singular still sounded weird to William, especially since he was the one saying it, and not pretending as he had pretended so many times before. "No one can make someone be an Illuminatus. Contradiction in terms," he continued, smiling. "You can just keep wearing black, go up to your room, and get a good night's sleep because we don't have anything for servants to do right now. Either way, you'll still be my friend."

"I don't want to stay like that.. I guess I was just thinking I could go home, you know?" His voice became higher and higher, hysteria creeping in. "I know, I know, you don't have to say it, there's no going back, I'm either a master or a servant and there's no room for anything else. I'm still not meant for this shit!!" The combined stresses had finally caught up with him and he started shaking, crying with his whole body.

"Paul, are you able and capable of looking through these messages for not only obvious pieces of information, but contextual and subtextual subtleties as well?" Howard asked gently and directly.

In the end, Paul would never intentionally lie to his Dominator and friend. "Yes. I am," he said, eyes downcast.

"Then do it," the twins said simultaneously. The implication was clear: 'And remain a servant, but doing masters' work.'

"Yes... Dominator," Paul replied, and the twins went upstairs without another word, closing the door behind them.

"I love him so much," William said.

"I do too," Howard replied, looking approvingly at his surroundings, particularly the enormous, inviting bed in front of him. He left his suit on and flopped down on it, putting his hands under his head. "Billy, is it all right for the controller of the world to admit that he's scared?" Sarah was completely wrong on that one. The engineereds hadn't shown fear. It definitely didn't mean they didn't feel it.

His brother laid down next to him in the same position. "Howie, I am one of the two biggest ass kickers on planet Earth. I can admit whatever I want," he said, smiling.

"I'll admit that I completely forgot about investigating Brutus Mando."

"Yeah. Sarah gave some instructions, though."

"Yeah, I was wondering about it for fifteen minutes before I remembered- she'd already dealt with it."

"Becomes easy to rely on good servants, doesn't it?" William asked, with the faintest hint of sarcasm.

"Yeah. I keep on thinking she might leave, but remember- we've got something she likes." The twins shared a chuckle, but couldn't resist glancing at the intercorm and the door.

"She's the one person who can kill us both. Not straight-up with us expecting it, but..."

"Yeah, like we'd ever be expecting it."

"Yeah, I remember what she told you when-"

"Oh, don't go bringing that April Fool's bullshit up!" Howard shouted. That had been a memorable day.

"Yeah, remember a year before that one? Fucking shit, Howie!" That had been another memorable day.

"Woah-woah-woah! I thought you forgave me for all that stuff."

"I do! But that, of all the fucking things- and you still have the recordings!"

"And you've still got the recordings of that other one!" The full-size viewscreen upon the wall opposite the bed was a massive help, wireless keyboards and mice were conveniently located, and someone had the wits to put a double interface into a single ACNOS desktop. A look, a tacit agreement, and both incidents were not removed but heavily encrypted and restricted. No one but the twins would ever be able to see them. Sarah and Paul would think they had been deleted.

"But you know what, Billy? Having you not implanted finally allows me to say something I never have before."

"And that is..." 'Go to hell? Suck my dick?'

"Kiss my ass!" There it is!

"Howie, one thing you really have shown about all this, and it's really impressive, is your flexibility." Howard waited a half second for the punchline. "Therefore, I invite you to kiss your own ass!"

Howard laughed and they got into a talk that lasted for hours. Their twin nature and engineered brains meant that they could converse far faster than normals, with subtext and double meanings throughout. Occasionally they flowed into Latin when it was smoother than English to discourse in, William having absorbed enough of it over the past two years.

Howard was frightened more than his brother, to neither of their surprise. The controllability of Enforcers was a part of his life since birth. When he was four, the Dominator was given a handful of Enforcers who would do whatever he told them, within a broad limit of reason. He ordered them around like it was going out of style (and it did, in fact, go out of style- he completely stopped giving them silly commands for his own amusement by the time he was six), making them do things like juggle each other's weapons and stand, no-handed, on their heads. (To his delight, they were rather good at that.) This sort of free-command activity has always been a part of the Northberg children's curriculum, and the un-people's complete lack of emotion or caring meant that they ended up being seen as simple tools, not perfect toys.

But, Howard admitted, he still did see them as perfect toys, in the game of Illuminated intrigue. More obedient than Asimov's robots (First Law? Never heard of it!) and completely without biases or emotions, they made the perfect servants to an insulated Dominator. Howard could accept other people owning Enforcers and using them to try to kill him- that was simply part of the game. But when his childhood companions, his Enforcers, turned on him- William made the comparison of Sesame Street's Elmo whipping out an SMG on his viewers, and Howard laughed in agreement- there wasn't much else he could trust. Rationally, he could break everything down and say things like 'This person could have killed me already' or 'That's not a trap they would actually use.' Emotionally, he didn't trust the bed he was lying on. Sarah was certainly in a similar situation.

There was no precedent for any of this. Then again, there was no precedent for a Duumvirate, either, and no precedent for any of the technological game-changers that had occurred in the last twenty years, such as human bioengineering and mind control implants. So fuck precedent. The only thing they would worry about was the future, a place they had agreed to go together, and a thing they were once again willing to believe they could control.

Chapter 6

The twins woke up at roughly noon, ate a meal of fresh grilled pork, and discovered that Paul had chosen not to delete as many as he had categorized. The categories were 'bitching about Duumvirate', 'important', 'standard Dominator stuff', and 'other'. The important stuff they read first, while snacking on chocolate energy bars and downing huge glasses of milk. Ah. Paul had categorized as important various statements of strength and unity, the senders promising to do specific things on behalf of the Dominator. Most of it generally was important in the sense that it needed answering, but Paul apparently had a higher opinion of the Levels than the twins did. That and the fact that it didn't matter if nineteen out of twenty of these promises were genuine; it was the twentieth that would kill them. Standard Dominator stuff was just that, and the twins rolled their eyes, knowing that Illuminati still had a right to petition their Dominator regardless of the circumstances, and these still had to be answered. The 'other' category contained mostly congratulations with various insights that Paul thought the Duumvirate might want to read; unfortunately, it was mostly based on guessing and assumptions of varying validity. The twins flipped through it and nuked the folder.

Then they read 'bitching about Duumvirate' and laughed. There were only about a dozen messages in this category, from various Illuminati who believed both that the existence of two Dominators was fundamentally wrong and that they'd get what they wanted by complaining about it. What did these fools think would happen? Did they really expect them to go "Yeah, okay, you're right, there should be only one of us, we'll go ahead and go back to that now"? It was tempting just to kill them all for their idiocy but the twins couldn't afford to do things like that anymore. Anything of that nature would invite someone else to become an enemy, and above all else they didn't need any more of those. If there were a dozen people dumb enough to complain, there were also probably many hundreds who also believed as they did but weren't as dumb. The solution, the twins decided, was simple: There was only one Dominator, and the twins were that Dominator, and if anyone didn't like the idea it was his problem.

Two hours into their work, Paul woke up. He'd had undefinable nightmares, the result of way too much stress. He didn't want to get out of bed at all, and only did so when he noticed something soft and white on his black covers, draped over him. He recognized it at once and sat up abruptly, grabbing it and sitting up off the bed in one motion, sending the sheets onto the floor.

The item in question was a white one-piece suit, sized to his measurements exactly, the only other difference between it and the twins' a tan back coat instead of a white one. There was no question what it signified. If he wore this, he was an Illuminatus, with everything that meant. Power, prestige, mastery, all symbolized by the color of one single garment.

He didn't have to accept it. Since Sarah was almost certainly the one who had snuck it onto his bed, he could put on one of his black outfits, hand the suit back to her, shake his head, and return to the twins as their willing servant. The chance would never be offered again. It was surprisingly tempting to do this, to say that he was too weak to handle it, to refuse the responsibility. He didn't need it, and the twins didn't need for him to have it.

He set it down on the bed and got a whiff of himself in the process- he needed a shower before he'd wear any clothes at all. He took one for ten minutes (oh, joys of hot water) before he went to his closet and pondered what to wear. He was feeling a little chilly, so black shirt and long pants would be comfortable, maybe socks as well.

'Holy shit, what the hell am I doing?!'

He leaped back from the closet, rolled over the bed, and grabbed the suit as if it were a firearm and this was war. With a minimum of motions, he quickly unzipped the vertical magnetic closure on the chest, stepped into the legs with the steel-toed feet, put his hands into the gloved arms, and zipped it back up. There were hand-length blades coming from between his knuckles when he clenched his fists, and small claws coming from his nails when he pressed the palm a certain way, just like the twins had. The somatic message was unmistakable: I am an Illuminatus very close to the Duumvirate.

The first thing he told was the computer. Since he lived in the Dominator's mansion and was once his servant, he had almost complete Dominator-level access, which meant that he could edit his own entry with impunity. Paul Smith  Servant became Paul Smith  5th just like that, fifth being the lowest level of the Illuminati hierarchy. Theoretically, he could make himself a first just like Sarah surely would, but he hadn't earned it and it wouldn't be accepted by the other Levels. Sarah had power he did not; power differences were the reason they had a level system to begin with.

But levels were arbitrary and relatively inconsequential. He was still a very, very important person. And like so many other important people, the very first thing he did when he got to work was check his e-mail.

Two messages were from Joey, both video. One directly after the attack: "Dude, when you get this, answer, all right? You're the only one there who's not engineered and I don't want to see you get hurt." This, apparently, for lack of better things to say. The second was a few hours ago. "Saw you at the party. Wanted more chance to talk. Gimme a call back."

As a sort of slap to all the overlords demanding his attention, Paul answered Joey first. It took five seconds for the other end to pick up. He was expecting to leave a message but got Joey's smiling face instead. Joey had a blanket draped over his nether regions, having gotten up in what was for him the middle of the night. He took one look at Paul and his eyes went wide. "Holy shit! Congratulations!"

Paul showed none of his worry. This was his good friend Joey, and he really should be honest, but he was an Illuminatus now and he had to pretend he knew what he was doing. "Thank you, Joey. I'm looking forward to what I can do with this."

"If you're anything like Jeremy was, you're going to be one legged ass kicking for weeks."

And that threw Paul off his perch and he broke up laughing. "Okay, truth is? I'm not looking forward to it, I don't know what the hell I'm doing, and I'm not even sure what questions to ask."

"Jeremy was the same. But fuck, he had Richard guiding him." Both Jeremy and Joey's opinion of that guy was getting lower and lower. When Richard Goldman first patronized Jeremy, introducing him to the Illuminati and showing him how everything worked, he was the font of all knowledge. Now he was just another fool among many. "You've got the Duumvirate." Jeremy had taught him the proper way to pronounce it: Doo-um-vur-it.

"Yeah, they kinda threw me into it."

"They wouldn't have done it if they didn't think you could handle it, right?" Joey was smiling at him, wider and wider. "You can handle it, right?" Great. Now even the nicest servant in the world was playing with him.

"I don't... know. Seriously, I don't know."

"Dunno what to tell you, dude. Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about." Paul raised his eyebrows and waited two seconds. "I've just been getting this weird idea that you might end up dying for some stupid cause or something. Like you're going to find them and fight them, but do it in a wrong way so you get yourself killed. Same for them, but that's really ridiculous isn't it?" They shared a smile. The only cause the twins or Sarah would die for would be hubris possibly involving rage, but they were fairly immune to the standard pitfalls. "I imagined that you'd sacrifice yourself for the twins, but now you're wearing white so that's kind of unlikely now."

Coming from him... "As if you wouldn't for your master."

Dead serious: "In a split second. You know it." Paul just nodded. He wouldn't want to see that scenario, though. Joey dead, and Jeremy pissed... "But I mean it, congratulations. I gotta go back to bed. Everyone's going apeshit and it's going to be a freak day tomorrow. Love ya, dude." Click. Every day's freak day.. did he really just finish with 'Love ya'?

Okay. Whatever. Joey was Joey. What else was on the plate?

Half of the remaining 58 messages were well-wishings, a few congratulations that started streaming in the moment he had updated his entry, a few more messages from servants Paul didn't really know. Ah, that's right, he did know that one- Bryan, Akira's servant, acquired when Paul had finished his spying session on James Baker, the twit who had failed to follow basic secrecy procedures when acquiring children in a boys' ranch. The message had been typed straight, not spoken, but Paul could read Bryan's anger anyway:

"fuck u bitch, i hope u die, ur nothin 2 ne1, they will c how stupid u r and kill u"

How anyone could live with an Illuminatus for over a year and still remain so blindingly moronic was a complete mystery to Paul. Was Akira making him type with his nose or what?

But his real interest was in the the messages that were coming in faster than he could read them; other Illuminati had pre-written them in anticipation, and sent them the moment he took power. Most of these contained congratulations as well, but added extremely carefully-phrased requests for arbitration, cloaked in the masks of attempting to discern Paul's sense of judgment, given as hypothetical questions. Most of them were worded so that even if Paul saw through the guise, it would still be a valid question. It didn't take a genius to understand the ostensible reason: they didn't want to call direct Dominator attention to themselves with minor matters when the Dominator was worried for his very life. Paul's status was an interesting combination of high and low; he had the ear of the Dominator but was presumably a brand-new fifth learning the ropes. The full explanation came in a flash of insight: they could figure out that the Duumvirate was trying to give him his own power, and so wouldn't want their new protegé second-guessed. By getting Paul's favorable decision in the matter, they could go to the other party and say 'Do you want to go to the Dominator and tell him that Paul was wrong? Who do you think the twins will listen to, you or him?' And if the decision was unfavorable, Paul figured, they wouldn't tell the other party at all.

Paul's insight continued: The other party, faced with his decision, would go to him as well. 'You didn't get all the facts, they left this out,' they would say, and both parties, convinced that they could manipulate him better, would pull him in their respective directions, pulling shit that they'd never dare try with the Dominator.

'I'm going to have to deal with this constantly. I'm an Illuminatus now.' Paul was expecting a heady rush of power from that realization- an Illuminatus, one of the most powerful people in the world!- but instead he felt a growing sense of fear. Of all the things he could be doing, being pulled apart by other Illuminati was not high on his list. But at least he had a guaranteed place in it, and likely some real holdings as well, as he was not bound by the traditional Dominator restrictions on personally holding power. If the Illuminati who asked his decisions complained when he wanted something in return (likely some of the between-parts that both parties had a stake in), then that was their problem- he could instantly throw it back in their faces with 'Why didn't you go to the Dominator, then?' And then they would have to either pony up, or end up sheepishly explaining to the twins that they were trying to use Paul as a cudgel against their competitor.

And, he figured, if the shit really hit the fan with this plan, he'd go straight to the twins and they'd laugh with him, give him a pat on the back, encourage his intellectual judo, and settle everything the way they always did.

Paul took a deep breath, hit Reply with Text, and... sat there.

'Okay, let's back up a bit. I'm just nervous.' So he chuckled, slacked off for fifteen minutes, opened up an emulator of some cheap handheld and played for another half hour before he realized what he was doing, closed it without saving, looked at the message again...

It suddenly dawned on Paul that being an Illuminatus was a lot harder than being a servant.

Maybe he really should have.. no. There was no way. He could do this, and he would.

And it was, after all, just a recorded message. He had time to think about his reply and overcome the mental hurdle of manning up and treating Illuminati as equals, or even subordinates. Paul had the ear of the Dominator. If Paul were to tell the twins "I don't quite trust this guy", that guy would be not quite trusted- or at least trusted a bit less than the average manipulative Illuminatus.

Okay, down to business. First, he considered the actual content of the message. Okay. The regional overlord of a part of South America, Wilfred Garcia ('How the fuck do you end up with a name like that?'), wanted an American media corporation to make some positive news stories about the Venezuelan government, to increase stability in the country and the feelings of security of those living there, an island of real stability in the metastable region. (The ongoing chaos there was cyclical, hence perversely stable.) The letter was full of the usual assortment of insinuations, pleas, manipulative language, ad nauseum. Paul recognized this sort of thing instantly and ignored it.

Had he been more normal-world informed, Paul would have known that the request was ridiculous, that the government of Venezuela was too "left", and the US media too "right", for it to happen; and said regional overlord was trying to use Paul's newfound status to completely alter the shape of politics there. Paul was almost thirteen years old, and a servant for two of that. Although he could pretend from time to time, and knew details that no normal could, he really didn't have much knowledge of the details of pan-American dichotomic politics.

So, instead he decided to go with a blanket, all-encompassing statement, Dominator style. "Don't expect cooperation to fulfill your goals".. no. The twins said on a regular basis that cooperation was to be encouraged. How about.. "Cooperation cannot be forced. You cannot expect a fellow Illuminatus to use his resources solely to benefit your plans. If you wish my aid we may be able to come to an arrangement." There we go! Important-sounding, just high and mighty enough to be an Illuminatus, in line with the Dominator's opinions, yet not unduly dismissive. Heh. He could get used to this. (What he didn't know was that the regional overlord was chuckling about 'come to an arrangement'.)

Why was there a regional overlord, anyway? What the hell was he doing that the normals didn't? If South America was pretty much a self-sustaining cesspool, what need to maintain it? But that was a bad question, Paul surmised. For when you found a lack of a 'need' for a regional overlord, you started to find the lack of need for local overlords, or corporate overlords, or political-party overlords, or any other kind of overlord, in which case you started to lose control over large chunks of the planet.

Basically, Paul figured, there was a regional overlord for every hectare of land and sea because somebody had to do it.

Once Paul came to the realization that a lot of the secret masters were just there to fill space, his confidence ballooned and he began to go through requests with a grin on his face.

When he was almost finished, he realized his errors, and smacked himself in the forehead. He had been brushing them off mostly, occasionally pointing out that he knew what they were trying to do, more than once outright asking them why they had come to him, continually saying that he would be glad to help for a price. Foolish! He wanted to take it all back and start again- wait, I fucked up, do-over! (There was no 'unsend' button. Once the message was out, that was it.) What he should have been doing wasn't offering assistance in exchange for resources- he should have been using their requests to directly help himself. He shouldn't ask, he should just take. But how would he get away with that? The Dominator's power couldn't be used for that, that was one of the big ones. But everything was owned by somebody. And yet.. people moved around in levels regularly, lost and gained things, and there was no way all of it could be just from trades, deals, and expansion. Was that how it really worked? That ownership came from saying "It's mine" and making people believe that?

Which was exactly what Sarah had been trying to tell him, leaving the suit on his bed without explanation, simply there for the taking.

It was then that Paul understood that his initial assessment was wrong. Illuminati didn't take control of things because it was their organization's duty. Illuminati- and everyone else- took control of things because they could. This didn't change the fact that many of them were effectively just filling space.

He then looked at the last message. Wilfred had replied! Another chance to do this right. He really should call him.. no. If Wilfred wanted text, then text it shall be. Gave him more time to think, anyway.

Patronage was also one of the ways new Illuminati gained holdings. Another Illuminatus wanted dependents, and didn't want to deal with the hassles of direct ownership even with servants. Wilfred was trying to turn Paul into his vassal. 'You infinite dumbass,' Paul thought to himself, laughing harder and harder. As Bugs Bunny would say, what a maroon! It was a bold plan, to be sure. Say this and this and give him this and make him think you're his friend and get heavy Protection from Dominator. Did this work for him in normal land? Just suck up to the boss's kid? 'Man, I might not be the wisest one here, but this guy must think I'm a real tard.'

Wait, could he have read that right? Could Wilfred actually have been dumb enough to use bad phrasing on a former implanted servant, who had personally killed an Illuminatus through that exact thing?

I think that you or another Illuminatus should control the politics of Venezuela directly.

No, it had to have been intentional, but okay- he would! It was done before, and the past exploits of Illuminati showed the way, with technology and oh-so-useful implants it wasn't even anything but a large project...

...which he had no tools for. His mwa-ha-ha high fell with a crash. The Dominator could not grant him resources because the Dominator had no resources to grant. A handful of Enforcers wouldn't cut it. To insinuate himself into an existing power structure, which three different Illuminati already had hands in, was beyond his resources and his ken. He needed help and lots of it. What Illuminati did he know who had that kind of thing? Jeremy? Just not enough power there. Operator and other science-types, hell no, he didn't have anyone else remotely as a friend... except maybe someone he knew who had more than enough power indeed.

The moment he stepped out the door, he was cheered, in echo, by a very pleased Duumvirate at the bottom of the stairs.

"I guess I really don't have personal servants anymore. That'll take some getting used to," Howard said with a grin.

"I actually thought that you might walk out that door wearing black," William told him, and read the reply off his face. "You almost did, didn't you!" Paul would never admit that out loud, not even to them.

"I.. ah.. I appreciate your congratulations..," Paul said awkwardly to more clapping, "but right now, I have.. business to transact with one of my.. peers." Even more clapping and cheering before the twins returned to their own business.

The fact that she could kill him in a split second notwithstanding, it was a girl's room, so he knocked first. Sarah opened it for him with a smirk and closed it behind him. Apparently she'd been expecting this.

"A regional overlord said that 'I or another Illuminatus' should control Venezuela." Sarah started laughing and offered Paul ideas he'd already figured out.

"Yes, I know he wants to mentor me. Yes, I'm sure he'll infiltrate his own guys into my operation if I let him. Not going to happen. I just want to take it with my own guys, and I have some idea how, but I need help and I need, well, guys."

"Taking the whole country by surprise against him is a waste of time and force," Sarah said. "He's expecting you to ask him for help. Do so. Play along with everything he says and let him insinuate as he pleases; then we reset the implants of his, or implant them period, which involves a decently sized effort on my part- but you get your guys from him." Paul nodded and said nothing. "Getting involved in fights between Illuminati is something we seldom do these days, and usually the exchange for this sort of thing involves a non-interference clause and an offering of resources. Existing resources, not what you get from him." She plopped down in her comfortable swivel-chair, looking at Paul with her nose slightly up-turned, projecting an air of Now, we do business.

"I don't even have- wait. This is where I'm supposed to negotiate, right? But you don't actually want anything. You're just going through the motions," Paul said. "You know I'm starting broke, and you know I couldn't possibly be dumb enough to get in your way." Sarah nodded. "Neither one of us likes bullshit, so what's the real reason you're so eager to help me?"

Sarah raised her eyebrows. "More powerful allies wasn't your first guess?" Internally, she was applauding like crazy. She had been meaning to teach him how to negotiate the right way, but this was better.

"If that's what you wanted you would simply have shown me everything yourself and I wouldn't have been sitting in there figuring out what the hell I'm trying to do." Or standing in here, desperately making educated guesses at how to deal with the freshly ennobled Sarah.

She nodded. ('Oh, he's already so good at this, even stressed half out of his mind.') "Paul, you're still their little friend. The fact that you're not engineered is only some of it." Her look darkened. "They need to grow up. Now." And it was fortunate, Sarah thought, that they acted in audacity instead of fear. Good thing too- they had no one to run scared to. They just needed to grasp it better, which meant using all their minds seriously instead of what she took as just playing. "And having little pet-friends around who will always be psychologically dependent on them is not going to help them. It might work for Jeremy but it is not working for them. This might offend you, but this obviously means that you need to grow up."

"You just called me a little pet-friend and then you think 'grow up' might be offensive?" She shrugged. "Fuck you. I just got done getting shot at and shrapneled at, and this is my fucking first time doing any of this. And I don't have your fucking reflexes, or your mental state, or what you grew up with, or any of that shit! So just.. fuck off with that. It doesn't matter what the hell I look up, I'm going in blind."

"Oh, it's always like that. I have a power symbol to get, then I'm off to go take control in person before I can send somebody to go grab your guys."

Paul almost asked what the power symbol was but decided against it. "So it's a done deal then?"

"Yes. Now get out of here." She gestured towards the door. "What if they walked in and saw us conspiring?" The question was something of a test.

"So what if they did? I'd just tell them 'Isn't that what we should be doing?'"

Sarah smiled. That wasn't the expected answer but worked very well. "For you, using your own naivete for Illuminated purposes is probably the best way to start."

"No shit. That's how I got offered a whole country in the first place," Paul said, smiling back, and shut the door.

Sarah cackled as an old witch in a teenage body, followed shortly by deep thought. Well, of course she was better than him, she was engineered and grew up here. And she'd have her power base just by walking in and taking over. But he knew what he wanted and she didn't have a clue. The only want she had as a servant- after she was lied to and implanted- was a way out, including suicide. Unimplantation was supposed to be impossible. Now that she could want again, should she just say screw loyalty and get the hell out of here or maybe...

She took a breath. That kind of emotional reaction was even more useless than usual. 'Consider the whole situation.' Of all the positions she could be in, this was by far the best one- fully trusted by the Dominator, and with an organization at her beck and call to do damn near anything in the world she wanted done. By that logic her real power was enormous, provided she could get the twins to do what she wanted, a thing they generally did anyway. And then there was the psychology- who in the Illuminati was, realistically, going to deny her anything? If she had a power base and a relationship with the Dominator, she by definition was Empress of the fucking planet!

'If the rogues don't usurp it.' Okay. Situation considered. At least she had an enemy. If all she had was love and power she'd never know what to do with it. She envied Paul; he at least was a basically conventional Illuminatus getting a conventional power base and developing a conventional will to power.

Paul, who considered himself a very unconventional Illuminatus indeed, was saying a few meaningless uncertain things to Wilfred, who went into full patronization mode almost immediately. 'You fucking twat,' Paul thought as he played along. 'Do you think I even want a father figure? Do you seriously think this shit is going to work on me?' Why, yes, he'd be more than happy to help, and even bothered telling Paul about some of his own men he was leaving in key positions. 'And I know about the rest, too, you stupid fuck.' There was actually no good reason for Wilfred to leave anyone under Paul's actual control.

Paul compared timetables; by the time Wilfred was done 'giving' it to him, Sarah's squads could easily be in place to actually take it. And she never failed. "Now I own Venezuela," Paul said aloud once Wilfred was off his screen, as if he were playing a game of Risk or Monopoly.

His head suddenly pounded as he considered what it meant for a conspiracy to control a country. Men in key places, in all walks of life. Organizations, owned wholly. All top political parties, behaving in top-down hierarchies, doing whatever their masters commanded. Less top-down organizations more subtly controlled. For a small country the number of servants would be at the very least a dozen, with hundreds of nescient sub-servants of their own, and this was just in direct control positions and not media or other social structures. The complexity was insane, but how much of it did he actually have to know to get things done and not get owned in the process? And, more importantly...

"Now what the fuck do I do with it?"

"That's an excellent question," Sarah asked, stepping around the corner. Paul'd left his door open. "Unfortunately, no one can answer that but you."

Paul sighed and rolled his head back in his seat. "Can we assume that he knows what he's doing, generally?"

"I think that's a safe assumption, inasmuch as those things exist."

"Okay, well, then, I won't tell them to change anything. The whole day to day operation, all of that, remains the same. It just belongs to me. If there's any contradictions they should do whatever benefits me, if there's something of his they relied on that they can't now, they should let me know about it."

She nodded. Good, he was conservative. A significant fraction of Illuminati would have changed everything just because they could. "Will he be informed of this operation after it's completed?"

"Let him know that we took his guys?"

"Yes. With implants there's very few ways of him finding out."

Paul thought for a moment. Pure stealth or abrupt surprise? Fuck, he felt overwhelmed just doing one country, trying to control a country while in the middle of a double-cross.. fuck that, not worth it. That was a tricky business that he really didn't understand, and odds were he'd fuck it up. "Yeah, let him know. I'll just have them stop talking to him. Make him call me." Easier that way.

"Okay. Time to give the orders."

"Huh?"

"Did you expect me to do the talking parts for you?" she asked. "You just said what needs to be done. They'll be implanted for you right off the bat. Controlling them is your business, Paul. Remember that. Now just look into the screen, greet them with your name and inform them that you control them, suspend their standing orders, not to tell Wilfred or break secrecy, and this will go into the recording." A quick, cheap goggles/earphones headpiece had become the standard for implant raids, as new or freshly-reset implants forced their subject to forever obey the next person they saw.

Paul remembered the key rules of control implants. The first and most important was that his new servants would do what he told them, not necessarily what he wanted. The second was that the implants controlled actions, not thoughts. The third was that they were reliant on the subject's brain; if the brain didn't work right, neither would the attachments. But he knew all this intuitively. He'd been on the wrong side of them, after all.

She clicked a few buttons and turned on his screen's recording function. "Hi, I'm Paul, and I'm your new master, all standing orders on you are suspended, and you may not tell Wilfred what I have done to you nor break Illuminati secrecy," he said in a crisp, clear voice. She translated that into Spanish for him, which he recited before clicking it off. "Shouldn't that 'suspend' be 'revoke'"?

"No, we don't know how he governs or what kind of orders he gave." It could be anywhere from nothing but basic laissez-faire general orders, to pages and pages' worth of secrecy concerns, if-then commands, and a slew of reporting shit. The record was rumored to be something like a 2000-page document for one unlucky servant. "There are boilerplates, but realistically, you're going to want to discover their orders and alter them yourself."

He thought it through in his head. "So I'll be waiting here the whole time, and when your guys take them, they'll have screens right there, right?" She nodded. She'd bring spare communicators for those who didn't have them. "And I'll have to be here waiting, and each one could be different, and each one of them has to be done personally, and there's like two dozen of them and maybe even more. Is that right, do I have it?" He wasn't relishing this, and it showed in his voice. Especially if he got three calls at the same time.

Sarah rolled her eyes, he had been doing so well and then he whips out this childish bullshit... "Were you under the impression that this would be somehow easy or-"

"Would you shut up about that already? I know it's not going to be fucking easy. Don't ever talk down to me, isn't that the whole point of what you just fucking said?" he snapped, sitting up. He fell back down, shaking his head, almost apologizing for that outburst. "Just.. go back into that assassin mode of yours and go do it. I'll deal with it." What else could he say?

Sarah obliged him, silently exiting the room and smiling inwardly. He was learning how to alter his own reactions to stress.

She would soon see if another Illuminatus would do the same.

Chapter 7

Sarah had always wondered why the leader of the general operatives had a plaque on his desk. It had actually been Karl Mandel's replacement for his master's, an old-fashioned bureaucrat who was drafted into the Illuminati for his pure guile. The old man believed in doing everything by the book, and had been so steadfast in this that he even had several highly-accomplished servants help write the book, the tome of information and detailed secret-operations regulations that had become one of the Illuminati's bulwarks. He had also brought some mild normal-world fripperies with him, one of which was the plaque.

Despite its being wholly out of place in an Illuminated setting, it did leave her with an easy-to-recognize symbol of power, and she brought a replacement with her, in a few ounces of gold and hardwood.

The act of taking over was very easy: She simply announced it to the servant managing the base, and if anyone wanted to challenge her, it was his funeral. She had undergone a good amount of training here, and held a great many discussions with professionals four times her age and less than a quarter as lethal. As she strode down steel halls unopposed, a few men gave subtle bows and nodded their heads, their discipline preventing them from showing their elation. Almost all of them had a certain amount of affection for her, having watched the princess of death grow up from a sweet little silent-killer into the champion butcher of men. Our Lady has returned to us. They felt she had always belonged here, and none of them liked the lie she was told- that she would be promoted directly to first level Illuminatus, the first engineered to hold the rank, after she demonstrated enough ability for it. Instead she was implanted and given to the Dominator as a present, as what Sarah suspected was an act of symbolism as much as anything else: 'You, Dominator, may have the power, but here is what we can do to engineereds.' If so, it badly failed.

Walking the halls brought back a great many memories, of her old training instructors, her old challenges, her old room, the one place she thought she was almost completely safe- and where she had been given the sleep gas to prep her for implantation. Had Karl objected? Due to the likely bullshit factor, she wouldn't bother to ask.

Karl was entirely out of contact the whole time. This was usual for him; he made a point of occasionally drafting himself for low-level missions, simply to stay in touch with the rising technology and evolving techniques of his foot soldiers, and he had opted for a refresher the moment he learned the Dominator survived. (Whether or not that was just to get himself out of the line of fire for a while was another don't-ask-and-don't-receive-bullshit question.) It also gave his direct subordinates a chance to experience greater command.

She smiled when she reached his office, a hardwood-paneled 20x20 room in the middle of a steel-and-more-steel base, a hundred feet under a normal library in the middle of downtown Paris, the nexus of a web of underground passageways and hidden spaces, everything in a quarter-mile radius owned to some extent by the assassins. She had been briefed and debriefed by him personally many times; when she was young she had to sit on a tall chair to see over his desk, sometimes looking at the plaque itself to make sure she was in the right room. Now she sat at it, replaced the plaque with her own, and waited for him, spending the time at his computer examining the current state of the general operatives' organization. (He didn't bother with a password to read the files from this terminal- if he didn't want people in this sub-organization to know something, it'd never leave his head.) She gave several nods of approval throughout. Karl had been managing wisely, and had made inquiries (fruitless, sadly) when he'd learned of the attack on the island. There was always the chance that the files she was accessing were formed of complete bullshit, but it held together very well and smelled of reality.

She spent hours familiarizing herself with chains of command and various tactical assets- damn it, if she had been carrying one of those cellphones back in that sewer, she could have had men at her side in ten fucking minutes, tops- and gave Karl a grin when he finally arrived. Cheshire Cat, he thought reflexively.

The assassin lord looked at his most powerful disciple for a moment, standing in the doorway, his expression betraying nothing. If there was one thing he knew from his time in the Illuminati, it was that radical change was the only true constant- the organization would never stagnate. Unfortunately, some changes were better than others, and although he had some feelings for her, he was much more political than his men. "The Dominator should not be this desperate." Disappointing, really. At first he was annoyed when a ten-year-old had taken the position, then gradually won over when the boy had proven more than competent. But giving a personal servant white clothes and putting her into a high-ranking position in place of a real Illuminatus was petty, polarizing, and stupid, despite recent events.

Sarah cut to the chase. "I'm not implanted anymore." Karl's brain took only instants to know what that meant.

On one side of the desk stood a man with more than twenty years of experience in the Illuminati; five of those as a servant, and after his master died of old age and manumitted him to his position (complete with desktop plaque), fifteen of them as a steadily-rising Illuminatus, growing in power with the Illuminati's enormous clandestine-operations apparatus. At his beck and call were several dozen direct operatives, with hundreds of Enforcers, and hundreds more normal operatives thinking they were working for some government agency or other. (He missed the old KGB, but since Vlad Putin started wearing white back in '91 there was no help for it and he had to pretty much remake the Second Directorate himself.) Working with other Illuminati, he could command and direct a force of thousands, far more lethal than any comparable normal force. Here stood a man with a record of kills that would make Idi Amin blanch, a man who felt absolutely nothing when committing murder, not even the satisfaction of a job well done.

On the other side of the desk, leaning back in the chair, was Sarah Mortis Dominus.

Karl felt a sense of vertigo, as if he found himself on the precipice of a ten-story building, the blood rushing out of his head. Sarah showed the faintest smile as she watched Karl go pale. 'I'm screwed,' he realized, which brought a strange feeling of elation at the entirely new experience. He'd been shot at before, gotten into and out of a number of very ugly situations, nearly killed by his master in a fit of anger when Karl didn't realize something about a mission and partially botched it, and then as a master has had to do some ugly cover-ups, and a few 'employment terminations', when his servants fucked things up. But never once was Karl Mandel, himself, royally screwed in an irrevocable way.

"What would you like me to do?" he asked her. If the answer was 'Die' he was a dead man already. If the answer was servitude then he might not even have the option of suicide; by the time he could bring one of his three concealed weapons to his brain stem, she could easily have it out of his hand. The implants hadn't been invented when he had sworn himself to the organization, and he'd always secretly wondered what it was like being controlled like that; he supposed that he'd find out instead of chicken out. Sarah, after all, would be a mistress more than competent.

"Find a new office," she answered, lobbing him his plaque. She knew the answer would confuse him further; she was enjoying it. She couldn't really afford to waste his life, and he hadn't really done very much to her other than feed her the same lie everyone else had, but she could enjoy making him squirm. When he didn't answer for lack of words, she continued, "You heard me. And make sure your name is on the door this time." That would probably be more humiliation than she really wanted to inflict on him, but it would decisively cement the transfer of power.

He started to turn. But if she wanted the operatives to know where he was, then... "Will you be assuming direct command?"

"Don't be stupid. I have more important things to do than get whined at by a bunch of balloon-headed losers who think they can solve everything with someone else's violence. That kind of crap is not my problem anymore. I'm just taking this to make sure I have it when the shit really hits the fan." Sarah wasn't expecting her own venom. Hormones, she figured. She had to go home and get laid.

Karl, for his part, didn't give a shit what her tone was. He was just glad he was retaining control. As he started walking out, Sarah said, "One more thing, Karl." It had an edge to it. He stopped dead in his tracks and turned back around. "I'd like to think that I know you well enough to know that you would never sign up for something so stupid as operations against the Dominator, and the data here agrees. I also know that if they had consulted you it all would have been carried out in a much more professional fashion. However, if I intuit wrong and you are somehow involved in this, I guarantee that you will have much more of a future if you confess everything now than if we have to find you out."

"I have no involvement in, and no clandestine knowledge of, any such operations... Mrs. Dominus," he settled on for a formal title. There was resignation in his voice; he'd wanted badly to know what was going on. None of the resources under his control had been used for anti-Dominator operations, at least not in any wise that he could detect. None of his Enforcers had gone missing, none of his vehicles had been used. The attack had been done amateurishly, panicky. She intuited right; he'd have done things much more professionally indeed.

'Shiva, that was close,' he thought as he walked out and she started typing up orders for Paul's country takeover. Karl didn't really believe in any religion, but to satisfy his occasional longings, he'd created his own. He did, in fact, worship death; for every man, woman, and child his operations killed, he believed it was not only necessary but desirable for the long-term health of the universe. His own death, however, was something he'd rather not face just yet.

He set about finding a new office- not bigger than Sarah's, but near the entrance, more conveniently positioned for everyone who wanted to talk to him in person. The days of worrying about anyone directly attacking this place were long past.

Or, he mused, recalling recent events, maybe not. Across the hall from Sarah's it would be, then.

Chapter 8

For spies and assassins, it is a very fortituous thing indeed when targets' locations, names, faces, and hierarchy are all known. Most Illuminati had at least some information about their top servants in the database, but lower-level operatives were left in the shadows, to anonymously make trouble in case of a takeover. This raid was no exception- surely Wilfred didn't tell him everything- but Wilfred had handed Paul a list, and it was accurate in what it contained. Almost all of the known targets worked regular hours in their jobs as high-ranking normals, and so were suitably diurnal for a mass 3 AM raid to catch them unawares, some right after they had staggered home from a Saturday night drinking binge.

It was most sensible to start at the top. The servants' de-facto leader was not Hugo Chavez but a normal-unknown by the name of Jacques Barrera and his wife, Carmenita. Sarah's first call that night showed him lying, face-up, on his bed, the covers pulled back with a slight bloodstain from the implantation. The first words out of his mouth were the same as he had given Sarah, in nearly-unaccented English: "Please don't involve my children in this." Their school-age children were safe asleep a few rooms down, husband and wife refraining from screaming for their sake, assassins quieter than Santa Claus.

"You're consciously excluding your children from us?" Paul sighed as Jacques nodded. The idea was somehow loathsome, but fuck it. "If that's your wish I'll respect it. Answer my questions and tell me no lies. Were you assigned to be in charge of Wilfred's continuing operations?"

"Ah- not after- when the time came, yes, but for day-to-day, no."

"Explain. Fully, so I understand." He didn't have time to listen to this, but he really didn't have time not to listen to it.

"His intention was to actually give basic control of the country to you. He has his own enemies, who he's.. surmised will have the ability to take this nation away from him. By giving it to you, he blocks their attack. I was to be left as a sleeper agent to retake the country when he felt it necessary for his ends. The rest of Wilfred's men, you see, are loyal to me and to Carmenita- and we are- were- loyal to him." That made sense. Servant hierarchies beat dealing with them all yourself.

"I'm implanting all of them as well. Your old master messed with someone he can't handle," he said on a whim, smiling. "Move the screen so your wife can see." Jacques might have been resigned to his fate, but Carmenita looked like terrified hell. "Give me the names and locations of all of Wilfred's Venezuelan servants not on this list."

This took a while, with the two of them consulting everything from email to a genuine paper Rolodex. Paul found himself in contact with Karl Mandel for the first time, who Sarah had assigned the task of new target acquisition. Paul, new at this, was slow and trying to be methodical; Karl was fast, methodical, and immediately helped correct any of Paul's omissions and mistakes in acquiring needed raid-aiding information. 'That was Sarah's tutor? God damn. No fucking wonder.' Paul found himself dealing with two new acquisitions, listening to two voices at the same time, his fingers flying between the 'mute' for one contact and the other. It felt like juggling chainsaws. How the hell did the rest of the Illuminati do it? (Paul would later learn that this sort of mass acquisition was something most Illuminati would have their own team for, not try to do themselves even with support, instead implanting some servants to other servants and resetting them later.)

He found a moment to give the husband and wife their final orders. "I order you two to retake your place as servant leaders, and things are to be ran as they were before Wilfred's 'gift'. Understand that I'm giving you broad discretion in operations. Use your judgment for my benefit. The screens will be our points of contact unless I establish more. Don't try to avoid me." The servants looked at each other as Paul said that, and he realized he committed an operational safeguard but a social faux pas. Avoid their new master and be left adrift? Any servants worth the name would rather gnaw their own arm off. "I'm inexperienced," Another meaningful look, this time no shit, "and you're implanted. If there's something you feel I should know, you're ordered to tell me as soon as secrecy permits."

"Wilfred will seek revenge," Carmenita immediately said, right before her husband. "He may not react immediately. But he does not forgive slights. He may make attempts on our lives." It was Paul's turn to give the meaningful look: what, really? Of all the things, that was what they were worried about?

"Did you notice the people who implanted you? Those are from the assassins' organization. Which is now run by Sarah Mortis Dominus, you might have recognized her." Their eyes widened. "If he tries, Sarah and I will turn him to soup." Or Paul may be expected to do it himself by that point, but he wanted to instill confidence. His screen informed him of another implantation. "I have more new servants to deal with now. We'll talk later." He was about to order them to try to get some sleep, but that's about as counterproductive as implant commands get. He clicked off instead ('setting one chainsaw down') to focus on the other operations.

Almost all of them went as smoothly. It had been so long since Sarah was on a real mission herself, and since she commanded the operation this time she didn't have to worry about someone else's stupid orders getting in the way. Glorious! Sarah enjoyed the thrill of silently leaping from rooftop to rooftop in some cases and remotely sabotaging normal-make motion detectors in others, pure efficiency and purpose her way of showing off to her astonished team what she was for, why she was created. Illuminati symbolism be damned, black was her color.

One mansion-owner had his own private security; they never knew their employer had been raided at all. One particularly paranoid man, implanted already, had a suicide injector that he wore beneath his hair and a cubic centimeter of neurotoxin slammed into his brain the moment he detected, with his many sensors, that someone with Illuminated know-how was trying to sneak in. (No one, not even Karl or Sarah, was reasonably expecting something like that. These servants lived among normals in residential districts, some rich and some poor.) Another man noticed early, freaked out badly, and managed to give one of Sarah's agents a flesh wound (silenced pistol; at least he regarded secrecy as important) before Sarah took him down herself. Once he realized who, what, and why, he calmed down; being implanted scared him, but one of Wilfred's existing foes terrified him a great deal more for reasons Paul didn't particularly care about at the moment.

By the time everything was over, Sarah and Karl were approving of a mostly smooth operation, an anonymous agent was cursing himself for not seeing the gun until it was too late, various servants were in various states ranging from 'Oh fuck, that chamito's going to get us all killed' to 'No more Wilfred, thank God'. Paul found himself with a shitload of names and positions to memorize, and all he wanted was to go to bed. So he did.

His best friend's voice: "Hey, Paul!" Oh come on, already? It was light out, but he didn't even dream.

"Whatever it is, I don't want it," Paul replied, mostly to his pillow, just loud enough for engineered ears to hear him. He ran a chunk of the world! Couldn't he at least sleep in?

"You don't want breakfast?" That voice again, as if it was just ten-year-old Paul sleeping over at nine-year-old Billy Bohecker's house, and Billy would eat three times Paul's breakfast before the two of them would play together on the weekend before they did homework, Paul sitting on Billy's shoulders, amazed when he could not only walk carrying him like that but run fast, which ended with both of them promising to Billy's mom not to reveal that he could do that.

But that was before they found out that Billy didn't really have parents but did have a twin brother.

Paul sat up. His head felt like it was full of not-quite-depleted uranium, and it took him a second to realize the color swap of his room. The silent servants had come in overnight and changed the contents of his closet and all of the furniture except the bed he was laying on. He had slept with his suit on, and didn't bother changing; instead he meandered downstairs, the smell hitting his nose.

Sarah smiled at him over her mighty slab of bacon, not in smugness but in deep satisfaction. Paul didn't get it. She'd just been on the business end of his night from hell and it was almost as if she was thanking him for it. What was she so happy about? He was about to ask her when she slept, but he knew the answer: anywhen she got the chance. "Forget assassinations. You are the goddess of catnapping." She laughed at that, smiling even wider.

"So Paul, how'd you like your first day of Illumination?" William asked, smiling as well. Paul flipped him off in response. William looked Paul over- haggard, messy, uncut hair, bloodshot eyes, downcast, worried, and with a great weight on his shoulders. He almost said something sarcastic about respective worries and responsibilities, but then again Paul was only human.

"Is there anything I forgot?" Paul asked, plopping down on the chair like he weighed a hundred tons.

"I doubt it. What were your orders?" Sarah replied.

"I gave Jacques broad discretion, told him to use his judgment for my benefit, and told him to tell me if there's anything I need to know."

"Then definitely not. He'd tell you, wouldn't he?" Paul ordered a servant to use his judgment for Paul's benefit? She liked that phrase. Quick, general, and all-encompassing, yet loose and non-restrictive. Didn't Howard use something like that on her at one point? She'd have to use that one herself.

"You're right. I just want people who know what they're doing to be actually running things. And I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."

"If it wasn't bad politics I'd put you to fourth level right now for that," Howard replied after swallowing. "Because that puts you above those who don't know what the fuck they're doing, but insist on actually running things anyway."

Sarah left for a few seconds and came back with a tall cup full of brown fluid in her hand, which she placed in front of Paul. "I wondered why we had any of this stuff. Drink."

He looked up at the cup. She definitely wouldn't poison him, but... "What's in it?"

"You don't recognize the smell? You just took a South American country, you should get used to this."

"Oh, it's just coffee." Some half-formed memory told him it was a drink for adults, and the engineereds never touched it, but he chugged it in one long gulp. The aroma and deep bitter taste kicked him like Juan Valdez's mule and the caffeine would kick him again in a few minutes.

"And a little bit of coca leaf extract." He perked up suddenly- she gave him what?! "Chill out. It's a tiny dose. Your servants are probably chewing on five times that much right now."

"They chew it.. I didn't know that, and you want me to learn stuff like that," Paul figured out immediately.

"The drugs down there would be one of the first things."

"If he starts snorting Bolivian marching powder, I'm blaming you," William said offhand. Howard, who never heard the term but knew of all kinds of chemical ways to get Bolivians or anyone else to march, started laughing hard.

"Hey-o for Llello," Paul joked, pronouncing the Spanish ll's properly.

"That needs to be a song," William replied before diving back into his food.

Paul waited for Wilfred's call all day, doing the research Sarah suggested (everybody used coca in that part of the world; it was only when it was refined that it became a problem), trying to relax screwing around playing games with the twins and their dogs, now obligated to step off-screen when they got a call from some Illuminatus requesting arbitration. (Having another Illuminatus by the decision-making Duumvirate's side was more bad politics.) The Duumvirate had proclaimed that the accusatory use of the R-word would inevitably cause somebody to die, either the accuser or the accused, and probably a lot more people as well. Implants would be used to verify and hunt the rest of them down. Normally, everyone tried to trick the Dominator, it was part of the business; but the Levels had apparently gotten the message here.

When it finally did come, he took it upstairs. Answering this one on the Duumvirate's comfy couch wasn't quite what he was going for.

Wilfred's ruddy face, all stern and frowny. Would it get frownier, or shocked? Only one way to find out. "Paul, there is something concerning our agreement we need to talk about," he said in that increasingly grating voice.

For an instant, Paul felt the faintest twinge of now-I'm-in-trouble fear, swiftly washed away by 'This guy can't hurt me. Very few of them can. I'm wearing white. That means I can do anything I damned well want, proven by the fact that I am doing just that.' A smile broke out on his face. "An agreement? I don't recall signing anything," he said with a smirk. "Are you sure you have the right Paul?"

"I don't know what you've done, but I've tried contacting three of the men I have working with you" ('With, not for, fuck you,' Paul thought) "and I haven't gotten responses from any of them. Would you mind telling me what is going on?" Dear God, that paternal voice was starting to grate.

"Oh, that's nothing. Have you tried to contact the men working for you that you thought I didn't know about?" Wilfred half-opened his mouth, falling off his high horse. Paul exploded, his voice cracking more than once and his eyes getting slightly more damp than he would have liked. "Do you think that I'm dumb enough to believe that you'd just hand me a country in exchange for my trust? Great idea, give some kid pretend-control and get a sub-Illuminatus, lots of respect from your friends, 'cause you've got a free in-road to the Dominator! How about none of the fucking above!"

"If you didn't know who you know-"

"If I didn't know who I know, fatass, you wouldn't have called me in the first place! So fuck off!" Wilfred stared at him, almost said something, but clicked off as Paul stared him down. If I wanted a father figure, asslicker, I'd go find my real father and implant him.

Laughter broke out to his side, and he swiveled his chair to look at the twins. "Are you sure you have the right Paul?" Howard imitated. "I've got to use that. And with us it's even worse."

"You know what else we can do?" William started, grinning. "When they refuse to take responsibility for their failures? We just blame each other for smacking them down. 'Well, I would help you, but this other Dominator...'" Even louder laughter. "Your voice just died on you. And you obviously didn't plan your words."

"I actually planned too much. I thought of all these things I could say and so I never said any of them." The twins gave him a been-there look of understanding.

"That was an awesome finisher, though," William continued. "He wouldn't have called you."

"So true," Howard said, nodding. "But if you researched him, you could have continued with the fact that if he didn't know who he knew, he wouldn't be in a position to talk to you at all."

"Wait, you checked up on him?" Double eyeroll- after that much smart, please no stupid.

"He's obviously trying to find a side road to us," Howard reminded him. "Think how we take that shit. Especially now."

"Wait, isn't that what always happens?" Paul asked, laying back in the white velvet. Damn, this chair needed a footrest- ahh, there it is. If he was really going to be an Illuminatus he needed a smug look, and he felt it easier to be smug in a more relaxed position. And holy fuck was this the most comfortable chair ever. He felt like he could lay in it for days, and that was all he wanted to do about now. Anxiety and panic were starting to get annoying. As a servant he had done a moderate amount of serving, and a great deal of passive learning, game playing, and lounging around. He was starting to deeply miss that.

"Paul, in case you have short-term amnesia today, we are in a mood for killing people," William said. "Anyone taking risks to attract our attention is either foolhardy or has something serious up his sleeve."

"What- what the hell? I thought they all had something-", Paul started.

"They do," Sarah interrupted, appearing out of nowhere as usual, behind the twins. "You think, 'big shit just went down, there's a threat to the established order, everybody better pull together and stop the bullshit for a while until we put down the threat'. And sure, that's completely right, that's the sensible response." She rolled her eyes a bit, shaking her head. "Not gonna happen, guys. The first thing that they thought of when you said calling people rogues would get somebody killed? 'How can I make this one guy accuse this other guy of it without it getting traced back to me?' To everybody in here, it's the end of the fucking world. To them? Not so much. It's just another plot among so many." The twins looked at her with a degree of understanding and horror. "They hate you because you don't give them what they want, but they support you because you don't give the other guy what he wants. Fairness doesn't mean a damn thing to them." She tried to hold it back, but couldn't hide the bitterness.

"Or to you," Howard said.

"That place was mine. Mine by birth, mine by popular authority, mine by promise. Mine by nobody got in my way."

"Except for all the people who are going to see you still with us, and say 'The Dominator gave it to her.'", William replied.

She stopped her frustrated look- he was surely right, hell, that was Karl's first assumption- and pantomimed looking at her wrist instead. She hadn't worn a timepiece there for many years. "I understand, Dominator. I will begin caring in half-past I don't give a fuck."

"But you take one," Howard said, stepping towards her.

"Finally," she said, and in engineered-movement instants they were in the twins' bedroom, leaving Paul on his swivelchair, blinking. What exactly did they do in there, anyway? There was one appropriate hole, and two sticks. Did she take it in other holes, use her hands, did they take turns, what? With engineered strength there were positions they could take that normals wouldn't dare try. Maybe it was better if he didn't know. He had things to check up on- make sure that Wilfred didn't have long-term traps or go apeshit or something- then he was going to take the longest rest he possibly could before duty pulled him away.

As it turned out, duty was existent only in limited amounts, as a conversation with Jacques and Carmenita confirmed. Most country-owning Illuminati took the time to micromanage somewhat, choosing policies and laws and altering the way they wanted their chosen nation to behave. Forms of government, behaviorism, making people believe this or that; that was what they cared about and why most of them had gotten in the Illuminati in the first place.

But Paul didn't really care what form of government normals lived under, and so gave his servants nearly total reign over policy, deciding only to step in when they needed extra coordination or immediate orders. So long as things remained stable and his forces remained in power, who gave a fuck about communism or capitalism? Venezuela was socialist, so he figured he'd leave it that way, but whether or not free enterprise or collectivism were the chosen ideology meant little to him. Illuminati had a long history of fighting each other with ideology, using various plots to take over each other's power bases- the Russian Revolution had been about this- but that was before the modern institution was fully structured, the Dominator enthroned, the organization's focus heavily altered from the original vision of Adam Weishaupt. World War 2 had opened the eyes that World War 1 didn't. These days the major industrialized regions' owners limited their conflicts to minor socioeconomic issues and all the direct power fighting was left for the less-developed regions of the world.

Like South America.

So defense was his immediate concern. There was no question of someone looking for ways to depose his hold; that was just what Illuminati did, powerlust above all, even though most would be scared out of it by the people he knew. There was a difference between 'disputes' and 'fair competition', although the line was blurry; they were supposed to be able to play the power game without interference from the assassins' organization or the Dominator, but 'supposed to' never meant a whole lot to an organization that could alter the rules of the world. A suitably power-hungry normal would do anything for a chance at his uniquely-privileged position.

And here he was, not really caring about normal political power in the slightest, but simply taking what he needed to be accepted as an Illuminatus. Why? Why didn't he care? Then he remembered what was really important- the twins, their ideal, the kids at Northberg and the engineered future. That was what this was all about. His own power was just a tool to that end.

The resulting contempt for his new peers came easily. Space-filling wastrels, con men and cheats, small-dicked weaklings, petty tyrants with the worst blend of superiority and inferiority complexes, and sad, desperate attention seekers whose path from fourth level to third meant so much to them that they were willing to destroy each other, and countless normals, in what they knew to be a silly game, solely for their own gratification. These were the people who ran so much of the world, and Paul found himself wishing for their swift demise.

Chapter 9

Time passed.

What had been fast, hard paranoia turned into a slow simmer. Facing a dead end in all available investigation, the twins couldn't start randomly raiding anyone who they thought might be a rogue, because that would make more enemies than it discovered and lead directly to what they were trying to prevent; the rogues couldn't attack again because (most Illuminati figured) they risked discovery and almost certainly didn't have the materiel to make it effective against powerful autocannons, fusion lasers, and engineered reflexes. Cold war. Zugzwang.

Being in an indefinite Mexican standoff was mildly frustrating, but the twins reminded themselves that time was on their side. Every day, the rogues grew older and the young engineereds grew up. As biological immortals, all they had to do was wait, and no fusion laser nor engineered fist would solve the problem for them, but rather heart disease, kidney failure, and brain cancer.

Unless. And there was always an unless. Unless the enemies had their own generation, raised in secret away from Northberg. Unless the enemies were developing their own superweapons, out of sight of the Consortium. Unless the enemies had found a way to make themselves immortal and would come back for more in fifty years, long after the End of Secrecy had been declared and everyone thought they were a distant memory. A Sword of Damocles above the heads of those fast enough to dodge it.

But in the absence of any concrete moves by either side, it became less and less relevant on a day-to-day basis. The twins occasionally requested that Illuminati tighten certain things up to stop rogues from misusing resources, some of the "I can help you" promises turned out to be real help for security in specific settings, and nobody ever started the firestorm of accusations, even anonymously. The two-as-one nature of the Duumvirate was accepted without further protest, with some joking from Levels about how they'd be able to deal with twice the bullshit now. It didn't turn out that way; the twins made all their decisions together and the middle-aged soul manipulators got used to being told what to do by two white-haired preteens instead of just one.

The jet arrived sooner than expected, less than three weeks after they had requested it. Daniel and his father were, as usual, already working on new prototype parts and had originally intended to build something much more grandiose in scope. With the Dominator making formal demands, they immediately crammed down their development and pieced together what they had. The process was an arduous blend of computer simulations, neural-network analysis, Enforcer work, and the truly hard part: testing, testing, testing. Nothing short of absolute perfection would suffice, as if the jet failed on the Duumvirate at a critical moment, the Westhams would be no more and no one would mourn. Eventually they had something worthy of the Duumvirate, Daniel doing Mach 4 barrel rolls with glee before he delivered it to the twins personally. As a combination of luxury craft and deadly fighter, it was similar to their original, but larger, faster, and with more powerful and more focused lasers, with three redundant fusion chambers instead of just one. The seating area was larger as well; a dozen people could be placed in the back before it started getting crowded. They'd send future iterations of their craft to the Duumvirate in the future, but this would serve for now, and they made smaller jet-helicopter counterparts for many younger Levels, Paul and Sarah among them.

The twins agreed that if they were waiting for something to happen, it was probably the best waiting in the history of mankind; they lived on an island paradise with their girlfriend and best friend, ruling the world and doing more or less whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. When they got it into their heads to see the Aurora Borealis up close, they went ahead and did it. When they felt like jetskiing in stormy waters at two hundred miles an hour, their custom-made fusion jetskis were delivered in less than a week from the (now very popular) Westham family. When they wanted any sort of media, they downloaded it in seconds if it wasn't already on their database. When they wanted a movie or game that didn't exist, they suggested an outline to one of the more artistically creative Illuminati and had it in a couple of weeks, with the item being placed on the database as "Dominator-requested!" And, sometimes, when they just wanted to relax, they unfurled a gigantic white towel on the beach and laid there, the four of them swapping anecdotes and laughing at life's daily absurdities. All four had ongoing duties and responsibilities, but generally the days were just packed.

June fifteenth was Paul's thirteenth birthday, and because he was having his party here on the Dominator's island, he was able to invite as many young Illuminati as he wanted and have them drop everything to attend. For fun, the twins and Sarah decided to be somewhere else for most of it; since most of the kids who had showed up really just wanted to talk to the Duumvirate and not the Duumvirate's normal-born fifth-level friend, a few of them were left squirming as they tried to explain away what they were searching for. Paul, smiling in the hypocrisy, explained to them that the personage of the Dominator was not anyone's political tool. Some of the smarter ones truthfully said that they wanted to get to know Paul better, and they played conversational cat-and-mouse as the kids subtly looked for ways to get on the twins' good side. Most of them decided it was a good idea to try to be Paul's friend as well, even if he was just some elevated normal. Paul played the gracious host and the beach was filled with smiling, laughing kids, with a number of beach volleyball games being played. Jeremy's servant played this time, as he didn't last year; he turned out to be better than he thought, even if he got generally demolished. The twins and Sarah walked in while they were eating dinner, and suddenly there was a tumult of greetings; the twins asked how everyone liked Paul's thirteenth birthday party, and refused to answer anything relating to themselves, to their amusement and the attendees' great vexation. All in all, it was great fun, and Paul made a number of real friends.

Summer turned to autumn, and autumn to winter (Sarah, at fifteen, didn't do the birthday thing); a hundred miles from the Oregon coast, all they got for a climate difference was a slight chill with rain and more rain. They didn't mind at all. What normals would consider dreary, they just considered another part of their paradise, climbing trees and sitting on top of the central cliff even when it poured. They watched the American election fiasco with mild amusement, as the de-facto owner of America, Donald Simpson, played with the political system, convincing normals that their votes actually mattered. The twins had more fun discovering that rocket-powered sleds really could be made to work without killing their riders.

They rang in the twenty-first century, and although the Illuminati didn't care for the Christian calendar very much, it was still a reason to celebrate as the organization now spanned four centuries. They'd come a long way from their initial, silly rituals and desperate, often-unsupported normal manipulation. In the modern era, controlling the world had become a science, they no longer had much to worry about, and having flourished so well in the twentieth century they had so many things to be happy for. If it wasn't for the existence of rogues (presumed; no one had heard from them in the past eight months), it would have been perfect.

Winter gave up to spring, and finally a full year had elapsed since the group was unimplanted. The twins joked about chronicling everything they had done in that year; it would have been utterly impossible to write and interminable to read. There was the time one of the island's secret servants utterly fucked up and was standing in the center room dumbfounded as the twins came back in unexpectedly; they told him to "Return to your trainer in shame!" while laughing. There was the time Fido got it into his doggy head to sit at the table; the twins indulged him although he failed to learn table manners and most of his meal ended up on the floor. (To Fido's credit, he never tried it again.) There was a convoluted five-way round-robin of holdings wants and needs, and the twins finally managed to get all five of the unwitting participants to make a mutual agreement. There was the time Sarah had two Illuminati trying to hire her to kill each other's gangs of Russian thugs; she considered starting a bidding war, but realized that technically the requests weren't in direct opposition and so she killed both groups off. And it took almost the whole year for Paul to finally, truly learn to take Wilfred's place.

Then the twins had their own thirteenth birthday, on which they got a variety of useful presents, most notable being Daniel's gift of fusion laser/shotguns, the latter molded on as a sort of grenade launcher to the former, direct microfusion initiation replacing the older plutonium. Since both triggers were next to each other, they could each wield two for maximum devastation. All they didn't have on their birthday was Paul with them; he couldn't be invited because he couldn't possibly keep up with what they had planned. Their friendship was solid enough for them to simply tell it like it was and for him to simply accept it; they were engineereds, after all, and if what they had in mind was a globe-spanning series of adventures in a variety of bizarre and unlikely locations including Tierra del Fuego and the inside of a dormant volcano, he had no business trying to tag along or discourage them. They did what they felt like doing. That was the whole point.

And when they decided that they wanted to drop in on one of their friends unannounced, they did that, too.

Chapter 10

Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Jorgensen leaned back on his reclining couch and perused a popular novel, some of his long blond hair hanging over the back of the seat, glad he'd never need reading glasses again. His eyes were still growing, but when they started to blur at any distance he simply went to Northberg to get them repaired, like everyone else in the Illuminati. Three years ago he would have marveled at the prospect, but these days he wondered how he got along without it.

The novel in question was 1984.

"Reading an old enemy's book, I see," a very familiar voice asked to his left. Eric Blair (George Orwell) was, in fact, a traitor to the Illuminati. Before the Second World War, the Illuminati had far less real power than it did in the twenty-first century, and Blair lived long enough to publish something he thought would help undermine their authority, by showing men what may happen under total control. Like many things in history, it seems far sillier today than it did then.

Jeremy Jorgensen didn't need to turn his head and look at them- they could practically read his face from behind- but did so as a gesture of respect. They'd decided to have fun by simply showing up uninvited and walking in, Jeremy's Enforcers opening the door for them. Few Illuminati, especially after last year, would deny the Dominator access to anywhere unless they had a very good reason, because of both formal statute and physical power. It was a common-sense order that many hundreds had given: if the Dominator wants something, give it to him, and if he wants to enter somewhere, let him the fuck in! Jeremy's own personal servant was an exception because of Jeremy's unusual insistence that he have no standing orders of any kind, meaning that Joey would happily let them in on his own initiative.

Jeremy wondered if it would have been more embarrassing had the twins walked in on him when he was naked, instead of when he was wearing comfortable white shorts and a Duumvirate-logo T-shirt. Jeremy wasn't quite sure when the Real News-derived logo had become so popular in the organization, but almost every teenager had at least one, and he wore one of his regularly.

"So how many times have you read this?" the twin to his right asked. Jeremy recognized the look- 'I'm going to teach you something, so listen up'- instantly, even though it had been about two years since the Dominator had personally given him his unique brand of pedagogy. He- they- had a bit more height, strength, and a slightly deeper voice since they last did this, but they gave both the impression of eternal youth and that they had all the wisdom of the ages, so that two, five, a thousand years would make little if any difference. Both statements were backed up by scientific fact. "And where's Joey?" the one on the left added.

"This would be my third. Joey's in the basement doing weapons testing." With no retrovirus, a perceived need for intensely personal defense, and many Illuminati being of limited physical strength, there was an obvious demand for some weapons to be carried and used by people you wouldn't expect to be combatants, as a last resort. Unfortunately, as the events of last year had shown, a lot of things could end up at last resorts, so the people who would be carrying these weapons would do so with the knowledge that they just might have to pull them out against a far superior set of combatants. On the bright side, it gave a great opportunity for a pair of normal-born fourteen-year-old boys to play with them.

"So how many mistakes of the Party's do you recognize?" the one on the right asked, casually flipping over the couch and plopping at Jeremy's right, looking over his shoulder, as the other sat to his left. Jeremy realized the signal honor he was getting. Sitting in the center of the Duumvirate symbolized that he was the most powerful person in the world at the moment, and the twins didn't give the privilege to anyone except their dearest friends.

"Quite a few, but I wasn't focusing on that. I was thinking about how they're like us in controlling the perceived opposition."

"Yes, but they do it inefficiently," the one sitting to his left said. It was probably Howard, with the familiar pedagogy, but Jeremy knew he could never be sure. "Think about it. All that waste for each dead prisoner. They disobeyed their own logic. They could have wasted him and wished him out of existence." Jeremy nodded- he'd seen it too, but took it as just a literary phantom. "All that bullshit about power being attained through someone else's suffering." All three of them took that part as a vulgarity, almost a personal affront. "And that whole nonsense about doublethink- the changing of allies, the bullshit about believing two thoughts at once. Wholly unnecessary. Jeremy, how many of us are there?" the one on his right asked.

"Two of you. But there might as well be one, since you do the same things and agree with each other all the time. It's just more familiar for us to think Dominator instead of Duumvirate, you've declared yourselves to mutually have the one position, and of course all the old formal documents still say 'Dominator', and the position is still called that. It's habit, especially since we can't even identify you by first name. Why don't you let people tell the difference, anyway?" What Jeremy had in mind was an 'H' and 'B' embroidered somewhere near their heart- an 'H' and 'W', he mentally corrected himself. He had a hard time thinking of Howard's brother and former servant as anything but 'Billy'.

"Just a proclivity," the one on the right said with a smile. "It adds to the mystique. My point is that you know what the truth is, and you don't deny it, you don't say the truth is anything else, you simply move around it for reasons of convenience. Suppose the Operator royally fucked up and there was a huge bulbous growth on the end of our noses." Jeremy smiled in spite of himself. The idea of the genetically refined Dominator having a deformity of any sort was humorously absurd. "You would notice it- you couldn't help but notice it, and if asked, of course you'd say you notice it- but you wouldn't stare at it. You'd ignore it, for politeness. Sure, it'd be a running joke, and everyone would constantly poke fun at it, but in a very real sense, eventually it would be as if it wasn't there at all."

The one on the left started speaking as soon as his brother finished- another truth to ignore, Jeremy thought. "This is where Orwell is wrong, and I don't think he's being intentionally wrong to make a better story. You don't make people believe two contradictory things at the same time. You don't try to edit reality. That's insane. What you do is make it so that it doesn't matter what the truth is. This is why we don't need to lie about the news or about politics."

"I thought that was just because we control both sides of everything that's newsworthy."

"It is, but that's only part of it. Any move we make towards control is going to leave some kind of evidence. There's just no way around it. All laws are public in most civilized countries, and there's no real way we could make it otherwise. So what we do is we put up stuff that doesn't matter as if it does matter, and move the public stuff that really matters to the back."

"I was wondering why you report it at all." This was actually disheartening to hear for the twins. Howard had been preaching Advanced Recursive Encompassization- full control of the social results of what the Illuminati did, while they did it- since he took the reins of power. Nice in theory, great speech fodder, devastatingly difficult to find Illuminati able to carry it out.

"Because we need to raise the stink as well. Now, this is utterly unlikely, but let's say that we got really ambitious tomorrow in, say, the United States of America, and built a really big facility making mind control implants with the eye-in-triangle symbol all over everything in the industrial part of a city." Jeremy couldn't help but laugh. "Now, what do you think we'd do in the city papers and on the local networks? Would we put it on Page One, 'Industrialists who believe they control the world building huge facility in middle of city!' Of course not. Would we not report it at all? No, because people would get suspicious. What we do is just lower the importance a notch, maybe a small blurb on a few pages, a few paragraphs, 'Neurotechnology innovators open up new facility downtown', with some volunteer requests in the classifieds." Jeremy laughed even harder, and the twins chuckled along with him. "This is obviously an extreme example to make a point, but you get the idea. News of that nature we have to report, since it's big, it's obvious, and it can affect a lot of people. A lot of our real operations just get passed along in thick bureaucratese, available to anyone who wants them.. but who the hell would? It doesn't matter, it's pointless to read through, and since the world and its politics are all already being dealt with anyway by people with suitably different political opinions, who cares? They might argue over stuff we've set up, but usually the masses just say 'Let them deal with it.' and go about their business, and they vote for people who serve us when the time comes. It's true what happens, it's true that the laws are passed, it's true that who they elect gets into nominal power, but it doesn't matter. We've already set up the game board and determined the players. They don't realize that anything has been taken away from them, and in an important way, not much has."

"Which one's better?" the one on his right asked. "To focus on controlling everyone's mind absolutely, even your own Inner Party, or to make it so that the real happenings in the world simply don't matter, are controlled by things they know they can't really affect anyway, and can be ignored as part of everyday life, or argued about to make them feel like they're accomplishing something? Remember.. oh, the American presidential election?" Although his residence was in England, Jeremy and his servant grew up together in American suburbia.

"I don't want to. It's not my department, and I've got enough complicated crap to deal with." The difference between ignorance and apathy: Don't know, and don't care. But Jeremy was good at what he did, and knew more about European social balance and imbalance, particularly in relation to the recent twisting of Western-Islamic relations, than the twins ever would.

"See? Even you don't want to think about things that don't directly matter to you. Why would you? The only difference is that you're one of us so you know your group's interests are being served, if not yours personally. To the masses, they don't know, and they think it does matter to them, so they argue. They can't do anything else, and even if they could, it really wouldn't matter. Let them argue. Let them fight, let them whine, let them ignore what doesn't matter to them and pontificate over what does. Even the highest levels of normal government not controlled by us can whine and pull this way and that. These votes are illegal, that party is trying to steal the election, and of course, the servants are given instructions to do exactly that. We haven't made anyone do any doublethink, we haven't told any direct lies. Any normal who knows who to contact can get the information and write articles, even whole books about it. It's not bullshit rewritten over and over like Winston's Ministry of Truth does. It all actually happened."

"Now this is something that Orwell was right about. There's a part in this that the best books tell you what you already know. I've known all of this in fragments, the whole business of recursive encompassization, the idea that they shouldn't affect anything.. but I've never thought about it like this. And here I was thinking you were going to start with some sort of defense advice," Jeremy said with a slight smile.

"What advice could we possibly give you?" the one on the left asked. "We've let you have a larger force for a reason. I hope those weapons Joey's testing can save your ass in a pinch."

"I hope I don't ever have to find out. I better keep my ass away from pinches."

It was out instantly: "Better watch which third levels you talk to, then," and Jeremy exploded laughing. Some Illuminatus had at one point decided to pinch the butt of his female colleague, who took it very poorly indeed. There are no sexual harassment lawsuits in the Illuminati. The resulting holdings-stealing, servant-manipulation, disinformation-and-backstabbing, full-on war ended up in front of the Duumvirate and in the Real News and was a source of jokes for months.

Jeremy, like his Duumvirate, had an elevator in his home, although it wasn't quite as good; they could hear it coming. It opened to reveal Joey, who blinked in surprise on seeing the twins. He and his master looked somewhat similar, but Joey had a slimmer face, dark hair, no freckles, and the color-inverted version of his master's clothes.

"You're hurt!" Jeremy exclaimed. There were a number of purplish marks on his servant's right arm, just below the sleeve of his shirt.

"What.. oh, damn. I didn't know I actually had bruises."

"Lift up your shirt," Jeremy commanded him, and Joey exposed some uglier bruises on his chest.

"Oh, woah. I guess we're going to have to tell Barnum to go halfway back to the drawing board," Joey said.

"Maybe, if whoever's firing it doesn't realize he's about to break his own ribs! Damn, Joey!" Jeremy shouted.

"If he'd put his eye against it, you'd need another servant," the twin on the right said. That was accepted as good humor by everyone in the room.

"I don't get it! I actually fired a few shots to make sure it wouldn't do that before I opened up.," Joey protested.

Most boys Jeremy's age could never have figured it out, which is why they're not in the Illuminati. "And then you set it to full-auto, and it was probably vibrating like crazy in your hands and smacking repeatedly against your chest, wasn't it?"

"Yeah.. it didn't start moving upward or anything, though." Illuminated weapons are balanced specifically to avoid that problem; the recoil always goes directly backward and weapon jiggle is usually minimized. By putting the bullets in a straight line, the increased accuracy actually makes the machinegun-type weapons easier to dodge. (That fact is not disclosed by the engineereds who discover it firsthand.)

"The recoil springs didn't have enough chance to push themselves back. Make sure that's the case, and if it is, let Barnum know to give it an option to automatically slow the fire rate after a certain point, and it'll be okay." As implanted servants do, Joey immediately left to obey, intuitively knowing that the engineering difficulties inherent in making such an option wouldn't be balked at by the manufacturer, because it was known to be possible, and so it would be done. "And don't hurt yourself this time!" Jeremy commanded before the doors closed.

"Is this a common problem?" Jeremy asked, after he was sure Joey was out of earshot.

"You mean having a servant so devoted that he subconsciously ignores his own safety and injuries?" one of the twins asked. Jeremy nodded.

"It's not too rare," the other one said. "Generally the solution is a standing order not to get themselves hurt unless it's in your direct defense. But in this case, all you really have to do is make sure he understands where on your hierarchy of holdings he sits." It didn't need to be said: the top. Without question. If an Illuminatus's house, car, or jet gets annihilated in an attack, oh well. Shit happens. Get a squad of Enforcers and maybe a good Enforcer-wielder (an informal servant designation, occasionally applied to some lower levels) to acquire or build a new one. Lose resources to something ugly, like plots or weird normal-world shit? Hey, call in the Dominator if it's appropriate, marshal your forces, get 'em back or an equivalent. Frustrating shit still happens. But good sentient personal servants are utterly irreplaceable, and Joey's love and loyalty made him one of the very best. Leaving emotional concerns aside, even if there were no such things as nerve-controlled prosthetics or superior medical technology, it would, in several ways, be worse for Jeremy to lose Joey than to lose his own arm.

"By the way, there's an assault cannon that's a pretty efficient Enforcer killer. Is this a variant?" one of the twins asked, in a slightly suspicious tone. Jeremy knew why they were suspicious, and all three of them knew how the conversation would go.

"Yes. Better. Wider spread, faster and heavier pellets, much lower profile, recoil system is a beast if he can make it work right. And I can hear it in your voice, you think it's for use against you. It's not. The manufacturer is Barnum himself and he swears he won't let an enemy get a hold of these if he can possibly help it."

"Related to P.T. Barnum?" the twin on the right asked, and Jeremy finally told them apart.

"Yes, William," Jeremy said, smiling. Howard wouldn't recognize the name as important. "Jeff Barnum is P.T.'s grandson. Jeff's dad promised himself to be an even bigger con artist than his father- he was so big he ended up here. Jeff can't manipulate worth a shit- his words- but he knows his engineering."

"Handing these out as goods is asking for Finagle," Howard said.

"Well, what else can we do? It's not like he can not make them," Restricting nuclear technology was one thing, but trying to deny Illuminati personal defense would lose the Duumvirate too many friends. "and he obviously can't put tracking devices in them either." Tracking devices can be tracked by anyone, after all, and anything RFID-related gleefully taken apart and misused. His best hope if he wanted that, Jeremy thought, would be to stamp encoded, nanoscale, serial numbers on them. And take them off the corpses...

"So he can't possibly help it if some friend-of-a-friend decides to trade his new toys in a reasonably fair exchange," William said, eyebrows raised. Arms control? In the Illuminati?

"Come on, guys!" Jeremy shouted. "If Barnum doesn't make them, your enemies will. If I was one of your enemies I think we'd have weapons like this already. What, you think that one of them can't make a better assault cannon?" The Illuminati assault cannon that Paul had put to great effect was a relatively heavy, cumbersome thing, using larger pellets that didn't have quite the same spread. "It's better that we control the supply. And if we find some not made by him, we can use the intellectual property rules," Jeremy finished, smiling. That would be an interesting way to go about discovering enemies.

"Either way, the only way we know when they have it is when they use it against us," William replied.

"If you have a way to stop that, Dominator..," Jeremy trailed off, looking at each of them.

"...we would have told it to you by now," Howard finished ruefully as Joey started coming back. "Joey," Howard said, and the servant looked at him attentively. "Is it physically possible that you could kill us with those?"

"I don't.. probably, well.. depends on the circumstances."

"As we are now," William said.

"No. I know how fast you guys are. I'll start to aim and you'll blow me away."

"Unarmed and a hundred feet away," Howard offered.

"Assuming no cover to duck behind? Yeah. Yeah, I probably could." Joey hated explaining this, but Jeremy's look told him to go on. "You can't dodge this shit. It's.. everywhere. It doesn't rick-o-shet, though."

"Rick-o-shay," Jeremy corrected him automatically.

"How much armor would we need to stop it?" William asked.

"Barnum said 'two and a half inches of high-grade steel'. We use like.. three feet of soft stuff in the basement," Joey replied. Soft to armor-piercing flechettes, anyway. Punching would find it hard.

"Then cover's probably not going to help," William said. Great, just great. The twins would have to fall back on the tactic they already relied on: shooting first.

"Good point," Joey replied.

"I want to see this," Howard said, with a bit of an edge to his voice. Jeremy and Joey gave him chill-out looks.

"Hold up. We've got it on vid," Jeremy said. Joey got space to sit next to his master, extending the honor further, and they played the recording of Joey emptying pellets into soft foam, annihilating quite a lot of ballistic-gelatin targets in the way. The targets didn't fall over- they disintegrated.

"Can you guys see it?" Jeremy asked. The specialized camera recorded at 4800 fps, and this screen's refresh rate was a quarter of that. The twins' visual centers were specially designed for fast-moving objects and they could see most bullets mid-flight.

"Barely," William replied. The pellets were very fast and very small, many times more powerful than a normal shotgun. Great. He'd have to face this shit personally, sooner or later. He just fucking knew it.

"What the hell kind of propellant is that?" Howard asked.

"It's like.. rocket fuel," Joey said.

"Exactly the opposite," William said. "Rocket fuel burns steadily. This stuff.. heh. That's some kick." Joey's idea of holding it was basically to stick it out from him and let it blast hot death in the general vicinity of what it was pointed at. The way it was meant to be used, apparently. No wonder he got bruises.

"It'll be patented like the rest of it," Jeremy replied. "I think that's where he's going to get his resources, actually. Even if people use regular weapons, they're going to still want this stuff. Unless you guys...?"

"What can we do?" Howard asked, almost spitting out the words. "Factories are almost impossible to find. Someone is going to reverse engineer this shit in a chem lab." Which, in the Illuminati, could be the size of a suitcase.

"Don't get us wrong," William said. "We're not mad at you, or even at Barnum. We're mad that there's still fucking enemies out there who would use it on us." A year was a very long time to be stalemated. How many more would this drag on before it was finally over?

"You guys going to threaten him?" Joey asked.

"Of course we're going to threaten him," Howard replied. "The only problem is what we can threaten him with."

"On the bright side, we can do that right now," William said. "Jeremy, if you would?" Suddenly Jeremy's position between the twins was something he didn't want. Being forced to call up another Illuminatus to help the Dominator make threats was not something that would be good for his social life. He did it anyway, gritting his teeth and reminding himself that he wore their T-shirt for a reason.

Barnum answered immediately, a shocked look as he saw the twins on Jeremy's couch with him. He'd just talked to Jeremy's servant a minute ago and was not expecting this. "Dominator! To what do I owe the.. pleasure?"

"Oh hey, Barnum!" William greeted him in a conversational, friendly tone. "We were just hanging out with Jeremy here and we found out you've been making some good weapons."

"Yes. Yes, I am. Reinventing the firearm from nearly first principles. There's so much work to be done," he replied, clearly nervous.

"Look, we know that you're going to make a lot of friends and a lot of power selling these things for people to kill each other with, but there is a certain minor problem, can you guess what that is?" Howard asked in the same friendly tone.

"Dominator, I'm not going to sell to anyone I think is going to use them on you or your friends. I swear."

"Mmm-hmm," William replied. "Can you also swear that you're going to keep any and all sales of them logged in the database, as well as keep a hidden mark in each one so we can know which one's which when we start picking them off the bodies?"

Barnum screwed up his face and looked at each twin in turn, unsure how to phrase his objections. "Dominator, if you don't.. I mean.. if it got out that I was doing that.. nobody likes to be traced. That's.. normal stuff."

"Then you're not going to tell anyone else you're doing it. Make it a system of embedded scratches on a very small scale, it will look like tiny flaws and not a code," Howard said.

Barnum's face twisted up as he realized how he could do it: he'd put the nano-scale imperfections on the inside of the metal, and ablate the layers atom by atom to read them. Technically, it was workable, but... "They.. still might find out."

"Do it anyway," the twins commanded him.

"Dominator.. I.." What he obviously wanted to say was no, but that's what he couldn't say. "Yes, Dominator." He clicked off, to Jeremy's relief; Jeremy thought the conversation would be much worse.

"Well, now that that's over with, you guys want to stick around for a while?" Jeremy asked.

"For political reasons, we really shouldn't accept invitations," William said, smiling. Which was one of the reasons they walked in without one. The Dominator, by custom, goes where he chooses and does what he wants, and no one else may influence his decisions. Absolute power means absolute neutrality. They had accepted invitations in the past, but that was before politics became something vitally important to their survival.

"So we're just going to decide on our own to stick around for a while," Howard finished.

Jeremy chuckled. "Joey, tea and pizza." The combination was one of Jeremy's favorites and he figured the twins would enjoy it as well. Joey immediately started for the kitchen. "The good stuff, the usual toppings, and remember how much they eat." Jeremy rested his arms behind the couch, relaxing. His couch was comfortable, his eyes were fixed, he was pals with the emperors of the world, and his best friend did everything he said. How did he live before he came here?

Chapter 11

BZZZZERT!

The twins sighed and rose simultaneously. They'd been enjoying a not-quite-shared dream, involving the particularly high-velocity recreation they indulged in last evening, and didn't appreciate someone buzzing them out of it. Anyone in the Illuminati could contact the Duumvirate, directly, at any time; this has always been the case, ever since the position of Dominator was established. The only thing that stopped them was the very real specter of being killed for interrupting their Dominators needlessly.

The immediate source of their annoyance was first level Donald Simpson, overseer for the United States of America. Donald was generally much busier than his Masters. As the one true overseer of the US (despite many, many other Illuminati having holdings there, including bits of government), he was ultimately responsible for its leadership and general behavior. Which made right now a very, very bad time for him, as some Saudis had just decided to park a couple of airplanes on the 80th floors of a pair of tall buildings.

The screen clicked on and Donald, surrounded by other screens and busy servants, faced it with a serious look. "What," Howard said, with a strong hint of 'this better be good'. That was mostly for effect; they knew he wasn't screwing with them. This overlord was far too experienced to consider it.

Donald followed custom to a T by simply changing his screen to some of the video clips everyone's seen, and some that normals haven't, including a satellite's eye view. Planes slamming into buildings (no collapse- not yet), people running scared away. There was almost no narration (save for some normal-grabbed clips), no commentary, just raw explosions and distant screaming. The twins watched passively, chuckling a bit, interested but unemotional.

"As you can see, we have something of a crisis on our hands." It was worse than that, actually; Donald had been so panicked that he had forgotten to move Bush for almost a half hour.

"Were there any of ours in that?" William asked casually.

"A couple of servants were in the area, but no casualties," Donald replied. He'd had a small hunch, not-quite-conscious, that the Duumvirate wouldn't really care. And without much of a reason to become involved- it would be easy to say that none of this was Dominator business, if there were no secrecy breaches and no one was raising a dispute over it- the twins simply wanted to go back to bed.

"What's the kill count?" William asked.

"The buildings are toast, but it might take a while.. I'm guessing three or four thousand." The public media would, of course, be screaming something different, as well as other assorted alarms. The government would, of course, firmly close the barn door after the horse ran out. Both had their role: to keep people panicked until the Illuminati figure out what to do.

"Who did it?" Howard asked.

"Passenger lists suggest- SHIT- The Pentagon. Oh, no.." Donald's disciplined face cracked and tears started running down his face, the nervous breakdown he'd been dreading his whole life happening right in front of the Duumvirate. He found himself caring less about that and more about his best servant. "STEEEVE!!!" He turned sharply to his left at a nearby servant. "Rid, contact Steve if he's still alive.. they hit exactly where he was, the bastards knew.. Dominator!" he shouted, turning to the twins, fear making him babble. "Steve Wintermute is probably dead. I don't know why they hit the towers, but.. it was an Islamic group called Al Qaeda. All over the Middle East. The- the-" Fast typing on his end. "regional director owns it, what the hell was he doing? I'm going to call and-"

"No you're not," both twins said simultaneously, realizing what they had to do. "We'll handle this," Howard said. The twins badly wanted to delegate this, but there was no one to delegate to. Donald's concern for Steve (whoever that was) could be a farce, a red herring for some other goal. The towelheads who did it could easily be Enforcers. It could have been a truly wild assassination attempt, or an inept or badly mistaken regional director letting some normal get too much influence, or some other Illuminatus having a hand in it. Or there could have been no leadership at all that wasn't blown up with it. The twins knew all this immediately; it was just time to divide the reality from the bullshit. They just hoped it wasn't actually an assassination of an Illuminatus or his servant, or the intentional frustration of an Illuminatus's goals, which were about the only things that could bring this under their purview. But it had to be official Dominator business before Illuminati started tripping over each other and it became a clusterfuck. They were too damn tired to deal with this shit, but the alternative was worse.

Fortunately, although they couldn't delegate responsibility, they could obtain information and command action. The Illuminati's investigative apparatus was already at work; the twins simply tapped into it for more than they really cared or needed to know about hijacking procedures and Middle Eastern religious politics. "Osama bin fucking annoying," William muttered after a few minutes of research.

"Osama bin getting his throat ripped out for waking me up at 6 AM," Howard replied.

They called the regional director of the Middle East, Mohammed Sheyikh, on his jet-helicopter craft- he swore up, down, and by Allah (monotheism was exceedingly rare in the Illuminati, but existent) that he had nothing to do with it and that he had every reason to believe he had Osama firmly contained and controlled. By doing so, he doomed himself. If he was a rogue the twins were going to implant him, interrogate him, and literally eat him alive. If he was not a rogue he would be killed for hitherto unimaginable incompetence.

Some fruitless investigation later, they sighed. They needed real information, not theories or possibilities. Fuck it.

"Sarah!" William called into the intercom. A full thirty seconds passed, but she started walking downstairs, naked. Engineered girls don't get PMS as such, but she looked pissed off, staring at them.

"Find Osama bin Laden and take him alive if it is reasonably practical," Howard commanded her. She rolled her eyes.

"Oh, is that it? I thought you were going to ask me to do something hard. You know what the best part of not being implanted is?" They looked at her. "Being able to go to the fucking bathroom first." She walked back up.

"Now that we've dealt with the direct stuff, Billy.. let's discuss symbolism," Howard said, quietly.

"Two towers, one military installation, one other one that didn't quite get to its normal-government destination?" Howard nodded. "Coincidences exist. For all we know right now, there's a fifth group that chickened out, or they had different plans and reduced it to this, or they had a surplus of personnel. But.."

"But it doesn't feel like one."

"No.. it doesn't. Not at all. But- wait, the fuck- if it is symbolism, using it doesn't make any sense. If they wanted to send us a message, they've already fucking done that! Or... somebody is trying to make it look like a rogue act, but they really want the repercussions of this to happen so their own goals get furthered." Whatever those were.

"And spawn a harder investigation, and lead us to believe they're rogues if we catch them. They'd have to be completely out of their fucking minds to do that." William smiled in reply, and Howard started nodding. "Which makes it a distinct possibility." He sighed, which turned into a yawn and his brother shared it. They got up, grabbing snacks before heading back to bed. "And they really have to be batshit insane to do it in our early morning."

Chapter 12

Sarah loved burqas.

For other females, it was a sign of male dominance over the female body and a symbol of patriarchy, or a uniform that liberated them from the constant gaze of male eyes, in accordance with Sharia law and the.. blabbity blabbity blah.

For Sarah, it was a free pass to Arsenalville by way of Concealed Weapons Parkway, with even her face completely hidden beneath ostensibly thick fabric. She'd be too tall for this in a year or two- she was almost too tall now, at a bit over six feet- but with the correct hunching and demeanor she got no more than a handful of glances as they drove down Pakistani roads in an uncovered jeep, despite the arsenal she carried. And, as a bonus, women in this culture were expected to be silent and walk behind men, meaning that she didn't have to do more than take a quick in-flight crash course on Pashto. For escorts she brought two experienced men from her ranks, one posing as her husband, the other her brother.

Despite their professionalism and long service, they were extremely worried, and would much rather have had Sarah use Enforcers. As genetic normals it would be unbelievably easy for them to get hammered in the crossfire. Both of them were Pakistani by birth, and both had lived long enough there before being recruited to have a native's grasp of the culture and language. They were also amazing actors, liars, and diplomats, with distinct combat skill- but in a battle between an absurdly heavily armed engineered and a crowd of al Qaeda, they had a tacit agreement to stay out of the way when the bullets inevitably started flying.

She had considered not bringing them. There were arguments for and against. If she had done a strictly by-the-book infiltration, she could be looking through a lot of caves for a very long time; driving along in this uncovered normal jeep risked them having to fight in from the guard area during the daytime if they couldn't lie their way in. Sarah considered her operatives' ability to lie versus the stupidity and stubbornness of towelheads, weighed in the burqa, and the choice became clear.

As a mere female, she sat in the back seat as one of her men drove down a winding, unmarked path in a narrow valley in the southeast Tora Bora mountain range. Her six perimeter Enforcers had already spread out around the area, hiding themselves deep in the local crags and crevices, their unminds finding far better concealment than the inhabitants ever could. She had brought six for a minimal, spread-out defense against unexpected incursion and escape, and mentally kicked herself for it. In this kind of landscape she could have brought dozens. Most normal Western forces found the terrain to be a barely-habitable treacherous maze of rock. Sarah thought it would make a nice playground.

They came upon a flimsy shack, like a treehouse with no tree, made of old wood and tin. Wait, there were men nearby yelling at them to stop; was this supposed to be a guardhouse? Apparently al Qaeda's construction specs were not on par with Fisher-Price's.

There was some back and forth; the guards were very belligerent from square one and Sarah wondered if she'd have to resort to Plan B right away. Some words in English were shouted: "CIA", "American", countered with her agents' vehement denial and gesturing to their own faces, bellowing assurances of their Islamic fidelity. The hair-growth substance applied to their chins and the turbans on their heads helped quite a bit, apparently. One of the men then gestured to Sarah and said something; immediately one of his men shouted something loud, to defend her honor, and the guards reached for their guns.

"Hey, hey!" the other agent shouted, ostensibly restraining his friend by the shoulder. He then said something else, using the word 'Allah' more than once, slowly produced a gold coin from his pocket (Real gold, probably; no one in the Illuminati cared), and held it out to the guard, folding the man's fingers around it. He then gave the other guard the same treatment. He apologized for his friend's behavior, and he and the guard talked for a bit, the guard, more pleased now, stepping aside. Then the good-cop agent gestured, and both agents got into the car with an impressive facsimile of restrained, ebbing rage on one side and fear on the other, the good-cop saying that he could have gotten them both shot. They even continued talking as they left the guard house and continued to the clearing, in a truly excellent display of showmanship.

When they turned the corner, they were greeted by merriment; rowdy voices filled the air between the hedged-in mountains, echoing between the hardscrabble and scree. They had apparently been having a long party, inasmuch as fundamentalists with no electricity can party, coffee instead of alcohol flowing freely. Some old, some young, some really too young for normals. How many explosives did they plan to strap on a ten year old?

Her driver stepped out of the car and introduced himself nervously. He intentionally sounded rehearsed, using the most polite forms of address, and tripping over himself a couple of times. A few of the men gestured to him, and laughed. One or two of them looked wary and kept their guns close. A couple of them looked Sarah's way and grunted. How twisted were these men, that females invisible were somehow more desirable than females uncovered? If they really wanted to know what she was wearing under that burqa, they had only to wait. One of the boys ran inside the cave and there was a couple minutes of small talk before an old man walked out.

Not only did he look horrible, decrepit, and diseased, he reeked like hell, his stench even more cloying than the rest of them. Sarah did a double-take; was this Osama's older, dirtier brother or was it him? He obviously hadn't had any kind of bath in weeks. No, scratch that; he had been washing, but in nasty water, a thin film of filth covering his pores.

He addressed his guests in nearly-perfect Standard Arabic, which was a pleasant surprise for Sarah; although it had been many years and she was rusty as hell, she could figure out ninety percent of what he was saying, his Pashto translator a trivial distraction. Greetings, salutations, and after a brief exchange, expectations that more people like them would come from around the world to join the fight. He led them and some of his men into the small entrance and an excavated, larger cave mouth, Sarah shuffling with her head low and five paces behind- there was a brief discussion on whether to let her in, but Osama used the words 'mothers of Jihad'- and they sat down in what Sarah could only guess was a traditional sort of palaver, Osama sitting on a chair with men sitting on carpets near him. (And her men gestured for her to sit in the corner, away from them- where she was utterly, pointedly ignored and could see everyone in the entire cave mouth.) He was clearly ready to discuss strategy- no, he decided to start with a rousing lecture, an exhortation for these rich men to spend their money, their very lives, with a call to Jihad.

And.. it wasn't much.

Sarah knew that power could be exercised from anywhere in any setting- but really, this was a perfect metaphor. One guy in a cave sitting above other guys in a cave. Even hiding in a sewer smelled better than this. And Osama was... nothing. He hadn't just been pretending to be closer to people, he really was a caveman. He kept up a stately bearing and he portrayed the image of a sheikh very well, but there was no real leadership here, nothing but empty platitudes and vague promises of Islamic society interspersed with declarations of removing the Great Satan and the elimination of Israel, none of which he could make good on in any sane world. Maybe it sounded better to native Arabic speakers than it did to Sarah, but it was rambling, long, and wholly unworthy of remembering in detail. Why the fuck do they follow him? Her own servants, however, knew and followed the mentality superbly, their subtle cues and body language indicating that they were eager to join the fight against the decadent West. She'd have to reward them for their skills.

But she wasn't personally interested in his ill-conceived gibberish; he'd be talking about entirely different things later and she had video games to play. Her touchscreen PDA had an Orbital Infrared scan of the whole area, another good reason to do this on a clear morning, the warm bodies contrasting nicely with the cold ground. Apparently Osama was so entrancing to the rest of them that they clustered within hearing distance of the cave mouth. Good. Well, except for a few watchmen in high places and those two at the gate, the bend keeping them out of line-of-sight of their fellows. That worked for her. She gently dragged her razor fingernail, Starcraft-like, on two of the green-tinted dots representing her perimeter Enforcers, tapped the icon for silent-kill, tapped between the men guarding the gate, and paid them no further attention, doing the same to the others in rapid succession. Using a burqa felt like cheating. She could casually text the Duumvirate if she wanted: "Hey guys, in a cave atm w/Osama, killing starts soon, bbiab". It was tempting, but she had her professionalism to preserve.

Finally Osama said something about women, and used the phrase "mothers of Jihad" again, looking past her escorts at Sarah.

All too often, her job was like being a chess grandmaster with no opponents but patzers.

They misregarded her movement as her burqa flew open, but by the time they could figure out what that movement was, they were already dead, not one of them being able to so much as reach for his weapon. With the kind of caliber coming from her pistols, she could have hit anywhere on their upper body for kills; she intuitively took head shots anyway, splattering the walls and giving the appearance of a sudden mass decapitation. She casually tossed Osama a drugged shuriken from between her pinky and ring fingers, catching him in the shoulder and knocking him out within seconds. She gestured to her agents, who distinctly did not say "You're the one with super strength, you carry him." in response.

Now there were men outside and deep inside the cave to deal with, none of which could be allowed to see her and survive; letting any of them survive was a poor choice anyway as it put secrecy limits on future plans. OIR had shown only the single entrance as a night radiator; Sarah opted to remove it completely, setting the timer on a football-sized device for one minute and lobbing it to the ceiling where it stuck. The agents looked at it with wide eyes and cooperated in hustling Osama out as fast as they could. She ducked out first, killing four before the rest could begin to squeeze the triggers on their AK-47's. Two more died before the bullets actually started coming out.

Satan's bowels, did she ever hate normal weapons, with their large cones of fire. These bozos sprayed and prayed, which, paradoxically enough, was more dangerous to engineereds than aiming Enforcers. She watched their barrels as she killed, zipping away from the handful that would hit her, her agents staying inside with cover. She stuck with the dual pistols, even bothering to reload each one (pocketing the spent mag- can't leave it lying around) while still shooting with the other; she'd probably use them the whole way though despite the variety she carried. She almost wished for a decent sniper among the lot of them, or someone with the wit to at least try to throw a grenade from cover, or some tactic other than 'get in the engineered's line of sight and get a headshot'.

Oh, there was a grenade, but not thrown from cover. She shot it before it left his hand, and the fourteen-year-old boy holding it screamed, his forearm and a section of his scalp gone. The scream distracted the last couple of allies he had left, who died like sheep. Sarah looked around her with equal parts contempt and wariness. "If I were not who I am, and we met in the open, what would you have done to me?" she asked the boy in stilted, quick Standard Arabic, while rushing him and flinging him thirty feet to the cave mouth.

Was that it? Did Osama really only have two dozen fighters with him? Wait, no- there were guys still in the cave- but they were choking their guts out, their coughs heavy with blood. Apparently one of her agents had the foresight to toss in a gas grenade. She smiled, and hustled back to the jeep, just noticing a figure fleeing the scene several hundred yards away. She instantly unfolded the sniper rifle she had on her back, and in less than half a second, the man's head flew up in the air from the hole between his shoulders. She checked her PDA. No moving man-sized blobs, none she didn't see or already deal with. Good. But what was that smaller blob?

Sarah ran fifty feet to some rocks. A six year old boy, having pissed his pants, looked at her and tried to run; she grabbed him, splattered his head on the biggest rock he was hiding behind, and heaved his small corpse into the air, to the general area of the rest of the bodies. And then she ran- faster this time, with a silent plea from her agents to hurry the hell up as it had been almost 20 seconds already and they were really running out of time here- dived into the jeep, and the agent driving it slammed on the gas.

The agent did not even slow down for the two Enforcers who had eliminated the road guards, and they jumped into the back anyway, to either side of Sarah. They had to get the hell out of there before-

BOOM

The football-sized device Sarah had used had a tiny fusion component, entirely imploding the side of the mountain. The jeep fishtailed from the force of the blast, tiny pebbles coming down among them like rain, the agent driving regaining control after a brief struggle. There was additional rumbling as tons of cracked and pulverized rock fell in upon itself. Anyone still inside the cave who survived the blast and the rockfall would inevitably suffocate. Granted, it could become cloudy, or there could be a secondary passage- but this was the best of all possible choices of evidence destruction, and could be chalked up to American firepower without the need to actually use a high-altitude bomber or UAV. She checked her other Enforcers; they had all been well out of range of the explosion, and would exfil easily after (clickety-click) obliterating the corpse of the one Sarah had sniped. Everything else now- additional secrecy concerns, replacing Taliban leadership, etc- was now officially Karl and Mohammed's business.

Sarah smiled as she folded her burqa back over her head. That was a way to end a mission.

Chapter 13

The interrogation room was of the standard variety: one wall consisting of one-way glass, a light available to shine directly on the interrogee, comfortable chairs for the interrogators and a hard wood one for the hapless subject, with a metal table between them. Old-fashioned in spirit if modern in structure. The twins chuckled at the setup and at the poor old bastard sitting in the hard chair.

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden looked at the Enforcer who served as his translator, at the Enforcers who served as the twins' translators, and finally at the twins themselves. There was no question. These two.. children?.. would kill him, surely. These were not Americans, nor were they even Israelis, which is what he had thought when he first woke up strapped to a bed. There was to be no long-term confinement. They would immediately take what they wanted from him and then he would die. He knew this intuitively, and prayed, making the final preparations for his soul.

But the twins were quite pleased that he had actually survived. If they fear discovery of secret plots, Illuminati will put suicide triggers inside their or their servants' bodies in case of capture. The problem is that such devices are usually very sensitive, and will usually activate on anything that can be considered a method of detection, so it was logical that Osama didn't have anything like that.

His implants had been reset to serve both twins, which was asking for trouble. Experimentation on Enforcers (and one particularly unlucky normal who really pissed off someone he shouldn't have) proved that the implants really would work on behalf of two or more identical entities at the same time, until they gave two or more conflicting commands at once. Then the implants temporarily broke, and occasionally the mind beneath permanently did. The twins, among the only known beings to survive implant withdrawal, found the concurrence amusing.

What they didn't find amusing was the fact that the implants would apparently also work for a faceless voice. When he was brought in for implant resetting, it was swiftly discovered that he had two sets: the usual kind and much simpler ones directly on top of his auditory nerves. The latter were removed, analyzed, and found to be utterly untraceable. Someone, somewhere, had spoke into a wireless transmitter, and Osama heard and obeyed.

Let the interrogation begin. "You have to answer us truthfully and directly. Who implanted you?" William asked in a neutral tone.

"What?" Osama replied. He had no idea. Great.

"I'll try again- whose commands did you obey?"

"God's," Osama answered. It figured. "Why must I obey you now?!"

"Because we're more powerful than God," Howard replied casually, starting before the Enforcer finished translating. "Now tell me, shitface. When did you start hearing God?"

"God has always been with me," Osama answered, causing the twins to sigh.

"Then when did you start doing what he said immediately and without restraint?" Howard asked.

"I have always done what God asks of me." Howard restrained the impulse to just butcher him then and there. The terrorist leader was getting more and more terrified of himself as he realized he couldn't control his immediate answers. Capture was one thing, but this... this...

"When did God start giving concrete commands, telling you directly and in a clear voice to do something?" William tried.

"That was when I was seven years old, reminding me to follow His dictates and fall upon His mercy." William snarled in frustration. When Osama was 7, action-control implants were considered a wishful fantasy.

"Okay. I'm going to try this again," William said, slightly exasperated. "When did you first hear Allah in your ears and not your head?"

"Summer of last year," Osama said, startled. Finally. A fucking answer.

"More specific," Howard commanded.

"Don't know.. July?" he said, the Enforcer translating the Iranian calendar. Osama paused a moment. "July second. God help me, it was July second." He was starting to have an emotional breakdown. He could accept frustration and delay; as Allah wills. He would have welcomed an American bomb making him a martyr so he could receive his 72 houris in Paradise, or death by age, or whatever; Allah's will, again. But this was so far outside his experience and so destructive of his religious beliefs that his reality was becoming undone.

"What did he sound like?" William asked. The implanter using his own voice was doubtful, but worth a shot.

"He talked with the voice of age, patience, and wisdom," Osama replied. No help there. All the suspects who knew Arabic were young or approaching middle age.

"What was the first command he gave you, talking in your ears?" Howard went for.

"He told me.. to protect my mind, to prevent anyone from looking into it." Protect his brain would have been either a better translation or a better command, the twins weren't sure which.

"And the second?" Howard asked, hoping for clues.

"I.. do not remember, exactly."

They spent a half hour asking him details. They kept him off balance, swapping good-cop bad-cop roles at random, trying to crack his mind for a more complete picture. "Tell us what you think we want to know" didn't work, as Osama could not conceive of them as anything other than advanced Westerners and kept telling them things they already knew. "Tell us what you're afraid of telling us" was similarly useless; the twins couldn't possibly give less of a shit about the who's-who of towelheads and he'd be pumped for that kind of information later.

"I'm hungry. Let's have some bacon," William said, and pressed a button in the wall to demand some cooked. Shame they didn't take him to Northberg. They always had bacon.

They continued asking him questions, this time about who he thought God was. Apparently whoever was controlling him had some very thorough knowledge of the Koran and Sunni strictures. It also didn't help that Osama's conflation was utterly complete; he really couldn't tell the difference between the God in his auditory nerves and the God in his head anymore. The first was gone and the second wasn't answering his prayers, but he'd learned to stop asking God for things shortly after he was implanted. One-way communication only, then. How had the controller gotten back information? Osama had no clue, and the fact that the controller's spy might be among the dead bodies left to be obliterated was maddening. Sarah might have had a bona-fide rogue's servant within her reach, now a few pulverized fragments of bone and ashes beneath a huge pile of rocks. But that was hindsight, and worthless.

The bacon arrived on a large plate, the attendant Enforcer placing the white plate into Howard's hands. He set it down with a flourish on the table and smiled, holding out a piece to Osama. "Eat up. It's not toxic, it's not laced with anything, and you're not allowed to puke," he commanded, eating a piece for himself. Osama freaked out at himself, yelling and screaming before his own hand inerrantly guided the bacon into his mouth, which chewed of its own accord. Tears welled up in his eyes, his hands went to his mouth, and he scrambled out of the chair before Howard told him to sit back down and stay there. Eventually he swallowed it, breathing heavily, no words available to him but the name of his God.

"Quit your caterwauling, Allah won't save you," William told him, grabbing several strips of bacon at once and popping them into his own mouth one by one as he talked. "You probably won't ever really understand what we are, but at least now you understand what we do. In case you haven't figured it out, the God in your ears controlling you was one of us. And that's what we're concerned with. Your miserable little organization doesn't matter. Your petty, spiteful God doesn't matter. Those three thousand-whatever dead people don't matter. Whatever war you think you're fighting doesn't matter. Only we matter."

"With that in mind, what group benefited from your actions?" Howard asked, wiping his bacon-greasy gloves off on Osama's beard, and sighed when he got the straight normal-world answer of Al Qaeda, the Palestinian people, et cetera.

"Did you ever get help from an unexpected source?" William tried, and whoever had been puppeteering him had been smart enough either not to let that kind of thing show or simply not to do it.

The twins tried variants of that and every question they could think of, most standard, some not, stopping only when it was beyond doubt that he didn't know anything and they were just embarrassing themselves asking. They'd intended to force-feed him more bacon, but ended up eating it themselves because bacon and why waste any on him? They wanted to splatter him now, but whoever inherited Mohammed's holdings (and possibly Sarah) would want what he knew about normal-world personnel. They commanded Osama to answer the translating Enforcer, commanded the Enforcer to do the standard grilling of captured revolutionaries, and left the room.

They spent some time walking down hallways and tunnels, eager to deal with something other than a clueless terrorist for a while, chuckling at how much the clueless terrorist would want a base like this one. The Bavarian headquarters was more than two hundred years old, a relatively small modern complex sitting atop and alongside a vast sprawling catacombs, some rooms having been moved brick-by-brick in their entirety, a great deal of it disused or archaic although well-maintained. Wood paneling was refurbished, old colors of brown and beige paint matched exactly, candles and torches replaced with soft incandescents, the aesthetic kept much as it was when the local manipulated-monarch was Ludwig the First.

There were places that Enforcers seldom had need to go to, some close to the surface and some not, half-hidden rooms with small knobless doors, some alcoves, and even an old-fashioned secret door that the twins noticed, now powered by modern motors when they pushed the jutting brick. No one was in there conspiring at the moment, but surely people had before and would continue to do so in the future, despite modern encrypted communications. At one point they heard the hum of genuine normal-world traffic from above. Occasionally their phones bleeped as they lost contact with the network, some unassuming and old-looking areas Faraday-caged against wireless transmission. This was a place meant to be conspired in.

"Hey, Howie. I've gotta remind you, Viktor Amsel's an asshole."

"What?" William answered by pointing into a doorless room, lit solely from the outside halls, the brick and wood dating from the late 1800s and the ceiling from more modern times. Someone had used a welding torch on the inside of a four-foot bomb crater to engrave the words:

If you're reading this
Remind the Dominator
Viktor Amsel is
AN ASSHOLE!

Despite the tool used, the handwriting was impeccable, with the last line underlined multiple times. The twins started chuckling, wondering what circumstances had led to this graffiti. "Hey, Billy. Just to make sure you know, Viktor Amsel's an asshole," Howard replied in turn. "I wonder why he's an asshole, though."

"I'm going to guess that the bomb crater in the headquarters has something to do with it."

"Yeah. World War Two. Whole lot of pooch-screwing in that." It was nice to be reminded that their forefathers had their own problems, and that betrayal and intrigue were nothing new. For all the twins knew, Viktor had dropped the bomb himself to eliminate a competitor. It wouldn't be in the database and they probably wouldn't get true answers even if there was someone left who knew the story. The twins held hands as they strolled down a memory lane much older than they were, and then one far older than man as they walked through parts of natural cave systems. Except for discreet ventilation, the natural entrances had been sealed off more than a hundred years ago, replaced by increasingly-hidden hatches and manholes, which themselves had been sealed off before the area was declared a no-go zone by the American military after Hitler ate his gun. These days, the headquarters was so thoroughly protected from prying eyes that it was both possible and pointless to open up some of the old entrances. The twins agreed to open them all once the End of Secrecy was declared, for posterity's sake.

After three hours of revisiting history, they returned to their current problems. Osama looked tired, but less afraid, lulled into a depressive hypnosis by his own voice from the full implant quiz, sitting there even a half hour after it was over, unable to move despite how much he wanted to and how badly he needed to piss, his diseased kidneys leaking back into his bloodstream like a sieve. It had all become a slow, numb nightmare, taking a sharp downturn when he saw the twins again. Why hadn't he known of the existence of such... things? How had they escaped his world view, they who broke God's laws merely by existing? Why hadn't he been told devils walk the earth? He muttered prayers and pondered what it would mean to ask God about this personally.

"I've been considering keeping you around," Howard said. "You're an old, decrepit bastard with kidney problems, a bad haircut, severe religious mania, and if we didn't wash you off, you'd reek like a dragon's asshole." He meant that literally. Those things digested like reptiles. "But you're smart and you have a good grasp of tactics." Osama barely heard the translating Enforcer. What he heard most was the Dominator's voice, and it sounded to him more and more like that of Satan.

"Once we finish developing the retrovirus, we could make you a young man again, and you could serve us through the End of Secrecy and beyond," William added. "You'd spend your days in luxury in between exterminating Muslims," he continued, smiling. Osama's muttered prayers- and his thoughts- became more and more garbled as he realized that they weren't kidding, that they really could make him turn against his people as they made him eat the unclean food.

"But we're not going to let you live," Howard said. "Your plan woke me up at 6 AM," he said, slowly and deliberately, as the Enforcer would translate it the exact same way. He gave it a moment to sink in. 'Six in the morning?' Osama wondered, confused. 'Why does he..' 

"NOBODY WAKES ME UP AT 6 AM!!!" Howard screamed, effortlessly ripping Osama's windpipe out and throwing it in one smooth motion. It hit the wall with a bloody thwuck and bounced off. The Enforcer shouted its translation at the dying man, who would have been screaming if he still had the equipment to do it with. William chuckled softly. He had wanted to try the two-commands-at-once lobotomy/kill, but Howard did call the throat-rip well in advance. Osama's bladder and bowels finally relaxed, and he sat there in astonished agony, an old man limply clutching beneath his straggly beard at what used to be his throat, finally expiring in a puddle of his own blood and waste.

The twins started to giggle, William first, then his brother joining in. This was all being recorded to the public database, and the Levels would be strongly discouraged from late-night buzzes on hearing that last line. Good. Time zones be damned; everybody ran on Dominator Time.

But even the Duumvirate needed to keep their appointments, and their next one was in five minutes.

Mohammed Sheyikh sat in a chair in the center of the room and waited for his fate to arrive.

Quite a number of other Illuminati were in attendance, more than the twins expected. They, too, had their minds on the all-important question Howard had asked Osama: Who benefits? The problem was that they had benefited, and with their intuitive skills they acted with such precise opportunism that they could reasonably be accused of having planned it out beforehand. To head this off, they came voluntarily, subjecting themselves to the Dominator's power so he would be less likely to hunt them down afterwards. They also had some contempt for Mohammed, despite their profiting from his stupidity, as he hadn't profited in the slightest with Western forces causing him to lose a great deal of political ground. If the Duumvirate wanted to kill him for his ineptitude, it was fine by the majority of them. They were more worried about each other, as most of them were convinced that there was someone (or a few someones) in the room who had planned it out, each harboring their own suspicions as to who.

The real problem, of course, was that one or more of them could have been right.

The twins had their own suspicions, most of them involving Mohammed. They badly wanted to implant him, but politics forbade. Killing was one thing, but there was just no way they were going to get away with the enslavement of an Illuminatus without serious repercussions, even if he was incompetent. Torture, drugs, and other intelligence techniques were also unacceptable. Donald had swiftly taken advantage of the normal-world crisis to consolidate his power, but that was something the Duumvirate could never do with their own crisis- not to Illuminati. All they could do was ask questions and administer the Illuminati's idea of justice, unless he admitted to being a rogue in which case all bets were off.

"Before this plan came to fruition, did you know anything whatsoever about the implantation of Osama bin Laden?" Howard asked without preamble.

The one thing Mohammed could not, ever, tell them was the truth. How foolish he had been! "A timeshare on your servant's mind," the rogue had said a month after the twins were unimplanted. "But just between us. No record of this. And in return, I release all my claims, say I simply can't be bothered with them." So easy, so simple. What was the man's goal? What was he trying to start, did he have something to prove? Mohammed just assumed the man was an idiot, but he had been the bigger idiot. The man had openly proclaimed he was a rogue (how could Mohammed possibly prove it?); if he let the Duumvirate know, they would surely implant him, a fate worse than death. And he had already decided on a pretense of ignorance.

So he answered, "No. I had no knowledge of this."

"And you also didn't know about what he was training those Saudis for? You didn't know about the flight schools? The training camps, the infrastructure he was trying to build?" Howard asked, looking around the room, seeking and getting tacit confirmation that this was a lethally stupid offense.

"No, Dominator. It is.. my failing," Mohammed answered, staring at the ground. That much was true. He had intentionally not known, subtly ordering his servants to look in other directions, thinking that he would be admonished should anything go wrong, but not attacked.

"And everything you know is in your computer. You have not withheld from your own servants?" William asked. There was only one reason he would ask a question like that. There was no way this could end well.

"That is correct, Dominator," Mohammed lied. He inhaled, to beg, because he knew- maybe he should just confess after all-

And then William stepped up to him as if in a hug, then reached all the way around his head, grabbing his face and twisting, holding on to Mohammed's body while extending his own arm. He overestimated the force he needed for it; he was going for a simple snap, and ended up turning Mohammed's head a full 270 degrees, skin stretched, neck muscles ripped, a few arteries pulled apart, vertebrae snapped, nerves torn from twisting. Mohammed's air flowed out in a strangled gurk. 'Dead, then, not worse. True Allah, take me.' His secrets went to the grave with him.

"Donald," Howard said, turning to him as William let the corpse slump to the floor. Other Illuminati stepped back a bit, wondering why they had come in person if it was going to be more than just Mohammed. 'First they came for...' was going through Gates' head; he had his own reasons to sponsor cyber-terrorism, and had done research into it. Done right, he didn't need to involve any others... but after this, those plans were kiboshed, and he hoped to hell the twins had never heard of them.

The twins expected the reactions. This was going to be a lot more delicate. They could threaten a bit, yes, but Donald had recently attained first level, and the same lynch-mob mood that had let them butcher Mohammed could not be spawned here.

"Ask me anything, Dominator," he said, remembering how the simple interplay of question and answer had served him before. He felt this one coming and had already devised his strategy: Tell them everything, admit to actions but no faults, protect himself without denial.

"The American president had received normal intelligence on the subject of an attack. Why did you not have him act on it?" William asked.

Good, an easy one. "Because I assumed it was cruft." The twins looked at him a bit sideways- good, they didn't know exactly, it let him act as a teacher. "False information. Either exaggerated, supposedly true but never going to be acted upon, or outright lies that had made their way into the normal intelligence pipeline by an ambitious normal, simple normal misinformation, or someone here trying to angle things." He glanced around to spread the paranoia. "If it doesn't make sense as a power grab, and nobody puts it into the system, it's not credible. That is an assumption we all make to keep the bullshit out." The assumption was a valid one. He'd seen all kinds of information received by normals, and most of it was crap. He couldn't be expected to change his policies for that, especially when he had his own plans.

"And the normal president not acting on received information is not a secrecy problem?" Howard asked.

Donald snickered, both at the comment and the fact that things were seeming to go his way. There were a lot of raised eyebrows in the room and a quiet admonishment: After killing someone for incompetence, you can't possibly be that out ot touch. "He's Bush. Ignorance is his stock in trade." Eight years would be enough of it, then the Americans would get sick of it, then he could get someone to run on a platform of change, after which he could do damn near anything he wanted. It was tempting to just use Hillary for it, but there was this one black guy in Illinois who was practically asking to be acquired...

"All right, Donald. I accept that," William said, and the twins relaxed, shortly followed by everyone else in the room. "I know that you're telling the normals that it's a whole new world, and that everything's changed, and I'm sure all of you are finding opportunities to be had." Oh, were they ever. He was tempted to continue by saying that things needed to change here as well, but no. The reverse was better. "It's not a new world. It's still ours." General, unexpected, light-hearted laughter of relief. "And what just happened here should remind everyone of that. Political holdings are not just something in the system, not something that you can put away in a safe somewhere. If you hold it, you must know what goes on in it. Otherwise the next one might not be like this." William paused for effect.

"The next one might be much worse," Howard said.

"The next one might be a secrecy breach," William finished. Having the Dominator use the words 'secrecy breach' to their faces was not an experience any of them liked. "Someone clean up that trash," he said, gesturing to Mohammed's corpse, and the twins walked out to everyone's relief. Still on the same side. Not about to kill their own power base. No mass butchery.

Donald ordered his Enforcer to take care of it before anyone else could, planning to bury the asshole upside-down as a mark of final disrespect. The Dominator, he decided, was right; if he held it, he had to know what went on in it. Size and complexity were just excuses; it's not like he didn't have the servants.

But before he did any of that, his servant Steve had nearly finished his emergency work and was able to come home soon, and Donald was going to strip him out of that Joint Chief's uniform, take off that nasty wrinkle-suit Steve wore for secrecy, and enjoy a long, slow night with his beloved.

Chapter 14

The Duumvirate personally approaching and inspecting new Illuminati was not an absolute barrier to treason by any means. Rogues could still filter in, easily. There was no way of telling what an Illuminatus had said to a recruit, and all the Illuminati had in the way of documentation for the normal-plucked ones were, obviously, normal records; the very same normal records that Illuminati may edit at whim. Theoretically, those edits would be logged in the master database. In practice, that was only when the Illuminatus doing it wanted them to be. Any fakers had a massive advantage over any inspection.

But, even so, the twins' examinations and easy interviews accomplished two things. The first was psychological; it allowed the nascent Illuminati to see their Duumvirate in person, and at nearly fourteen the twins were already quite physically imposing, their pure presence lending them credibility as the holders of absolute power. Rogue recruits, if not cowed, could be frightened into acting hastily or with greater hesitation. At the same time, it firmly established that the Duumvirate were not unreachable; that they could be approached and even conversed with, a terrifying thing for many fresh Illuminati, rogue or not.

The second reason, more concrete, was that it allowed them all to be scanned for implants in one fell swoop. William, striding down the Bavarian hallway with his brother and friends, was idly thinking of how nice it was to have a system where they could hide such scanners in the ceiling and walls.

And that was when the railgun projectile tore through the steel wall at more than twenty thousand kilometers per hour from roughly ten meters away, passing directly through Howard's torso, severing his spinal cord and tearing through the lower portion of his heart. The resulting wave of overpressure inside his body ruptured his lungs. Shock traveled up his spine into his brain and his world faded to black before even he could react. As the projectile was extremely thin and armor-piercing and due to the nature of Illuminated steel, there was a bare minimum of relatively slow-moving shrapnel, and it mostly embedded itself in the twins' clothing. William received a cut to his right cheek which glanced off the bone. Sarah and Paul, being behind them and just far enough to the sides, received no wounds save for a small cut on Paul's right ear.

For the sole Dominator still breathing, time slowed to a crawl.

Centisecond One: 'Howie's been hit.' His brother just starting to move backwards from the impact.

Millisecond Fifteen: His right arm instantly lashing out and catching his fallen twin. Sarah's firearm out and at the ready, aiming at the hole.

Centisecond Four: 'It went right through him.' His brother moving in earnest now, off his feet and sailing towards the ground. Pain, unacknowledged and unimportant, from the wound in his cheek. Sarah moving to attack the hole in the wall where the projectile came from, reacting and not yet thinking.

Centisecond Five: Paul just beginning to flinch.

Centisecond Six: 'He will not survive.' This thought clinical and cold, the emotional segment of William's brain having not yet recognized what had happened. Sarah reaching for her weapon.

Decisecond One: The understanding that his brother, his dear, precious twin brother, the one who had taught him everything about the whole world and had played with him and fought alongside him and laughed with him and always been his friend, even when he could have done anything he wanted with him, was dying. The clinical knowledge that the last of Howie's life was leaking out of the hole that the enemy had put in him. Sarah finding nothing to shoot at, the enemy in question being an automatic one-shot railgun, operated from a distance or by computer.

Centisecond Twelve: Denial. 'This isn't real. I'm going to wake up.' An almost unnoticed muscle ache in his right arm from lashing it out too fast even for himself.

Centisecond Fourteen: The wish, raw and naked, to alter reality, to step back two deciseconds and push Howard out of the way. 'I won't let this happen.' 'Seal the hole. Stop the leak.' William's left arm reaching for his fusion/fission weapon, his conscious mind not yet understanding the plan.

Centisecond Sixteen: 'Replenish Howard's blood supply. Regenerate the hole shut.' Conscious understanding and acceptance of the plan. William using his right arm to throw Howard a short distance into the air and removing his weapon fully. Sarah looking back at the twins in horror. 

Centisecond Eighteen: William shoving the tip of his foot into the trigger guard of the weapon and placing his hands above the shotgun barrel, aiming away from his brother and everything else. The very beginning of screaming "I WON'T LET THIS HAPPEN!!", which would take more than a second. An eternity.

Decisecond Two, one full fifth of a second after impact: Dominator William squeezing the fission trigger, the atomic projectile severing his hands at the wrist and continuing through the ceiling.

Centisecond Twenty-one: Shoving his severed right wrist into the large exit wound in Howard's back. Sarah turning towards them. Intense, sharp pain, expected and consciously ignored.

Centisecond Twenty-two: Forcefully shoving his severed left wrist into the much smaller entrance wound in Howard's chest. Pressing the two arms into Howard with as much pressure as possible.

Centisecond Twenty-Three: 'This better fucking work.' Sarah's eyes widening with astonishment. Unbelievable agony knocking his time sense back to a more normal one.

He knew the nerves hadn't connected at all, he knew it was a combination of psychosomatism and the very real pain from his destroyed hands, but William felt Howard's chest wound, felt every bit of the pain that his brother was blissfully unconscious for, felt it not in his own body but somehow in Howard's. He also felt Howard's blood pump, far too much of it pumping out of his body, the pumps becoming weaker and less regular. No. No, fuck that. Seal the space between us. Keep pumping regardless. Here, I'll set the pace.

Sarah immediately took off her suit, revealing a number of concealed weapons in places Paul never thought weapons could be concealed, swiftly wrapping it around the hole in her Dominator's chest, weaving the arms and legs around her other Dominator's arms. The waterproof, flexible fabric would serve for now. "Paul, call Northberg now," she told him.

He fumbled with his phone for half a second before his finger flicked to the speed-dial button. He'd put the major allies on speed dial before, on a lark. He never expected to have to press the button. "Operator, get a doctor to the Bavarian headquarters fast."

"Hole in torso of engineered, partially sealed, we're evacuating him," Sarah shouted in the direction of Paul's phone.

"I'll have one there as soon as possible!" the Operator yelled, his fingers flying across the keys as fast as his middle-aged hands could type, commanding some department or other to make it happen.

"If you don't get one here on time, I WILL KILL YOU regardless of whether or not it was possible!!" Sarah screamed at him. Fuck secrecy, fuck all the 'power base' crap, it didn't matter and she no longer cared. Either the twins were going to be in a safe place or she would make this place safe by killing everyone in it. The Operator clicked off.

"Wait, Sarah, they've got to have something here.," Paul started.

"They do, but it's not adequate for this and do you trust it?" She looked around at some masters, servants, and Enforcers who had turned corners to see what had happened, the sentients stopped in their tracks by the sight of the maimed twins and, for some, Sarah's naked body. "The fuck are you all staring at?!" she yelled at them, and they pushed each other out of the way to get out of sight. The Enforcers continued moving. "Enforcers, if you interfere, your master will have fewer Enforcers," she informed them. This stopped them and made them pull out phones instead; the more recent models could recognize and respond in a sensible way to a credible threat.

"Can you pick them up, get them out of here?" Paul suggested.

"No, they're too badly-"

"Yes," William said, gritting his teeth against the pain. The Operator had made certain modifications to fundamental parts of their brains. Pain, no matter how intense, would never stop a fully engineered or even most partials. "It's not that kind of injury. Put your arms near mine and don't worry about his legs or neck," he told Sarah, who did just that. Even with them carrying a badly wounded (or was he dead by now?) Dominator, Paul found it difficult to keep up as they rushed outside, leaving a trail of blood.

They stood on the landing platform, Sarah looking around and brandishing weapons, clearing the area as fast as she could as Paul supported his Dominator, the body parts oh-so-slowly sealing together. Seconds seemed like minutes, minutes like hours, even to Paul, who kept his eye on the skies, hoping to see the telltale dot with its long contrail. "Is he still.."

"He's alive. And he's going to stay that way," William said, as if attempting to alter reality by sheer force of will.

It took six full minutes, William fighting off a growing lightheadedness with pure white rage. The jet-helicopter, coming from the northwest, was of the same make as Jeremy's- for a confused moment William thought it was Jeremy's. "Good that he's here, but where the fuck's the doctor.," he thought, before it landed and six Enforcers carrying medical equipment jumped out.

"Enforcers, keep the Dominator alive!" a small servant said, following behind. Clearly a doctor, the man was utterly confused by what was going on. "But.. what did you..." The man had a bad assumption, and couldn't figure out how or why William had shoved his arms into Howard's sternum.

"You figure it out," Paul spat out, annoyed. After surviving that, and watching his Dominator and very dear friend at the brink of death, the last thing he wanted or needed was incompetence. "Your Enforcers have." The man took a closer look and gasped with understanding as his Enforcers proceeded with their work. Oxygen and nutrition- those were the keys to Howard's survival. So long as his cells could get both of those, the rest would be regenerated. To that end, the Enforcers unceremoniously shoved large needles into Howard's aorta, carotid, and femoral arteries- Howard's autonomous nervous system twitched, as if it was trying to dodge- and pumped blood substitute into him. The oxygen mask detected that Howard wasn't breathing enough, and forced pure oxygen into his lungs, side effects be damned- his furnace metabolism would make its own CO2. Every time the machine exhaled for him, the inside plastic became covered with blood. They used a liberal amount of skin-sealant, pouring it into and through the wound, finally stopping the blood loss.

Having accomplished that, the usual procedure would be to put the patient on a stretcher, but since that wouldn't work, the Enforcers simply lifted them up and the attached equipment with smooth grace, setting them gently inside the aircraft. The small man had to run to keep up, jumping into the passenger's seat just as the pilot Enforcer started a slow, gentle liftoff, followed by even more gentle jet boost. Paul stood there, watching them go with tears in his eyes.

"Paul.. c'mon. We're following them," Sarah said. He nodded. The twins' super jet could protect the older-model jet-helicopter, lasers against missiles if it came to that. Paul suspected that it didn't matter, that if Howard was going to die today, he would have done it already.

"Oh God, Sarah..," Paul sputtered as she accelerated them through the air, the familiar hum of the jet's flight comforting them both. "They could have put that through his fucking head!"

"We live on a lot of 'could have's, don't we?" she replied rhetorically. "By rights we should all be dead. I don't know if it's lack of foresight on their part or simple incompetence or really good luck or what. They know who we are, what we are, and often where we go. In fact they could theoretically blow that plane out of the sky." Paul gasped at his own incompetence- his job was to guard them, and one of the few times they actually needed him for that- "Don't worry about it," Sarah continued. "Those models were all retrofitted with anti-missile defense systems once the war started, and if they've got a laser good enough to get through the armor, they could easily have hit us with it when we were out of the jet. As for railguns..." Sarah shrugged. "If they had one they could set up outside, they would have killed us on the way in."

Insight flashed, and Paul's stress broke into a wave of logic. "It's not the same they," Paul said. "The ones we've been fighting would have. They could have just put it on the roof or something and blown us out of the sky. Whoever fired this one only intended to kill one of them, probably to send the other one on a berserk rampage. Maybe a crazy loner lurking to seize power, maybe someone disaffected with the current group. Shit, maybe he knew that Howard.. or William.." Paul suddenly realized that he had no idea which twin had gotten hit. "would survive, and he's trying to tell his friends, 'OK, I can kill them any time I want, you better change your plans to give me more power when I do kill them.'"

Sarah understood, and sighed, hoping that Paul was wrong but suspecting he wasn't. One group of demented fuckheads was quite enough.

"The enemy- enemies- don't have a Micro. Do you know how much all this hinges on that, Sarah?" Paul asked rhetorically. She nodded grimly. "If they get their hands on one satellite, one fusion weapon, a bomb or a Micro, whatever, even an atomic shotgun- we're fucked. If they capture one of those aircraft that were retrofitted, or steal anything else with any fusion they can rig up to explode, we're fucked! If they have a design plant somewhere where they can copy any of it, or even make a basic atomic weapon with technology developed in nineteen-fucking-forty-five, we're fucked!!" Paul's voice grew higher and higher, more profane, more hysterical, his insight having given way- or paved the way- to panic. "Why the fuck do we even leave the fucking island to begin with, or, alternatively, why the fuck do we stay there? I say we should live in this fucking jet and keep it flying 24/7, way the fuck out of range!"

"Paul, can you imagine those two living in fear like that?" The basic question calmed him down.

"No, I really can't. They just.. wouldn't."

"It's unthinkable. What normals would call unconscionable. And of course there's a very good reason why they shouldn't."

"We can't appear to be losing," Paul concluded.

"It would go against Illuminated theory, but of course you're exactly right."

"Illuminated theory- what a bunch of bullshit. It's.. what's the term for it here? False elitism? Most people, probably everyone here, aren't independent of psychological everything. They just pretend to be."

"Exactly," Sarah replied. "There might be some guy right now with access to technology that could kill us, who's sitting on the fence trying to find out which way the wind will blow. If he sees the Duumvirate being chickenshits he'll probably give his power to the other side for a higher seat in the new hierarchy. Morale matters. And to that end, it's great that things turned out the way they did. They struck what should have been a mortal blow. They were probably singing and dancing if they saw that shot happen. If they still see two Dominators instead of one after that, they're going to shit their pants when they realize neither of them are fake."

"Neither of them are... hey."

The problem with having engineered friends is that they can finish your thoughts way too often. "You're going to ask one of them to act like a robot or an Enforcer."

"They can swap every so often, but.. and of course we'd have to let everyone know soon for the morale thing, and we'd have to be able to really get an element of surprise.. it's a great idea but I can't make it work!"

"It is, Paul," Sarah said approvingly. "I can't make that one work either. But if you keep having ideas like that, you might give us one that will." It was a Twilight Zone sort of war- a war not only of force and of death, but of mind. Being able to win battles against videogame odds in reality was awesome, but to actually finish the war would take brainpower.

Paul just shook his head. He didn't have any more of that, either.

Aboard the medical aircraft, there were two other sentient brains which were similarly stressed. One of them was the doctor's. He was a rather traditional sort of doctor, having served in the organization for seventeen years. His practice generally consisted of aging Illuminati who didn't quite trust Northberg (which was funny, because he was the Day Operator's servant), inter-Illuminati spats, and the occasional normal who simply could not be allowed to die. Engineereds still felt new to him, and practically never required his assistance; this was the first time his Enforcers had ever used the training given them by the former Night Operator of Northberg. (The doctor made a point of checking the training for accuracy after that Operator killed himself. It was, in fact, accurate. The late Operator didn't lie when he had no real reason to and could be found out.) He had nothing but shock and amazement upon seeing what had happened to Howard, but now he felt a certain sort of pride. He was witnessing history, after all, and he was in the unique position of seeing that history with his interior vena cava and descending aorta torn apart. The thought crossed his mind that the oxygen pump might give his Dominator an aneurysm, but he had no alternative. The Operator had made it very clear: Engineereds can't stand oxygen deprivation, dehydration, or nutrient loss nearly as long as normals.

William was feeling no pride whatsoever. He felt nothing but hatred for the people who had tried to kill his brother, fear that the next time they might succeed, and an enormous, fantastic relief that Howie would live. Tears ran down his face and he shivered with an incalculable level of protective fury- whoever did this would pay, pay with his life and more besides. The screaming pain of William's lost hands meant almost nothing. He would rather have his arms and legs chopped off hundreds of times than lose his twin. "Howie, don't you ever die, it's against the rules, you're not allowed to die, don't you ever, ever get hit like that again, I swear if you die I'll kill you, don't you ever, man, don't you ever die on me..," he blubbered softly into his dear, dear brother's left ear. 

Howard heard none of this. What little brain activity he had was a glimpse of death itself. Had the shot been a few inches higher on his chest, he would have been doing more than glimpsing it. His heart continued to beat regularly, oxygen was forced in and bloody gunk was forced out of his severely damaged lungs, and the Enforcers occasionally pushed a needle back in when it was starting to wiggle out, but other than that he was inert.

The two aircraft landed at nearly the same time, Enforcers carrying the twins down the halls of Northberg, ignoring the tram, Sarah and Paul close behind. The Operator waited for them in what looked like an operating room, a single chair in the center of the room surrounded by all sorts of life-support and monitoring equipment, most of which neither Sarah nor Paul recognized.

The Operator glared at them, silently accusing: Why didn't you protect them? You're their guardians, aren't you? But they all knew it was utterly impossible to see coming, and the Operator turned his gaze away to monitor his most precious creation. He was proud of William's ingenuity for using himself to staunch the bleeding. The Operator's keen mind couldn't help but grok the scientific corollaries, even as he attached sensors and hooked up a different, more sophisticated oxygen pump. If one twin's entire lower body got blown off, he could, theoretically, graft it to the other one's torso until they regenerated. ('Joe Mengele, eat your heart out.') In fact, if there was somehow a need for mindless Dominator clones, he could grow them like Enforcers, a single engineered stem cell dividing into an adult. For a brief instant he wondered if Howard had ever considered using William for spare parts when he was his master, but realized that the Dominator had almost certainly already thought of, and discounted, that idea years ago.

'And that's why I'm getting heart rhythms from both of them right now.'

Chapter 15

Thought, and nothing but. Blackness, silence, the void. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell, taste, or feel. Sensory deprivation, except nothing to sense with.

'I'm dead.

Billy.. I hope you don't blame yourself for this. I'm so sorry.. it really sucks for you too, doesn't it? Just three short years together, and now we'll never play together again. Please don't join me here.. this afterlife is crap.

Sarah.. I loved you so much. You were always so good to me, always so kind.. My servant, my wife, my queen.. Take care of Quad. Please, Sarah.. let him grow up in Billy's world. I'm counting on you to stay strong, stay an operative. Do anything you have to do, I don't care. Just don't get too upset over my death and don't let anything else bad happen...

Paul.. this is going to hit you so hard. You weren't ready... I guess you'll have to be, now. Maybe this'll cut all that potential loose.

Jeremy.. Akira.. Boris.. all of you.. we talked, we played, we laughed, we ruled the world.. and I didn't even really know any of you all that well. It was okay. We still protected each other.

Bye, Daddy. You old bastard. You're really going to be pissed now that Billy's by himself on the throne, huh? I knew you never liked it. You never said anything against us, but I know you always wanted just one Dominator.. and now, there is.

Dammit!! Billy, this wasn't supposed to happen! We were supposed to go the future together, remember? I thought I had the power to make that happen, but I didn't! I wanted to do everything with you! We were supposed to be together forever, Billy, forever! You know what forever means, right? To the year 10,000, the year 20,000! And we were supposed to take the whole world along with us!

And now we can't. Well, maybe you can. I hope you can. I guess there didn't really need to be two of us. Everyone's probably going to stay the hell out of your way now, because you're probably pissed beyond belief...

What a stupid way to die. Sniped through a fucking wall by some goddamn fuckhead like he was cheating in some cheap computer game. I'm going to find you next life. Whoever, wherever you are, I'm going to hunt you down and make you suffer. 

And this.. this is BULLSHIT! My body is probably under some fucking monument by now. "Here lies Howard, our beloved Dominator, may his legacy live on forever in the person of his dearest brother, William." Fuck that! The enemies, whoever the fuck they really are, are probably going to dance on the goddamn thing! And meanwhile I'm stuck here in this nothing-space because I'm fucking DEAD!

And why does my chest hurt so fucking much?!

What the- dead people don't feel pain! Billy, you son of a bitch, what year is it? 2200? 2300? You must have called my soul back somehow. I must be regrowing in some tank someplace. How the hell do I remember...'

"...moving." The words were blocked by an irritating movement of air into and out of his throat, a constant puff-pussshh coming from something on his face.

"He's awake. I can tell. Open your eyes, Howie!"

And Howard did just that, and found the entire left side of his vision blocked by the tear-stained, smiling face of his brother. 'He's still young. I must have been hit recently. A day ago, hours? I never died?' 

"Howard, listen to me carefully. Don't try to move. Don't try to talk, don't even try to breathe. If you want to know what happened.. look down." The clinical voice of the Operator, only slightly colored with emotion. His neck moved slowly down, his eyes gazed past the breathing apparatus affixed to his face, and he understood immediately. "All of you.. just wait. I need to know something, and I need to know it now." The Operator placed a metal cap atop Howard's head, and he heard and thought a flash of strangeness, then the Operator pulled it off, looking visibly relieved. "Negligible if any brain cell death. Functioning is normal." An instant MRI. The people breathing on their own sighed with relief.

"Did you know that you really are the luckiest fucker on the planet?" Paul asked rhetorically.

William didn't want to hear their relief. There was nothing to be relieved about, here. In fact, they shouldn't even be here right now. "Sarah! Find out who let this happen. Reset implants if you have to, I don't care whose servants they are, I don't care who's running the investigation right now, you're in charge, personally. Paul! The railgun. Find out who made it, where the parts came from, who gave it to who before it ended up there. Anyone gets in your way, kill them, by order of the Dominator. Operator, don't you have better things to do than to stand there watching us?" Of course he didn't. The question was ridiculous on its face. But he didn't have anything better to say to get him out of the room.

"But, but, what the.," Paul sputtered out.

"Paul, what he's really saying is that they want to be left alone for a bit," Sarah said quietly. This was actually not what Howard wanted at all. After such separation from his friends, such emptiness, he wanted as many friends around him as he could have. But the twins never contradicted each other and he wasn't about to start by shaking his head. "We both better get our hands dirty in this more sooner than later anyway. Come on." The Operator glanced at the twins, sighed, and followed the other two out, closing the door behind him, leaving a redundancy of Enforcers and instruments. The moment he did so, Billy's emotions came out in a flood.

"You're not allowed to die! I don't care! I just don't care, about the enemy or the rogues or whatever else they're supposed to be! I'm supposed to go to the future with you, remember? Please don't die before that happens, Howie, not to this meaningless shit..." And he cried, his stumps moving back and forth inside his brother's torso. "This is the second time, the second fucking time, and it was you and not me again. What's the third time going to take, Howie? Your foot? Your balls? Your head?" The first time had cleaved his brother's arm off in a searing burst of microwave energy, the result of an Illuminated nutjob's pure insanity.

The oxygen mask made it impossible for even Howard's lips to be read, but he made his wishes known through eye movements and hand gestures: If I die, you don't.

"Even with Sarah and Paul, it'll be a lonely existence." The words hung in the air for a few seconds. Maybe, in a thousand years, he might forget that he ever had a twin. He didn't want to think about it. "Enforcer, gimme an energy bar." The nearest Enforcer obediently took one from its pocket and walked over, holding it out. 'What does it expect me to do, grab it with my teeth, maybe?'

Howard took the bar instead, unwrapping it and holding it up to his brother's mouth, feeding him a bite at a time. ('Isn't this what he did for me those two years? Billy, do this. Billy, do that. Billy, play with me. Billy, kill those people. Billy, help me rule. He's my twin brother, and he just blew off his hands for me. Maybe I should have helped kick the Operator's ass.') He considered things in a new light.

The Illuminati had a lot of phrases for the misuse of power, all of which were variants of 'fucking up': 'Majorly miscalculating motives', the notorious Triple M of failure. 'Did not take into account' was always a prelude to some disaster, and some operatives gave subtle groans the moment they heard it, particularly when secrecy was involved. 'Clusterfuck' was also popular. 'Setback', that most understating of words, was reserved for the worst of the worst. What there was not was any phrase that signified that maybe power should not be used in a specific place or another, that its use by itself would fuck things up; according to most of their texts on the subject, an Illuminatus simply talking to another person was, or should be, an expression of power.

That was ridiculous, unnecessary, and more than a little insane, leading directly to impossible consequences, particularly in relation to infrastructure. If the Illuminati actually believed they were supposed to work like that, they would swiftly degenerate into Hobbesian war; in fact would have disintegrated early on, due to lack of secrecy. So what they had was a strange combination of superiority dickwaving and necessary cooperation.

And with the implanting of the Dominator, the battle lines had been drawn- the people willing to risk everything for power on one side, and the cooperators (Altruists, but in the Illuminati? They'd have to come up with a new word.) with the Dominator. It was as old as man, with the Illuminated addition of playing both ends against the middle. It was just too bad the power-grabbers would save their overt backstabbing for after the Dominator was dead. But so long as they could prevent that, and maintain a united front against the fundamentally disunited fucktards, the outcome was inevitable.

Could he say it? ('Billy, it's an unstable dichotomy. We will win.') Well, his larynges would still do what he told them, he could move his mouth inside the machine, and the air pump moved at regular intervals, so... "Birruh, isanunsthable"- no, that wasn't working.

His brother smiled at him. "Whatever it is, Howie, it can wait."

It could. He was thinking in an altered state, mostly asleep due to his body's full regenerative demands, and he knew it. He closed his eyes and dreamed in colors.

Sarah blasted the jet high into the ionosphere, at more than ten thousand miles an hour, to convene an emergency meeting of the people responsible for the Bavarian facility, giving them a simple invitation: Be there now or be the main course.

There were eight of them, and at a glance she could tell that they no longer trusted each other in the slightest, if they ever did. They didn't even want to be physically next to each other, sitting far apart at the round table and giving each other dirty looks. They could have been doing a truly excellent job of pretending, but Occam's Razor suggested the obvious: they hadn't paid much attention to this specific holding, as it wasn't anything they could profit from despite its central position. It wasn't likely that any of them were rogues at all. Bureaucratic inertia and a lack of caring had led to them half-assing it on security. Since so many Enforcers came and went from the facility, they had ordered their own Enforcers to protect against sabotage by focusing on implements. No explosives, nothing too large, nothing that looked like a weapon, nothing radioactive, nothing acidic (which Sarah found amusing)- but the railgun was none of those things, having been assembled in situ by Enforcers that looked like any other. The concept of "which Enforcers are authorized to do what" was so fundamentally watered-down that slipping agents in was like breaking security on Windows 98, and she was very tempted to execute all eight for incompetence on the spot. Disgraceful normal bullshit. They'd surely fix it all after-the-fact, each one apparently paranoid that one of the other seven would try to undermine security, especially since Sarah really would kill them all if anything remotely like this happened again.

They brought in the servants, all eight of the conglomerate trying to pin the blame on someone that wasn't themselves. This, Sarah found even more disgraceful. The servants had so many orders with partially conflicting interpretations that it was a wonder how they ran the place at all. Eventually one of the servants just started quoting Office Space at them about the eight bosses, to Sarah's spiteful laughter and the conglomerate's consternation. What she wanted to do was manumit the servant and give him the facility, but what she couldn't do was anything that would cause backlash. The twins were right about political concerns, and she hated it. With every word these eight morons spoke, she wanted more and more to ram autocracy down their throats, but the resulting civil war would destroy the Illuminati even if the Duumvirate's side won it. Someone in an important position would die or lose power, someone would break secrecy.

So she simmered, quietly wondering how the fuck these people ever became Illuminati, and hoped Paul was having better luck.

When the Operator walked back into the twins' recuperation room a few hours later, he found Howard re-doing William's magnetic fly.

His shock was alleviated by one of the Enforcers walking past him with a medical-waste container full of urine and feces.

Of course. The Enforcers had made no provisions for the one who was presumably healthy just because he was standing- kneeling, now, on a foam blanket normally used for burn victims- and breathing on his own. Or perhaps they considered them one being, and simply judged Howard as the part to be treated. An unseen flaw in the training, but not one that was likely to be repeated any time soon. The Operator sat down at the monitors.

"His lungs are fine, but his diaphragm doesn't work," William informed him. "His spine's still gone."

"I see. What about your hands?"

"What hands?" The Operator looked on the monitor and saw only the beginnings of bone growth, and increased the amount of calcium and phosphorous in the nutrient mix. "I think he might have an esophagus again. Not sure." This was said with some nastiness; how else do you talk about your twin's organs being shredded?

The Operator looked at William, still kneeling on the blanket. "Are you comfortable?"

"Like I really give a shit," William replied.

The Operator just nodded. He was tempted to use this opportunity to apologize to William, now that he couldn't dislocate his arms for a while, or tell him.. what? No, scratch that, now was a very, very bad time.

"Out of respect for my Dominator," he began, looking directly at William, "I am getting you a chair." And he personally brought one in from another room, a large one with a built-in toilet, used for lengthy procedures. William accepted it without protest.

The Operator looked at William as he adjusted it, his face saying what his mouth would not. Now we know what is important., that look said. Will you forgive me now?

"I accept you, Operator, and I think I even understand you. But I will never forgive you." The Operator left without a word.

"Yeah. Even now, I still hate him," William told his brother. Howard put his arm around him in response, and it was William's turn to fall asleep.

He woke up to feel Howard kicking. "Did that wake you up?" Howard asked, and for a moment William wanted to throw his arms around him just because he was overjoyed to hear him talk again. Oops, still lodged in his torso.

"Yeah. What were you saying before?"

"Oh, that? I was thinking how we'll inevitably win so long as we don't get killed by something stupid now. It's not just because of who we are, it's because of the philosophies of our supporters and our opponents. We fundamentally stick together, they fundamentally fall apart."

That was so sweepingly positive that William had no immediate reply, and simply blinked in response. He could understand how Howard could come to that conclusion, but it had the air of wishful thinking about it. Was it true? He couldn't decide. There were a whole lot of endorphins flooding his system, that was for sure.

"Yeah, I know. Nice hope, right? Now I have to reteach my spine. My right knee lifts, my left knee just won't move.. maybe if I try to.."

"Agh! That was me!"

"What do you mean, that was you?"

"I mean you made my arm twitch. That's not your left knee. If this is your right knee, then your left knee is probably over here, and your left foot is.." Howard's left leg wobbled around at random.

"I think I know how the fuck you're doing that." Nerve connections, where none should be. "And I don't even think it's all back yet."

"I wonder if I can..," William started, and sent specific pulses into the area. Howard's body twitched a bit.

"That tickles! I've got to get my bullet dodging reflexes back, and you're not helping!" Between the endorphins and the silliness, they both became giddy.

"Now we need to bring Sarah in here and make sure your orgasms don't go to your lungs or something." And that was even funnier, and Howard started coughing.

"Woah, you all right?"

"Yeah, hurts to laugh."

"The Operator didn't fuck us up on something, did he?" William asked.

"Not directly. I figured it out. Normals release endorphins when they're hurt to counteract pain. Same with us, although we're not supposed to get hurt this bad."

"So basically the Operator fucked up sometime in mid-'88 and got the Dominator high." That brought up another round of laughter.

"I kinda wish you would forgive him."

"I can't, Howie. I mean, for you, I'll treat him all right and I won't hurt him again, but.. he really screwed me over. And if it wasn't for you it would have been worse."

"Didn't you use to tell Paul it could always get worse?"

"Oh, shut the hell up before I figure this hands-to-spine thing out and make you do something, namely dance the goddamn fandango!" And that was the funniest of all. "Oh shit, I hope you don't rupture something."

"Nah, I'm all right. Hey Billy, why don't we always talk in echo?"

"Because it echoes in our heads."

"Mmm. Good point. All right, my left foot is over here, my left knee is over here." His legs did a few kicks of increasing finesse. "I think I've got it. Thanks for pointing out where my legs are, my back forgot." That, too, was funny, even if literally true.

"Going to try to walk?"

"Still a bit too low on vertebrae for that. I'll let you know when I get some more."

"Yeah, and be sure to pick up two sets of tarsals and a grab bag of wrist bones while you're out." Howard didn't get it at first, and then started giggling.

"But if I gave you a grab bag, what could you do with it?"

"Shut, the hell, up!"

The Night Operator walked in then, and was quite surprised to find them laughing. "Endorphins, Operator, we're screwed up on endorphins," Howard said.

"Do you want me to do something about it?" the Operator asked, ready to obey anything they might tell him. This Operator had dealt more with equipment and administration, and was not familiar with the twins. The only things he really knew about them were their specifications, which still left him somewhat awed. As an engineering administrator, he didn't readily believe anything without solid evidence, of which there was plenty.

"No," William said, decisively. The Operator nodded and looked at the monitor, and nodded again.

"Dominator, please let me know if anything else unexpected happens," he said, and left them.

"He's afraid of us," William pointed out.

"Everyone's afraid of us," Howard reminded him. "We are fucked up. I think we should go back to sleep."

"Think we can just do that? Go back to sleep, just like that?"

It turned out that they could.

Paul didn't know when he'd ever sleep again.

He'd brought out everything he had on the presumably simple task of examining the railgun, a few of his Venezuelan servants and the Dominator's island operatives contributing their time. Sarah's job was harder than his, but he was still able to siphon off a couple of her operatives for advice and some technical help. There was just so much to do. To examine something properly in Illuminated terms, first you examine it for tampering since it was used; had anyone messed with it after it was fired? The answer was 'apparently not'. Then you examined the overall structure of it, taking notes on what went where and tried to match it to existing designs of anything else. Then it was down to individual parts and materials, how the steel was constructed, residue suggesting it was made in some location or other, perhaps a couple grains of pollen or dust to pinpoint it geographically. Paul didn't have his own personal forensics department, so he'd had to make one.

What he was getting back was that half of the damn thing's parts had been siphoned off the normal commercial market, the parts that weren't normal-made had been sterilized clean and weren't identifiable in the slightest, and the overall structure of the railgun was an entirely new design built specially for the purpose. Frustrating. So when Jacques Berrera called him up to tell him that there was an opposition march on Hugo's presidential palace, Paul snapped an order to stop it by whatever means would get the job done and retain secrecy, and went back to his more important work.

Jacques, implanted, had no choice but Enforcer snipers.

The twins were woken by the knowledge of a presence in the room with them. Enforcers had come and gone, activity and monitoring was constant, but this was different- this person was standing in front of them, and they heard his faint breathing and smelled his sweat. Which, they both recognized, contained the sharp ammoniac tang of fear.

They opened their eyes simultaneously to look at the Day Operator, who stood before them, his lip screwing up in contortions of uncertainty, taking uneven breaths and looking at them with the hint of an expression they've seen so many times before from so many people: Please don't kill me. "I was.. waiting for you to wake up," he said, faintly. "We... need to talk."

"You need to talk," Howard corrected him. "Say it."

The Operator took another deep breath, and found his throat tightening as he exhaled. "I found an anomaly. Not from this latest attack, you're fine, you're more than fine actually," he hastened to add.

"Was there an error in our engineering, Operator?" William asked quietly. The Operator's pleading expression grew in intensity.

"Not.. an error." ('Aw fuck, get a grip, just get a fucking grip', the Operator told himself, praying to a God in which he did not believe to save him from his social insecurities) "Do.. you know why implants don't regenerate out?"

"It's not because they're attached and don't have anywhere to go?" William asked, raising two white eyebrows.

"That's.. what I thought too. That was the logical way we thought it would naturally work; we ran tests, we saw it working that way, we took it as something of a blessing for future development, and we moved on. But.. that's not how it would have worked." He sighed. "I had to completely retrace my steps to find it, almost redevelop the whole thing from scratch. There was one sequence that looked like it came from development but actually came from nowhere."

"The old Night Operator," Howard said.

The Operator nodded. "And the son of a bitch wasn't even in place for two months." The Operator silently cursed himself. The whole Day/Night system hadn't been formalized at the time. He could have held off and used servants instead, but noooo...

"How did you find this out now?" both twins asked at once, two unsynchronized questions zipping together to form one.

"That magnetic scan. I didn't notice it at first, but there's about an extra millimeter of white matter where the implants used to be. I have theories as to why, but.. William, if I may?" The Operator held out the same tool he had used to scan his brother.

"Hit me." The Operator placed it on his head and he was promptly hit with a faint wave of disorientation. The Operator pulled it back, looked at the imagery on a nearby screen, and nodded. "As I expected. The same. And I know for a fact that this microstructure did not exist beforehand." He furrowed his brow, looking for the briefest moment like a truly old man. "The two of you don't experience headaches, do you?" It was a senseless worry, just a millimeter, but...

Howard laughed thinly, and his brother joined in. "All the time, you have no idea of the kind of fucking headaches... Ohhhhh, you mean from thiiiis," he said, adding sarcasm and echo to his voice before coughing hard, his diaphragm spasming, reddish flakes of 'second-reason' (emergency sealant) skin and collagen spraying on the floor. "No," William finished for him. "Speaking of which, we need to get back home," he said, looking to his brother. It had been about sixteen hours since the attack.

"No, what you need to do is drink this," the Operator said, gesturing to an Enforcer that had just entered carrying two half-gallon jugs of something that began with Enforcer milk and ended with specific proteins and trace elements. He looked at the twins, trying not to roll his eyes. "Must we go through the whole 'authority versus medical necessities' business? Because I've had this argument so many times before, Levels who just had to leave before they were healed.. must I really have it with you?" The twins, at least, accepted the milk, each of them chugging it in two long gulps. "Surely any necessary business can be conducted by phone?"

"Ruling from here destroys many accoutrements of majesty. There's a certain dignity we must preserve," William said.

"Your hands are still part of his chest," the Operator reminded him.

"Operator, we don't tell you how to do your job, do we?" Howard asked rhetorically, slowly dislodging himself from the chair, beginning to put weight on his spine, partially supported by William's wrists. The discs, vertebrae, and spinal cord were mostly there but they were fresh and raw, and the newly-regrown parts protested with a grinding agony. Naked, he picked up his double weapon and stumble-walked out with each step more sure than the last, his brother stabilizing him.

Chapter 16

The twins checked their phones as the Northberg Enforcer flew them home. Fortunately, almost everyone had shut the hell up for this crisis. There were a few genuine "I'm so glad you're both all right", mostly from engineereds and their other friends, and a few bits of blatant sycophancy. A few other Illuminati with disputes had canceled their Dominator requests and settled them themselves, not wanting to piss the twins off. Would that the Levels always acted like that.

They came home to an empty mansion, which was surprising. Sarah might be off doing interviews or something, but Paul did almost everything at home. At least the dogs were there, and Fido could not understand why one twin's wrists were in the other. Jumping up, he licked the connection, as if it were an open wound, and the twins' gentle voices barely consoled him.

Sitting down together like that was not the easiest thing to do. Howard suggested that William simply lay next to him with his arms outstretched, but his regenerating wrists screamed when they tried to bend. Having Howard's weight on William's forearm hurt them both even worse. Eventually Howard ended up resting sideways against his brother, William's right elbow bent and his left one sticking out. Howard playfully reached back his left arm and ran his fingers through his brother's hair. "I'm comfortable, how about you?" Howard joked.

"It's fine, you're like a soft blanket." That brought mutual chuckling. Howard had used his brother as a pillow when they were master and servant. William didn't mind all that much then, and he didn't mind at all now.

"Technically, you should have used your legs," Howard said. That would have brought more blood vessels into play but made their current position even worse.

William laughed, visualizing it. "No, the entry hole was too small for that. So it'd be arm for the front and a leg for the back." That was even more hilarious, and Howard relieved that he didn't uncontrollably cough anymore when he laughed, William's wrists tickling him as they moved around with his own laughter. "The funny part is, if I would have thought of it, I would have done it." Hindsight, hindsight, hindsight. "And if you didn't survive, I would have thought of it eventually, and.. oh man."

"Yeah.. let's try not to contemplate things like that," Howard said. What he had been trying not to think about was that he never would have thought of plugging the hole at all, and if his brother was the one hit, he would have been sole Dominator again. It was better to think about the better ideas he'd found himself with, and he called up the Operator with one arm, still playing with his brother's hair with the other.

The thought came unbidden- 'Haven't we used enough of his time?'- and William felt a bit ashamed of himself for thinking it. Even after nearly two years ruling the Illuminati, a fraction of his subconscious was still that of a powerless normal, worried about wasting people's time with unwanted questions, despite his time and actions as Dominator. Hell, he'd been the one to kick the Operator's ass! He scowled, pushed something in the back of his mind, and would not make that subconscious mistake again.

Howard's thoughts on the subject were that the Operator was probably in the middle of something, but then again the Operator was always in the middle of something, and being interrupted was not going to cost him an insight he would have had otherwise, as the Operator's genius was simply too compact and powerful to be distracted in that way. The genius in question showed no signs of being in the middle of anything when the connection was opened, but that was to be expected; the viewscreen window was part of the Operator's console and that was where he did the majority of his work.

"Let's discuss Enforcers, Operator," Howard said. The opening statement was to set the tone of the discussion. The Operator might react differently if he thought he was being interrogated.

"Certainly, Dominator. Where shall we begin?"

"Sentient Enforcer production was halted, with no production models following the prototype. Why?"

"New advances saw the concept outdated. Whatever would you want a sentient Enforcer for?" The twins were surprised at his need to ask such a thing.

"Squad leadership, tactical planning, research and development innovation," Howard answered.

"The first two can already be done to a good extent and the third is a double concept- non-sentients will be able to consider the wants of requesters and develop accordingly fairly soon, but the new ideas will always come from Illuminati or ordinary servants. In theory a sentient Enforcer could have a problem with a mission and envision a specific tool to complete it, but if you're going to have an entity wielding that sort of genius, you'd want a servant with experience and grounding in reality." That was the problem that the Anarch had, serious tunnel vision due to his complete lack of life experiences. Although he had successes from his raw power and unexpected tactics, review of his techniques showed evidence of magical thinking and occasional lack of common sense. He simply didn't know any better.

William wasn't going to let his brother be so swiftly out-argued. "Advanced strategical planning, complex resource allocation, reasonably accurate prediction of future events with incomplete or varying information." He wasn't worried about the Operator accusing him of wanting a fortune teller; the Operator knew what he meant.

"All three of those simply require brainpower. You may think of them as requiring sentience but they really just require neuronal interaction. The problem is simply one of untying cerebral thought processes from personality and will."

"Without a soul, how can they have a will?" William asked.

"They can't. Without the core, the personality areas express themselves in chaos. The implants can still control them, but the interaction is badly damaged and they can do many bizarre things." The Operator spoke with the tone of one who has seen it all. An Enforcer once rammed its thumb through its hard palate to adjust the implants because it concluded that its imperfect control was because they were not seated right. "The problem is that we need to undo what nature has done, create a computer out of neurons which will never start thinking for itself, a computer that can accept complex sensory input and produce wildly varying output without the need for a determiner in between. But I assure you this is all much easier than creating a sentient Enforcer capable of the same things. With regular Enforcers we're just playing with neurons. With sentients we're creating variants of human beings." The Operator smiled wryly. "There's reasons people prefer human servants. Enforcers can already do a passable job of human impersonation for many purposes, but why is it not the same?"

The twins answered simultaneously: "Because Illuminati like controlling people."

"Quite. And Illuminati who want people are simply going to get them. The only others who have contacted me about this are the Satanist contingent," LaVeyan Satanism, with its dreams of Artificial Human Companions, was alive and well in the Illuminati. "and, frankly, if they can't accept what we have now then they can go jump in a snake pit. Everyone else is more interested in making their servants into engineereds," he said, and from the tone of voice the twins could see that he was very well-henpecked over it. Like some major game companies, the Operator had eventually stated that the retrovirus would be done when it's done.

"And almost all of them are going to be disappointed," Howard said.

The Operator sighed. "Is this going to go the way I think it is? Are you going to tell everyone that they can't have it because it might improve one of your enemies to the point where they can hurt you?"

"We don't have a choice," William said, shaking his head. "Unless we absolutely know that they're loyal. It's a matter of brainpower, speed, and technological development. You already saw how someone with nothing but cleverness and the element of surprise can ruin our whole day. The only reason we're still here talking to you is because they overlooked something important. A retroviral probably wouldn't."

"Speaking of improvements not given.," the Operator started, pondering how to inform them of something that he'd been on the fence about for a while. "Dominator.. can you keep a secret?"

They stared at each other for a full second before a faint smile crept up on the Operator's lip and the twins burst out laughing. "I think.. and this is just a guess, Operator.," William said between bouts of laughter, "that we might be qualified to do that."

"It's a possibility," Howard added. "Just a hunch." Who ever heard of white-haired people leaking anything, anyway?

"Okay. Well, the secret this time is that I've been lying about the limitations of Enforcers. No, not in this conversation, on the database. And nothing to do with brainpower. You see, Dominator, what I worry the most about isn't a trap in a wall or something like that. Enforcers are everywhere now, there's no way around it. That initial command you gave, that every fifth level should have two of them? In many cases it's a lot more than that. Imagine facing hundreds, thousands, at one time, all of them just as fast and coordinated as you are, maybe even more so, working together as a single whole, because they managed to pull off whatever trick they did to suborn them again and I still don't know how they did that."

"So your solution is to keep Enforcers weak." Weak in comparison to sentient engineereds, anyway. "Given any kind of reasonable situation, we'll always be able to beat them," Howard said.

"Yes. It's either that or go by your standards of loyalty to see who gets the good ones, but like I said Enforcers are everywhere and no matter what I did the secret would get out if anyone noticed differences. And they would." The Operator sighed. "Damn these rogues, this.. whatever the hell it is. Damn them all. I'm sure you hate this more than me, but even needing to think about this kind of thing is maddening for someone in my position."

"We wouldn't know, Operator. We don't get mad," William lied gloriously.

"You don't get mad?" the Operator asked, eyebrow raised.

"No." His brother finished it with him: "We get even." The Operator nodded and Howard clicked off.

"So what were you thinking of when you called him?" William asked.

"How nice it would be if we had clones we could replace," Howard said, sighing. "But since almost nobody else wants them, if we directed development into that direction, it'd be obvious what was going on."

"Somebody'd figure it out sooner or later anyway. Howie, there's nobody that could replace you," William said, smiling, having done just that so many times before. Howard couldn't help but laugh. He set the screen to silent mode, laid his head back on his brother's shoulder, and they swiftly fell into a convalescent sleep once more.

"Hi, honey, we're home!" Paul woke them up with as he opened the door. It was daytime again, and he hadn't slept in more than thirty hours. "I've got bad news and bad news, which do you want first?"

"Food," Howard answered right before his brother. Sarah went to the kitchen and rapidly came back with a substantial plate of sliced cheesecake. Howard took it, put it on his lap, and methodically started feeding himself and his brother bite by bite.

"Good choice," Paul said, snagging a cube for himself, chewing as he thought of what to say. "The bad news is, the facility owners are so incompetent we'll never figure out whose Enforcers put the railgun there, and that thing was untraceable, so after hours of work neither of us has any fucking idea who did it."

"Incompetent in every sense. Six men, two women, and not a clue between them," Sarah added, as if asking permission to kill them all for it.

"So what's the bad news?" William replied instead. He tested his wrists. Good, they could bend without tearing something since more of the ligament-anchor small bones had come back.

Paul's eyes rolled back into his head and he sat heavily to the twins' left, sinking into the seat like he usually did when tired. "All right, so.. here's what happened. I'm in the middle of doing the railgun shit, there's some kind of protest whatever going on against Hugo, I can't be bothered so I just tell Jacques to put an end to it. I know. Stupid. He just snipes the thing down, Enforcers, headshots. Turns out there was a coup planned the whole time."

William shook his head at him, as he did when they were young and Paul fucked up like the ordinary kid he was. "They're your holdings, Paul," Howard reminded him.

"I know! I know, I have to know what goes on in them, fuck! Been kicking myself all day. Servants didn't see it coming either, I know I'm not supposed to blame them, just saying. Anyway, there's this bigass coup, this jackhole managed to take the military. His name was Carlos Enrique Hernandez. And that motherfucker Wilfred Garcia got every single TV station to start reporting that the coup was already over and the other side won."

"That's almost a damn secrecy breach," William said.

"No shit, right? Almost." Paul shook his head. "You want to know the best part of this? Doesn't the timing of this little coup seem a bit strange to you?"

Howard sat up, pressing his back into his brother's wrists painfully. He'd have spilled the food if not for his reflexes. "You're not saying-"

"Yeah, we're saying," Sarah said. "Carlos was a rogue. He blew his brains out and wiped his systems the moment we showed up. Every hard drive in the building was magnetically fried, everything that even looked like a record was torched. There was some bullshit with his Enforcers trying to kill me but that didn't last long." They fought a standard fight, Sarah eliminated them without incident. It wasn't worth talking about. "He didn't have shit for evidence other than his own suicide, and Paul doesn't think Wilfred's a rogue."

"He's not," Paul said. "He completely wasn't expecting us to show up at his house. He did work with Carlos to plan it, but he didn't know what Carlos knew. He was really freaked out when he figured out what happened. I mean, I kinda wanted to kill him, but.." He shook his head. Sarah was surprised at his mercy when he turned around and walked away, just as the twins were when listening to it. Politically, it was a bad idea to use Sarah's power to kill another Illuminatus for his own personal gain or to eliminate his own opponents- unless rogues were involved. He could have had Sarah splatter Wilfred's guts all over the tiger rug in his foyer and his brains all over the chandelier, and almost no one would have blinked, least of all Sarah herself. So long as he asked nicely, Sarah'd kill almost any Illuminatus Paul wanted. All she needed was an excuse.

"Even though he tried to take your country?" Howard asked, a corner of his mouth upturned.

"I showed up at his fucking front door with her," Paul said, gesturing to Sarah and chuckling a bit. "I don't think he ever will again. Anyway, after Carlos was dead it was easy to take his servants. Everything's being cleaned up now. Hugo'll be back in power in a few days."

"So this rogue Carlos timed this, just because he knew you'd be distracted," William summed up.

"Well, yeah. But he probably didn't know you both lived before he told his guys to finish it. If you'd have bled out, I think I'd be a lot more distracted than that," Paul replied, eating another piece of cheesecake to try to take his mind off it and other things. Even thinking 'I'm glad it was one of them and not me' felt like a betrayal, but they regenerated and he didn't. If he would have been hit by that he would have died on the spot. He gave them a hug and went upstairs to pass out.

Chapter 17

It was an expected lull in retrovirus development. The Operator had sent billions of DNA possibilities into the computer system. Enforcers weren't necessary for this sort of thing. The computer did it all. Within a matter of half a day, there would be several dozen candidates for a specific part of the final sequence, ready for pseudohuman testing on in vitro specimens. For the Operator, this was not a time to rest but rather to catch up on other, less urgent projects.

Of all the people in the Illuminati, he knew he was the one with the real power. Many people in the Illuminati have occasional, usually subtle and harmless, megalomaniac episodes, buttressed by very real ability. This feeling was lessened by the current conflict, but fantasies of omnipotence still popped up among its members now and then. For the Operator, there was no fantasy. His creations sat in the highest seats of power, with brain chemistry, abilities, and attitudes almost completely determined by him. He thought of the previous Dominator as only a tutor who simply didn't know enough about genetics to have a true influence. The Operator had the final word in deciding what the twins were going to be.

Granted, his power could be nullified or turned against him. Dominator William getting unimplanted and kicking his ass was the starkest representation of this fact, which in retrospect was probably the best thing that could have happened; the young Dominator took his anger out on him without causing permanent harm. "I'm sorry, Billy," he said aloud, even though no apology would suffice. It was hard for him to explain his emotions towards his creations, even the ones he selected as servants. He wanted nothing but the best for all of them, to be content and powerful and full of joy. Overall, it was a whole lot like love.

At the moment, though, he was working not out of love but of old hate. He barely knew this. Occasionally, at times like this one, he'd remember why he abandoned normal humanity. Born Narvie Percival Morgan, easily distracted by moving objects, and far more intelligent than he should have been, he was a social outcast through all of his life, utterly friendless right through his private school and college. For someone like him there appeared to be no reason for the torment and no end to it. In the seventh grade, he was fascinated by biology and entertained dreams of 'fixing' all of humanity through the use of DNA. In college he had gotten a Master's- magna cum laude- to facilitate this. But when he graduated, he learned some facts that he should have known earlier, had he looked up from his books to check: There was no serious company involved in what he wanted to do, practically everyone he discussed his ideas with immediately opposed them on ethical grounds, and no one was willing to grant money for the research necessary. Although he could instantly have gotten a job making nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year, no one else could help him with his true dream and he didn't have the resources to do it himself- his early life was all for nothing, he was condemned to a life of hopeless research on ultimately unimportant subjects, and he was always the last person to know these things. Eventually he became despondent, even suicidal.

He was a week from dissolving his own head with sulfuric acid when the Illuminati recruited him, letting him even write his fake suicide note. The previous Day Operator of the fledgling facility had been keeping tabs on him for months and was the first person who truly knew what he was. The Illuminati was such a welcoming, joyful place to him that for a few weeks, he subconsciously felt that he had died and gone to a sort of heaven. A heaven in which he was able and encouraged to do things like, say, make a disease capable of murdering almost everyone on the planet.

Compared to creating engineered vertebrates, making lethal plagues was easy. The real problem was making them stay lethal. Mutation and natural selection could turn a deadly virus into just another long-lasting ailment. A few peptides one way, and the disease would end up similar to the first disease created by the Illuminati, HIV (a project in which he enjoyed taking part)- another way, and it would spread faster and kill hundreds of millions- yet another and it would have the potential to eradicate most of humanity. He'd run the candidate lists through the computer once it was finished analyzing the retrovirus subset.

This was the Operator's fifth attempt at an omnicidal disease. The other four sat in cold storage, waiting to be unleashed. Come the End of Secrecy, he intended to spread them all at once, knowing that no one bug could do the job. A lot of the other Illuminati had fantasies about armies of normal servants, finally seizing direct power, having every man, woman, and child on the street beholden to them. The Operator's ideal was to eliminate almost all the normal men, women, and children, and his engineereds would easily pick off the survivors and eventually bulldoze the street.

"I'm going to fucking kill you," he said out loud, with much the same tone as his most powerful creations. "I'm going to fucking kill you all."

And then the Operator, through with being distracted by his own thoughts, swallowed a carefully-dosed capsule of methylphenidate and returned to work.

Chapter 18

The assembler was among the most basic of the Operator's tools, and never, ever had errors. It was also slow. Everything that it produced was assembled from scratch almost atom by atom, and then triple-checked for accuracy, as one bad peptide can ruin your whole day. For a project this ambitious it would take an entire hour, and the Operator knew he had other things he could do, but he spent most of that hour staring at it anyway. 

"And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever," he intoned, as the user-friendly blue bar on the screen reached the 99% mark.

The moment the vial was extended from the assembler, he immediately, deftly inserted it into a needle casing and slammed the point into the vein at his right elbow, pushing the plunger home and ignoring the pain. He began, slowly, to laugh, and pulled the empty needle out, looking at it with a grin.

His laughter grew to a chuckle, then to a boisterous shout. "I beat you, you stupid old son of a bitch!" the Operator screamed aloud, raising his fists to the sky in triumph, one still clutching the empty needle. "I BEAT YOU!!!" He hadn't expected to defeat Death by such a large margin; he had more than twenty, possibly thirty good years left in him before his victory. Beating the reaper at age 53 was, by that reckoning, roughly equivalent to beating Gary Kasparov in a twenty-move chess game.

Three kids in Northberg's ventilation system heard his jubilation on finally achieving the retrovirus.

"Hello, Duumvirate. Guess who I am." That was a hell of a thing to buzz up and call with. Particularly when the face with deep red eyes wasn't recognizable at all and the voice was vaguely reminiscent of someone they knew. But the background was familiar, as well as the lab-coat suit.. some engineered teenager wearing the Operator's clothes, or-

"Operator, you fuckhead!" Paul shouted. "You could have told us you had finished it!"

"And have you losing sleep like a little normal kid before Christmas?" the Operator asked with his usual inflection but the larynx he had more than thirty years ago. There was a gentle insult in that; in many ways Paul still was a normal kid, comparatively little, and he probably would have been affected by anticipation. "Besides, I had to make sure it completely worked." He could have ripped some normal off the streets or found someone else in the Illuminati worthy of it, but using himself as the final test subject was a very Operator thing to do. He would have eaten the anticipation otherwise. "There will probably be a general one made later, but the model we're working with now requires tailoring for each specific person. I was the first. The Night Operator received his eighteen hours later." And the next person in line.. "Paul, yours will be finished in a couple of hours."

As a precursor to his forthcoming abilities, Paul tore himself off of the couch and rushed up the stairs to get dressed with phenomenal speed. Everyone else smiled watching him go. Kid on Christmas indeed, with the unequivocally best present in the world coming to him.

"As much as we welcome this, Operator, we'd much prefer it if we knew who our enemies are beforehand. Now that it's out of the bag, there's going to be a lot of anarchy when we have to tell people we don't trust them enough to give it to them," William said.

"I'm aware," the Operator replied. "But you know I couldn't sit on it." The twins figured that was because just too many people needed it, but the Operator knew damn well it was his own ego. There was no way he could not let others know about his triumph over Death, politics be damned. The twins might have their problems and he might not be able to give it to everyone he wanted, but at least making it known was his right. "Since you had to mention it I'm assuming you haven't figured out an alternative either." They hadn't. Without knowing who was who, either an enemy would get the retrovirus or someone who was on the Dominator's side, but not quite trusted, would get the shaft. The last thing the twins wanted was a retroviral enemy, so there was going to be a lot of shaft recipients. There was simply no way around it. "With that in mind, who should we start developing it for next?" The question could have been phrased as 'Well, Dominator, who are your real friends? Paul was a gimme, but is there anyone else you absolutely trust?'

Fortunately, there was. "Jeremy Jorgensen and his servant," Howard said. An easy one; the Operator nodded. "The previous Dominator." The Operator was very slightly startled but should have seen it coming. Even for him, it was easy to forget the retired old man still existed. "Our island's servant trainer." That fell under the didn't-even-have-to-mention-it category. "Wilbur Cronkite, the Illuminatus who has had control over microwave satellites since our unimplantation." They let the Operator figure out that if the microwave controller was an enemy, the twins would have been cooked long since. "Hadji Rajadhiraja and his father. Other members of the nuclear group.. to be determined." He needed to see how much nuclear material they really controlled first, and whether or not they had the opportunity to use it.

"Jack Guernsey and Arthur Rosene," William added. The two who had gotten them out of the initial post-unimplantation clusterfuck. "By the time you get done with those, we'll have determined various others." The Operator smirked. Making the retrovirus was a time-consuming proposition, needing lots of physical resources, sentient attention, and computer time to make sure they were doing it right, and that was per-person. Although Illuminati would get priority, there were engineered masters with unengineered servants who needed it, Sarah first among them; she had formally requested that the two Pakistanis who'd helped her in the Osama raid get it ASAP. Both Day and Night Operators would be very busy men these next few weeks; after that, they would have a better system than the laborious process they were using now. Or so the Operator hoped.

"By the way, Operator, now that you're a different person, would you like to give yourself a name? Now that you're one of us it doesn't seem consonant to keep calling you that," Howard noted.

The Operator paused for a brief instant; he hadn't thought of that. "No," he finally answered. "I still prefer my title. But thank you, I appreciate the gesture." He gave a deferential nod and closed the connection.

There was no sense in procrastinating; the twins got down to brass tacks, doing a lot of research on a lot of people they barely knew, pausing only to give their jocular farewells: "Goodbye forever, normal Paul!" "We'll never see you again!" In the normal world, friends help you move and real friends help you move bodies. In the Illuminati, everyone helps you move bodies, and most of your real friends were people you owned. It was an unexpected change of pace; today they were trying to find out who they could trust, instead of who they couldn't.

Which, naturally, lead directly to the same proving-a-negative problems they had before. Damn implant withdrawal. Without it they could easily prove anyone's innocence and not have to leave them implanted. It was an interrogation technique beyond compare. "Why haven't they fixed that yet?" Howard asked.

"Because it keeps servants in line, that's why," William replied sardonically, and Howard felt like an idiot. Knowing that you couldn't be de-controlled without fatal backlash was a damper on otherwise disloyal servants. It was so easy to forget things like that... "Do you want to open that worm can?"

"No." Hey, everybody! We've got a system where we implant Illuminati, ostensibly for short amounts of time just to test their loyalty! No, really, that's all we're doing! That'd fly like a lead brick, and possibly lead to investigation of their real plan.

"It's funny how most of these are servants," William said after a short while. Unimplanted public servants, many of them, tied to no specific Illuminatus but rather a committee or one of the ill-defined conglomerates of which secret masters were so fond. Such a person, whose orders were determined by unanimous consent, could not be a rogue unless everyone in the group was one. The previous Dominator had suggested a new class of 'general servant' for some of these; it didn't fly because masters didn't want to lose their property even if they didn't directly control it. And who was a general servant loyal to, anyway?

"It's funnier how many Illuminati abrogate power like that." But they knew the reason for it: Lack of trust. If one specific Illuminatus got a hold of the microwave satellites (an endeavor that took twenty of them), he could use them on anyone he wanted. A servant, prohibited from seeking power, could not be the same kind of threat.

Except, of course, when the servant in question let a railgun get built in the middle of his base...

"Let's implant every servant we augment if they're not already," William suggested.

"Ooh, they're not going to like that," Howard replied. 'They' in this case being almost everyone else in the Illuminati. The Dominator was, by custom, not allowed to seek direct power, and especially not allowed to start grabbing any holdings for himself. That was theft of a kind the Levels would not abide. "They're still technically owned by somebody."

"But they won't try to stop it. We have precedent. We have logic- we can't be absolutely-absolutely sure because we don't know who they actually obey, and after all, they're just servants; it's not like they have rights." A similar statement would endear them to the Illuminati who kept saying that the Duumvirate was too nice to servants in general. Most of them were older, not quite understanding the new relationships. "And considering that we will make a public declaration that only those absolutely loyal can receive it, who would dare to speak up at the time? By the time anyone does, the deed is done and we now personally own every maintenance man in the Illuminati. No more railguns in walls." Bold, this was fucking bold, Howard thought. Daddy's general-servant idea, returned with an ultimate vengeance. But just say that they'll only get commands to keep the status quo and inform of suspicious activity, since they weren't anybody's personal property and didn't have sensitive info, it'd get grumbled at a little bit, but the benefit.. oh the benefit...

Howard turned to his brother with a smile. William smiled back. Howard put his hand down low and William slapped it from up high; they did the reverse and finished it with a loud smack near their heads.

"And that will be a good show of power before we start dealing with the various engineereds' parents," Howard said.

"Oh hell no," William replied. "Remember Damien? 'My kid is going to replace the Dominator.' Even if the kid in question has no idea. We can't base trust off that."

"Which is why telling them that is going to need the power show." Howard reached under the viewscreen to grab a game controller and a gun-like pointer. Keyboard and mouse be damned. "Speaking of which..."

When they were pwning some very surprised young Illuminati and servants in UT2003 CTF (and getting pwned in return; these kids were getting hard to beat), Paul was feeling the most anxiety he had in a long time. He also felt exhaustion, as he had hauled tremendous ass getting here, both with the jet and his feet. He had passed some kids in the hall, who weren't sure whether to follow him 'I am a bomb technician, try to keep up' style or run away from whatever his goal was. Curiosity won and some of them almost ran into the examination room with him before the Operator shooed them out. (One little retrovirus, and they listened to him quite a bit faster now...)

Now Paul was staring at the needle that would change his life forever, which the Operator had wryly labeled 'Health Insurance'. He blinked at the size of it- a small tip but twenty-five cubic centimeters of fluid, enough for every cell in his body and then some- as the Operator took a deep breath. "Paul. I want you to understand something before I give this to you." Yeah, that helps a lot.

"Cut the shit, Operator," Paul said. "You don't think I've dreamed of this almost my whole life? I've wanted to be as powerful as Dominator William" Paul was half a syllable from saying 'Billy' there. "ever since I met him. You have any idea what it's like to be in a shadow since young childhood? Even when we were servants I was always beneath him. You've already made the fucking thing, and there's nothing you can possibly tell me that will make me reconsider."

"Not even that you still will be?" Paul looked at him. "The regeneration side of it is perfect. Has to be, for it to be worth anything at all. You'll be every inch as diseaseproof and immortal as your friends. About as proportionally strong for your size, although nowhere near as big. The other abilities.. the speed, the smarts, the perfect coordination.. I can't. It will take at very least six months for me to be able to perfect that in a retrovirus. Maybe even longer, maybe I never will. I could tell you why but it'd sound like nonsense to you." The extremely basic explanation, which Paul would puzzle out days later, was that the nerve cells would change too much in relation to one another and it'd be brain-lethal halfway through. The body would survive- engineereds usually do- but the axonal connections would be broken, the personality and the memories wiped. "It is still a massive improvement in those areas as well, maybe about 85% of the way from you to them now." 'Less,' Paul figured. 'He doesn't know just how much the twins changed after unimplantation. But that wasn't genetics, that was something else...' "It just won't be.. perfect." He said that like he was admitting that he fucked three goats last night and was trying not to go after a fourth. "And it will probably be many decades before there can ever be anything to improve an engineered." Retroviruses are still viruses and get slaughtered by the superior immune systems in very short order. "So you can either take it now and still be a bit less, or you can wait a while and be at least closer to an equal."

Paul did not even hesitate. "Give it to me." As the Operator injected the needle directly into Paul's vein ('the best pain I'll ever feel'), he explained his reasoning, his teenage voice going higher and louder. "What if something happens to me in those six months or more? What if something happens to them, that I could have prevented if I took it? Do you think I could let my own.. my own vanity stand in the way of that? You took it; why would you even think that I would walk out of here a normal? What kind of Illuminatus would I be?"

"A less thoughtful one. And nowhere near as good of a friend for them," the Operator replied, withdrawing the needle. Paul's arm felt funny from the sheer amount of fluid pumped into it. The Operator set it down gently and then did something Paul absolutely did not expect- he rushed towards him and picked him up in a gentle bear hug. "Two or three days. And then.. welcome to the fold." He gently set the young Illuminatus on his feet.

"Thanks. Thanks.. a lot. I wish I could give you something back for that," Paul awkwardly said, just to say something grateful.

"Sarah lives to kill and destroy. The Duumvirate lives to rule. I live to create and improve."

"I live to preserve," Paul said after a moment's consideration.

"Then that is what I hope you do. Don't let the bastards win. Even if the worst happens, even if.. even if your friends are killed, Paul, never let these usurping scumbags win." Oratory was never the Operator's strong suit.

Paul didn't want to think about his friends dying any more than he had to. "I know, Operator. If it happens that way.. I'll go down fighting." He had had thoughts along those lines less than an hour ago. Those engineered kids.. the entire world.. under the control of the enemy? Not on his watch. Not ever. Imperfect or not. "One more thing. You keep focusing on them. But I'm one of your creations now, too." Paul turned and strode from the room, and left the facility with not nearly the hurry he had coming in, flying home at a leisurely pace as the virus snuck into his cells to alter his DNA.

He found himself consuming three energy bars on the plane, and the moment he got home he immediately treated himself to a buffet of freshly-butchered meat, vegetables, and starchy egg noodles, the twins sitting down with him to have dinner early. He generally understood why he'd be so hungry, but wasn't expecting to get hit with it so fast; he didn't even feel like anything but his usual self. But he was tired and readily fell asleep at five in the afternoon, waking up to a dark room and intense discomfort on every level. This was not the effect Paul had in mind. Lying in bed, tossing and turning, unable to feel relaxed or comfortable in the least, guts painfully stretched to the limit but somehow not quite satiated, pulling the sheets off of him and over him again because somehow in the perfectly climate-controlled room it was too hot or too cold, feeling a nameless, low anxiety because something just wasn't quite right, something with his body..

That was it. Not just his body, but his whole being, felt wrong. He felt much too weak, much too slow, much too stupid. His cells were starting to write checks his bloodstream was having a hard time cashing. But he knew what was going on, and with that knowledge brought quietude and acceptance. 'If an engineered found himself in a normal's body, it would feel something like this.'

He drifted off into an easy, peaceful, dreamless sleep.

The next morning he woke up feeling like he was on cloud nine. He catapulted himself out of bed with an enormous smile on his face. Life was great. Life was awesome. He was going to go and play some video games, then he was going to go on the computer and figure out all of the Duumvirate's enemies and kill them all, and then go get a skateboard or something and do some awesome tricks. He knew how silly he was being, but his manic euphoria wasn't abated until he felt the pangs of really needing to go to the bathroom, and intense hunger. He settled the first immediately, rushing to the toilet and immediately vacating his bowels and bladder, expelling a wretched, foul-smelling mess that poured out of him like liquefied rot incarnate. He knew what it must be- almost everything in his gastrointestinal system. An overload of bacteria, some impurities, some oddly-digested turds caused by his body's change. His piss was thick and orange, his improving kidneys removing more garbage than before.

Feeling much lighter, he rushed downstairs, not waiting to get dressed (God knew he saw the rest of them naked often enough), and smiled when he saw what was waiting for him: a massive meal of bacon, eggs, cereal, and thickly buttered toast, with cups of milk and orange juice, the 'complete breakfast' of TV fame that almost no one could actually eat. The amount of calories in this meal, he figured, were enough to give normal dieticians a heart attack just by looking at it.

"You're up early," Sarah remarked, as Paul attacked the food with his fork and teeth. He almost choked, forced himself to swallow, and went after the next bite as if nothing had happened. Sarah sat down and started to eat.

"Did you cook this yourself?" he asked her after several more bites. It tasted like she had.

"Yeah. I think I should start doing that again." She didn't explain why, and Paul didn't ask. "You look.. insightful.. today."

"Like you wouldn't believe! I feel like I can do anything. Or.. no, I feel like I should be able to do anything, I just can't right now because I'm still mostly normal inside. Do engineereds feel this way all the time, and just don't show it?"

"Not at all. Improvement in your condition brings that kind of elation, but maintaining a current state does nothing. It's like that for everyone."

"Bullshit it is," Paul replied. "When I became an Illuminatus, that was the second biggest improvement of my life, but I didn't feel happy, I was just worried sick."

"Did you feel happier when you figured out what you were doing?"

"...Kinda."

"Hm." This actually told Sarah a great deal about Paul's subconscious, and what it considered to be truly positive. "As for your original concern, we don't have this happy thing like we feel godlike all the time. We don't feel strong and smart; we intuitively feel everyone else is weak and stupid." He didn't respond to that, and she gave him a look conveying the simple message: Including you. He didn't respond to that, either, and continued shoveling down food. "That doesn't bother you?"

"What? I always knew that. I figured you guys considered me just a normal. It's always been like that, even when it was just Billy and me, of course I didn't know it was quite like this."

Sarah thought a bit. "Paul, have you ever had any friends in a wheelchair, or on crutches, something like that?" He shook his head, knowing where this was going. "Remember the all-engineereds party they had back on their thirteenth?" Paul looked up. Since they didn't want to stoke Paul's envy, they never told him the details, and he never asked. "That was actually all engineereds with a certain amount of physical ability. One part of it was rock climbing, slamming spikes into the rocks with our hands, and some of them halfway fell just reaching back to jam it in. It was the classical definition of incredibly dangerous, but since there was no one trying to kill them, none of them got hurt. I was the one in the back pulling the spikes left behind." Nominally that was servants' work, but it fell too squarely in the 'If you want it done right' category for Sarah to delegate it. "Paul, them being with you is like.. it's like having a friend in a wheelchair, and going to play frisbee."

"Hey, we have!"

"That's right. And the kind of frisbee you'd play with a kid in a wheelchair is about the same way they've played with you. Hell, if they didn't like you so much, I'd leave you behind half the time, because if we ever have to run very fast, you can't keep up and they'd probably end up carrying you."

"What, is this some kind of an apology? I always considered you a psycho-bitch from Hell, and I'm really, really glad you can't get old because I'd hate to see you as an old lady," Sarah laughed uproariously at that. "but if you didn't start this I would never have told you. Why should I have? C'mon, Sarah, I am one of you now, and isn't that all that matters?" Paul's acceptance and forgiveness were astonishingly rare in the Illuminati, and Sarah blinked in surprise.

"Yeah. Yeah, it is an apology. I just thought maybe you'd made yourself intentionally blind to it, so I thought I'd just tell you, and let your happiness absorb it."

"Sarah, did you really think I'd be mad at any of you for being engineereds?" She blinked. "Don't you think I know what it means to be inferior? I've known Billy since we were little, I've knew some of what he can do and how much better he was than me, now it really stands out, but since I was a kid then, I didn't see anything really weird about it. I think I even helped him hide it, because he wasn't allowed to tell anyone and even if nobody else knew, I knew, because we're best friends. That's why I was taken in the first place, remember?" He paused a moment. "I just wish I would have been taken with him, because Damien was some major fucking bullshit." Damien had eaten Paul's bullet five years ago, but for the first time Paul wished he was alive again, because as an engineered he could do so much worse than simply shooting the fucker.

"And watching you blow a hole through his head was the most satisfying day of the tenth year of my life," William said decisively from behind him, Howard smiling at the memory. Paul turned- how had they gotten so close?- but then remembered that they possessed the same stealth skills Sarah did, if with less polish and practice. He'd have to study it.. and all the other things engineereds took for granted, but normals had a hard time with or could never know. Could he really retrain his body's reflexes?

Howard was considering apologizing for Damien, but decided against it as awkward and unproductive. So he wordlessly hugged Paul for a moment instead, and Paul laid his fingers on his arm, smiling. How could I blame you for being you?

Then the twins sat to eat similar portions to what Paul had, and Paul marked 'Appetite' as one of the first things that had changed about him. Wait- no- it was even worse than that. He was hungry, but he couldn't physically eat another bite. His stomach contents would have to migrate further for him to be able to shovel more down- which his body was desperately telling him he had to do.

"I'm full, but I'm still hungry!" Paul exclaimed after sitting at the table another fifteen seconds. "Do you guys get like that?"

"Not unless we've been starved.," Howard started, remembering those silly Inheritor's Tests they had been forced to undergo. They had never found out just who had come up with that shit, and both independently considered that whoever had was a possible enemy of some stripe or another. Or maybe just someone with a mean streak, which was another phrase for 'everybody'.

"That's.. kind of what I am." He was normal. He needed to be an engineered. Whence would the energy and matter come? Ah, if only he could simply eat uranium and bypass all this organic shit.

"Blood substitute's in the walls," Sarah suggested. After the railgun incident, she had ordered some of that to be placed in similar fashion to the weapons. She didn't care if it was overcautious.

"Um.. no thanks. I'll be all right. Fuck..."

"Drink more, it absorbs faster," she shrugged and said, going back to her plate. Paul poured himself another tall glass of milk (sheep, this time) and chugged it down by force, refusing to choke. He then closed his eyes, pretended his stomach didn't hurt so much, and sat there, listless.

"You remind me of a snake," William said off-hand, and this time Paul did choke, milk coming straight out of his throat and into his nose and lungs as he started laughing.

"What? Why?!" he finally said, after he had coughed the last few drops out, his stomach actually feeling a bit better with the convulsions; he could swear he felt some food drop into his small intestine.

"Don't you remember that snake eating that rat on the Discovery Channel? The rat was three times as wide as the snake."

"Oh, that, yeah! But the snake only eats every 48 hours." Paul had watched his friends pig out constantly. He just didn't quite cognite until now that it would be him doing the same. He walked out of the room and to the couch, popping out a controller. "It's my first day, let's see how I do!" he called back to them.

He thought about playing normal-world stuff, but was too familiar with the stuff he liked; instead he tried one of those engineereds-only games that some bored, twisted Illuminati programmers had made, and got his ass swiftly handed to him, the game mocking him outright (in a horrible nyah-nyah voice, too) that he had to be a normal because he failed so miserably, his friends giving some good-natured laughter as well.

"Wow, I've never seen that," William said through the chuckles. "Try again tomorrow? Or go outside?"

"I am not doing physical anything until I know I'm not going to fuck up and kill myself," Paul said decisively. What if his reflexes tried to make a move his muscles couldn't actually do, or his muscles became too strong for his bones for a while?

"Not even Frisbee?" Howard asked.

"All right, Frisbee. But I am definitely not working until I know I'm not going to fuck that up."

"What if your rivals had the same thought?" Howard suggested. It didn't seem likely that they'd piss off someone who just got a greater capacity to hurt them, but some Illuminati did things like that.

Paul winced. "Fuck, looks like I am. ..Later. Much later." 'When I get a hold of myself.' He didn't have that many real rivals anymore, anyway. Wilfred had a more or less permanent grudge but would never act on it. He enjoyed general non-aggression with pretty much every other Illuminatus with Central and South American holdings, and had mild, active agreements with a few.

Paul didn't feel any different- he didn't see himself catching up more, or thinking ahead to one of the twins' insane wind-predicting boomerang throws, and he didn't even try for the laserlike toss that sizzled a foot past him and banged the steel wall- but they smiled at him at the end of it nonetheless.

He watched the twins deal with various retrovirus seekers, trying to see if he had any new insights yet. Not really. The twins were still the same to him, dealing with problems in their usual way. The day's petitioners, he noticed, were more pissed than usual. From what he gathered, the twins had found loose servants who didn't exactly belong to anyone, and were going to implant them before giving them the retrovirus. This proved unpopular, particularly since most of the involved Illuminati weren't getting the retrovirus themselves. Paul congratulated himself on noticing something: the twins' faint look of puzzled surprise when they found out that the main problem wasn't them stealing servants through implanting them (many of the Illuminati in question were starting to consider them more of a burden than a bargaining chip in the post-Duumvirate political climate), but a more generalized fear of power concentration. 'Unitary executive theory' was a line of bullshit fed to normals, and despite the twins' frequent reassurances, they had difficulty convincing everyone in the Levels that they had no intent of eventually misusing those servants in an all-out power grab.

Paul wouldn't have minded losing a problem as thorny as a shared servant; he still felt like he was struggling to tread water in Venezuela. He had no idea if his few enemies knew he was retroviral or not; none of them had anything to do with the few various things he had to research that day, which turned out to be actual coincidences instead of a real conspiracy. Well, at least they looked like coincidences.. fuck that. Even before the retrovirus he knew not to try to prove that kind of a negative. After dinner (veal, very fresh, the calf having been butchered on the island an hour before), he went straight to bed, the light in the windows just beginning to fade.

He dreamt. It was at once terrifying and exalting, depressing and jubilant. His life flashed before his eyes- he thought that was only supposed to happen to the dying- and suddenly he found himself in a massive adventurer's dungeon, wearing gleaming weightless platinum armor, his shield made of the same, a mirror-bright longsword in his hand. He slew screeching demons with blinding speed, dodged balls of fire from iron dragons' heads while wall-jumping, escaped a flooding trap by climbing up the rock wall, and before he knew it he was at the final guy, an enormous, hunched-over thing with blades on its arms, back, and tail, foot-claws poking holes in the ground, angled eyes glowing yellow.

And the monster spoke to him in a deep, gentle voice from between its long, pointed teeth, giving him some sort of promised blessing and asking for something wholly incomprehensible in return.

Paul awoke suddenly to the dawn, and felt like he had never done it before.

"Alive. I'm alive," he whispered into the darkness. He was alive, more than he had ever been. He was surprised he had memories; how could he have been awake and moving before, and yet.. not? His experience yesterday morning paled in comparison. This was life.

And- at the same time, yet not cancelling out- he felt like his entire body had been burning from the inside out. His muscles felt torched, his nervous system screamed as if it was looking for something it no longer had. His bones were the worst; they felt horribly mangled, twisted somehow.. no, short. His bones were too short by a tiny amount, enough to loosen his joints. Paul sat up- very quickly- and his vertebrae screeched in protest, a whisper of a headache starting to confound his transcendent elation. I do not want to get up. At all. Nope, nope, nope...

Yet he did, hunger his driving force. First to the bathroom, where his piss smelled of something rotten and fermented, his shit that of a dying man; he started to drink large gulps of water from the sink before he stopped himself. Water wouldn't quench this fire. He ambled down the stairs, torn between the strange knowledge that he could backflip down them, and the pain making him walk like an old man. 

Eventually he gave in and flipped forward off the fourth stair from the bottom, landing on his feet with his legs bent as if he had been practicing parkour all his life. His knees popped loudly and he stood up- fast- his back screamed again. "Nnnnnngggg!" Okay! No more of that! Not today!

Food. Lots of it. What's for breakfast? There was plenty of cereal- no, wait- the calf had weighed more than four hundred pounds, Sarah didn't waste that much meat, the island's servants would eat some and the dogs got the legs, but it can't be all gone...

Good. A large haunch was impaled on one of the deep freezer's many meat hooks. Paul darted in (he hadn't gotten dressed that morning, and it was seventy below in there), ripped off the entire seventy pound haunch with one hand, and darted back out, slamming the door to the freezing air.

His bones were screaming again and he shifted to carrying it in both hands, plopped it up on the counter, and began to cut. He tried taking a bite, but it was too cold, too tough. Boil it, then; he substituted strength for finesse, chopping the frozen meat harder than he had ever hit anything in his life, tossing the loose cubes of meat into one of the large pots. But not by itself. He chopped up some potatoes, using the same blade and almost as much force, and plopped them in, the water boiling over.

"Stew for breakfast?" Sarah asked next to him, and he felt no surprise at her stealth this time.

"You've never made stew, have you?" he asked.

"I usually let you guys do the digestion," she replied. "What goes in it?"

"Anything and everything," he replied, feeling a pang of loss- his mother had said that- and then laughed despite himself. He was now as different from his mother as she was from a chimpanzee. Spices, herbs, salt and pepper- no carrots, those tasted like ass when cooked- went into the pot, before he sealed the lid and superheated the contents to a cheery 150 degrees C. He waited ten agonizing minutes until he stopped caring if everything was soft enough, and turned off the stove, strained it all through a colander, and poured it into a large bowl, taking the entire thing to the dining table, picking meat out of the bowl with his fingers and tossing it through the air to cool it. "Want some?"

"First recorded negative effect of retrovirus: Loss of table manners," she said dryly, and shrugged, picking out a few chunks with her fingernails, then leaving to get a bowl for herself. As well as some milk. And utensils. She chuckled to herself. Engineered males were cavemen. She scooped some of the chunks out of the bowl and he almost protested; he wanted to eat all of it.

"Your back hurts?" she asked. He nodded. "Your joints are swollen, but your back's like a mountain range. Did you do something or is that what happens?"

"That's what happens. My vertebrae are too small. More milk?" he asked, having drained the cup in one gulp.

"Get it yourself or get a servant," she said, and he got it himself.

"I do need my own servant by now, don't I," he said. "But you're much higher than I am and you don't have one either." They both had plenty, of course, but none of those were personal servants.

"I don't know if I ever will," she replied. "Don't get one just to get one, or that you think you need one. Make sure it's someone special to you," she continued.

"I wouldn't do that to the people special to me," Paul answered. Besides, his brother would make a piss-poor servant, even implanted. "Wait, are you saying I might implant a girl?"

"The concept of it! That such a thing might be done!" Sarah said with more than enough sarcasm. "Engineered boys enter puberty earlier. I don't know what happened with your balls after the Operator grew them back, but if you suddenly get the hankering for a harem, get it somewhere else." And GTFO.

"Sarah- just- no! No, there's no fucking way! I'd never do that. If I ever need it that badly I'll just use Enforcers." What he didn't mention was that fucking Enforcers felt very wrong after the first few times and so he had been making semi-regular dates with Palmela Handerson and her five sisters. They ate in silence for a bit.

'Who knows? Maybe he's even telling the truth,' Sarah thought. It was funny how an essentially random normal managed to keep his personality under both the influence of servitude and power. Maybe what he really needed was someone to corrupt him.

The twins came down the stairs the way Paul wanted, with a couple of quick leaps and a casual flip over the railing. "Something smells good," Howard said.

"Is that.. stew?" William asked. "Your mom used to fix that stuff. So what's up?"

"We were just talking about sex. He might even be genetically compatible," Sarah said. The transparent attempt to induce jealousy induced humor instead.

"Yeah, good luck on that one," William told Paul. They grabbed bowls and spooned stew from Paul's dwindling bowl, reinforcing Sarah's judgment of cavemen. "You look like you just got off the rack," he continued as he made winching motions with his hands.

"I know! And it hurts like fuck."

"I think you might want to tell the Operator some of this," William suggested. Howard took a bite of the stew- too bland. More spices had found their way to the table and the twins used them copiously.

"Doesn't he already know? He first used it on himself," Paul replied around a large mouthful. Ahh, fuck, was one of his front teeth coming loose? Yeah, maybe he hadn't cooked through all the meat, but.. oh, right, he might lose and regrow all of them. No wonder he needed calcium.

Howard chuckled. "The Operator's modified himself dozens of times, done things with his bones, muscles, and yes, his brain. Good for a guinea pig but not good for a baseline. His side effects probably had side effects."

Paul's first thought: 'Mmm, guinea pig. Maybe I'll have cuy for dinner.' His second he spoke aloud: "Why is this sounding less like medical science and more like mad science?"

There was some chortling. The twins looked at each other.

"Number one, it's just him," William began. "It's not like he's working with a team that he doesn't control on this. There's no peer-reviewed journals or medical texts or FDA or whatever the hell normals would use to regulate this thing."

"Number two, there are no regulations. The Operator makes what he wants. If his instruments and experiments, or ideals, or anything else he values, tell him it's a good idea to do something, he'll do it," Howard continued.

"Number three, that asshole cultivates his mad scientist image," William said. "He drops it around us, but he does it. It works most of the time, too."

"Number four, he is a little bit crazy. His brain is not configured in the same way as.. anyone else's, actually," Howard finished.

Paul started chuckling. "Now what I'm seeing is the Operator making the final version of a certain genetically constructed cell and going "It's alive, it's aaaaaaaaliiive!" Paul's Frankenstein impersonation would have impressed Bela Lugosi.

"Paul, I can absolutely guarantee you that he was not doing that," Howard replied.

"How can you be sure?"

"Because the cell divided almost immediately, and he was too busy going 'Oh shit, what the fuck do I do, there's two of them, there can only be one Dominator so I better make one the servant.'", William replied, and took a large bite.

Paul had been trying to reconcile the various qualities of the Operator for years. He summed it up: "He's a great guy, though. He's loyal, he's confident, he's brilliant, and he's more than competent. He's just.. a fucking mad scientist." Painfully full again, he got up to talk to the Operator. Main screen, nothing else would do for this.

"He's a great guy, though," Sarah said from behind him, matching his cadence exactly, and Paul turned in surprise. "He's loyal, he's mostly confident by now, he's smarter than most, and he's generally competent. He's just.. a fucking Illuminatus." The way she said the last word could have been compliment or epithet.

Paul sat down on the couch and did not bother with pleasantries in his call. "Why didn't you warn me?" As was to be expected, the Operator knew exactly what he meant.

"Placebo effect," the Operator replied. Paul nodded; that sort of thing was supposed to only work on nescient normals but that was egotistical bullshit. "This is especially true when entering uncharted territory and doubly true when dealing with things that might be psychosomatic. I was hoping that you would come to me after the process was finished. But I didn't want to say that beforehand, because anxiety would be a factor. But now that you've come to me, go on, tell me everything; I'll let you know if you should panic." Wow, your bedside manner sucks. Paul told him pretty much everything anyway, including attitudes and emotions, and showed the Operator his swollen joints.

"Hrm. That's a growth-rate issue; you're a teenager, hormones, et cetera. You'll have a growth spurt and it'll level off soon. Been drinking milk?" Paul nodded. "Don't be afraid to eat mammal bones now." Paul pursed his lips; his teeth felt like they were taking too much abuse, and a couple of them.. "Teeth feel like they're about to fall out?" The Operator was obviously a jump ahead of him. "You'll lose your right upper incisor, your right upper canine, and a left lower bicuspid at the least. Don't be worried; their replacements will be in shortly."

"Will my brain outgrow..."

"Don't worry about it. You might get a mild headache for a couple of days, that's it." The Operator's tone indicated that he'd already thought of this one, too. Paul started to think of something else to say, but shrugged. A half-second of silence and he clicked off.

"He's afraid of what I might have told him," Paul mused aloud. "He doesn't want information suggesting that it's not perfect. If it's not an epic fuckup, don't mess with it." He started to chuckle, right along with his friends who had heard him. "Being engineered doesn't mean you don't try to protect your own ego. But wait!" He turned from the screen to look into the other engineereds' smiling faces. "I already knew that."

"But you know what we're protecting more than our ego?" William asked, looking at Paul, who didn't know the answer. "Our asses! To the extent of total paranoia, thanks Sarah." She just shook her head. Operational concerns had to take place over political concerns. No matter how much they thought they trusted someone.

"Jeremy's coming over," Howard explained. "We're going to test him."

"Test him?" Paul asked.

"Yeah, we're going- actually, make this a test for you too. We need to make absolutely sure that there is no way the rogues managed to get Jeremy to join them," William said. Paul was willing to play their game. Okay, the way he emphasized Jeremy's name meant it was something specific to him. His position, which these days involved intricate Eurozone economic bullshit? His age, his lifestyle? Maybe the fact that Jeremy actually knew something about electrical engineering, or.. damn, if he could just call Joey up and ask what was special about-

Oh. Duh. That master-servant pair was practically inseparable. "You're going to reset Joey's implants for a while?" Paul offered. That would likely be taken poorly.

"We could do that, couldn't we?" Howard considered. "No, too invasive. We're just going to make Jeremy order him to tell us the truth and then cut them off for a few minutes. Shame we can't use this on everybody, but how many rogues are going to have servants they trust that much?" The answer was 'probably not many'. The rogues would likely see the vulnerability in the first place. And if this test procedure got out, it wouldn't be reliable anymore.

Chapter 19

Jeremy and Joey showed up fifteen minutes later, jet turning to helicopter before gently landing on the twins' front lawn, joyful greetings exchanged in the sunlight. The last time Jeremy'd seen the Duumvirate in person was their birthday four months ago, a spectacularly awesome affair involving both normals and engineereds, spanning the globe from the Sahara to Antarctica. One of the twins asked what Joey was doing way down there (his head came up to the Dominator's mid-chest), and, laughing, picked him up to sit on his shoulders. The honor was accepted with mirth as they walked inside; now the servant saw over them all.

And they continued carrying him, into their upstairs room, away from Jeremy who was held back by Sarah. What the hell--

That was when Sarah showed Jeremy words on a screen that he recognized immediately, startled. The phrasing was for Joey's benefit. 'The complete and whole truth' would have carried the same general meaning but the formalized courtroom version left no room for misunderstanding. He looked up at Sarah, only beginning to realize what was going on. She glared back at him in silent command: do it or you're fucked.

"Joey, when they ask you questions, tell the Duumvirate the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!" he called upstairs in a much louder voice than necessary, almost screaming the words. Instantly the door to the twins' room closed and Jeremy was left to ponder why he had been told to say that and why Joey had been led away from him, and came to the obvious realization he didn't want to think about: they didn't completely trust him.

"Sarah, Paul, after all this time, you honestly think that I might be..," he said in a much softer voice than necessary.

"Operationally speaking, it remains an open question," Sarah said neutrally. Jeremy was an experienced enough Illuminatus to know that was intended as a statement of fact to avoid insult. It still felt insulting, though.

"Yeah, after all this time," Paul said. He gently reached out and grasped one of Jeremy's hands in both of his. "I'm really sorry we have to treat you like this. We have to be sure for the retrovirus. Until you've tried it, you have no idea how powerful this is."

"Now you're just making me want it even more!" Paul's excitement was contagious.

"How do you think I was? When the Operator said he had almost finished mine, I ran out of here like a bat out of hell! For the first time in my life since I met Billy, I'm not completely outclassed anymore!" The boys shared a chuckle at that.

"Are they actually making mine or was that going to.," Jeremy started.

"They're making it," Paul interrupted. "We'll be very surprised if Joey starts telling us bad things about you." And Jeremy's thoughts turned to what Joey actually would be forced to tell them, and he blushed. It wasn't the hidden abject fear of someone about to get caught for treason to his Dominator. Nor was it the cringing humiliation of someone about to have some horrible personal secret ripped out of his closet like a dancing skeleton. Jeremy's red face represented simple youthful embarrassment, and he let out a long, chuckling sigh and sat on the Duumvirate's plush red couch, head in hands, as his servant was interrogated.

"What the heck is going on?" Joey asked the moment the door was closed.

"Ve are azking ze queztions here, untermensch," William growled in a very convincing Nazi voice. Joey flinched back but relaxed when he saw the smiles, and stiffened when they went away to be replaced by piercing looks of stone. Cigar-store Duumvirate. He sat down at one of the twins' computer chairs, swiveling it around and fidgeting, figuring that if he was going to be aggressively quizzed, he might as well get comfortable.

"Is Jeremy plotting against us?" Howard asked, flatly.

"No," Joey replied, stopping his fidgeting immediately, the word escaping his throat and barely brushing his mouth on the way out. Had he not been commanded to answer, his reply would have been shocked silence. Their body language didn't show direct threat and they weren't upset, but why would they ask such a crazy question? Joey was starting to feel what everyone else felt when confronted with a serious Duumvirate.

"Has he ever communicated with any of our confirmed enemies?" William asked.

Joey had meant to answer 'No, hell no, what are you thinking?!' but realized that he just might have at some point. "...Maybe. I don't know. If he did, he probably didn't know who they were." This, or something akin to it, was the expected answer. If Jeremy had been regularly communicating with someone later found to be a foe of the Duumvirate, the twins would have expected him to tell them about it.

"Are you there for most of his conversations?" Howard asked. Joey started looking between them, anxious. This wasn't good cop/bad cop; this was neutral and intimidating cop/neutral and intimidating cop. The effect was striking in its own way, especially since he knew their power and they were so much bigger than him. He knew that was silly, it's not like their size of all things made them dangerous, but...

"I don't know, some of them. Probably most. Yeah, most, unless he's talking to a lot more people than I know about."

"Has he ever sent you out, or allowed you to be sent out, of the room before a conversation?" William asked.

"No way, he never, ever, does that, and nobody ever asks for that." Once upon a time, servants weren't expected or even allowed to know what their masters know and weren't part of Illuminated conversations, but by the fall of 2003 the term 'nescients' was only used for normals. This was another of the culture changes that the twins had helped bring to the Illuminati, although it had been happening anyway. When servants are your weapon holders and information is a weapon, withholding information from servants is a good way to get screwed over or even killed, and asking servants to pretend they don't know what you do is silly.

"Has he ever said he was going somewhere without you, and you later found out he lied and went someplace else?" Howard asked.

Joey's reply involved a smile. "He never goes anywhere without me."

William's turn: "Do you ever get the feeling that he's not telling you something?"

"Oh yeah, all the time." The twins didn't show their surprise. "He never tells me everything he's doing. I watch him do it, and usually I understand most of it, but sometimes he just does something that doesn't seem to make sense but it ends up working out in the end." The twins' surprise was replaced by complete understanding. Although he was by no measure stupid, there were very good reasons why Joey was the servant and Jeremy the master. He simply couldn't match wits with his white-wearing friend.

Howard's turn: "What does he really think of us?" And at that, Joey blushed just as Jeremy had downstairs.

"He worships you. He.. he idolizes you. Sometimes he tries to act like you. He's not obsessed or anything but he thinks that your ideas on practically everything, control, relationships between Illuminati, all of that stuff is all right and tries to follow them. It usually works, too." That was it; Jeremy had just been outed as the world's biggest Dominator fanboy. The twins shared a deep, lengthy chuckle and relaxed their intimidating poses.

"I'm.. heh.. I'm really sorry about that, Joey," William said, giving him a gentle pat on the shoulder.

"It's all right, I understand. You guys had me pretty scared," he said, getting up and chuckling as well, his mind awash in relief. "Hey, um.. I'm getting this too, right?" Wouldn't it completely suck if he didn't?

"Once Jeremy is cleared for the retrovirus, that means that he's also allowed sentient engineered servants," William replied, smiling.

"You don't think he'd leave you a normal, do you?" Howard asked. The question was intended in jest, and Joey wouldn't have answered if not for the command.

The word was carefully enunciated with lips and tongue: "No."

Paul saw the matching blush on Joey's face as he slowly walked downstairs and tried to guess the reason. Were the two of them sharing something more than a house over there? It couldn't be just regular old gay sex, that wasn't even a blip on the radar. Maybe Joey was the one on top? That would explain quite a bit. "He's our fanboy," Howard explained, nodding at Jeremy, whose mouth opened in shock. "What, you thought we wouldn't tell them?"

"More importantly," Jeremy said in an obvious bid to change the subject, "you're really that scared? To start worrying about any slim chance that anyone ever might be plotting against you before you can make them just as fast and strong as you are?"

"It's not the strength or the speed we're worried about. Or the regeneration, or the immune system, or the immortality even," William said, looking at him solemnly. "It's the intelligence. Take microfusion. It's incredibly difficult to comprehend, even for us. Magnetic fields right down to the atomic level, it involves using quantum physics against itself. And no one can get the chance to reverse-engineer it who isn't on the retrovirus short list already."

"But you take one of the enemies, and you make him engineered?" Howard asked rhetorically. "A genius, who knows that microfusion can be made to work, who hates us. We are not having one of those."

"I understand," Jeremy said, nodding and smiling. "Anyway, it's good to hear." The twins raised eyebrows at him- good to hear?! "You just said that I'm going to become a genius. I think I need it." He smiled wider. "And yes, I'm a total fanboy." Fuck it, it was out in the open now, so why not? He reached out and hugged one of the twins, burying his face in the white fabric, his servant following suit with the other. It was good to have someone to look up to, someone to trust, someone to call if the shit hit the fan. In normal land and even as an Illuminatus, he'd have people he was supposed to look up to. Invariably, they ended up as patronizing, vain douchebags, failing to live up to expectations and making ultimately unreasonable demands. The Duumvirate tended to exceed his expectations and their demands were sensible and executed well, if paranoid. Such as them actually ordering him not to tell anyone how they interrogated servants. Geez, guys, like he was really going to do something like that.

Joey had it easier. The person he looked up to was almost always right there beside him, and he had the luxury of having that person directly command him on a day-to-day basis.

The six of them hung out for a while, enjoying the island and each other's company, occasionally watching the Duumvirate deal with various problems ('patience of fucking saints', Jeremy thought; he'd have dealt with all the horseshit much more harshly), with an invitation to come back later once the retrovirus had finished with them.

Chapter 20

What's worse than Illuminati demanding the retrovirus? Illuminati demanding that some other Illuminatus not have the retrovirus. One particularly vicious pair of enemies, ex-lovers who had a horrible falling-out, had asked both to receive it and that the other not receive it; the twins had called them back up and put them on the screen with each other. The ensuing fireworks made for some decent entertainment, and the twins made sure to record it and make it available for public viewing. If there was no such thing as secrecy, they would have made it really public and hosted the file themselves. The swarthy, toothy man was an asshole and the frown-lined, makeup-laden woman was a bitch; in a sense they deserved each other and the twins half-expected them to get back together after this.

But there was more after that, a daily flood of requests, demands, complaints, and all sorts of other bullshit, half of it not even mentioning the retrovirus in the least, as if all six thousand of them were actively trying to pester the twins at once, hoping that their frustration and distraction would lead to them making more favorable judgments for the petitioner just to get him off their screen. It came as a relief when a man came on the Duumvirate's screen and simply smiled at them. He didn't look that strong- at maximum age he was probably a bit weaker than one of the twins at fifteen- but he exuded a confidence all his own, his body language and posture conveying absolute command.

Howard saw the resemblance and made the connection instantly. "You can't fool me. Daddy." William was surprised for a split instant- this young, solid man was the same fading, wrinkled geriatric he had intimidated years ago. As with the Operator, the previous Dominator had undergone a tremendous change in appearance.

The twins wondered how much of the visible power was his own and how much was the retrovirus; when he actually was as young as he appeared, the Illuminati were far too insecure in their power to take pictures of themselves, particularly their insulated Dominator. He'd obviously made at least one modification, as he decided that red eyes were worth it. Striking, at the least.

This was one of the few times the twins could be easily told apart. Howard was relaxed, glad to see his mentor's survival was assured. William's eyes burned with the white fire of pure hatred. He said nothing- just stared. Staring directly into someone's eyes had its usual effect.

Howard and the previous Dominator waited for him to say something. He did not. His constant stare- blinking at perfectly-timed ten second intervals- was sure to put a damper on the conversation.

"If you want your old position back, I have some bad news for you," Howard said. William cracked no smile.

"Being nagged at by six thousand dumbfucks? You can keep it."

"You could have warned me," Howard said.

"I did warn you. They just didn't let me use the language I would have liked." 'What, they stopped you from swearing?' William thought reflexively, but still found no humor.

"You know, for all the things you told me about how the mass of Illuminati influenced your decisions and forced your hand, none of them are happening to us." At least not nearly to the same extent.

"Mm. That's because they're fucking afraid of you." 'Either that or you were weak sauce', both twins thought. And great- the vulgar old bastard had went for a double larynx of his own. "And your enemies are so scared they don't know what else to do but keep hatching wildcat plots to kill you." Which was the prevailing wisdom. The prevailing wisdom also maintained that having scared enemies that nobody wanted to join was better than the alternative.

"If you recall, our enemies' organization was hatched in a time when they did not fear their Dominator so much," Howard said evenly, his voice smooth and deadly cold. "With his decisions influenced, key positions could be subverted, and critical elements could be allowed to be placed." The previous Dominator's face went almost as white as the twins'. "Furthermore, since that Dominator allowed everyone to influence him in that way for the promise of peace, tracking the rogues' maneuvers is impossible."

"It was a different time! Everything was different. This whole system that we use now was fucking finalized in the early 90's. I swear, I couldn't afford to be a hardass back then! I wasn't super- I wasn't invincible the way you are. Not even close. You know that. So if you're going to do something to me for it you might as well just do it."

"Oh, I'm not going to do anything to you. I can't speak entirely for him, though," Howard said, gesturing a thumb to William, whose face was fixed in a sneer.

Howard's Daddy swallowed, once, and looked his un-son in the eye. "Can you accept my apology now that I'm engineered?" he asked.

"Would you have given it if I were still implanted?" The answer was obvious and the previous Dominator didn't reply. "Then get the fuck off." With ice on one hand and boiling acid on the other, he had little choice. Would William kill him? He realized he'd never know; it'd be an instant death beam to the back of the head.

"You know, if-", Howard started.

"Don't," William interrupted him. He was pissed indeed. "He was never my Daddy, Howard." A brief silence; he didn't need to tell his brother what birthday present was given by who to whom. "Whatever he did for you, whatever he taught you, I had to learn the long way around. And if he were standing here right now, I would rip out his God damned lungs. Then I would desiccate them, and bring them to the next Illuminated meeting that we speak at. And then I would throw them into the first row as a reminder."

"Then go do it," Howard said. "Would I stop you?"

William made a move to get up, then immediately sat back down. "Politics. If I actually did that, how would it look?" That was an excuse, but it had its own merit. It was a horrible thing to consider. Engineereds killing other engineereds over something as petty as two years' worth of personal revenge? The Dominator doing this? What would the kids think? "Howard, let's pretend for a moment. Pretend there was only one of you. You're the Dominator, I never existed. Okay?" Howard nodded, expecting something different from how he actually continued. "Now, pretend you age. You need an heir, an engineered immortal to take over the world permanently. Okay. The cell divides. Your head engineer has a plan to send one of them off into normal land for ten years before being enslaved to his twin. What is your response?" William actually didn't know the answer to this hypothetical. Any there-is-only-one-of-us postulate would apply to him as well. If his twin, more calm about this, looked him in the eye and told him that he'd go along with it...

Howard nodded again. "Yeah. I'd tell him it was a bad idea, ask him what he was thinking, and wonder if his lack of judgment had adversely affected the engineering. But, Billy.. that's me. Asking what I'd do if I had the mental limitations of a normal? You act like I've forgotten the basic truths of our existence. Have you forgotten that we're fully engineered?" He was smiling, and Billy felt his rage dissipate. "There is no me-as-a-normal! And if there was no you, I'd be either still implanted or dead!"

"Howie.. even we are prisoners of the past. Things happen, quantum waves collapse, and there's no going back."

"Anything that could do that would already rule the world. By definition. I can't see us ever having that kind of power. Hey! Future-us! Send us a sign! And tell us if Future-Daddy still has his lungs!" Finally, Howard had gotten his brother to laugh.

Nothing, of course. The laws of physics held true.

They read messages, sighed, and continued to deal with the swarm of Illuminati vocally unhappy about the retrovirus policy, making sure it was just vocal. It was a relief when Jeremy and Joey came over; it gave them a good excuse to ignore all but the most urgent messages (and both of those were mislabeled; the twins gave the hapless Levels a reminder that if something is flagged urgent it better be fucking urgent) and relax.

And discuss politics. Joey tentatively raised the fact that the six of them were discussing political issues while mowing down hordes of zombies; the twins expressed the opinion that all political discussions should be conducted while playing cooperative games, and that the Illuminati having beefs with each other should at least try it before calling up their Dominator. It was difficult to get into heated ideological arguments while the guy next to you was saving your ass from a rotting, berserk mutant three times your size, after all. Sarah remained convinced that operational concerns had final authority over political ones, and that if those thousands of Illuminati really wanted the retrovirus they should accept implantation and subsequent unimplantation, with other Illuminati they trusted there to observe the process. The development of a real implant-feedback prevention system would, of course, trigger ideas in certain servants, but that was just another political concern after all. To do otherwise was, according to her, accepting irrational behavior and a bad idea.

But behavior was irrational, most of the males answered (with a brief pause for full attention on the oh-fuck hundred-foot monster in front of them), and although it might be impossible to predict everything an irrational person might do, it was possible to come to many reasonable conclusions about how they might act and what would make them start actively opposing the Duumvirate; political concerns became operational ones. It was also offered that doing what they did with Jeremy and Joey was ultimately pointless, as any real rogue never would have let himself get into that situation to begin with; their thought processes meant they'd avoid it. Sarah mulled on that one, even through the final boss, some hideous multi-stage skyscraper-sized monstrosity coded in by some particularly evil engineered with way too many gun turrets embedded in its skin, the players having nowhere near the firepower they did in real life. As they almost always did, they won despite the difficulty, as there was a clear path to victory; if you did this, that, and the other thing, you could win despite the overwhelming odds. Reality was never so clear-cut.

Chapter 21

Jeremy opened the door and wondered if it would meet his expectations. A cynical part of him figured that he might be knocked out through concentrated gas the moment he opened the door; that didn't happen. The room was smaller than he imagined, with two dental chairs connected to large insert-head-here machines which occupied the majority of the room. What he really didn't expect was a white-wearing muscleman standing next to the Operator. Jeremy had seen the man's face before, but not much of the body it was attached to.

Perhaps Wilt "Stark" Columbus, Engineering Director of Bavarian Research & Development, had body issues when he was a normal; he was taller than all three of the retrovirals by a few inches, and appeared to be much more muscular. He had commissioned Northberg for a number of modifications to his structure, with bone and muscle grafts reaching to his toes and fingertips. It was funny, as he was by far the weakest guy in the room- and if he ever did get the retrovirus (likely; he was in good health and hadn't shown signs of being a rogue), he'd be in pain for weeks as his body reformed itself. He was only present as an observer; he had been maneuvered into saying that the control implants could accept the telepathic overlay without any problem, and cursed himself for his foolishness. He wasn't expecting a demand like this, and didn't even understand quite why the Operator had wanted him to take responsibility, save that the Operator was paranoid about something he wouldn't explain. It worked fine in all the tests with normals. Why have him here for this?

And Jeremy, for a brief instant, wondered why he was here as trepidation struck him. They were going to lean him back into that thing. They were going to insert electronics into his skull as an addition to his brain, so that he and his servant may communicate without words. A vague unease came over him, half-memories of old science fiction episodes flooding him with images of pod people, Tommyknockers, The Borg. (The thought came unbidden: 'Joey, what have I done to you?') Although he knew the Operator well enough, Jeremy and Stark were in entirely different social circles and Jeremy couldn't help but be paranoid. What the hell was that guy doing here anyway?

Embarrassment hit him shortly afterwards. His fear had to be showing on his face, unbecoming of an Illuminatus. He had decided to go through with it even before he got the retrovirus, knew that any trickery on Stark's part would get the man torn apart by the Duumvirate, and after all, he'd intentionally done worse to his best friend. He furrowed his brow and walked resolutely to one of the seats. "Joey, sit down in the other one," and the obedience was faster than any other servant would have been. Jeremy turned to the Operator and Stark. "I know, I know. You're going to ask if I really want to do it, tell me all of the assorted risks, et cetera. I've already looked at all of it several times. You've got your willing guinea pig. Just do it."

Stark and the Operator looked at each other, body language doing their talking: If he wants to be like that about it, okay from Stark, It's to be expected from the Operator. Stark considered telling Jeremy that the Operator promised to kill him if Jeremy's servant died on the operating table, but decided against it. Stark wasn't worried so much about that as he was about what would happen if they were more subtly flawed. Engineereds, particularly young retrovirals, scared the piss out of him, but he could never join the enemy; he, like many hundreds of others, had no idea how anyone could be stupid enough to go toe-to-toe with monsters like that.

He had no pretensions about being able to affect the brains of the two, particularly Jeremy, but he was curious to see what the inside of their minds looked like, and disappointed when he realized that they were almost shut down by the anaesthetic. He also would have loved to tap into the communications between them- not to insert anything, but rather just to read the data. Although he was only peripherally involved in the control implants' development and had done little neural-interface work himself, he always was curious about it. He never got past the brain-as-wondrous-machine idea, which was in fact one of the reasons he hadn't started any related projects on his own, and in fact had almost no idea how the implants actually worked. The theory, design, development, and construction were all done by others; he was simply the ultimate overseer. Being able to herd geniuses was the reason he was in the Illuminati in the first place; his philosophy was to largely leave them alone, give a unique blend of generic and specific commands, and let them do what you wanted.

These implants, however, were not done by any servant of Stark's, but rather the Night Operator and his crew. The Night Operator knew he had to make his own splash in research and development- in a sense his dissertation- if he were to have any hope of one day becoming the better-respected Day Operator of Northberg or some other facility. Telepathic implants seemed simple, almost straightforward, compared to a number of other projects, but would be popular and make a good enough impression for him to be something other than the Day's shadow. The real problem was integrating them with the existing control implants, a frustrating and demanding task because the Night Operator didn't fully understand how those worked either, try as he might. He didn't have to; treating the control implants as a black box, all he had to do was develop a sort of API, to make sure the neural impulses were integrated in a way that made cognitive sense to sentient beings.

The Day Operator understood precious little of how either implant worked, and was simply here in his official capacity without much more than a well-crafted technical paper on the subject that he'd practically memorized, and his own retroviral wits. The Night Operator had dealt with the Day's work in the same way more times than he could count, so it was only fair.

In contrast, the procedure itself was laughably easy. Do some basic sterilization, give them the engineered-affecting anaesthetic, use an autoscalpel with a blade ten molecules thick to cut a very precise distance into the bone, insert implants into one head, add a very small overlay to the implants on the other, re-check placement, put bone and skin back on and they regenerate it sealed. A five-minute procedure with Illuminated equipment, with an extra five minutes for assurance that it's being done properly. Just under the dura, right next to the white matter. On top of folds, don't let it get wedged sideways into one before the connections start. Their cortexes are smart; they'll figure out what to do with it. And just make sure you're not breaking any connections, particularly the ones between Joey's implants and his mind...

Naturally, Enforcers assisted with hyper-precise machinery don't make mistakes like that, and the new telepaths were given the antidote and woke up completely two minutes after it was done. Stark had ordered the Enforcers to intervene if Joey attacked Jeremy or tried to hurt himself. The Operator just chuckled when he did that.

Because that was the one thing they could never completely test. Would homicidal or suicidal thoughts somehow slip through? Was there some sort of existential horror that could be created by mind reading, driving them insane? Would one loose thought by Jeremy kill him? These hadn't happened in human testing, but they hadn't used engineereds or anyone experienced with implants. The risk was clearly listed in the materials Jeremy had read, but he'd refused to acknowledge it as a problem. In his opinion, if he couldn't control the thoughts he sent to Joey, he'd deserve to die for the sheer retardation.

He looked at Joey. Hey Joey, can you hear this?, he sent. Nothing came back. Joey! What's up? Nothing, except a strange sensation, like he was thinking of flying in circles, doing loops and barrel rolls, combined with the concept of eating mustard.

"The easy to kill stuff at the first part of the last level of Diablo 2!" Joey blurted out. Jeremy looked at him in puzzlement. "That's not what you're thinking about? Is it a Mexican jumping bean?"

The Operator just nodded slowly. "There is an adaptation period." He was hoping there wouldn't be one with these two, but that had been just wishful thinking. He was also hoping for evidence that the debacle almost four years ago had something to do with the implants themselves, but no matter how he read the body language Stark didn't seem anything but basically curious and honest here. Oh well.

"How long do you think it'll last?" Stark asked.

"Who knows? Between two retroviral sentients we haven't been exactly able to do tests. And it's not like the usual implants where they go off of the brain's own language." That last part was mostly for the subjects' benefit. "Between two different brains? Could be hours, could be days.. could even be weeks." That last was based on a test done between a man and a woman.

"This wasn't in the shit you sent me, Operator," Jeremy said with some venom. Stark tried to contain his involuntary recoil. Joey found himself thinking of being mad, a rare thing for him. The reason was obvious, and his happiness that he was learning how to read Jeremy's mind made Jeremy think of happy things.

"Actually, it began with several lengthy assumptions, one of which was the neural networks having a common interface scheme," the Operator replied. "You'll develop one; you can't help but develop one. It's just a matter of time. But before then I recommend being careful with how quickly your servant can physically kill you." This last was said with a glance of apology to Joey. "But unless you want to be under watchful eyes while you learn the whole time- which would actually not be too bad of an idea, considering you're immortal- there's nothing more I can do for you." He knew Jeremy would never consent to something like that. The impulsiveness of youth. "Please give me regular updates on your progress."

Stark opened his mouth to ask if there was nothing else, surprised at the Operator's brusqueness, but realized that there really was nothing else. Jeremy and Joey gave their fond goodbyes to the Operator and Stark, and started leaving with the same quick stride they had arrived with.

"You really can't control your excitement, can you?" Jeremy asked.

"You're feeling it?" Joey asked.

"I'm thinking about it. It's like watching a five year old jump around. And it's all connected to things that make no sense!" Literally nonsensical, like a purely chaotic dream.

"All right." Jeremy felt the excitement change form somehow. "What number am I thinking of?" Five, Joey sent.

"Four," Jeremy said immediately.

"It was five," Joey replied, a bit downcast.

"All I really heard was 'ffffff'. You were thinking of the word, not the number, weren't you? We'll get this, dude. Couple of days, we'll be able to completely rock James Randi's world." Joey found himself forced to contain his riotous laughter. "C'mon, we're in the hangar, almost to the jet... okay, we're inside, you can laugh now."

Joey exploded and started talking after five seconds of laughing. "Oh man.. hahahaha.. you mean that skeptic, right? That guy you were reading online? Dude, think about it! The telepathy wouldn't even start his problems. Half this shit would have him eating his own head."

"Yeah, but since it's not really supernatural, we couldn't get the million dollars out of it." More laughter. "Hey, fly us home. And make sure you're sending me everything when you do it, because I thought you were thinking of flying earlier, but it didn't come out right."

"That wasn't flying, that was supposed to be a hug." Joey caught a sharp tang of what seemed to him to be stark outrage, mixed with contempt and annihilation. It wasn't; it was Jeremy's automatic revulsion to anything resembling an accusation of homosexuality between him and Joey. The emotion changed to a strange idea of digging, which Joey did not let interfere with his ascent away from Northberg.

"Is that what that actually feels like in your mind?" Jeremy asked. Ah, not digging, curiosity.

"Guess so. Jeremy, we're going to be closer than any two people have ever been before. You're the one who signed us up for it, master. So don't push me away now."

"Pushing you away? Dude, I don't even know if you caught that thought right, but I just don't like anyone thinking I'm gay. Oh no. Oh no, don't tell me you really are." Maybe, Jeremy pondered entirely to himself, telepathy was a Pandora's box he should have left the fuck closed.

"I'm not- at least I don't think- I don't know what the hell I am," Joey said, truthfully and a bit hurt. He just wanted to be with Jeremy, now and forever, the closer the better. Did that make him a fag, despite his lack of interest in rectal spelunking and butt piracy? "Is that really what goes through your head every time we're close?"

"Yeah. Sorry."

"You're a fucking Illuminatus!" The jet-helicopter actually wavered slightly, and Joey's telepathic outburst was just as fierce; subconscious image-expressions were, they noticed, transmitted with near-total accuracy. "And we're retroviral! You're still consciously, or sub-consciously, whatever, still worried about what some cockmongrel a thousand miles away would think of you. Not even allowed to know you exist, remember?"

"I said I'm sorry! I'm not used to having my thoughts dissected by my best friend. And didn't I tell you to think about flying?"

"You can't control my mind with these things, remember? But I'll do it, for you," Joey said softly. Jeremy received a confused, gentle emotion that he couldn't make sense out of at all. "Man, if you're not gay, find a girlfriend."

It was the girlfriend who found him.

Four days had passed since their surgery; during this time, the Duumvirate continued their eternal vigil, the Day Operator of Northberg dealt with peptides and the Night Operator pondered the feedback he got from the new telepaths, and Jeremy dealt with mid-European politics when not sharing his dreams with Joey. (The Night Operator had become quite interested when told that dream-images communicated far better than sent-thoughts.) The work, he reminded himself, never went away. He would have loved to take a vacation, but couldn't. (No rest for the wicked, he sent Joey on the third morning, and to their pleasant surprise Joey got it exactly.) This person to that person, prevent this group from geting out of hand, monitor this group which has a potential for riots in the wrong places, implement these police procedures but forgo these ones as it's too blatant and useless, this politician's being too much of a twit so let's marginalize him, contact these other Illuminati to make sure it'll all work out, et cetera, ad nauseum. It was all so formulaic, really. In his darker moments, Jeremy figured it could all be done by an advanced Enforcer or even some well-programmed computer.

But there weren't too many of those moments. Joey's lightheartedness was constant and infectious. 'Is this what he's always like, on the inside?' Jeremy was careful not to send. Joey was happy, tempered by the world and the realities of society into being more calm, but on the inside... 'Damn, he really is a little kid,' Jeremy also didn't send. 'I'm glad I don't get like that.'

And that was when the screen signaled an incoming call from Kylie Robins, and all questions about Jeremy's sexual orientation were answered in an instant.

The emotion was unmistakable, particularly since it was being sent with half-formed images and words. Jeremy wanted to grab that pink-threaded white top of hers and cast it aside with one hand, while yanking down her smooth, tight pants with the other, then grab one of those growing breasts in each hand and fuck her until he could fuck no more. For a fraction of a second Jeremy didn't know what to say. A flood of hormones was threatening to turn him into an ordinary lovestruck teenager.

Man up, twit! You're an Illuminatus! Joey had received that with some confusion before realizing that Jeremy was talking to himself.

Kylie spoke first, but he'd have to replay the conversation to remember what she said; his answers were on pure autopilot, a small part of his subconscious casually checking their conversation with the usual paranoia while his conscious mind went exploring inside her clothes.

"Kylie, I think it'd be a good move to discuss this in person," is all he really remembered saying, and even as he said it he thought it was stupid and unlikely to work.

"Mmm. I like what you're thinking." That meant she had designs on him, then. Was it because of who he knew, what he was, what he could offer? Who gave a fuck? Even if it was a trap- no, an actual trap, not that kind of trap, there was no fucking way she was hiding one of those- he figured he might as well jump in with both feet, and the best time for them to meet turned out to be immediately, and in a few moments Jeremy and Joey were airborne, on their way to a very secluded patch of forest in upstate New York.

It was days like this when Jeremy was glad he didn't have to deal with the CAA and FAA. The Illuminati had taken full, direct control of everything dealing with airspace years ago in practically every civilized country, and represented itself as military forces in countries that weren't; ADIZ clearances were never a problem, the registration was whatever he wanted it to be, the communication between ground and the helicopter (and it generally was a helicopter as far as normals were concerned- the jet function was usually the secret part) was actually done by Enforcers many thousands of miles away (unless ground control, itself, was manned by Enforcers), and the flight plan of record was automatically changed to wherever Jeremy wanted to be at the moment, barring investigation by some nosy ATC (who would suffer a temporary glitch, or simple disinformation, should he think to look too closely). How the fuck did normals tolerate it? They invented vehicles that permitted the oldest of human dreams, flying- and then they let someone else railroad them into following predetermined paths whenever they happened to be crossing something as specious as a national border (or when it happened to be cloudy, or if they wanted to fly high, or..), transforming the entire three-dimensional volume of airspace into a bunch of predetermined tracks regulated by whatever cocksucker happened to be wielding the hammer of government at the moment? And then to top it all off, a huge, presumably civilized, country gets its shit rocked by a handful of towelheads, the entire country's general aviation shuts down, even five thousand miles away, and this is considered sane and secrecy-acceptable? Sheeple, all of them!

"Huh?" Joey asked.

"Nothing. Just thinking." It amused Jeremy thoroughly that the person actually flying the aircraft had no idea of these things, and probably never would. Joey could unleash instant hairpin turns with jet assist, fly on false-color infrared without the slightest problem through thick fog, and land with startling speed and precision. Yet if Jeremy were to suddenly ask him what IFR stood for or what class A airspace was, he'd just get a blank look for reply. Joey just got messages from an Enforcer with a gentle voice telling him to go in some direction or other when it became a problem. The system not only worked, it worked with a maximum of contempt for normal rules and regulations.

"Well, at least not all of your mind is on that girl," Joey said and sent. His sending also included desperately in love, with a very subtle undercurrent of which one of us is the servant, again?

"I am not in love with her." Instant skepticism. "No, really. I am in lust with her." Being able to immediately tell the difference was one of the reasons he was an Illuminatus.

"That.. doesn't change much." Telepathy was much more concise than words. Joey sent unambiguous mental images of Kylie eventually leading Jeremy by the dick into some sort of disadvantageous situation, from which Joey would eventually have to point out the obvious and pull his ass out of the fire. Jeremy was glad Joey didn't read Horace, as Joey would probably have started quoting Satire II.7 at him.

"Geez-o-fuck, I'm not going to let it get that far." More skepticism. Why couldn't Joey realize.. no, he did realize, and he was doing his damnedest to prevent Jeremy from getting hurt. "If it's any consolation, you are doing your job right." His servant was, had to be, more important to him than some piece of ass, no matter how delicious and how Illuminated. Now he knew where the phrase 'bros before hos' came from.

Kylie's home was a sprawling ten-acre estate. Like a fifteenth of the Illuminati, she had kept her normal identity, inherited wealth providing her home, basic secrecy provisions helping hide it from curious normals. To the New York legal system, she was the heir to a powerful venture capitalist, her father dead a couple months ago from a heart attack, her wealth and education being held in trust to a man named Charles Conway, her mother having passed away when she was very young.

In reality Charles was her servant, her mother was someone else's servant, and her father had died in the line of duty, serving a man named Richard Cream. (Jeremy and Joey shared a laugh at the name.) It was indeed a heart attack, induced by an assassin's poison utterly unknown to normal coroners. What had happened next was unclear from the public records; the assassin's master had apparently intended to use the death for a major power play, acquiring normal-world voting shares in several corporations by some undetermined agency, and promptly using them to further some agenda which was left unwritten. The only part that was clear was that her father's master had managed to use the death to round up something of a posse, using several other Illuminati to lure the offender into a trap, an engineered dealing the final blows to him and his bodyguard Enforcers. The Dominator was never involved. This stuff just happened sometimes. Puzzlingly, most of the offender's materiel had gone to Kylie, and why Richard didn't make her a servant instead of mentoring her was anybody's guess.

Charles opened the door at Jeremy's first knock, and he dressed in a black suit recognized by normals as a business professional. He was approaching normal retirement age, his greying blond hair showing a great deal of white, the wrinkles on his face suggesting a life of mental work. Jeremy could see himself looking like that in fifty years, provided he survived that long and no retrovirus was coming.

In person Kylie appeared as a coy debutante, a modern princess with her crossed legs hanging over the end of a soft couch, toes waggling in pink socks, skirt just long enough to cover the important bits, a thick head of full blond hair, hands behind her head as if utterly innocent of her own sexuality. Her other personal servant provided a contrast: a simple, black-clad chubby girl sitting on a comfortable chair next to her with freckles, mousy-brown hair, and a neutral expression.

"Well," Kylie asked, "what do you want to do first?" There were so many answers to that leading question, but most of them were obliterated by Joey mentally, earnestly screaming at his master Come on, can the trap be more obvious?!

Jeremy judged that his servant was most likely right and decided to see if there was any substance to this meeting. "Women", Jeremy said, "have a better connection between emotional and rational sides of their brain than men do. Therefore I request that we separate this out and put business before.. pleasure." Jeremy had a suspicion how she had gotten here, and wanted to see if she was, in fact, a real Illuminatus.

Kylie giggled in response. Sweet Duumvirate, had she really gotten into the Illuminati on the strength of that alone?

"First off, why me?"

"You got in by being able to build electronics, and you're in England with holdings in Europe, so it makes you perfect for what I have in mind." That was such utter, transparent bullshit that Jeremy almost laughed aloud. And so much for keeping business apart from pleasure. "Rick has requested that I 'directly help create a more docile United Kingdom'. He says he needs me to 'clamp down on their culture'."

"Richard Goldman?" That was Jeremy's mentor, and that kind of thing would be highly out of character for him, but Jeremy felt like he had to act like he hadn't done his research. Illuminati usually stalked each other before doing anything, let alone partake in romantic relationships.

"Huh? Nooo, Rick Cream." Jeremy almost laughed again at the name, and almost laughed again when Joey sent him No surprise he's a hard authoritarian, then.

"So he wants you to jump right in?"

"Without help, either. He wants no direct communication." Ah, NDC. A cheap secrecy-preserving measure. Ideally, two Illuminati wih a mutual goal would coordinate everything perfectly, working together in such a way that it looks like their holdings are not. This takes time, planning, and intense cooperation. The second best was for them not to communicate at all and simply go about their business without stepping on each other's toes. If what they were doing was in opposition, then the social dichotomy would show up in normal land, and they could pit the disunited normals against each other at leisure. Half-assed coordination was much worse than either.

"No direct communication? With you?"

"I wouldn't fuck him," she said sweetly.

I'm not going to fuck you either. The thought came without negative emotions, though, and Joey raised his eyebrows in response. The thought that followed was an oft-felt one by Jeremy that a great many Illuminati had no clue what they were really doing.

"What's in it for you, then?" Jeremy asked, smiling. Joey almost thought that was impolite before he remembered where he was. In the Illuminati, 'What's in it for you?' is like 'How's the weather?' or 'Care for a bite?' He made a conscious decision to stay out of it, anyway. He could tell that Sally was worth getting to know, they'd shared a few knowing looks and half-smiles as their master and mistress talked, but he had no intention of interfering with the special moment. Assuming she wasn't just playing his master like a fiddle, which he still thought likely.

"A few more broadcasting rights, a handful of some really experienced servant reporters, a couple places in Russia, favors from two other Illuminati, and a museum." Cruft, in other words, although Jeremy didn't know the Illuminati controlled any museums directly. It looks like Kylie didn't receive an Illuminated Starter Kit the way some new recruits do.

"So what is it you want me to do?" Now that was a leading question.

She smiled at him. "I was thinking maybe a parallel camera system, with a new twist that they haven't thought up before." Yeah, she's an Illuminatus all right.

"Nah. That would step on too many toes. Besides, this is NDC. He knows what you have. If you did something he wasn't expecting it might really mess him up." She looked nonplussed. "Here's what you should do. Get your channels talking about some made-up crisis, maybe one of the more recent laws, but nothing to do with anything he might actually want to stop, this is NDC. And just for the dichotomy, have a few of the other channels promote it. He'll either come through after something like that or he'll lose basic trust, and if you do it right he'll even take the responsibility off your hands with the bigger media. You've never created a controversy by yourself before?"

"Nope."

"Well there's no better time to get started. Grab each side.," he said, making a gentle motion with his hands, "and squeeze." 

That was her cue, and she took it. They both leaned forward and she practically fell into his lap, reaching down and putting both hands on his ass. He hugged her, tightly- not too tightly- and planted his lips full on hers and they engaged in a long kiss.

He was tempted to reach down into her pants and diddle her with his fingers, but refrained. He couldn't. Not now. Not yet.

He pushed her off him, gently sitting her down on her couch, and said, "I believe you have what you need for now. Some other time." He then began walking away before she could react. One mental command and Joey was on his heels, they were out the door, and Kylie sat there, her mouth half-open.

Why the hell didn't he try to do more? That was the plan. She'd seduce him, take him as close to the edge as she dared, but then refuse to go all the way until she had the retrovirus, claiming that she wasn't going to have sex with someone that different. Driven by his passion, he'd find a way to get it for her. Well, either that or rape her, but taking that particular risk was what had got her into the Illuminati in the first place.

He'd even kissed her, for fuck's sake! Was he waiting? Was he suspicious? Or did he simply just not do it on the first date? Sally sent a unexpected, rare feeling of consolation to her mistress in response to her frustration, which Kylie stopped herself from answering with a lash of anger. It wasn't Sally's fault, it was her own, and she felt the usual amounts of regret when a plan fails. What if she had done something different, what if she really had worn something else, or what if she had just asked him?

She would have probably been amazed at the answer, which was sent by Jeremy to Joey's similar question as they entered the jet-helicopter:

Because she wasn't retroviral.

Engineereds had to be extremely careful when having sex with normals. Even Fido knew that. Jeremy didn't want to have to be that careful with her. He wanted his first time with her- his first time at all- to be an all-out dick-slamming fest of wild jungle sex. On the other hand, he definitely didn't want to hurt her, and he also didn't want to have such an unequal long-term physical relationship. Kylie had to have it. There was no other way.

But how to get past the absolutism of the Duumvirate? He avoided blaming them for their approach; Jeremy still understood the twins to be smarter than himself, and wasn't going to question them now just because it got in the way of his love life. He planned- he considered- he thought. How did he prove conclusively that she wasn't an enemy? Proving a negative is one of the hardest exercises of logic to do. Circumstantial evidence wouldn't cut it. He had to set up a situation in which there could be zero doubt that she was not conspiring against the twins.

At the end of more than an hour of hard considerations and dozens of discarded ideas, all Jeremy got was a pounding migraine, and he only knew he was spreading it when Joey said, out loud, "Jeremy, I'm getting a headache. Why don't we just ask them?" Jeremy's response was unsaid, and emotionally charged- Because if we ask them, they might say it's impossible, and then there's no hope. Joey's reply was one of wordless trust and understanding: if Jeremy found a way to prove Kylie's loyalty after the Duumvirate said it was impossible, they wouldn't mind being proven wrong.

The call would wait until tomorrow. Jeremy and Joey were almost home at 6 AM their time, 10 PM the twins' time, which was a time they might not be awake. So out of courtesy, Jeremy endured a fitful lack of sleep, rife with worry, making sure not to send any of the worry, and then worried about that, until Joey's dreaming brainwaves finally lulled him to a good nine and a half hours of sleep. When he got up late that afternoon he had almost forgotten what all the fuss was about. 

Hamburger for dinner/breakfast? Biologically he didn't even have to cook it, but unlike other engineereds he wasn't willing to test that. He did it himself; not even Joey could cook it just as he wanted it. If you want it done right, and all that, although he'd use telepathy once he gained a finer level of control. As he cooked and ate a large mass of ground beef seasoned with garlic, spices, and hot peppers, he considered how to phrase things.

No matter how many times it didn't happen, he was always afraid of the Duumvirate snapping at him for calling, imagining that they might not want him to call because they were in the middle of something or maybe just sick of his shit.

That's what I always thought you might say, Joey sent.

To you? Since when? Get down here before I eat all the burger.

Already dressed, Joey slid down the stairs' railing on his crossed ankles and wrists in a move that normals could never match. Since you told me you were in the middle of some long retarded project in school.

"I remember that," Jeremy said and sent simultaneously as Joey walked in. Duplication was a good way of training the telepathy. "You came anyway."

Joey talked and sent at the same time as well. "Yeah, I told my mom it was okay, and then I told your mom how our teacher always said to help each other out so long as we're not doing the work for each other, and I had to ask you stuff about my project, and I then had to get into your room and close the door before you said something stupid."

Jeremy cracked up laughing. "I had no idea what was going on. But we actually did end up working on that shit."

"For a little while, anyway."

"I can't believe we remember all this school crap. Your project was already done, wasn't it?"

Define 'done'? It was crystal growing shit. I just made everything up and bought the rock candy at the store. Joey sent this one exclusively, as his mouth was full.

"How the hell could you have been a bigger bullshitter than me?!"

Joey restricted his laughter to their minds, as he was still chewing. I just had more experience at bullshit. I was never as smart as you. They ate a few more bites in silence before Joey let slip from his mind, At least when you're not mooning over girls.

"Joey!" Jeremy shouted in mock outrage, but sent, Is it really that bad?

"Have you listened to yourself think? Your mind's like a furnace!" Joey sent associated images of chaos and panic like the original Chinese fire drill.

The thought slipped out: She's perfect, Joey! And this is before the retrovirus!

"Well you better call the Duumvirate. C'mon, it's not like it's 6 AM or something." They shared a laugh. More than two years after the fact, that was still some funny shit. Jeremy sat on his couch of authority, cracked his knuckles with some explosive pops (Wow, not doing that again), reminded himself that he was capable of this, and called the rulers of the world.

For a brief instant he wanted to talk telepathically to them before he realized he couldn't.

"Duumvirate, I have a unique problem. I believe that the Illuminatus Kylie Robins should recieve the retrovirus," There was no hiding why. He was originally going to give reasons but knew it'd be pointless. Better keep it short. "but I have no method of absolutely proving her loyalty. Is it impossible?" 

The twins opened up other windows on their screen and Jeremy was expecting a negative.

What he got was the growing smiles on the twins' faces, and them sharing a chuckle. "No, you romantic fool. Don't you remember what we did with you and Joey? And now we have a way to tell even if she has any thoughts against us."

"I'm an idiot!" Jeremy shouted. Now he knew the Duumvirate was smarter than he was, a lot smarter.

Holy shit, Jeremy just got oooooowned, Joey thought reflexively, and Jeremy mentally thwapped him.

"Romance can do that. It's a good thing we've never experienced it. And you now have to do things that aren't very romantic."

Jeremy was glad they were, in fact, orders.

Jeremy chose to do the flying himself this time, and on the way he wished he had thought of all this before he had gone out there the first time; he'd have the element of complete surprise and he wouldn't have had to make two trips. Joey gently poked fun at him for second-guessing himself like that. Illuminati make mistakes. Shit happens.

"Back so soon?" she asked, eyebrows arched. She'd hit him worse than she thought- here he was, flying back and forth like an idiot. Men did crazy things when they thought they were in love, but she wasn't expecting to reduce him to little-finger status quite so fast.

"Yeah. I know. It's silly. Come on, let's go for a walk. Just the.. just the four of us."

Kylie's heels went tik-tik-tik on the cobblestones from their walkway. Master and servant put their arms around the girls' waists, Joey feeling a slight bit of pity for Sally with her rolls of lard. Assuming this went well, she'd be rid of them soon enough.

And when they approached the closely-parked jet-helicopter, Jeremy and Joey picked them up in one fell swoop; Kylie actually laughed, as she'd even given her Enforcers very specific instructions to not interfere should the boys start touching her and her servant. Not that two Enforcers were any match for them anyway. Her laughter stopped when they closed the door and Jeremy jumped in the pilot's seat to immediately take off.

"Kylie, listen. I really can't tell you what's going on. This is by order of the Duumvirate. I can tell you what I'm not doing. I'm not taking you to be killed, or hurt, or implanted, okay? I'm not kidnapping you." Kidnapping was exactly what he was doing, he just didn't want to admit it. "You'll be back home in a few hours." More like several, even with Jeremy switching to jet and hauling ass.

"How do I know that? How do I even know you were ordered at all?" She was basically screeching at him, but it was all she had in her rising panic. "How do I know they didn't tell you to just lie and then make me a servant just because they felt like it?" Since her initial meeting with them, the Duumvirate struck her as capricious beyond belief, like Greek gods. Most people could have their morals turned against them, a thing she was good at. The Duumvirate apparently had no openings at all for that kind of hook, which combined with their power scared the crap out of her.

"'Cause if they did, I'd disobey the fucking order," Jeremy said quietly, and there was no more talking. Joey smiled gently at Kylie's servant, helping her mistress's mood a bit.

And for me, this is just the frying pan and the fire, Sally sent.

Have you seen what they do to female servants here?, Kylie shot back. I hear there's this one guy who built his own harem. She sent that and realized there was probably a lot more than just one guy. If they do anything to me where the fuck do you think you'll be going? Okay, calm down, she told herself, working with Sally to come to a conclusion. Find the facts. Jeremy obviously didn't want to do this and so was probably telling the truth. Other Illuminati had made it clear that the twins just couldn't go around blowing away their own organization no matter how much it seemed like they wanted to. The twins had given her a standard introduction and she hadn't felt threatened then, although they had admitted paranoia. "Is the Duumvirate just paranoid?" Kylie asked aloud.

"Yes. That's exactly right," Jeremy replied. His tone said that it wasn't exactly right, but close enough. It also said that she'd come out all right. And, she realized, he's probably good enough at this to make his tone say anything he wants it to.

But there was one person in the plane who he couldn't fool. You are in love with her, Joey sent. Now, if you weren't before. Jeremy couldn't deny it.

The twins were standing outside when he landed, and they beckoned Kylie to follow them as she uncertainly stepped out. She and Sally reluctantly came along, Jeremy and Joey following. There was a new room at the bottom of the stairs, Jeremy noticed, and that was where the twins were leading the girls. Probably Faraday-caged and insulated.

Trepidation struck Kylie. She'd heard ninth-hand rumors about the Duumvirate having a torture chamber. Would they seriously just do that, using techniques that bypass the usual problems with torture and actually guarantee truthful answers? (The torture chamber was actually eliminated in their 2000 remodeling, but they hadn't told anyone else that.) "Duumvirate, what is this about?" she asked.

"It's about your servant," Howard replied, and then, in a fraction of a second, they had picked up Sally, whisked her inside with them, and closed the door.

Sally's thoughts were cut off from her sharply. "Sally!" Nothing. Kylie didn't understand. What would they want with her servant?

And then Sarah was beside her, a sheet of laminated paper in her hand. "Read this." Sarah held down a button next to a speaker grille. The paper was nearly the same as what Jeremy had been told to read to his servant.

Kylie did, stammering a bit, hearing her own words throughout the house, and turned to Sarah when she released her hand, understanding the what and why immediately. "You couldn't have done it some other way?"

"Do you have a more efficient way? It's bad enough having to worry about this-really-means-this counter-commands." Sarah thought Jeremy had probably given it all away. She also thought that the odds of Kylie being a rogue were infintesmally low; trusting a normal-raised girl to keep the secrets they wanted kept, from her Duumvirate-aligned boyfriend, while giving her a retrovirus- and every reason to switch loyalties immediately afterwards? If the rogues were that stupid they'd already be dead.

"I mean the whole.. no, I guess not." She stared at the door for a moment.

"Want something to eat? Drink? You look like hell." This was simple courtesy; her face was tense almost beyond recognition, and Sarah recognized the stress lines as the sort that get permanently etched into a normal woman's face. ('Good thing she won't be. Now let's see if I can figure her out before the twins do.')

"Yeah. Sure. Why are they.. doing it themselves?"

You have no idea. "Because they want it done right," Sarah replied. "C'mon. They might be a while." Sarah led her down the stairs, holding her hand, feeling the blood pump and the tenseness of her muscles. ('No autonomous reaction control at all. Weak. Why the hell is she wearing white?')

Sarah pulled a few rice balls out of the fridge and poured a cup of juice. ('Probably should keep some fermented just for this- a bit of ethanol would clear this right up.') Kylie ate and drank appreciatively, but didn't talk; fear and an unspecified dread marched across her face. Twice she tried to send and twice she remembered that was the whole point. Jeremy sat near her, but not too close, looking vaguely guilty.

"You look guilty," Sarah said offhand, and Jeremy opened his mouth before he realized that Sarah was talking to Kylie and not himself. Kylie choked on her drink, finally managing to swallow it down and take a few gasps of air.

"I am not-" Cough, hack, inhale. "-not planning anything against the Duumvirate of the Illuminati. Nor do I know any-anyone who is."

"Hrm. You're probably telling the truth. So what did you do?"

The twins came in at that point, a slightly crying Sally a few feet behind. The twins were laughing constantly, a constant stream of mirth as if they were watching a comedy show. This caused some confusion, particularly for Kylie with Sally's sending: I told them everything. Kylie had no idea why they would be laughing. Wouldn't they be pissed?

"This is great," Howard declared. "The personal and the political intertwine and the misconceptions abound! We could write a poem about this."

"Or put it on a daytime talk show, but it's better if we don't record this. Kylie, would you rather tell him, or should we?" William asked.

"Tell me what?" Jeremy asked her immediately. She wasn't an enemy, was she? Maybe someone in her family was. That'd be a good reason for the way everyone was acting. Maybe she had some older relative, he figured, who was involved in the conspiracy, and she didn't want to hurt him so was just trying her hardest not to get involved.

"Jeremy, I.." She was determined to hold on to as much of her dignity as she could by using as few words as possible. "I wanted the retrovirus." Of course she wanted the retrovirus, everyone wanted the fucking retrovirus, so what does that mean, unless she knew from the outset that Jeremy would...

Oh, shit, Joey sent.

"JER-RY! JER-RY!" Paul shouted, bringing fresh laughter to the twins, with Sarah joining in, knowing that she'd never have guessed that. Only Joey could hear the thought, but the facial expression Jeremy showed Paul was unmistakable: Shut the fuck up!

"You wanted the retrovirus? Wait, is that the only reason you did all that? The only reason you came on to me, the only reason you got telepathy in the first place?"

"No! I wanted those anyway. I just.. I just thought it would be an opportunity." In a part of her mind that Sally would never see, Kylie cursed herself for acting so damn normal. No! Not here! Not now! Not when she was so damn close!

"Excellent word choice," Howard echoed, laughing harder. Jeremy glared around. Apparently the twins were in a highly flippant mood- not surprising, considering their disdain for normal-world relationships (and wasn't that, at the core, what this was?)- and Jeremy didn't want to deal with this in this setting. But what could he say, anyway? 'You used me'? 'You manipulated me'? This was the Illuminati! Admitting that would be the same as openly saying that she was a better Illuminatus than him.

"It gets better. Ms. Robins, are you aware of our actual retrovirus distribution policy?" William asked formally, and got a blank look for an answer. "We distribute the retrovirus, and the associated lifting of restrictions on owning sentient engineered servants, to all Illuminati who we know beyond doubt have no designs on working with our enemies or harming us in any way." Jeremy understood long before William finished, and started looking around, not sure who to stare at in shock. But the twins' policy wasn't affected by his love life any more than it was by partial proof. I could kill her so fast... he found himself sending, quickly followed by the fact that he wasn't going to do that. She'd just received the Duumvirate's stamp of approval, after all, and in spite of everything, he still wanted to make passionate love to her.

Kylie got it almost as fast, and Sally received a brief wave of mental chaos. The Duumvirate had exposed her, humiliated her, let everyone know what she had done.. but in spite of it, she was getting the retrovirus anyway. She actually did entertain a few nasty thoughts against the twins but discarded them. It was better this way. She'd be an immortal superhuman genius, and she wouldn't even have to touch Jeremy. She had what she wanted. Why was she becoming upset? Sally couldn't answer her.

"Come on," Jeremy said in utter resignation. "I'll take you home."

"Have fun, you guys," Paul called after them as they left.

Knife-twisting little shit, Jeremy sent.

He just thinks it's funny, Joey replied. And it kind of is.

They sat in silence on the flight home, each waiting for the other to speak, neither having any idea what to say. It took thirty minutes before Sally finally said the first words. "It's immortality, you asshole," she enunciated clearly. "And a thousand things besides. She doesn't want to say it herself, but it's really obvious. Do you think she wouldn't use you for it?"

"Love is cheap, and easy to replace," Kylie said then, her eyes narrowed, her hands on her bare knees; leaning forward, Jeremy could see down her top. She's back to sex queen mode again- and after she's retroviral, that's probably the only mode she's going to have. Fearfulness and timidity would be discarded with normalcy. "The only thing that matters in this world is power and the ability to use it." She wasn't even sure if she really believed that, but damn it sounded right, and Jeremy found himself falling in love all over again. She smiled at him, recognizing the truth of her own words. The Illuminati's traditional approach, she recognized, was the right one, and everything that had just happened validated it. The only way to get what you want is to reach out and take it. And, she realized, she wanted both the retrovirus and him.

"I am going to bang the hell out of you after you're fully changed," Jeremy said. So that was what he was waiting for, Kylie sent.

"I sure as shit hope so," Kylie said dismissively, casually arching her back to stretch her breasts. "It'd really be crap if we went through all this not to end up getting laid." Ah, so she was both a whore and a powermonger. What better girlfriend could he possibly want? Before he knew it they were discussing living accomodations, moving arrangements (he would move in with her; her place was bigger, older, and had a great deal of some very old secrecy-proofed land), and sexual positions. They actually briefly considered putting all their implants on the same wavelength before reading more on the subject: males and females would never really be mentally compatible that way, and a four-way was an invitation to chaos and there was no way to single one of the group out. "Close, but not that close," Kylie said, and they laughed, and Jeremy began tickling her under her arms. His mouth was on her breasts sooner rather than later, and his head under her skirt a few minutes after.

Who knew an engineered tongue was fast enough to be an effective vibrator?

Chapter 22

Sarah's thoughts roiled.

They did that on occasion. As the empress of operations her ruthlessly logical mind naturally developed strategies and followed every line of inquiry to its end; the Operator had constructed her brain shortly after developing an Enforcer prototype, and she often suspected that some qualities had rubbed off. She couldn't not think tactically. So when she woke up one morning with the idea that perhaps their enemies had psychological traits in common, it jabbed at her until she did the necessary research.

What she found was nothing quite approaching evidence, but she did find a great many other things, some of which she found unnerving. A plan started to take form. She compiled her research and went downstairs, the twins at their usual spots, Paul between them, this time browsing through games looking for something that might actually pose a fair challenge that they haven't played before. She decided to give them a new game to play, even if it might not be much of a challenge.

"Honored Duumvirate, Fifth Level Paul," she began, voice dripping with wry sarcasm, "Towards the goal of ferreting out your presumably insane enemies, I would like to inform you of a number of abuses of power within your organization."

"If it can't be abused, it isn't power," Howard replied immediately, almost forgetting that he was talking to Sarah and not William or Paul fresh from normalcy.

"That doesn't even make sense," William said, looking at Sarah like she was a normal and it was just that time of the month again. "It's an infinitely long list. Anything that can be defined as an abuse happens more frequently than you can mention one."

"Which is why I've stuck to absolute extremes. Humor me," she replied, flipping over the couch and sitting between Howard and Paul, taking the extendable keyboard/mouse setup and rapidly going through a number of windows.

One of them involved the exploits of a Mr. Vernon Stuart, a British chap, who was cheerfully masterminding arms sales to Sudanese factions. The regional administrator of Africa was in on it, and approved; the way things played out apparently made his job easier. The twins clearly didn't see anything wrong with it. So he was making a few of his favorite arms dealers happy. So what?

"Easy to become reliant on this damn thing, isn't it?" Sarah asked. "I followed a thread here..." Click-click. "and it led to this. He's not selling to the highest bidder all the time, he's selling to the people who are the most vicious. Janjaweed factions directly, sometimes at cut rates."

"But still making money. This is secrecy. Without an Illuminatus, the guys selling wouldn't always know who could pay the most. They'd just sell to whoever would pay well and who they felt comfortable with," Paul pointed out.

"You misunderstand," Sarah said. "He's not selling as normals would sell. He's selling to whoever has committed the most atrocities. Sometimes he would reward a massacre with a new shipment the next day. It doesn't always go the way he wants it, because he's working indirectly, but that just ends up being variable reinforcement. It's not like the locals are smart enough to figure it out. They think it's God working his will to make them kill more."

"To what end?" William asked, perplexed. If Vernon wanted to make Africans kill each other en masse, there were faster methods. "This just sounds like genocide the long way."

"That's what I thought, and I went poking around to find out why. Actually he has nothing to gain from successful genocide, the African administrator doesn't have any need and his arms business is a very small part of the things he does. Vernon's a power broker only in the abstract- he's really something of a jack of all trades. Works with other Illuminati very well. I don't think any disputes involving him have ever come up on your screen, and there's nothing in the records." She paused for a short breath, thinking.

"But that's all beside the point, because he isn't in this for kills. He's in it for atrocities, torture, rape. That's how he selects the people he sells to." Finding this out took some very serious investigation. "He does want to see butchery, and he wants to see lots of it, but he also wants to see horror. He has some very good intelligence down there, a couple Enforcers at the very least, and my guess is that he's recording it all for his private collection." She gave the subtlest of glances to Paul, who had once been the unwilling star in an atrocity collection.

"Interesting choice of hobbies," Howard said. "But he seems to be handling it very well. You're right, the locals aren't smart enough, the other normals won't have a clue, and even you had to search before you found anything. If anything, his personal interest is making things more certain, not less."

"It's not really any weirder than doing research on a handful of local thug lords out in the Third World just to prove a point to three people," William said offhand. "C'mon Sarah, you know very well we're not going to touch this guy just because he likes to see gore." If nothing else, they couldn't afford to.

Her reply was with face and gesture: And yet you got Damien killed.

William narrowed his eyes. That was Paul. That was different. "These people have been killing and maiming each other since time began. You don't care either, you're just ramping up to something else. Cut to the chase."

She shrugged in concession. "Are you sure you don't want that ramp-up? Because I actually spotted three more before this last guy."

"The last guy," William said. "This is your Dominator speaking."

"All right, but first I have to know something on policy. What is more important in these cases: Thoughts or actions?"

"Thoughts, obviously," Howard replied, a bit bereft of patience. "Vernon wouldn't even be interesting if it was just actions. The point you're trying to make is that we can find out who's crazy through research, and take the crazy ones as potential enemies. Unfortunately, the kind of global toying sadism you're talking about can actually make them more desirable as Illuminati, a fact that Paul doesn't like either. It also doesn't mean they're against me. I thought you were above this." That last sentence was a heavy insult to an Illuminatus. Especially, Howard didn't need to add, since William was right about the normals killing each other anyway. Who gave a shit?

"The fact that it's pointless doesn't mean much, then?"

Howard was losing more patience. "Sarah, if we were to seriously investigate everyone who's done pointless sadism, we might as well just try to outpower all six thousand and do things the ugly way. Taken literally that would include people in this room." Three of them, in fact. "I can't think of any current Illuminatus who'd be worth extra attention just for that."

Sarah replied by closing the windows on the screen and opening others.

The twins would have been horrified flat if they were unfamiliar with control techniques. As it was, revulsion and disgust crept across their faces like centipedes, although they had the self-awareness to find this amusing in a dark way. Disturbing the Duumvirate with a form of control- holy shit, give the man a medal! Sarah made a slight face in disgust before turning to the twins with a smug look: C'mon, boys, you can't tell me this guy deserves to live.

"Politics, Sarah. Is this necessary? Can we afford to?" William reluctantly replied.

"The first question you can answer on your own terms. The second is yes, as very few people are going to care at all, and the ones that do aren't dumb enough to start something over it."

Paul wasn't listening to them talk. He was reading and re-reading, failing to understand it fully because a large part of him didn't want to understand it. "This is a joke, right?" he asked, clearly understanding that it was not. The expression on his face was unmistakable, his muscles vibrating with pure hate. Rage like this could only end in a handful of outcomes, some good, some bad, none pretty. For a brief moment the other three thought that he was going to scream. Suddenly his face went expressionless and his muscles went slack.

"Dominator," Paul said formally. "To complete my plan, I require the fastest aircraft you can possibly afford to give me. I will also require use of the satellite laser system. Is this acceptable to you?"

The twins looked at Paul's fury, back at Sarah's smug expression, and then at each other. Fuck it. They'd killed people over much less. "Paul, you take the jet, you tell the laser operators where to point it, and you kick some ass. This is a command from your Dominator," Howard replied in the same tone. Paul got dressed in his signature trenchcoated suit, went down the elevator, retrieved a variety of weapons, came back up within minutes, and walked out the door silently. The look on his face was flat murder. William wanted to say something as his friend left, but words would not suffice, and he was very surprised at the depths of Paul's rage. He hadn't seen his friend pissed anywhere near that badly for years.

The cause was the rather perverted idea of one Mr. Matthew L. Rhines, and the criminally-oriented children, teenagers, and young men he had subjected to it. The implementation involved the victims being forcibly regressed via heavy Pavlovian pleasure-and-pain conditioning with brain electrodes to an infantile state, as a sort of twisted rehabilitation, in an attempt to rewrite their personalities. The theories were clearly bogus to anyone with a passing interest in psychology, based on flawed assumptions and wishful thinking. Had any of the victims been returned to society- assuming they could be, at all- that much would have been evident immediately. Paul didn't know how the hell this guy became an Illuminatus, and didn't much care at the moment unless it meant even more people to kill. Four years prior, Paul had suffered vicious, painful, hellish torment involving anal rape for six straight weeks before he had the opportunity to blow his tormentor's brains out. Spying for his Dominator, he had spent time inside a boys' ranch that, while brutal, was nothing compared to the pure human desecration that was the keystone of Matthew's theories, and he understood this on a fundamental level. Oh yes. Ass was going to be kicked today.

The first thing that Paul used was an excuse. Matthew, I would like to meet you to discuss.. blah, blah. Paul could have made up anything that the man was peripherally connected to. Just for fun, irony, and morbid curiosity, he pretended to be interested in his theories and didn't involve the Dominator at all. The man ate it up like candy, and very fortunately wanted to have all of the real conversation in person- Paul didn't feel that he couldn't keep the bullshit up or his gorge down for very long, and swallowed vomit after he clicked off.

He was high-strung through his flight, with anxiety he wasn't familiar with. He hadn't felt this tense since he first became an Illuminatus. Like a bowstring pulled way too far back, the slightest uncontrolled push could set him loose. He could have, of course. No problem for him. He'd just run through and kill every target he saw. The odds would be twenty to his one- wildly imbalanced in his favor, as they didn't have access to weapons sufficient to kill him. Unless someone had been quietly slipping Rhines some heavy hardware or major auto-defenses- an unlikely proposition, as he wasn't in the Illuminati very long- Paul could have simply raided the place in the manner of the Middle Ages.

But he didn't want to do that. He was an Illuminatus, after all, not an assassin or a servant. He would not act out of instant rage; instead, he would calmly, rationally confirm what needed to be done, and then do it. He wasn't feeling very rational, however. He was remembering Damien, that bastard who hurt him, hurt him over and over and over again just for the fun of it, just because he could. Paul forced himself to also remember how he had ended it with that single pistol shot to the head when William had tricked Damien into letting him do it. He was remembering James Baker, that overwrought asshole who ran that shitpit boys' ranch he had been sent to infiltrate. Paul never told the Duumvirate just what things were like there, and they never asked. The only thing that kept him sane, from mis-reacting to the (fairly standard, he later learned) brainwashing he received there, was the knowledge that he was on a mission and was still Howard's servant, implants as a psychological crutch. James died because of him. And now he was here. Paul knew how this would end, barring some sort of impossible misunderstanding or reverse miracle. It's just how it would proceed that he was thinking about.

And then he saw the facility and a terrible sense of wrongness grasped him, as if it literally shouldn't have been there at all. Well, no shit! Half of the things he dealt with on a regular basis probably shouldn't exist, that guy who got off on blacks murdering each other might be stereotypical but still shouldn't exist, what was so special about this one? Other than the psychosis, it was just another building in the middle of nowhere, home to another asshole. For a lot of them, this was what power was about. But despite that logic, he couldn't shake the feeling, and he was tempted to simply command the satellites now and damn everyone inside.

He took a deep breath as he slowly, carefully landed the jet. Fuck fear. Fuck anxiety. And fuck that sense on the edge of his consciousness. Was he an Illuminatus or not? It didn't matter that he was still a fifth; men many times more powerful than this assclown feared his disfavor.

Rhines' servant was there to greet him as he disembarked. In Paul's amped state he thought he could hear the man's voice speaking to him in his mind through that glare and his overall body language.

You've been a bad little boy, haven't you? Oh yes. And we know how to treat bad little boys here, don't we? You need to be put in your place, little boy, and I'm just the man to do it. This, despite the fact that Paul was two inches taller, visibly more athletic, and clearly an Illuminatus. Even if the man didn't know Paul's retroviral abilities, Paul wasn't expecting that sort of condescending loathing.

Paul simply looked back at the servant, sending a silent message of his own: You'll be dead within fifteen minutes, so why should I care what you think? Paul smiled as the servant didn't seem to get that at all. The man gestured at Paul with a false casualness, and into the building. "Lead the way," Paul countered with, pointing at the man and his Enforcers. Although their speed was likely no match for his reflexes, he still didn't want them getting behind him. The man scowled, gestured to his Enforcers, and Paul followed them in.

The walls were painted brick and mortar, not the typical Illuminated-facility steel, and the colorful murals and paper cutouts (depicting things Paul refused to understand) adorning the interior walls made it look almost like an elementary school. Disturbing as it was, it meant that Paul could use photons instead of the projectile weapons he had concealed in his white trenchcoat. Matthew might have been able to borrow a few building-constructors had he asked, but really, what did he have to defend against, retroviral teenagers with microwave lasers?

Paul pretended not to notice the horrors he was passing, the room full of locking cribs, the "nursery" he passed next to containing kids who were either completely brainwashed or on their way. He heard the loud wailing of some boy, but it passed over his conscious mind like the breeze. His step was light and airy; a smile graced his lips. In fact, he felt no rage at all. Why would he? There was nothing to be angry at. And if it wasn't for the Enforcers and the cameras, and the fact that he still wanted to continue with his conversation plan, he would have broken the servant's neck before parting with him.

The chair was comfortable, but Paul noticed different indentations in the carpet; another sort of chair had been placed there recently.

The man in front of him was thin and old, and likely was heavily affected by Northberg; life-extending surgeries were common practice when recruiting men his age. Minor waste of resources, in his case. He smiled at Paul, and Paul read the body language, and saw nothing but what the man outwardly portrayed: respect and friendliness.

"Welcome, welcome! Have a seat." Paul instinctively checked the chair for traps before he sat down, making no show of trust yet acting like this was perfectly normal. Unless they were hidden perfectly well, there were none, although he imagined needles rising out of it hard enough to break through his suit. Paul supposed the man in front of him would have inflicted the horrors on him given half a chance; perhaps he might have some special variant for engineereds. Rhines simply nodded at him and looked at him with an expression devoid of fear or worry. ('Does he even see me for what I am? Does he even realize why I might have come?')

"Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee? Cup of milk?" A cup as opposed to what? Oh, that's right. Fuck.

"I had a good drink on the plane." You can't possibly be stupid enough to think I'm going to accept consumables from you.

"I hope it wasn't anything too strong for you. Tell me, dear boy, what you would like to know," he said, sounding much like a kindly grandfather. Dear boy. It was perfectly possible that this man was a full-blown member of the rogues, and was simply using basic methods of lulling Paul until he would spring a trap. That was one alternative. The other, which seemed more likely, was that since Paul was intelligent, polite, pleasant, and apparently agreeable, the nice old man would behave like Mr. Rogers to this dear boy. Why not? Paul was a good kid, right? (Clearly the man had done no research on him. Even if he had, it wouldn't have told him nearly enough.) This man apparently had no hidden animosity, nothing but caring concern for good boys like Paul. A few commands and his servant, chastised, would pretend the same. Paul could easily continue, cup of milk in hand, and conclude the conversation amiably, leave peacefully, and return to his Dominator with the opinion that an ass kicking was not necessary.

And then one of the geneticists could create a breed of avian swine to commemorate the occasion.

Paul could barely speak without cutting loose, so stayed terse. "Of course I've seen brain electrodes used before, but never anything quite like this. What exactly is this technique?"

He was expecting the old man's answer to start with 'Well, I've explained in the records...' Nope. Old men like to talk, and Matthew spoke with the deliberate patience of someone who has all the time in the world. "Their bad behaviors are simply an outpouring of their base, inborn impulses. We simply condition them into acting as what they truly are, and then we rebuild them from there." The man turned his laptop around to face Paul, showing a graph that was half spikes and half flatline, demarcated with a vertical 'Use of Therapeutic Positive/Aversive Conditioning' line. "As you can see, the short-term effect on instances of unacceptable behavior is immediate, but permanent results can be achieved in a few years." A few years. With brain electrodes, if he really knew what he was doing, he could accomplish the Pavlovian conditioning in a couple of days. Likely he actually did...

Paul was starting to feel a sense of urgency. While they talked, the kids suffered. He decided to make the conversation shorter than he originally planned.

"So, then, your intent is to rebuild them from a different foundation."

"Yes, that's right." There wasn't even the slightest hint of irony.

For a moment, Paul thought it was all one big April Fool's joke. Maybe today really was the first and he had just got his dates mixed up, or maybe the twins decided to do one a few days early so he wouldn't catch on; they had only promised not to play them on each other, after all. The beginning now, maybe, and the end of the joke on the first?

No, no such luck. This guy meant it.

Rhines noticed Paul staring at him and continued, a bit awkwardly: "Oh, there's more to it than that. I'm aware that they can destroy themselves fighting it." 'And that differs from what you're trying to do how, exactly?' Paul didn't say. "I have one boy conditioned to convince newcomers to 'pretend to go along with it', as well as a normal woman with similar instructions. They both suggest that they're against me, but that it would be best for my patients to accept things 'for now'. They don't last long after that." He smiled as he spoke, the delight on his face obvious. That tore it. Time to end this. 'I'm going to own this guy so hard, people three universes over will feel it.'

"I find your unique therapeutic approach fascinating, but there is one more thing I'd like from you."

"That being?" Was he beginning to get a clue, yet? Did he have some inkling?

What Paul wanted to do- what every nerve in his body was screaming at him to do- was pull out an anti-Enforcer weapon instead of the tranquilizer gun, splattering this fucker's brains like so much mushy pink Chef Boyardee, bits of skull the size and shape of cornflakes embedding themselves in the far wall with almost the same velocity as the buckshot that had carried them there. But Sarah, procedure, and common sense had demanded at least an attempt at implant interrogation, so he held down his gorge, shot him with the little gun instead of a big one, and reminded himself that he'd ordered the interrogators to cremate this asshole alive once they were done, tearing his atoms one from the other and leaving nothing but carbon dioxide, water vapor, and a faint layer of ash. Paul started to smile and laugh at the prospect.

The Enforcer guards went for him. There were only two of them and they fell in instants, one with a crushed skull from Paul's armored fist and the other with an imploded neck from his forearm. Laughing louder and louder, Paul pulled out the fusion/fission weapon, and began to sing something from Katamari Damacy as he sauntered, almost skipped, down the hall.

The shot and the following fight were both unmuffled, echoing up and down the halls and intermingling with the background noises in a cacophony from nightmare which he tried to drown out with his own voice. ("Na NA, na na na NA NA NA, na na Katamari Damashii...") Enforcer nannies, untrained in engineered combat, rushed up the halls and went down in burning pieces, Paul carving them at a distance in patterns, the thundercrack of the Micro booming like a continuous explosion. Paul giggled loudly at their ineptitude, as well as the sheer comic effect of an Enforcer nanny, its smoldering head a few feet away, bleeding dark red all over the screaming, babified teenager it had carried. Paul didn't let himself feel anything else, still singing. If he went into rage now, he wasn't sure if he'd ever come out.

He turned the corner and nearly collided with a normal-born woman, dressed as the Enforcer nurses. She looked at him in absolute horror, backing up slowly, completely disbelieving what he was doing. "Oh, hello there," Paul said, still smiling. "Can you tell me what you do here?" He was curious as to how she'd phrase her job.

"Listen, I was just trying to help-" Ah, the sputtering of fearful lies.

"You're full of shit," Paul said in the same pleasant tone, put his foot on her chest, and ripped off her arms like drumsticks, smacking her in the head with them a few times after she went down. Paul looked at his white outfit with mild dismay. He'd gone and gotten himself covered in blood. Oh well. A few more unarmed Enforcers showed up ('They ought to start training them not to bother.') and were sliced easily in half in one microwave swipe. Paul heard one behind him, and as he spun on his heel, it fired a Taser. A Taser! Giggling even harder, Paul plucked the electrodes out of the air, tossed them aside, and ended the offending Enforcer with a burning hole in the center of its head one centimeter wide, through which superheated brains gushed.

On impulse, Paul kicked open the door to the nursery and his singing died in his throat. Roughly two dozen males from ages 8 ('Eight! Fucking eight!'- Paul clamped down on that) to 25 sat or lay about the room, wearing baby clothes, the majority of them crying and wailing, some of them looking around wildly for the nurses who had met their end trying to repel the unstoppable threat. Paul's self-enforced good mood almost collapsed into screaming fury, but he retained his composure and went to the one boy who looked to still be lucid, who was staring at him with trembling lips, looking him in the eye. As he had with Rhines' servant, Paul felt he could read his innermost thoughts:

I'm begging you, get me out of here.

Okay, that one didn't take a telepath.

Reading the nametag on the boy's clothing, Paul asked, "Hey, Cody. Want to be my friend?"

The boy had been there for roughly three days. Confused, terrified, unable to understand what was going on in his mind yet still smoldering with residual rage, he blurted the first thing that came to mind: "It's Luke, not Cody!" He braced himself, expecting pain and a terrible sadness that wasn't really his, and a look of relief came over his face when he received nothing. He didn't wholly realize what had happened, thought that the explosions were figments of his imagination, didn't know what the smell of ozone and overcooked meat really meant, didn't quite cognize that the red stains on Paul's suit were, indeed, blood.

"Okay, Luke. Want to be my friend?" Paul asked again. Receiving no reply in three seconds from the baffled boy, he simply turned around.

"Wait! Yes! YES!" Luke screamed.

"Okay. I'm Paul. You're my friend now," Paul said simply, reaching behind Luke and crushing the control collar's electrical system by main force, knowing that it was discharge-proof. If it wasn't for the electrodes going deep into Luke's brain, he simply would have torn it off. He reached out with his hand. Luke took it, unsure, and Paul shook it firmly before pulling Luke up. "Have a gun," he said, handing Luke a smallish semiautomatic rifle. Luke looked at the Illuminated weapon uncertainly, vaguely understanding that he was being extracted. Was this some sort of dream, or was he in a coma this whole time and this marked the end? Who the hell was this guy? Did he really kill all the staff as it sounded like?

One last nanny Enforcer entered the room, going for Paul with the same intensity that all Enforcers have in combat. To Luke's eyes, one instant the nanny was moving towards him, and the next instant Paul's foot had already kicked it in the chest with unbelievable speed and force. It fell backward, destroyed ribs ripping holes in lungs and heart. It sat up for a moment before falling back down. Almost all of the other victims started screaming at the top of their lungs, some sounding like normal teenagers, some giving a high-pitched whine that should have come from no post-pubescent throat. Paul ostensibly paid no attention.

"So, Luke, what do you like to do? What are you good at?" Paul asked, in a forceful voice that cut through the noise.

Being asked that, in this setting, felt so weird that he immediately blurted what he thought was the truth instead of a lie or a non-answer. "I blow shit up. Destroy shit. Cause fucking chaos." A look of realization, of latent hate being drawn towards the surface, drew across his face.

"Really?" Paul asked perkily but with the same forceful voice. "We definitely have a place for people like you. Welcome aboard." Luke was only half-listening, instead walking up to and aiming at what looked to be a completely catatonic boy. Paul looked on as the boy seemingly went lucid in an instant and started to say something, but was interrupted by the loud .45 caliber crack of the semiautomatic. Although he would have greatly relished it, Luke never had the opportunity to fire a real weapon before; the Illuminated mini-rifle jerked directly back, spoiling his aim by a fraction of an inch. Instead of putting it right between the other boy's eyes, it instead went through some of the top of his skull, splashing the nursery-print wall with crimson, the shock to the brain killing him instantly. Ah, yes; that must have been the boy cajoling him to accept this. Paul simply smiled, and led Luke out with the same sauntering near-skip he had when he entered the place. "You killed someone the moment you had the chance. And here I was thinking I'd have to train you to be one of us." Paul actually wasn't too surprised. Considering that Luke had been through more hell in the past three days than most boys his age did in their entire lives, the fact that his savior, new friend, and thus example-setter hadn't been adverse to killing at all, and that Luke probably didn't have much of a conscience to begin with, it was natural that murder would be the first thing on his mind. (It had actually been on his mind the whole time.)

"Wait! Who the fuck are you?! What the fuck are you?! Why are you here?!" Luke shouted over the screaming as he uncertainly followed his new master out, looking with simultaneous horror and fascination at the burn-slashed corpses littering the floor. ('What the fuck did he use, a lightsaber? Is this guy some kind of Jedi?')

"Paul Smith, fifth level Illuminatus. I'm retrovirally engineered, and I'll make you a retroviral, too. I'm here to make friends. C'mon, bud. Let's get you out of here and into some real clothes." Luke was confused and unnerved by most of what Paul had to say ('Illuminatus? What-engineered? And he wants to be friends?'), but the last suggestion got him going. ('Wherever the hell he's taking me, it's got to be better than this.')

Paul looked around for a while before pulling out a small radio. "It's empty or close enough. Send 'em in." Then, to Luke's surprise, Paul put his arm around him, looking at him with a smile. Luke remembered the white-clad boy's immense strength, and hoped to God he wasn't queer. To go from mental destruction to anal rape would be just his luck about now. "So tell me, Luke, how does it feel to know that there's a place for you in the world, just the way you are? What went through your head when someone as powerful as I am took time to save you from this? What's it like to be rescued?" Paul was a good six inches taller than Luke, and for a moment Luke felt like his little brother. He rejected it out of hand, as he couldn't tell the difference between real and artificial emotions anymore.

"Just... fucking.. I don't know!" There was a woman's scream outside, then the loud b-r-r-r-r-rap of an automatic weapon, the perimeter Enforcers coming through. "It's.. it's fucking great, I'm so glad you did it. Why the fuck weren't you here earlier?!" he shouted, reaching behind him for his collar.

"Don't, there's wires in your head. We'll take them out professionally," Paul said, moving Luke's hands down with his hugging arm. "We didn't know. There's six thousand Illuminati, and many of them keep a substantial amount of privacy. Sorry." That apology was so fucking ridiculous, and Paul knew it, but...

Luke didn't care about that. "Jesus, some of those guys in there are so fucked-"

"I know," Paul said gently, as his Enforcers rushed into the building. Generic, military, and late-model, they moved past Paul and his new friend with alacrity. "Hopefully they'll forgive us for being so late." Most Illuminati would have laughed at Paul for saying that. Forgiveness from normals? "It's all right, we'll give them their brains back." Or what was left of them. Paul didn't mention what would have to happen afterwards, in the majority of cases. It would be a mercy. "When I was rescued, it was one of the best experiences in my life, although I didn't really know it at the time. I can't tell which was worse, my or your tormentor, but my best friend gave me the power to kill the motherfucker, and his twin brother adopted me. Much as I'm doing for you. Let me tell you about us." Having been through the unbelievable, Luke didn't disbelieve any of what Paul had to say. He did not, however, really think about it. Stress, murder, and action had shut down most of his forebrain. 

Paul walked out, still talking, and found the corpse of Rhines' servant outside the jet. The sharpshooter Enforcers keeping the perimeter had been methodical in preventing him from getting in. Instead of sniping him in the head, which would have passed through and done damage to the jet, they had shot him in his right knee, then got him in the head when he went down. High-caliber bullets meant there wasn't much of either left. Paul frowned at the stains on the reflective armor, still casually discussing Illuminated secrets as he would the weather. Then he looked at Luke's clothes with sheer disgust and ripped apart the one-piece in an instant, exposing the full diaper underneath. Sickened to his stomach, Paul tore that off as well and threw the wet and messy object to the place where the corpse's head used to be, still talking. Luke looked bewildered for a half second and then laughed, a wild horse-laugh of impending insanity. Then he followed Paul up into the jet. Naked was better, anyway.

"There's a toilet opening inside the seat," Paul said, noticing that Luke was dripping from his dick. Luke pulled it agape and Paul noticed that he intended to leave it that way. Of course. Likely they had done significant damage to his bladder control. Paul gave him the dignity of pretending not to notice as, apologetically, he explained the bad part: that Luke would not become an Illuminatus and would be a servant, most probably an implanted one.

Luke didn't cry or whimper. Of course not. He had spent the last three days fighting that, and without the control collar's effect it was much easier. Instead, he stared at Paul with simultaneous awe and rage. Paul didn't mind. Luke could cuss him out all he felt like, particularly right now with a semi-fucked mind. He could even viciously attack Paul if he so chose. They'd still be friends.

"Don't give me that shit!" Luke screamed after Paul explained that it was necessary. "They were all telling me how I needed that crap! Now you're telling me how I need this, huh?" He started to point the gun at Paul, and Paul instantly took it out of his hands and flung it away into the back of the jet. Luke buried his head in his hands and silently quivered with fear and rage.

"Listen closely. You haven't gone from the frying pan and to the fire. This is an entirely different sort of need. There are far more humane, and ultimately far more effective, ways of channeling the destructive anger of men your age." Luke liked being called a man; that was why Paul did it. "You don't deserve to be treated like that. Nobody deserves that, or anything remotely like it. Death is far more preferable. You don't even deserve the problems associated with implant slavery, but we do that both for security and secrecy reasons. We're going to be giving you access to power, Luke; lots and lots of it." That perked him up. "The implants are just there to make sure you use it for, not against, us."

"What the fuck are you talking about, power? You mean like what you did in there?" Luke had never had anything resembling power before, which was a root cause of his rage. The only way someone like him could get power was through destruction, which he had become very, very good at.

Paul launched into a discussion of Illuminated power of all types, with a special emphasis on the fusion technologies and the extreme weaponry, including the Micro he had used to chop those Enforcers up, and the existence of Enforcers themselves. Paul concluded with, "And you'll be a regenerating immortal as well, stronger, faster, and smarter than ever before." Luke thought Paul was being snide with 'regenerating immortal'.

Luke's swirling mind ('Sweet Jesus, he just killed everyone and now he's talking like a fucking doctor') was going in a different direction. "He could have used those fucking collars to train us to do anything, right?"

"In theory, yes."

"Then why that?! For the love of fuck, why that?! He could have made us all like you and trained us all to be firemen or politicians or something! He could probably have made us to be cops!" Paul's friend still didn't really understand Illuminated secrecy, nor did he know that the retrovirus would cause such electrodes to be regenerated out. Paul still acknowledged his point.

"I could go on about his rather nonsensical theories, but they're all complete hogwash. Basically, he did it because he wanted to. Having a room full of destroyed teenagers pleased him and probably got his servant off every night. While you were being brainwashed, that guy was masturbating." Luke was sickened and stunned. "You have destructive impulses, as do I. Have you ever wanted to do anything like that to anyone, ever?"

"Fuck no!"

"Why not?" Paul asked.

"Because it's sick! It's bullshit!"

"Of course it is. The stuff you've done isn't even in the same league as that. And yet he, and many, many others like him in the normal world, have made themselves believe that such things are right and proper and perfectly okay because you're a teenager with destructive impulses. The act of destroying you gives them pleasure, and they justify what they've done with smart-sounding nonsense. Such people are badly imbalanced, unable to separate their fantasies from the objective reality of human psychology, and need to die."

"Is that what I'll be doing?" Luke asked. Paul sensed Luke's sheer glee, the only honest good emotion he had really felt in three days.

"There's not enough of them to make it a full-time career. At least not ones that we can afford to go after; secrecy, again. But there will be times, yes." Luke looked downcast, as if that was the only fun he was going to have. "You can cheer up. You're my friend, remember?" Paul realized how scarily like the Dominator he sounded, but plodded ahead anyway, using the same calm tone of voice Howard used for this sort of thing with him almost six years ago. "I'm not going to hurt you. It's how we all get along here, by masters and servants being friends. We'd be completely fucked otherwise. You'll be having a lot more fun here than anywhere else you ever have, and if my hunches on your psychology are correct, you're going to become a mostly independent ass kicker. You'll have almost everything you can possibly want, including sex, and we'll eventually get you a real girlfriend. I assure you, serving in Heaven is far better than being coddled in Hell."

Luke looked at Paul, befuddled and not knowing what to say. People had done things to him. No one, but no one, despite what they repeatedly claimed, had ever done anything for him. Especially not as an act of seemingly random kindness, especially not as violently and flashily as Paul had been. And that affected him most of all- Paul's sheer confidence, his demonstrated power, his decisiveness, the fact that he could rip through people like nothing (Paul mentioned Enforcers, but Luke didn't quite understand what one was), get blood all over his clothes, and still talk as if he was playing a game or going out for a party- that's what made Luke trust him. Although he had serious misgivings about the implants (he didn't realize what they really were, and thought of them as a variant of the electrodes in his head), he'd blow up what this boy- his friend, make no mistake- wanted destroyed, servant or not. "Thank you," he said. He had never had an honest reason to say that before.

"You're quite welcome," Paul replied. "Welcome to the Illuminati." His screen signaled him again. "Ah, yes. Okay. Okay, nuke it." Paul then pulled out the swinging-arm viewscreen, gestured, and Luke immediately got out of his seat to look, still dripping slowly.

It was an aerial view of the facility. The building was somehow.. changing? Fire erupted from it, small at first and then immediately everywhere. The building itself, not just the inside but the outside as well, started to burn. Within seconds, the entire building collapsed inwards, pieces of white-hot metal struts visibly melting under the thick smoke. It reminded Luke of the World Trade Center disaster he had laughed at. In less than ten seconds from the start of it there was just a pile of rubble nearly invisible underneath an expanding cloud of smoke and loose, burning debris.

Paul felt a quick surge of snap-back relief. The sense of wrongness was abruptly removed. It reminded him of popping a zit (when was the last time he had to do that?), with the nugget of extreme unwholesomeness sitting on his finger- or, in this case, standing less than five feet away.

"Good fucking riddance," Luke said, sitting back down, the beginnings of a smile on his face. "What the hell did you do?"

"I didn't mention the satellite Micros, did I?"

"...You rule. You fucking rule."

"That we do. Any questions?" Luke was slowly regaining his mental state and asked pointed ones, such as how the hell any of this could happen and what the hell was Paul's weapon. Paul answered everything in detail, even questions about himself that Luke started asking when he realized that Paul really would tell him everything. He didn't quite catch everything the first time around and ended up asking things Paul had already told him. The concept of people his age, and younger, ruling the world excited him and filled him with joy. He didn't recognize the feeling of vindication any more than he did gratitude. Eventually he got hungry, and gobbled up an energy bar and some water readily. Normally it would be too rich for his taste, but he hadn't had any solid food in three days, either. Paul left him in his own thoughts for the remainder of the trip, for Paul, too, was thinking.

Heh. He had really outdone himself that time, hadn't he? He doesn't just empty the place. He picks the first someone to lay sane eyes on him, and lifts him out, just like that, no hesitation and without a care in the world. Even if Luke was ill-suited it would change nothing. Paul had declared him his friend, and so his friend he is. Didn't he have that right? Being a close friend of the Duumvirate put him a position to change the fate of more nations that one. He can at least decide who his friends are.

He knew there was no such thing as atonement, but he couldn't help but think about Ryan and his three friends. More than five years ago, they had broken into an amusement park when Howard had taken it over for his own entertainment. There was no retrovirus to make them suitable for the organization, and secrecy dictated that they could not be allowed to see the Dominator and walk away; thus, they had to die, and Howard made Paul kill two of them as an object lesson in the sort of things he would have to do, even as a servant. But they didn't deserve to die. All they did was break into an amusement park, looking for thrills. Howard reminded Paul to 'lose the local morality'- forget about the corpses in front of him and remember all the ones out there in the wider world- but Paul would never forget those deaths, even if standard operating procedure considered them necessary at the time. He considered the score a bit more balanced now. Although against his will, Paul had killed; now he had chosen to save. Saved a natural born killer, from the looks of things. Paul smiled. After all, there's a lot of people who do deserve a good killing, and the Illuminati could always use the help.

"Man, why won't this shit STOP?!" Luke interrupted Paul's thoughts with, looking down at his genitals.

"Still dribbling?" Paul asked. Luke nodded angrily. "They did something to you. We will undo it." Luke wanted to share Paul's confidence and didn't reply.

It took a couple of minutes after that for Paul to realize something that he should have earlier. The secrecy! Good crap, the secrecy! Was Rhines serious about releasing them back into society after something like that? Paul had been so fixated on the horror that he hadn't realized the obvious. He started to get very worried indeed- how many more Illuminati would fuck up that badly?

'Few,' he said to himself, calming himself down. 'Or none. The organization's lasted this long.' And even for the few that do, there's experienced servants around who will quietly correct them when they try to order something secrecy-breakingly stupid, and quietly drop hints to other masters, or perhaps the Dominator, if the order isn't stopped.

But that was for people smart and resourceful enough to have savvy and experienced servants...

When they debarked there was a troop of Enforcers waiting for Luke, who took no chances and had a stretcher ready. "Trust them," Paul said, and he did, the Enforcers efficiently putting him into what looked like a golf cart and zooming away at speed. Paul'd taken him this far. Although he did wonder what the teenager coming up to Paul would be so enraged about. ('Fuck it, probably nothing to do with me.')

That was no teenager- that was the Operator, and he was indeed pissed, his face red and his fists clenched. Paul didn't think he'd ever seen the Operator angry before. Scared, yes, and worried- but never pissed off, especially not as a retroviral. "Paul! Are the people who did this still alive?" Paul smiled and shook his head- you're kidding, right?- and the Operator relaxed somewhat, sighing. Paul had sent Northberg basic background information on what had been done to his new servant. "What the hell is this, or, no, why the hell is this?"

"If I could have implanted that asshole, I'd tell you," Paul lied.

"You know, you four should probably consider implanting some of these shits and fuck the political consequences."

"Believe me, we'd love to, but we really can't," Paul lied again. He was tempted to let the Operator in on it, but this was need-to-know information and the Operator didn't need to know. It wasn't as if the interrogators were going to waste time asking about Matthew's theories, nor would he want them to. "If you want, I'll send you what we pull off his computers."

"Oh, I'm sure I'll be enlightened." There was hypocrisy in the sarcasm. The Operator had done things that were arguably even worse, and Paul knew it. But unlike Matthew L. Rhines or Josef Mengele, the Operator's medical atrocities were always in the service of real research, he never used humans when simpler animals would serve, he minimized pain because it messed with his results, and he never did anything like that for the fun of it.

Paul pondered where to wait as his servant was restored and analyzed. There was always the educational wing.. no. As an Illuminatus, Paul figured he should be able to go from something like that to dealing with engineered children without feeling anything except a minor sense of irony, but the concept was too disturbing and he decided against it.

"I'll never get used to this," he said to no one.

"You and me both," no one replied, and Paul didn't bother looking around the hangar for the voice, instead finding himself more exhausted than he had realized. Sleep on the jet? Nah. He took the next tram to the medical wing, found the psychiatric ward (a tiny affair, he found; in light of recent events he felt it should be expanded a bit), and slept on a conveniently-placed couch. ('And if anyone comes to psychoanalyze me on it, I'll give them much more than they bargained for.') 

He did not like his dreams.

The psychologist looked at Paul's sleeping, twitching form and pondered attempting to figure out the nature, if not the exact details, of the nightmare. Better not. That suit was coated in dried blood for a reason. "Paul," he said, from a safe distance of twenty feet.

Paul sat up in half an instant. "Gah! Oh. Sorry. Is he fit?" he asked.

"Oh, absolutely. If not now, after the retrovirus," he answered. "Although his intelligence per se is mediocre, he maintains a high level of cunning and skill in some areas. He's a natural fighter. I'm sure you'll find some use for him." This last part was with a smirk; everyone knew how much fighting the Duumvirate and their direct subordinates could end up doing.

"And the status of his servitude?" The attitude of the Illuminati towards implants became somewhat more negative after the unimplantation of Howard's servants. Acquiring people and then not implanting them was becoming more popular because of it. Asking that question would have elicited a 'Huh?' if that was not the case.

"My recommendation is unimplanted."

"Unimplanted?" Paul asked with surprise. "How did you come to that conclusion?"

"For starters, there's loyalty. Towards the Illuminati as a whole, he feels little deep surprise and is fairly ambivalent. However, he considers the engineered leadership to be wonderful and you to be more or less godlike, although he has a certain degree of pride and won't admit it outright. Then there's the risk of secrecy breaches. He has nothing to gain and no impetus for doing so, no serious normal-world relationships other than unfriendly ones and almost no societal empathy. He doesn't fully understand secrecy requirements yet, but there's nothing to suggest he'll oppose them. Then there's the matter of self-determination. Luke is a very animose young man, and has even more hate for mental control applied to him than is apparent." Paul wondered if that was possible, given the amount of apparent hate, and found himself pondering if hatred had a maximum. "This one had me indecisive for a while, but I feel that the implants would do more harm than good. They'd reduce him in a fundamental way that I believe is not worth it. Both before and after the retrovirus, it will be possible to adequately control him without them." 'It will be possible' meant that it wouldn't be easy for Paul to do it. The psychologist had long experience in keeping his private assessments of Illuminati's manipulative skill private. He also had a concept of confidentiality with his patients (he had been a normal psychologist, and still thought of them as that), and avoided direct quotes whenever possible.

"I'll follow your recommendation." Paul didn't show his joy. He didn't want to use implants if he could possibly help it.

"Shall you select a retrovirus? As you're probably already aware, the Operator is working on several new experimental ideas." Paul actually wasn't; after his own augmentation, he hadn't been following the project much at all.

"He's very animose, right?" Paul asked. "Then let him decide what he wants."

"As you wish." The man left Paul's presence, and returned back to his office. Some servant acquisitions featured the grim, disturbed, or intrinsically violent. Every last one of his patients, of course, distrusted him at first, and getting real information about them required a combination of brain monitoring, interrogation, and subtle manipulation. If he could extend his conmanship to larger areas he would certainly be wearing white. 'And Paul doesn't quite trust me. And I don't trust myself, either.' Which settled things into the familiar, comfortable niche of all fucked up, the same place he had been in for the past half hour.

First, news of non-implantation. Good, he's happy.

Then he discussed possible retroviruses, and gave Luke a wide selection of possible abilities. "Do remember that this will be with you forever. This is not to be taken lightly. He said to let you decide what you want, so if you ask for blue eyes and red hair, we'll do it."

"Leave all that stuff. I like how I look. I just want the benefits." There were a number of possible additional benefits- some simple claws, some hair modifications, a certain running change... and one that will turn the subject into a human electric eel. "Holy shit!" Luke exclaimed on seeing that, double-checking what he just saw, eyes wide. "You can actually do that?"

"Oh yes. This one is new, and slightly experimental." The man's forte was psychology, but he knew enough about biology to discuss it briefly. "We estimate your output will be roughly a kilovolt, DC of course. The organs go into your back, with corridors throughout your body. Nothing near the brain stem, of course. You were born right handed, so for you it will be left side positive, right side negative. It'll take you a while to learn it, but you'll be able to charge batteries." He didn't have to mention the effects on human beings.

"Holy... fucking... shit. I'll take it." Luke grinned like Satan. No one would ever be able to shock him again. From now on, he'd be the one doing the shocking. "Whoever the fuck made this, whatever genius thought this shit up.. I want to shake his hand."

"You and a lot of other people. Hold out your arm."

Luke eagerly stuck out his right arm. Dr. Zarnecky was the second person he had ever met that he could trust with his life. He was surprised when the doctor took a tiny sample of blood instead of injecting something. "Oh, you thought you were going to get it right away? The synthesis process for this will require human supervision and take as many as two days. We work around the clock. I recommend you use the time productively. There's always more to learn. In this organization, what you don't know can kill you."

"Or leave me in some fucking hellhole getting turned into a baby. I know. So, um.. what do I do now?"

"Your friend is just outside, waiting for you." The psychologist tried not to put any special emphasis on 'friend', but the word stuck out anyway. Luke shook the man's hand and left almost instantly. Paul got up from the conveniently-placed couch with a smile on his face. Luke would have held his hand all the way to the jet if he didn't think that was gay.

Paul's words, however, were somewhat harsh. "You're not implanted, so listen carefully. This is very, very important- no matter what I tell you to do directly, you have to do it, immediately and without question. Usually I won't phrase things that way. If I ever do that, do exactly as I say, because I always mean it. Disobedience can mean instant death, and not just from me." This was somewhat of an exaggeration, but Paul was trying to inculcate the mentality of the serious operatives.

"So what you're saying is, I'm your nigger."

"You can put it like that if you want, but with this kind of power there has to be things that I just won't command you to do. If I ever command you to do something really stupid, pointlessly self-sacrificial, or anything like that, kill me, because it's not really me. That's one good reason not to use implants." Paul would never forget William's brush with commanded suicide. A couple more syllables and...

"It's not really you?"

"Robots. Yes, it's been done." Luke was too used to weirdness to be surprised.

Although Luke was never a big fan of computer or console games, they played together on the jet. Luke was brutal and went for the jugular (a thing Paul strongly encouraged), but he couldn't hope to match Paul's retroviral power in any game.

"By the way, when you're near the Duumvirate, act however you want. Swear, carry on, do whatever pleases you. The twins see right through false decorum," Paul said near the end of the trip. Luke had to guess what 'decorum' meant through context.

"Are you serious?"

"Absolutely. It takes a lot more than that to piss them off. However, if you do that, even I can't save you. Remember how I said that I can do whatever I want to you? Although there are some practicality issues, the twins can do whatever they want to anyone." Paul had told him about them earlier, but didn't put it in quite those terms. Luke didn't reply to that and the jet landed softly. Paul led his new friend inside, still wearing just the black robe and the generic shoes, across the wet grass. The smell of the ocean brought back some memories for Luke- when was the last time he went to the beach, anyway? And if the mansion was as palatial on the inside as it was outside, he could get used to living here. When he stepped inside, he nodded in satisfaction, only one thought on his mind: 'They've got it made.'

The twins were eating, loudly as usual, and Luke followed Paul into the dining room where a Thanksgiving feast waited for them, a massive turkey (engineered for size and muscle density) and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and corn and pumpkin pie, despite the fact that this was late March. Luke's stomach rumbled. He was worried he'd never eat real food again, and look at all that. Then he noticed the people eating it. The albinism and hair were ignored, the fingers not noticed right away and then shrugged off when they were. What he saw first was the broadness of shoulder and the height of torso and neck; approaching sixteen years of age, the twins nearly reached seven feet. Even their heads were larger than normals', retaining proportion and giving the impression of simply being expanded in volume. 'Damn, they're big fuckers!'

"Have things been peaceful while I was gone?" Paul asked them. The question was half-serious; in five hours all hell could have broken loose and been forced back in.

"As they ever are," William casually replied. "Who's your friend?" Howard asked. The question was a formality.

"Duumvirate, Sarah, I'd like you to meet my new servant, Luke; Luke, this is William and Howard Dominus, the Duumvirate, and Sarah Mortis Dominus, first level Illuminatus." Sarah grinned, displaying her razor nails. The twins looked at the servant as if he was an exhibit in a museum, judging him, casually dissecting his soul in a far different fashion than any psychologist. Luke looked back at them uncertainly. Five hours ago he had been the victim of some asshole psycho's idea of rehabilitation. Now he was in a room with the masters of the entire world, and he could feel the absolute power they wielded as if it were tangible. Under normal circumstances Luke would have told them to blow it out their ass, for the sheer pleasure of telling the rulers of the world that, mortal threat or no. There was a brief smirk as he considered this; both twins smirked slightly at him as well. It's all right, that smirk said. We welcome your hatred, as we have uses for it. Piss us off too badly and we'll slay you like a dog in the street, but you'll receive no condescension from us. Then Luke started smiling a real smile. Just like that, he was home. He pulled up a chair, cut off a large piece of breast meat ('Damn, that knife's sharp'), and began to eat.

"So, Luke, what was it like in there?" Howard asked casually.

The question rubbed Luke the wrong way. He pushed himself and his chair away from the table as if he meant to get up and beat Howard's ass, despite the ridiculous physical mismatch. (You're gonna need a lot more than the Force, Luke.) "What the fuck do you think it was like, fuckin' Disneyland?!" The rest of them chuckled at him, although Paul was amazed at the sheer balls Luke had to do something like that.

"Well, what do you think of the guy who ran the place, then? Was he nice? Gentle? Kind?" William asked, smirking.

"The fuck- stop playing with me."

"No," Howard said. Luke was taken back a bit by the echo effect, pulled the chair back up, and went back to his turkey. Being toyed with wasn't so bad, considering.

"Did you hear about his experimental new retrovirus?" Paul said, attacking the engineered turkey as well.

"Electric eel modification," Sarah replied, having read the psychological transcript with the twins.

"Hey, the cunt got it in one!" Luke shouted between bites. ('I can swear all day at the rulers of the world, and they won't care. This is more than awesome.')

"Hey, the dipshit is going to have several pounds of extra organs and high voltages coursing close to his nervous system. Don't get too close to any electromagnets," Sarah retorted casually. "Are you on your best behavior today, or are your manners always this good?" Luke just looked at her, unable to think up a reply.

"So Luke, do tell me, why are we suffering your presence here?" William asked in a serious tone, an exceedingly rare real authority that punched through Luke's bravado like an ice pick. Luke had had tons of assholes telling him what to do, but none of them were like this. They pretended to authority. The Dominator just had it.

"Huh?" Luke replied. ('Oh fuck...')

"You've proceeded to treat us all with disrespect, blithely eat our food, swear at us and Sarah, and generally act like an asshole. What makes you think we will suffer you to be here one moment more?"

"Well, I.. shit, I don't know..." Luke looked at Paul desperately for salvation and found none. Surrounded by unfriendly-looking engineereds, any one of which could have put him away in an instant, Luke started to get very, very nervous indeed. It was only when the smiles crept up on those faces that he realized what was being done. "...you fucks!" All four of the engineereds erupted in laughter. The twins slapped each other six. Again, Luke found he really didn't care about the twins' idea of messing with him. It was a hell of a lot better than some other people's.

"Why that retrovirus, in particular?" Howard asked.

"Because I want to zap people."

"Really? Is that it?" William asked. "No battery charging, light bulb glowing, fun with electronics? Although we have fusion power," Luke didn't know enough about science to be impressed by that. "being your own personal dynamo has its advantages. With the right equipment you can even be a miniature Magneto."

"That shit sounds cool. But I just got it for all the ball stomp it can do."

"Along with the intra-brain shit, Luke received a lot of electric shocks," Paul explained. "I'm guessing he simply wants to do some shocking back."

"Shock? No." It had sounded good at the time, but now he wanted to go to bigger and better things. "I'm going to fucking electrocute people." The engineereds smiled at him. He didn't have the smarts- not yet, anyway- but he had the right attitude. They found his unpolished aggressiveness and brutality endearing, almost sweet.

"You better start studying electricity now," Sarah informed him. She was talking down to him, but he didn't realize that. "Electromagnetic theory, some electrical engineering principles, basic circuit behavior, maybe even transistors. You've got to know everything about conductivity and don't ever forget Ohm's Law." Luke didn't even know that V equals IR. "Otherwise you'll probably end up electrocuting yourself." Luke just nodded and went back to his food. She was right, of course. No sense in having a firearm if you didn't know what it would do when you squeezed the trigger.

"Well, at least the lights won't ever go out if anything happens to the geotherms and the fusion," William said.

"You would use me like that?"

"What, with your power? Of course not. That's way too inefficient. We've got a giant hamster wheel downstairs waiting for you," Howard said, deadpan.

"Ha fucking ha." The Duumvirate and Sarah filled up and left and he continued to eat with Paul, who was eating twice as fast as he was, but filling up at about the same rate. "Are they always like that?"

"It's just their way of greeting you. You're just not smart enough for them to really talk to right now," Paul said. Luke was about to retort, but just nodded at the honesty. "Relax. You have no idea how much this retrovirus will do for you." Aside from physical exercise, Luke had never believed in 'self-improvement' anything, because everything with that label was bullshit. Having real superiority simply handed to him felt a bit like cheating, which made him smile inside. "I'm done."

"So am I." Luke's stomach was about to burst. He followed Paul into the main room and watched the rulers of the world at their work. What he didn't realize they were doing was divvying up Matthew's productive resources, having decided to take a firmer hand on their organization. Years ago, the lone Dominator would simply have let the recipients fight it out and come to him with problems in the traditional way, but the twins had given up laissez-faire world controlling. Luke read rather slowly and thought they were briefly skimming things that he didn't understand, lists of holdings and duties and servants. He didn't notice the puzzle piece-like fitting of responsibilities, and he most certainly didn't notice the twins trying mightily not to simply give it all to the one slightly engineered teen who could take some of it. Matthew didn't have very many resources- almost all of his real effort had gone into his dream hellhole- so the whole thing had taken less than fifteen minutes. Luke sat in a comfortable chair and watched the whole time in silence, too full of food to be more bored than tired, trying to puzzle out just what the hell they were doing. It felt like they were playing some advanced simulation game and he was a five year old watching them, and did he ever hate that.

Almost immediately after they had finished the distribution, the screen buzzed. The engineereds figured that someone might bitch. William took the call grudgingly, the usual Dominator don't-fuck-with-me look on his face. "Speak," he commanded Douglas Evenhart, a thick, balding man of about forty who wore useless glasses (literally useless; his eyes were surgically modified to 20/20, and he just wore them for effect) and looked every part a professional.

"I'm quite happy with the holdings. And after reading the report I agree that the man was a complete nutcase. But considering he wasn't fouling up any operations, I'm just wondering why you bothered." The man assumed that the Dominator had initiated the decision to do it. Paul's entries in public logs had encouraged that belief.

The Duumvirate looked at the man askance; if he was a complete nutcase, why do you ask why he was removed? Howard found an excellent way to answer him. "Luke, express your opinion of this man's opinion."

Luke wasn't expecting to be put on the spot like that and said the first thing that came to mind. "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on," he told Douglas.

"Ah. Taken out another degenerate to get yourselves another nasty servant, I see." He clearly had a low opinion of Paul. "Only a matter of time before you give him a white suit. Ah well, I suppose that's what retrovirii are for." He nodded deferentially and clicked off.

"He's a dick, but he's dependable," William explained.

"Remind you of anyone?" Howard asked, smirking. It flew over Luke's head that he was referring to him. They continued to do some more work, much of it not relating to Rhines at all. They'd been following Sarah's chain of logic, considering that she might have been right; perhaps sadistic idiots, even rogues, could be identified by their acquisitions and operations? Thoughts led to actions, after all; perhaps there could be some trace beyond blatant acts of insanity. It was the closest thing they had to something they could actually follow up on.

Nope... nope. The twins used their previous victims and enemies to serve as a baseline, but the correlation was too loose. The previous Night Operator, for example, acquired no one at all. The Bastard and Bitches who they had killed six years ago all had wildly varying needs. And the techniques used varied more with the servant actually doing the work than with the Illuminati ordering it. The twins had only had contact with one other Illuminatus who acquired teenagers in such numbers; the long-dead James Baker that Paul had helped raid. They searched operations for various parameters and found only one living person who was acquiring youth on a regular basis: one thirty-five-year-old by the name of Peter Gritzl was discreetly, carefully acquiring a new teenage girl every two months or so. Gee, why ever could he possibly be doing that? Sexual conquistadorship was, however, definitely not something the twins were going to attack people for. Especially since several other Illuminati were also quietly acquiring girls only a few years post-pubescent, albeit in smaller numbers.

If Luke had the reading speed and the wakefulness to follow the Duumvirate, he would have heartily approved of the idea and suggested that his master join in the practice. However, he had soundlessly fallen asleep without quite realizing he was going under. He hadn't really meant to do it- with all this new information, these strange, important people, this new life, who could possibly want to sleep?!- but the action of the past few hours and the horror of the past three days had taken their toll. Luke's subconscious had determined that the island was safe, and adjusted his somnolence accordingly.

Howard and William widened their search somewhat. A few Illuminati had taken some teenage boys recently... ah, only one of those Illuminati was an adult male. What about the non-recently, the twins looked over the search list, let's look at one male Illuminatus who took a teenage boy.. Jeremy Jorgenson had taken Joseph Freeman. The twins looked at each other and chuckled at the sheer silly futility of this line of inquiry. There was, however, a darker side to that. What do you do when most of the sickos and perverts are on your side?

At some point Howard noticed that Luke had gone to sleep, and gestured in his direction. 'Let's stick a pacifier in his mouth,' whispered William in his brother's ear, and that sent Howard on a characteristic laughing binge, William joining in instants.

Which of course woke Luke up. "What's so funny?"

"You wouldn't get the joke," Howard replied.

"They opened a new room there," Sarah said, pointing to a door next to the stairs, and he got up like a heavy golem. "It's yours, enjoy." The twins nodded in appreciation of the modular design; if they ever wanted to acquire anyone else, they wouldn't have to worry about where to put him or her. "Don't wet the bed."

Luke turned to look at her with hate. "Listen, bitch, that shit's just not funny." Because he was still recovering in that regard and might do exactly that.

"I was the one who found out about that place. Any one of us could have ended it, but if it wasn't for me, you'd still be there," Sarah replied.

Luke opened his mouth- maybe to swear at her, maybe to thank her- but then shut it and entered the room and closed the door behind him. He glanced around at the room- 'nice'- before taking off the robe and the shoes and lying buck naked under the covers. He'd care about the rest of it in the morning.

"So.. what do you guys think?" Paul asked.

"I think you're doing an excellent job, Paul," Howard replied. This wasn't the answer Paul was expecting. "You've been following us around like a puppy for far too long. Making decisions on your own, acquiring servants you like, it's about time you started being a real Illuminatus."

"Decisively," William said, nodding. "We read his interview. Paul, we know you didn't want to implant him. Why didn't you just make the decision not to in advance, and let the chips fall where they may? Consulting a psychological expert was a good idea, especially since you had to take him to Northberg anyway, but you're the Illuminatus." Paul had intended to rescue someone from dependency. He didn't realize that he'd be rescuing himself in the process. Why had he hesitated? What the hell did he have to fear?! Paul felt an infusion of power but knew that wasn't quite right. 'I had it all along. I just didn't know it until now,' Paul realized.

"As for him," Sarah said, "he's violent, vulgar, vile, and, verily, a very vicious villain. Treat him right, grow his power, and if you don't find uses for him, I will."

As she said that, Luke fell asleep, and immediately started having an extraordinarily bad dream, the details of which he would never repeat to anyone.

He woke up six hours later- it felt like he had been in nightmare-land for years- with dream-confusion and panic clouding his mind. It felt like a supernatural entity had wrested control of his life from another one; he had the vague impression of a massive blade cleaving slimy, sluglike flesh. For a vertigo-inducing instant, Luke thought he might wake up out of this as a dream and return to the nightmare as reality. 'No. That shit can't happen, it's totally fucking impossible, they all got slaughtered, it's not.. fucking.. real!' He looked at his hands, then his muscular arms, then at the metal walls. Still here, in the Duumvirate's mansion, still fourteen years old, still whole. He slammed his fist into his palm; his knuckles stung and his palm ached slightly. Real as real gets. 'Why me? Why the hell would they fight over me?' The idea of supernatural beings bothering to alter his reality was so antithetical to Luke's way of thinking that he put it out of his mind.

"Bad dream?" Paul asked. He hadn't entered through the door; to Luke's astonishment, there was an open trap door in the ceiling, no pole or ladder or anything. 'That's one hell of a way to go up and down.'

"I don't want to talk about it." Or even think about it, for that matter.

"Dreams are often the mind's way of purging unwanted thoughts," Paul said.

"Shut the fuck up! I said I don't want to talk about it!" The idea that such thoughts could exist in the first place royally pissed him off. "Listen, I'm pretty much useless without this retro virus, right?" Luke pronounced 'retro' and 'virus' separately. Paul shrugged and nodded somewhat. "Then I'm going for a walk. Alone." He glared at Paul, daring him to command him otherwise.

"Enjoy yourself. You sound like you need it." Paul leaped up into the hatch, pulled himself up effortlessly ('That's why they have it like that!' Luke realized), closed it, and then proceeded to monitor everything that Luke did with the ubiquitous surveillance equipment. Paul had nothing better to do, and was simply that curious.

Luke got out of bed, cleared the last vestiges of the nightmare out of his head ('they're dead, destroyed, gone'), and got dressed. He always went commando-style, the head of his circumcised dick having lost its sensation long ago. Loose black pants with metal on the knees. Black T-shirt, very loose in the back, under black leather jacket of similar sizing. He looked in what he took to be the sock drawer and found gloves instead, most with metal on the fingers and knuckles. Luke ignored these and spent three minutes looking for socks ('They didn't even bother giving me any.. fuck it.') before he put some engineer-style boots on and realized that these had soft material built in. They were about a size too large. 'They can make a retrovirus that will change my DNA and they can't even give me clothes that fit.' That's when it hit him: 'They're not giving me clothes for what I am. They're giving me clothes for what I'm going to be!' Suddenly, he appreciated every inch of the bagginess. The metal.. conductive! He walked out of the mansion and into the drizzle with a smile on his lips.

He never minded rain. It kept people off the streets and cloaked him somewhat. It made spraypaint useless, but he never could get much of that and for the more advanced vandalism the rain provided solitude and cover. That part of his life was over, though, but he didn't miss it; he'd be smashing groups of people, not mailboxes or windows. Out here there wasn't anything to really smash anyway. Out here... out here, there was the constant rushing sound of the waves, the open and inviting grass expanse under which was buried the fastest, most powerful jet known to mankind, out here there was a lush green forest at the end of March. He walked directly into that forest, head down against the drizzle, and his mind, unused to such labor, started to deal rationally with what was going on.

Upon reaching adolescence, he found himself sick of being talked down to, sick of the way people had treated him, like he didn't know how to run his own life. His way of thinking had almost immediately gone to the typical me-against-them logic of rebellious teenagers the world over. Even that.. place.. was still, completely, me-against-them. Now he had supped with the rulers of the world and one of them had declared Luke to be his friend. But this was a different Them, a Them that changed all the rules and redefined power.

Luke looked up at the forest around him. He had just noticed the differences in the trees, pines right next to one kind of leafy tree next to some other kind, as if they were just naturally like that, even though he knew that wouldn't happen in nature. As he looked up, a raindrop hit him in the eye. An old joke came back to him: Rain is just God pissing on you. He'd been pissed on by God enough times to agree with that.

But now, instead of punished, he was being rewarded for his deeds. Luke stopped walking and started to snicker, then to burble, then he just threw back his head and laughed at the top of his lungs, alone in the woods. He hadn't heard Illuminated maniacal laughter before, but he did a fairly good impression nonetheless. It was just so goddamn funny! His parents, his minister, all the adults in his life had threatened him to change his ways or suffer the consequences. And now he was wandering around a paradise none of them would ever get to see, with friends that could kill them all in moments, and super powers two days away! Those were the consequences! "BWAAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!" Not being a game player, Luke had no idea of the word 'ownage'. He felt a slight twinge of embarrassment- someone might have heard him- but decided not to care. After going almost instantly from degradation to apotheosis, why should he give a fuck?

Something other than human did hear him, though, and it rushed out behind a tree, barking. Fido had been tailing him, and Luke recoiled in surprise at the sight of the albino canine. "Easy, boy, easy," Luke said. He'd had to kick a street dog before, but he knew that this was no ordinary mutt, not with that muscular frame. Fear gripped him as he realized that it could probably make short work of him. "You're probably not used to strangers." Fido was actually quite used to the smells of unknown persons, but it unnerved the dog that there might be a strange human making such loud noise. He didn't move like the hidey-men and smelled of fear and a few chemicals; an outside-human, here? But he smelled of Master's house, too. A new friend of Master's? Fido barked once and Luke took a cautious step back, splaying his open hands, trying desperately to think of something to do. Run? If it was anything like Paul, that would be a joke. Scare it off? Not fucking likely. Throw a stick? Would that actually work? Who cared; it was his only choice, and there were plenty of sticks.

Fido watched the broken-off twig sail over his head. The stick game! The strange human knew how to play the stick game, so the strange human was like Master! But Fido had gotten bored of that game a long time ago. Instead, he rushed towards the strange human, pounced him to the ground, and started licking his face. Luke yelled twice; once in 'oh fuck I'm dead' alarm and the second in relief. "Get the fuck off me!" he shouted, more in mirth than annoyance. Fido barked and started running around him.

"Yes! You're faster than me. I get it." Then as if to prove it, Fido dashed into the forest with a burst of speed that Luke found absolutely incredible. 'I bet it thinks I'm going to follow it. Guess what, dog- you might be a bio-monster like the rest of them and like I'm going to be, but you're still just a stupid dog.' He then continued the way he was originally going, not knowing that Fido had effectively protected him from the other dogs by covering him with his smell.

Ah, what he wanted, a secluded spot. A cave formed from a lava tube, it was halfway in the water, going nearly ten feet towards land before terminating in collapsed rubble. It had ledges which looked like they were carved with the intent of sitting on them; he found it surprisingly comfortable and stared at the opposing cave wall.

Two minutes into that, Paul became bored, and a bit curious. "What the hell?" he muttered aloud. What the hell was his servant doing? Soul searching? Purging himself? Communing with the devil? Trying to turn himself into an Enforcer? Paul would have thought it was a still screen if not for the wavelets lapping at Luke's waterproof boots. High tide would be a couple of inches below the seat; if Paul knew the phase of the tide he could have figured out when Luke would snap out of it from the water pouring into his boots, but he really wasn't patient enough to make such a calculation, and looked at the clock again. Ten minutes. Maybe Luke knew, and was just waiting for Paul to tip his hand? Nah- he wasn't nearly that bright, and didn't have the background-noise paranoia most Illuminati and servants get after a while.

Although Paul knew he could have used some more of that paranoia himself. His new servant could easily have turned into Fido's new chew toy.

'I should go to him.' No- he had to create the idea that he was neither a petty nor overbearing master. This watching was simply out of pure curiosity. And if Luke wanted to spend his free time in a meditative or trance state, that was probably a good sign- but no, he wasn't in a trance, he was blinking at irregular intervals, fidgeting slightly, neither bored nor intent. 'What the hell is he doing?!' And Paul began to watch him intently, searching his face and his body language. No clenching of fists, no stiffening of arms...

It was twenty more minutes before Paul realized he was doing the exact same thing as Luke, except he was staring at a screen. 'Holy shit, he's infectious.' And that thought made him stop short. It was still early morning, and Paul hadn't had a full night's sleep, and he'd just spent half an hour doing nothing but imagining. What if his new servant really was infectious? What if Paul had set off a chain reaction, and Luke would proceed to convert whatever normals he could find into his apostles, who would continue to iteratively make more, a sort of anti-Christianity spreading like wildfire?

Paul giggled at himself. It was nice to flirt with the nearly-impossible every now and then, it was just when you went steady that you had problems. And he did go to see his servant; it had been long enough for a non-spying Paul to start wondering where he was, and they had a lot to talk about anyway.

They did, for hours (getting wet in the process, eventually lying on the ledges instead of sitting on them), and what they talked about was generally a rehash of past events with rather vile overtones.

Some hours later, it came to their attention that Richard Jacobsen, third level Illuminatus, was displeased. After being informed that the resources he had delegated to his new subordinate were under the control of a new, decisively more influential and aggressive, Illuminatus ("What happened to Matt?" "Matt went splat," Douglas had answered), he had gritted his teeth and swore at the sky. At least Rhines was somewhat adequate, compared to the servant he originally had administering that agglomeration of local media and political groups. 'Should have just found myself another servant', he thought with force, but hindsight was always 20/20. After a brief debate with himself on the merits of whether or not it would actually accomplish anything, he had finally gotten up the gumption to call the Dominator and request some form of redress, interrupting their dinner. "Dominator! I feel.. that.. I must have a discussion with you about the.. consequences.. of your termination decision." Dammit, he was never good at talking to people higher than him on any social scale. Being the authority was easy for him, subordinate less so. That, and the twins terrified him.

"What, another one?" William asked. This conversation had obviously gotten off on the wrong foot for the petitioner, but then again most did.

"Dominator, you feel it was necessary?" he asked in a carefully neutral tone.

Luke glared at the man and smashed his fist into his palm. "Paul's servant shares our opinion. Mr. Rhines was clearly such a poor choice of people that we wonder how you could ever blunder so badly," Howard said. Jacobsen stiffened up at 'blunder', as it was a word often followed by elimination of the blunderer. Calling was a bad idea, very bad, and there was that 20/20 hindsight again. "Granted, we did approve him, but that's never a perfect filter and we don't pretend to do a mirror investigation." He had been nice to them just like he had with Paul, and almost every recruited Illuminatus adopts some form of superior attitude to match the position. And of course if they went around asking 'do you have perverted fantasies that you would like to make real' they usually wouldn't get anything but naked lies. (They would, however, leave some advice in the system: Start checking the Internet history of potential recruits, checking complete ISP logs and tracing through proxy chains, with some extra investigation dedicated to local Wi-Fi networks.)

"He passed the tests and appeared to be perfectly sane," the man replied defensively. Implied was You designed the tests, you know we don't care much for normal definitions of sanity, and you approved him personally just like everyone else.

"Mr. Jacobsen, tests are just tests. In a controlled setting, we can only test for the power with any confidence, not the correct way, and there is a correct way, to use such power. A certain subtlety of actions that should be taken, and actions that should not. All of the rogues clearly fail to understand this. This is not some sort of Dominator-enforced code of ethics, although you can call it that if you like. Consider the activities of Mr. Rhines in a future, End of Secrecy environment," William pronounced, needing no further explanation. Jacobsen actually relaxed- 'good, they're not going to kill me for it.'

"I see your point, Dominator, though I imagine that several hundred other Illuminati will disagree fervently, especially considering your past actions."

The twins glanced at each other, realizing the truth of that. Several hundred. Several fucking hundred, possibly even more, Illuminati who would probably take the paradise they had been granted- total power to do anything they want- and each and every one building his own private hell. Pre-apocalypse, this made the majority of them dutiful and cunning. Post-apocalypse, presumably retroviral, they would form cysts of diseased thinking all over the twins' planet.

"We do what we want to anyone- that is still true?" Jacobsen continued, not knowing what he had just said would inevitably end in either targeted attrition, outright carnage, or both.

"Oh, decisively. You can do what you want to anyone; the Illuminati decide what power is, after all. And I will sit here and I will do what I want to you," Howard said.

"Understood, Dominator." Click.

Chapter 23

The next day, Luke discovered he could do call-downs of almost anything he wanted, and his first request was an ounce of high-grade sensimilla. The agricultural lord's servant was mildly offended by the puny request and sent him ten full pounds of it. The twins had laughed and chosen to have some of his stash, eating instead of smoking it; Sarah cooked up some Hans & Hans-style flour, butter, and oil, and made marijuana pancakes. Paul told Luke to enjoy it while he could, and Luke swiftly learned the reason why; an amount that got him completely baked off his ass got them mildly buzzed for about fifteen minutes, their systems metabolizing the THC almost as fast as it came in. Luke, like many stoned people before him, started to ramble about conspiracies, which under the circumstances was one of the funniest things any of them had ever seen.

The retrovirus arrived the day after that. A single, tiny box under a parachute, containing a needle roughly the size of the one Paul had accepted. Paul picked it up almost reverently, understanding its transmuting force.

He was sorely tempted to play the grandest, most diabolical of April Fool's jokes: Give his servant the retrovirus, and then say that it wasn't the retrovirus at all, and that he better get used to being a good little boy because he'd start deteriorating in, oh, five minutes... no. It was just another of those mastermind flashes, ideas not acted upon, and for good reason. No gain, no point, not even funny, firmly in just-fucking-don't territory. He asked his brain for a mastermind flash to solve the larger crisis, and didn't get it.

Instead, he did give him the retrovirus in a quick, casual injection belying its importance, and Luke laughed in an attempt to imitate one of the twins' good days. It didn't work, but they recorded the attempt and gave him advice. No, no, no, this is the Illuminati, you have to start from lower in the diaphragm and not care who hears you...

Luke ate three bowls of cereal and went to bed early- more accurately, he decided to lie down for a while with his clothes on and simply passed out- and had much better dreams than he did before, for eighteen straight hours. There was no drug in the injection; the newer retrovirus itself placed demands on the body for sleep.

He woke up with emotions flooding him, good and bad. "I fucking win.. hahaha, I fucking.. oh fuck, HURTS!" Agony. Pure fucking agony. His head, his fucking head, his face, the rest of his body, his stomach, his guts, his dick.. oh god, his dick and his balls, don't touch them or it hurts even worse.. his arms, legs, everything... he smelled something, what was it? Get out of the room- no, gotta take a shit first (and a deep yellow piss), and it flows like water and smells like.. (Luke made himself not remember what it smells like.) Then go look, oh they're all eating breakfast together like the perfect picture of some shitcom happy family, how fucking nice, they left me a spot, I'll fucking take that, and one of these big bowls, pour it on the plate, they want me to do that, fuck them but fine, now I'll start shoveling food in my mouth even faster than they are...

Paul's original feeding frenzy was outdone, to the point where Luke was having trouble finding time to breathe, brief gasps of hyperventilation before diving back in. ('Rebuild me, you fucking food, take this damn retro-disease and make me what I should be instead of this fucking tortured thing my mom shat out.')

And then he abruptly stopped, forcing down a final swallow, sitting there as if he were frozen in time.

"Have you satiated yourself, good servant?" Paul asked in a debonair voice, prompting chuckles.

"No! I'm still fucking hungry! I just can't eat any more!" The twins laughed gently; Paul had been the same way. Luke could tell from their tone of laughter ('when did I start being able to do that?') that they were laughing with both mirth and understanding.

"Well then just wait until you can scarf more down," Paul advised. "I didn't have it nearly this bad. I'm wondering.. you're still growing, aren't you? The retrovirus uses your original DNA. It'll add a bit of height and a lot of strength, but your retrovirus won't do any more than that.. Luke, were you underfed as a child?"

"Are you saying my growth is.." He looked for the word and, to his surprise, found it. "stunted?" Luke was comparatively brawny to other people his age.

"Was stunted. And yes. When you're 17 or 18 you'll probably be bigger than me." 

"That's awesome," Luke said, clapping his hands together in satisfaction. There was a sharp snap, like a rubber band breaking. His palms stung slightly, with a strange tingly feeling. Luke threw apart his hands in surprise. "Woah!"

"Better get used to it, Zappy," Sarah said, smirking. He'd have to. His electric powers would always have that sort of sensation, even moreso when they fully formed. Luke considered pain an extremely small price to pay for his abilities. He'd make his targets hurt one hell of a lot worse.

"Zappy, don't call me that shit. Seriously, you have no idea how much it pisses me off now." The rest of the engineereds smiled at his volcanic temper. They'd get bored of this eventually, but for now, he was fun to play with.

"Luke, I'm not going to go back to calling you.," Paul said, intentionally not finishing the last word.

"Shut the FUCK up," Luke finished Paul's sentence with. The other engineereds smiled at him again.

"Nah, I've got a name for you," Howard said, as if Luke were a pet. Another small price to pay, really. "Loki!"

William chuckled. "That's great, but I think he's more of a Thor than a Loki." Howard chuckled in response. Luke looked baffled.

"Low-key? Thor? What are you talking about?" The other engineereds chuckled some more at his ignorance. "Dammit! Stop laughing at me! It's not my fucking fault I was stupid and never learned this shit!" It wasn't, Paul realized, his fucking fault at all. He was beginning to suspect that Luke had very slight Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. It would be interesting to see if his face changed when the retrovirus started reforming his skeleton.

"Norse mythology," Sarah informed him. "Loki, the trickster god; Thor, god of thunder. I think it'd be up your alley." Sarah's mental alarm went off and she pushed away from the table and stood up. "Now, gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I have business to conduct." The twins gave a silent wave. Out of respect for her abilities, none of the engineereds told her to take care, or to have good luck, or anything else.

"I need a girlfriend like that," Luke said after she left. The twins and Paul laughed uproariously in response. Bringer of electricity, bringer of hatred.. bringer of comedy! "What? What's so funny?!"

"Wouldn't that be nice? To have a girl who will kill for you, and have sex with you?" Howard asked.

"But not at the same time," Paul noted. "Although they could probably do that if they really wanted to." It was Luke's turn to laugh.

"It's so easy to forget what it's like to be normal," William said. "You've probably been asking yourself why we don't have our own harem, or even more toys or paraphernalia of awesomeness, or our own.. whatever. Our own whatever."

"Well, yeah, now that you've said it." The fact that they could know his thoughts before he did was unsettling.

"What would be the point?" William responded. "We can have anything we want, just by asking for it. With that said, where's the challenge in doing so? Where's the fun? In seconds we could have more electronic games than we could possibly play, in hours we could have more objects than we would ever possibly use, and in a couple of weeks we could have damn near anything we want custom made. With that said, why do it unless it's going to be superbly unique and useful?"

"This is something you and any other servant that comes in here need to learn. People and tools" From the way Howard said it, it was clear that they were one and the same. "are useful, and are often required for us to do what we do. On that level we need them. On another level, we don't. We aren't just holders of power, Luke."

"We are power." This last was said simultaneously. From anyone else it would be ridiculous melodrama, especially with the echoed voices. From these two... they were, in fact, power itself.

Luke's response to that was to turn to Paul with a wry look. "Is that why you brought me here? Someone for your all-controlling asshole friends to gloat over, because I'm superbly unique and useful now. Is that it?" He was a breath from calling his master a fucking faggot, but Paul didn't deserve that particular insult.

"Hey, you said you wanted to be my friend." More extended chortling from the twins. Oh, this poor bastard had no idea what he was getting into, did he? And Paul was acting far, far too much like an eleven-year-old Howard. The twins remembered the friendship bit well and looked at each other, gesturing. (Fuck, Billy, I did this same shit to you.) (It's all right, Howie, I was halfway acting like this guy too.)

"Oh, come on, man!" Luke clapped his hands together again and felt nothing. Then he exercised some.. muscle?.. he didn't really recognize, and did it again, feeling another sharp jolt. "This.. I'm gonna master this. And I'm going to kick so many people's asses with it." He looked up at the table. For close to the first time in his life, he stopped himself from saying something offensive on his own, not because he was threatened, but because he had a vague idea how the conversation would go. Directing hatred at his overlords would do him no good; they ate it right up, much as he was gobbling down chicken (the conversation had allowed a few more bites' worth of stomach capacity). He knew right from the first that they welcomed it, and he understood what they wanted, and it was what he actually wanted as well. It was time to stop fucking around, and start really kicking some ass. He'd just kick more ass than they bargained for. Of that, he was certain.

The rest of them saw his change of expression and knew that Paul had him.

His next week was spent largely in training with the island's servant leader, deep in the bowels of the servants' underground complex; backstage was a place he fundamentally belonged. Combat, anatomy, stealth, the beginnings of logistics, correct handling of delicate situations, stuff to shatter normal assumptions. The servant leader trained him with the other servants, with some special lessons aside to train his retroviral reflexes. Almost all of the others were eerily silent. Luke only spoke up for questions and a handful of sardonic comments; the others never spoke up at all. His mere presence was something of a mild distraction. He wasn't disruptive- merely mistrusting and subtly, irredeemably arrogant.

"Where do you find them all?" Luke asked the servant leader once, without preamble.

And inquisitive. But that was a quality to serve his master well.

"Here and there," was the reply. "Suburbia, prisons, cheap apartments, sometimes veterans' hospitals, more than once a literal gutter. Miscellany."

Luke's jaw dropped an inch and his eyes opened wide. These servants were devoted almost cult-fashion, the only difference being that they were told outright that they were being indoctrinated. The skills, the rigor, the fundamental superiority to any normal special-operations force... "But they're the cream of the crop. This has got to be harder then Army Ranger kind of training."

"No, it's not," the leader said, shaking his head. "Our requirements are different; we don't make the same physical demands and we don't waste time. Some of them have already been through that kind of training; some have flunked out." Luke's eyebrows raised. "We can't take the 'cream of the crop' as you put it, the ones who passed with high marks and flying colors, the so-called successes in life. The vast majority of those people are loyal to the normal world, could never accept service to us. We look for the disaffected, the jaded, the uncaring. The ones with nowhere to go and no way to get there, the ones whose families have left them, the ones who just don't care about anything anymore. We tell them the truth: that the competition they thought they were in is rigged garbage. And then we make them better than the people they envied. We alter their bodies and sometimes we alter their minds. Both to what are now considered limited extents."

"Alter their minds, just like that?" He obviously didn't mean implants, and there wasn't any of that control-collar bullshit here..

"Oh yes. They ask for it. I'm occasionally requested to tie up the loose memories in their heads or some such thing- a request I cannot grant." He looked towards the door as he said this, and Luke very faintly heard someone move away from it, and almost asked how he knew before remembering that this guy wasn't a spy teacher for nothing. "Usually it's straightforward psychological techniques, sometimes chemicals, once in a great while we use a light touch of the scalpel and some stem cells- with their full consent. It's simple to brainwash someone who's begging you to do it."

It made immediate, total sense. "Because they want out and you've given them a place to be. They're escaping to being servants." Their accommodations here were compact but well-made, like a comfortable Japanese apartment. They were expected to give absolute loyalty and receive absolute trust. They were outside society, and fundamentally above it. All they had to do was someone else's bidding, and that someone else had no reason to tell them any lies about who he was or what he was doing. In many ways they were set for life. Becoming an Illuminated servant was a fulfilling, life-affirming way of telling the world to go fuck itself.

"Just as you have. Is there anything else?"

"No, I'm.. I'm done." He had no intention of questioning the servant leader ever again.

He did, however, have time to spend with his master. Their conversations were long and rambling, with an unusual amount of awkward silence for engineereds. Paul could command men, engage in powerful debate, direct operations, manipulate normals, and kick ass. However, he never had a personal servant of his own and, frankly, it felt kind of weird. Although Luke wasn't implanted, Paul made a point of avoiding direct orders unless he meant it, and fuck if it wasn't awkward.

'I have him, but now what do I do with him?' Paul thought on more than one occasion, just as he had when he took over a country. There was a trick to all this; what was it? How had Howard made his servants an extension of himself? Well, Paul pondered, Sarah was inculcated from birth, and there was the strong sexual element; Billy had known Paul for years and rescued him from Damien; in less than two years they had all become very emotionally bonded, and unimplantation had sealed it. But he didn't want that kind of emotional bond with this servant. Not with his carefully honed hatred.

And, Paul figured, that was okay. He commanded other not-nice people too. Sociopaths are at their best when encouraged to do things unsocial in nature, and socializing with them was a tautological impossibility. So what the hell was he worried about?

The phrase popped into his head, but he wasn't quite sure how it applied:

'There are two sides to every base concept. A true Illuminatus is a master of both.'

He started to think on the implications of that, and did not like it. 

Luke was thinking of other things. Midway through the week he decided to go down the elevator and found the twins in the underground pool, laughing and relaxing and generally being carefree. Intense pangs of envy hit him like a blow to the gut. 'But they can be like that, ruling the world.' Luke's carefree had been doubly, maybe triply annihilated. Everything in his life- no exceptions- had conspired to positively ensure that he'd never have it again.

William took one look at him about to take off his clothes and get in. "No," he had said simply, chuckling.

"Why not?" he asked, knowing very well what they were worried about. Purified water was a bad conductor, sure, but get the tiniest bit of salts in it...

"For the same reason the Japanese Emperor doesn't eat fugu!" Howard replied, pointing out. The twins already had an intimate relationship with Death; they didn't need to flirt any further. Luke got into a crouching position as if he was going to dunk his hands into the water and cut loose; they grinned at him. He left their presence and returned to bathe after they had gone, daring once to unload with medium force into the water; it caused an intense muscular spasm which, fortunately, sealed his conduits. God damn. Of course his whole body wasn't insulated. He probably could kill himself simply by putting his hands to his temples and unloading.

Having an instant, built-in suicide method was comforting, somehow.

Or a homicide method...

An inner voice was telling him it was pointless, but another one couldn't let this one go. He didn't quite get the dynamic but knew he'd get chewed out or killed (there was a thin line between the two, here) for it, but he didn't care. If he died, he died. This had to be done. The things he had learned over the past week (and what he'd gleaned watching the twins at their work) were more than enough.

Chapter 24

It once had a formal name, an acronym with a number, but effectiveness and popularity had caused it to become known as the Deathmobile, shortened by field operatives to the D-Mo.

There is a secrecy scale in Illuminati manufacturing, one that ranges from 'perfectly normal' to 'can be passed off as secret normal-government stuff' to 'never, ever, let a normal inspect this'. Like most of the truly astounding innovations, the Deathmobile's latest iteration was at the far end of the scale, well past the point of no return. It appeared as a normal car, of various models; the framework had a remarkable ability to shift, and the outer skin was flexible and could change color in seconds, with even the license plate being mutable via an array of tiny rods under a thin, stretchy shell. The engine was pure fusion, with a carefully orchestrated rumble and sound system for secrecy; most of the associated equipment was in the belly of the car, leaving space in both the front and back. The back trunk was intended as a weapons cache and storage space. The front trunk was simply a miniature cremator, hot enough to melt iron. The windows had the standardized false-image routines developed a decade ago; the tires were made of a special polyurethane that would never, ever leave marks (the tire would come apart before that happened), and the transmission worked with a magnetic system that could take the car from 0 to 150 to 0 in a single second, without the car feeling any ill effects. (The occupants would be another matter.) 

The interior was pure Illuminati; anyone who's ridden in an Illuminated craft before would immediately recognize the inside of the D-Mo. Illuminated servants don't just kill people, they kill people in comfort and style. 

Naturally, using such a thing carries a certain amount of secrecy risk. There were no safety features for preventing murderous acceleration, so drivers had to be specially trained. Under no circumstances could one get into a crash; any sort of real impact would reveal the car's true nature immediately, one way or another. Ordinary police stops were survivable, but unwanted and extremely rare; Enforcers drive at a steady fluctuation between two and four miles over the limit and obey traffic laws with machine precision.

Riding inside this particular D-Mo at 2:30 in the morning, going east on I-40, were one Enforcer and one grinning, electrical 14-year-old.

Getting to this point was far easier than he'd expected; he'd forgotten that servants generally don't ask questions like why. Instead, the professional assassins he talked to portrayed a helpful, friendly attitude. Ah, you're running an assassination? You have it all planned out? What will you need? Okay, we'll have that ready for you immediately. Come on down. We'll pick you up at the private airport, a few miles east of Boone.

Even getting the jet-helicopter was easy. That sort of transportation was the property of an Illuminatus, and he was tempted to use the Duumvirate's jet (because hot damn that thing rules), but decided to borrow one instead. Luke had a completely bullshit explanation prepared, but didn't need it- the man immediately bent over backwards and asked few questions himself. Luke had wondered why the man had been so accommodating to a mere servant, but then realized that he was trying to endear himself to someone who lived in the mansion of the Duumvirate, as he wanted to show loyalty to get the retrovirus. Luke figured he could have told the 45-year-old manipulator of souls to pull his own toenails out, and he would likely have done it, just for the tiniest increase of his chance to be godlike.

Which made a lot of sense to Luke, because he understood the relationship between himself and his master as a simple trade: power in exchange for his humanity. Fine by him; since he never had much humanity to begin with, the Faustian bargain was just that, a bargain. He just had something he needed to clear up.

That and some Wendy's. Naturally, pulling into a drive-in of any kind was a pointless secrecy risk, but Luke knew he'd get chewed out for this no matter what the details were, so he didn't really care and stopped at the first one he saw. It's not like anyone was going to recognize him anyway; he wasn't even sure if his parents would. The Enforcer was a relatively new model and didn't really need to be told how to deal with a drive-through. Twenty chicken nuggets and a large lemonade, paid with a crisp twenty. As irony would have it, the kid working the headset was too immersed in his own highly disturbing fantasies to so much as notice the muscles on the driver, let alone the passenger; suffice it to say that had he really known who he'd just served, he would have run away screaming.

And had Luke known who had served him, he probably would have had to resist the impulse to chuck the food out the window and brutally kill the fucker by dunking his head in the fry oil, but instead he blithely gobbled away. Not for the first time in his life, he felt invincible, as if his desires would not be stopped by anyone. This was, though, the first time that assertion was backed up by powerful technology and tactics. For the next few hours, he really would be basically invincible. Even if Paul realized where Luke was, he wouldn't stop him until the operation was finished. Luke used the car's CD tray as a cupholder, fully aware of the irony. The car's hard drive was usually used to store complicated voice instructions and target data, but Luke had loaded up heavy metal instead. Although he prefered silence for the moment, choosing to close his eyes and let his imagination run wild the rest of the trip, he smiled at the concept of the next assassin to use the headphones getting a double earful of Primal Fear.

As they pulled into the residential neighborhood, the lights became gradually, slightly dimmer, and angled more towards the ground. Few people would have noticed this, and no one would have questioned why. One quick sweep of the streets with an infrared scanner: No one at the windows. The "engine" became quieter. Not too quiet- a silent car attracts attention- but just another car on the road, maybe someone coming home late from a party, maybe someone who works at night. No big deal, and no one was really watching anyway. The car pulled up into the Stephens' driveway, and Luke stepped out.

Seeing his old house, he simply scoffed. He had cared about coming back to this? He pulled out a keylike object from his pocket. The Illuminated lockpick would instantly scan the inside of any lock through subsonics and immediately extend parts of itself to fit the tumblers, opening locks faster than the key they were designed for. The front door opened with a small creak. There was no dog to smell Luke's changed scent, no siblings to worry about. (Being an only child made his decision easy. If he had a brother or two he really didn't know what the hell he would have done.)

All along the trip and even before it, he had imagined how he would confront his parents, imagine all the pithy things he could say to them and all the sardonic comments he could make. All of that was obliterated in a wave of rage when he saw their peacefully sleeping forms. Was that a smile on his mother's face, or was that just his imagination?

Did they even tell his parents he was dead? Did his parents still think he was in the place he never actually went to? Or maybe a dead kid was what they wanted all along. His enhanced intelligence gave him the idea to look for pictures, mementos, memorials. There weren't any. With a queasy, disturbed feeling in his stomach, he went into his old room.

His vague suspicion was confirmed: His entire room was transformed as they expected him to be. Posters gone, stereo gone, desk in place of his assorted collections, wardrobe completely turned into preppie clothes right down to the shoes.

Incredulity hit him a full second before anger. His parents had really thought this way? They honestly believed that they'd send him somewhere to be changed, and he would be? That you could inflict horrors upon a person, and somehow turn him into a happy, content someone else? For a moment he almost laughed- in many ways he had become a happy, content someone else- and got the wild idea that maybe he should just go home and forget it, because his parents were simply too stupid to be worth killing. But then he realized that his parents would accept a brainwashed puppet in lieu of an actual thinking son and a tsunami of hatred overrode everything else.

If he was still a normal he would have gone into a red haze and started attacking blindly, uncaring. Retroviral, he was strangely detached, fury somehow combining with logic to form the details of an overall plan. Even so, it took as much self control as he had ever used in his life not to murder them right there, but he was able to fight down the urge.

After all, he had already decided to torture them first.

Luke jumped on the bed and seized his parents by the throat, their initial screams cut off by Luke's crushing hands. He leaped off the bed, carrying both of them by the windpipe ('they're so goddamn light!'), and walked down the stairs, dragging his father against the railing and his mother against the wall, knocking down a picture as he went. His dad started to fight back, his useless blows strongly reminding Luke of how he had fought the Enforcers in that place, and how he had once struggled against his dad when the old bastard had spanked him. "How does it feel, asswipe?" Luke growled. He pushed out the door with his foot (he wanted to just kick it, but for the noise), and literally tossed his parents into the already-open back door of the D-Mo, slamming it silently shut. That last second was crucial- if someone had come out and seen during that time, there'd be hell to pay- but there was no one. The Enforcer would have reacted if there was. Luke quietly closed the door behind him, opened the passenger side door to a loud series of choking coughs, and got in with a grin, closing the car door with the finality of a coffin.

"Go," he commanded the Enforcer, and the Enforcer went.

"Who.. who is that with you?" his father sputtered out. People act retarded in these situations, don't they?

"That's my driver, shit-for-brains. Go on. See if you can get him to even acknowledge your existence. I dare you." The man was still unable to think clearly and did nothing.

His mother opened her mouth, took a deep breath, and started talking. "Co-"

Was Luke fast enough to stop her from even starting the second syllable? Of course he was. Instantly his hand whipped back in what, to him, was a casual backhanded pimp-slap; she spat out three teeth with a mouthful of blood, half-screaming, half-moaning, as Luke pondered how nice it was that he wouldn't have to clean the seats. That was apparently his father's cue to frantically try to open the back door, scream against the soundproof walls, and generally act like an idiot. Luke waited until he inevitably tried to make a dash between the two seats, and casually pushed him back with one hand, barely even looking, intentionally being nonchalant. He kept this up for a while before his father got the idea to grab the arm; Luke simply smiled as the man attempted to twist his arm and wrist, and then grabbed his father's left arm with that hand, reached around, and touched a single finger to his father's bicep. His father's arm instantly seized up, the muscle contraction almost breaking Luke's iron grip. Luke withdrew his hands and started slowly chuckling.

"Luke.. how can you..," he started.

"How can I? How can I, you fucking retard? How can you be so goddamn stupid as to think you can pay some cocksucker to wave his fucking dick like a wand, and you'll get a new kid back because this is obviously fucking Best Buy and you've got a warranty? Well guess what, bitch, you better call fucking Consumer Reports because you've just been had, like the miserable piece of shit bitch nigger you are." His father was white, and getting paler by the minute, realizing that this was indeed his son, not understanding how any of this was possible or what he had gotten himself into. Why, oh why, did he listen to that ed-con? "Guess what, Dad? I'm going to kill you. Not because you need to die for some greater good, not because someone's ordered me to kill you, but because I want to. You're going to die just because I feel like it. I guess you're just going to have to be sad, aren't you." That last phrase was originally his father's. "It's going to start just as soon as we get there. Oh look! Here we are." Luke had discovered this empty field when he was much younger, and was pleased to know that nothing had changed. He wasn't sure who the owner was; he wasn't sure if it even had an owner. It was simply emptiness in noplace, hidden from view by trees, and with no fresh tracks save the very ordinary-looking ones of the D-Mo.

Luke got out of the car and smiled; it was dark, but the moon was mostly full on a clear night, the cool wind of early April blowing into his face. He inhaled deeply, enjoying the night air and the glitter of the stars, before opening the door behind him. "Get out of the car, asswipes." They didn't move. "I said, get the fuck out of the car. Or am I going to have to ground you?" That word took on a whole new meaning with Luke, and he grinned at his own wordplay.

His father began slowly crawling over the seats to get out; his mother screamed for him not to, crying, trying to hold her husband back. Luke got sick of the charade and simply reached in and yanked them out the door to land in the dirt. His mother crawled against the side of the car, whimpering; his father started to slowly stand up and say something, but Luke started talking.

"I bet you want respect, don't you? You've always told me that because you're my father, you deserve respect. Well, guess what?" he asked rhetorically, tossing his dad face-first into the dirt yet again.

"THIS! IS! ALL! THE! RESPECT! YOU! DESERVE!" he screamed, punching his father in the back on every word with alternating hands and charging up before every punch. An interesting bit of electrical oscillation happened; although there wasn't much current flow because there was no direct connection, the man's sweat and skin received a voltage change, and that made Luke's hammer blows hurt even more. Luke noticed that the lemonade reached his bladder; he smiled, unzipped, and drenched his father with warm urine. His mother started making s-s-s noises like she was going to say something; he glared at her and she immediately shut up.

"Get up. Get up, you stupid fuckhead, I didn't kill you yet." Luke grabbed his father by the back of his sweaty, piss-covered wife-beater, lifted him up into a standing position, then kicked his legs out from under him and slammed him on his ass. "You're going to watch some reality TV. It's kind of like Survivor, only you don't." He walked up to his mother, who was still in a state of panic, unmoving, her lips quivering in something like prayer. "Hi, Mom," he said, and smiled at her for a second before he started punching her in the face.

The oscillation was even greater this time around; the copious blood was highly conductive, the surface area was less, and Luke was charging and punching faster. "Huh, bitch, you like this? You want some more, you stupid cunt? Where's 'You can't go out now, it's too late!' Or 'You need to look your best for church, sweetie'? Or how about 'I'm only doing what's best'?" Luke's imitation of his mother's voice was a sardonic mockery indeed. "Where's that now? I'm not hearing that anymore. Why don't you? Go on, dumb cunt. Tell me I need better penmanship. Tell me I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd. Tell me I'll be dead or in jail. Go on. I want to hear it." He waited until his mother started saying something, unintelligible to be sure through the missing teeth and blood, before he slammed her with a right cross to her lower jaw full force. This was the first time he had used his full rage-inspired strength against anyone before, and he simply wanted to see what would happen.

The results were splendid. His mother's jawbone flew off her skull like a wiffle ball being hit off a stand, with a heartening THWOK! She put her hands tentatively up to her face, tears streaming down her eyes, which were wide open with sheer disbelief. The electrical beating had deadened her nerves, pain no longer able to tell her she was dying. "'Aww, look at me!'", Luke mocked, putting his blood-soaked hands to his face in a McCauley Caulkin impression. "'I don't have a face anymore! Poor, poor me!' Hey, let's have a pity party for the stupid cunt! She just lost her ability to suck dicks! One, two, three, AWWWW!" He could dimly recall her having said similar, albeit less vulgar, things to him when he got hurt.

"Hey, you still watching reality TV over there, dickhead?" he turned and said. His father was not. The man was forty feet away, staggering and holding his left side, adrenalin and terror allowing him to move at all. "Trying to save your own ass? I guess you didn't love her that much anyway. Surprise, surprise." Luke reached him in seconds, grabbed him from behind with one of his hands doing a red flag touch, and simply tossed him behind his head, not even caring where he landed.

As luck would have it, he landed on his face, breaking his nose and rolling to a stop facing his wife, who was choking on herself, trying to reach into her mouth when she didn't have a mouth anymore. Luke wished he had chucked his father all the way, and with another mighty heave, threw him face-first into the car. Then he looked at his mother and pondered how he wanted to finish her; what he really wanted to do was shove something conductive up her cunt and something else up her ass, and fry her guts. He then realized how nice a pair of heavy, super-tough, conductive baseball bats would be to have, and made a mental note to have some made. Shrugging, he simply put one hand to each of her bloody temples and gave her some electroshock therapy not even Nurse Ratchet would approve of. In normal ECT, the voltage is about 450 and the amps are a bit less than 1, alternating current. Luke gave her a thousand volts and the amps were 3, direct current. Her brain seized up like an engine full of sand and she slumped over dead.

He grabbed his father by the testicles again, liberally touching his junk Miller Newton-style, and slammed his other hand atop his father's skull, his full power ready to go again. "Any last words, Dad?"

The man croaked through a blood-soaked mouth, "You're not my son."

"Not anymore." And with those words came his father's realization that he had been right all along, that this really was him, that the angry boy he had sent away less than two weeks ago had returned to him a monster-

And that thought was obliterated by the amperes flooding his brain to travel down his spine, releasing its chemicals in one fatal flash of insight.

The Enforcer understood that both targets had been killed, and got out of the car to unseal and sprinkle a small canister of bacteria where there was blood; the germs would eat away the hemoglobin and assorted small pieces of flesh inside of two hours, and disintegrate into untraceable nothing afterwards, the only clue that they had ever been there a slightly richer topsoil. Luke tossed the bodies into the front trunk and slammed the lid closed right after the Enforcer tossed the missing jawbone in, the powerful incinerator swiftly reducing them to fine ash within moments, to be gradually flushed out the exhaust pipe. He had been expecting to feel some twinge of remorse, but instead he felt a warm, content glow inside himself, an emotion he hadn't experienced in quite some time:

Satisfaction!

The first thing Luke did upon getting back in the D-Mo was plug in his headphones and turn on his selection of metal (Lightning Strikes Twice by Iron Maiden was first on his playlist); the second was to drink a mixture of half-melted ice, half-lemonade until the straw sssshhhppp'd against the paper cup which he tossed in the back; the third was to lean the seat back all the way; and the fourth was to fall into a peaceful, gentle sleep, the smile never leaving his face the whole way home.

He wasn't the only one going on a raid that night.

Chapter 25

Sarah had brought everything except people.

This was her business, and hers alone. This was a personal mission for her own and the Duumvirate's goals, with nothing to do with her holdings, and she wouldn't feel comfortable bringing any of her many retroviral sentients to this raid. She also strongly suspected that there was a good chance her target might have been like the guy Paul raided, in which case she wanted as few people to see it in operation as possible, simply because it could not be unseen. She'd summon the cleanup crew out of pure necessity, but no more than that.

However, she had no intention of pointless self-sacrifice. Along for the ride were an Enforcer pilot, a half dozen mimic robots, and another five mimic Enforcers, all of which looked exactly like her, all of which had explosives strapped to them, and all of which she fully expected to lose as her minesweepers. Combined, all her gear weighed a whole forty pounds, about a sixth of that ammunition, another fifth explosives, ten pounds being the fusion laser/shotgun combo and five pounds being the flexible mirror plate she wore around her clothing. A counterintuitive choice, the armor was the result of discovering that reflections could do some very weird things to some targeting systems, as well as adding some protection from lasers and giving precious moments of confusion to organic foes. The rest was extremely specialized spy equipment, some barely out of the prototype stage, her favorite being a long-wave radar echolocator that could detect holes in walls. It wasn't perfect- it could never be- but it was very nice to have along. 

The real problem was that the person performing many of the useful technical advancements was Gritzl himself. She scowled. The man was a genuine scientific genius. What's more, Gritzl was highly entrenched and had been for years; he seldom admitted visitors to his complex, never left it except for absolutely essential functions, and surely took the time to design it like the lair of a typical evil mastermind, continuing the Illuminated tradition of being the real-world, far deadlier counterparts of movie villains. And this place, situated in the far freezing North on some godforsaken and bitterly fucking cold island, was known to no normal organization, save a few miscellaneous tidbits warning pilots to stay away for some bullshit reason or other. Odds were the place was jam-packed with every kind of sensor she'd heard of, and possibly some she hadn't.

Which is why she didn't bother with conventional stealth. She had considered tunneling and striking from below, but he would probably detect that, too, and it was much easier to hurt people with a linear escape route. The only real way in that didn't reduce the place to slag was to kill everything outside, blast a hole in the wall, and let explosives and engineered reflexes do the work.

In a way, she was glad for it. Nuking the six targets from a mile away with sustained laser fire was much better than trying to play sniper tag. Other than that, it was two AM and fifty below, and having to lug around cold weather gear in addition to the rest of it was dangerously silly.

The blaze of four guard towers (and two immolated Enforcers at the building's entrance and gate) greeted her vision. She almost expected some kind of mirrored anti-air to pop up out of the ground once she slowed down; it didn't happen. She raked the ground and parts of the ceiling anyway, and as the doors opened to let the first wave of decoys rappel out, she listened to the merry, pop-bang-bang-pow sound of ammo cooking off, like a wet log thrown on the roaring fireplace of the rocket engines. Mmm. She'd have to have some buttered popcorn after she finished here.

She used a tiny fraction of the available power to blast a hole in the wall, slowly melting away metal, which glowed and dripped. A few trees some hundred yards away caught fire, whether as the result of flaming debris or simple reflection she couldn't tell. Her squad entwined itself with the ropes, prepared for the next phase of the plan:

The part in which she accelerated to the roof of the building, and dropped them off to use more conventional shaped charges to blast their way through the ceiling. As an entrance method the microwaves were useless here. Her squad could never actually enter the burning hole for hours; the molten metal at the spot was more than 3000 degrees Celsius. People on the wrong side of raids, however, would almost certainly not think of that, which made it an excellent feint.

There were two more feints. The six robots would go in first, followed shortly by one of the Enforcer impersonators. Assuming that he had something capable of telling the difference, the only biological target would be assumed to be her. Then, after a short time (depending entirely on the telemetry from the duplicates), she would herself go along with the four remaining impersonators. This also took advantage of misguided thinking: "She sent six robots and one Enforcer, now five more come, she probably got six of both, so she's still in the jet!" There was no logical reason to believe that from the target's point of view, but in blitzkrieg raids, targets didn't think logically unless they had the benefit of long practice, computerized tactics, or engineered DNA.

She blasted more holes as her squad entered, being conservative, using her screen to watch them gun down Enforcers ('Where did he even get that many?') with wide-area weapons and two robots get gunned down themselves. They had orders to spread out, the concept of a fire-team useless in such conditions, leaving miniature motion sensors as they explored. One robot followed a hall, its echolocation failed to find the trap and it was caught in a net, covered in some sticky substance. Sarah herself could have sidestepped it easily. Another robot was trapped in hooks of crisscrossing tape wrapped around it. 'What the fuck? Why the fuck would anybody use...' Her muscles tensed: 'He obviously doesn't know what I am, and he made this place for me.' This was replaced by a slow upwelling of mirth, followed by a deep chuckle. That arrogant, stupid son of a bitch. So he went all-out, did he? He went all-out with his idea of defensive operations, his insanity embedded in the architecture, and Sarah was going all-out with the offensive concepts the organization had provided and she had tweaked. And she knew what happened when those concepts met.

A sudden blankness hit the Enforcer's feed: Telemetry lost, with no clue what happened. There could be any damn thing down there. 'Fuck it.' Time to party, everybody in. Sarah swapped seats with her pilot, fixed the gas half-mask around her nose and mouth, and went in second, her first new infiltrator diving into the hole unopposed.

She took a quarter of a second to listen. Somewhere, something was on fire. There was the hum of heavy machinery, buried somewhere deep. There was no audible alarm; the concept was outdated. The half-mask made it impossible to smell anything, but she knew what was in the air: blood, smoke, and probably terror. It felt like home.

The room they had dropped into was a laboratory of sorts, unidentifiable bioelectric projects neatly arranged on tables, the door blown off its hinges. Her Enforcers rushed out immediately, Sarah close behind. Enemy Enforcers reacted to this new threat, approaching from an explored hallway, but the breadcrumb motion sensors alerted Sarah to point the Micro around a corner and incinerate them in one wide-beam blast. She rushed down the nearest unexplored hallway, seeing some downward stairs that none of her support had gone down yet, but she figured that was entirely a trap; her lead Enforcer rushed down a promising hallway instead, seeing nothing on echolocation, and suddenly there was a great amount of glue spraying from the ceiling, sealing it to the floor, coating its nose and mouth and choking it to death as it struggled against the heavy, viscous fluid. 'You've got to be fucking kidding.' Definitely something down that way, then. She considered bringing another Enforcer to lead but decided she needed the distractions more than she needed peace of mind. 'Next time, more!' she reminded herself. 'Always. Bring. More!' There was nothing that she did today that couldn't have been done with three dozen Enforcers instead of just six and some robots. She had resources now. She needed to think less like an assassin and more like a general.

But there was no time for remonstrations now. She took another look at the stairs, an office building-like construct going down to multiple doors at each floor. Clearly a trap. Not because of the way the fluorescent lighting subtly invited her to go down them, not because they looked somehow used and yet not, but rather because this was still a facility designed for daily use. There was no way in hell he would want to climb up and down two flights of stairs to reach what he wanted on a daily basis.

She gingerly held the EMP in her hand, setting its yield and its timer. She had to be careful with these. She carried plenty of electrically-detonated C4, it could erase computer data, and because Gritzl was using the control collars, an EMP would instantly kill someone she could have interrogated. She looked at the stairs again. Yup, definitely a trap, and if she was wrong, oh well. She tossed the EMP down the stairs to set it off and confuse the defenses, pulled out the fusion shotgun to fire two armor-piercing slugs at the far end of the hallway, one for floor, one for ceiling, and one in each of the sides, and rushed towards the glue.

This was the first time that she'd ever had to wall-jump while on a raid, and despite the danger she savored the experience. Her shoes were designed not just for stealth but for friction, able to get a grip even on slick metal, her gloves just the same. Her powerful legs and arms propelled her from side to side of the ten-foot-wide hallway, tremendous leaps keeping her well clear of the treacherous floor. She landed on the far end when the EMP went off, and nodded in satisfaction when she heard the tremendous crash of the entire stairwell collapsing.

She thought she heard human voices, and stealthily ran next to the side wall, using a small paint-gun-like tool to weld a few hallway doors shut in rapid succession. No sense in risking ambush. 

She flicked a mirrored hand and saw some of what she was looking for. Down the right hallway was a large, pink room, the doors wide open, a number of girls inside, guns in their hands and wide, frilly dresses on their bodies, the subjects of Gritzl's perversions. Just from the sounds of their breathing Sarah could tell that none of them had any idea how to use their weapons. She took a good look with her echolocator- yup, this hallway was trapped as well, irregularities all over the place. She fired the fusion shotgun through the walls, destroying and setting off traps, sending spikes flying into the hall, and sending a few more fusion slugs into the floor and ceiling, just to be sure. She only had a dozen left. She reminded herself to bring more of those, too. She rushed into the room, worried that perhaps something in the back would shoot right through the girls to get to her and taking the calculated risk.

While Sarah's first few bullets blew through the things that were actually meant to kill her- the auto-turrets mounted in the ceiling- another girl was waging her own, private battle.

Gritzl had been big on 'decisions'. "It was your decisions that put you here," he had told her more than once. "What you make of your experience here is also your decision." It was bullshit, she knew it was bullshit, but that was what he kept telling her over and over, controlling her emotions the whole two weeks she was here, patiently waiting for her to 'decide' to have sex with him as the rest of the girls had. Now with an invader there to kill or rescue them (she didn't see much of a difference anymore), there was a real decision to be made, and she made it at once.

So it was to Sarah's utter surprise when one of the collared, presumably brainwashed girls shot another girl in the back of the head with a glazed look in her eyes.

Sarah was still in motion, her mirrored suit playing tricks on the girls' eyes. Her guns spoke faster than any human can talk, semiautomatic pistols firing faster than some machineguns. She chose not to kill. Her armor-piercing bullets went for collars, guns, wrists, security cameras, other electronic equipment. None of the girls fired at her- they didn't even know where to aim. The ceiling of the room was higher than the hall she'd come from, a number of auto-turrets directly above her as she entered, but those were far slower than she was and she continued to disable them almost instantly. And then suddenly Sarah was right there, fingernails slicing nine-tenths of the collar away from the shooter, who didn't flinch.

"What's your name?" Sarah asked her, voice unmuffled by the advanced mask.

"Ruby." One of the other girls was on the ground and screaming, a thin high-pitched whine as a result of her shattered wrist, and Ruby shut her up with a kick to the throat. The rest of the girls, those who weren't already, broke out into sobbing and crying.

"Ruby who?" Sarah cared far more about the way Ruby would answer than the actual name, and talked as she reloaded and looked at the echolocator again. There didn't seem to be anything else in the local area. One of her robots reported being hit by Enforcers and she simply blew it up. The explosion was audible from where they stood.

"What's your last name?" Ruby asked in response. Sarah wasn't expecting that.

"Dominus now, but my maiden name is Mortis," she answered simply, waiting. "Which way is he?" The Enforcers were coming closer, running at a dead sprint. 

"Then I'm Ruby Mortis." Sarah wasn't expecting it to be that easy, and wondered how much Ruby truly understood.

"No, you're not supposed to tell.," groaned one of the sobbing girls. Ruby answered by aiming her gun at the girl; Sarah moved her hand away so Ruby stomped the girl's face instead. 'She's already mine,' Sarah thought instantly, and started getting suspicious; something was very wrong here. Was Peter up to this level of subterfuge? It was technically possible, but he'd have to guess that she was coming and what she'd do and where she'd go... What it felt like was that there was something else at work here, something outside her normal range of experience. The irony did not escape Sarah: A raid on a demented, high-tech psychopath, and the girl acting the most like her is the one who finally manages to creep the queen of death out.

"Down that hall, and to the left. Not either of the doors! It's the wall right between them. This whole place is screwed up like that," Ruby informed her, interrupted by an explosion from the hallway, one of the welded-shut doors bursting open. Sarah nodded, her echolocator agreeing, and rolled a steel ball with the number 1 on it down the hall she came from. "Once you get in there it's just straight, past the beds and the.. stuff. It's an elevator down," she continued in a rush. Ruby was surprised when the ball didn't seem to do anything as it continued rolling, bouncing off the wall and going out of sight, and Sarah just stood there for half a second.

Then the Enforcers reached the corner, and Sarah pressed a couple of buttons on her PDA. The ball exploded with a violence unexpected for its small size. The Enforcers were shredded, blood and body parts flying every which way. Some small pieces of shrapnel were not absorbed by the meat and ricocheted towards the girls; one went through Ruby's dress near her thigh, and another would have gone into her chest if Sarah didn't block it with a fingernail. That hurt like hell, but Sarah didn't show it.

And then she was gone, leaving Ruby standing there among a loose collection of crying girls. If they had been looking closely enough, they would have found the contempt on her face unmistakable. She almost killed them all right there before she figured that Sarah had left them alive for a reason. Instead, she just stood there, heedless of everything.

Sarah did not step into the elevator; that would have been incredibly stupid. Instead she C4'd the wall above the elevator door, blasted out the cables with a few HEAT rounds, and waited until she heard the crash. Then she put another fusion-propelled slug into the elevator-shaft ceiling (and out the facility, through the air, halfway to orbit) to check for another sort of deathtrap, fired another quad of fusion slugs into the walls, strapped on some forcible-suction pads, and scuttled carefully down the wall like a gecko.

She used a mirrored hand to take a look around the corner, then shot two already-wounded Enforcers. Already wounded? What had...

It is bad form to laugh in the middle of a mission, particularly one this dangerous, particularly when the deviousness and resources of the target mean that anything could be a trap. She cackled anyway, to the point where Ruby above thought she had been hit by laughing gas or something.

This room was apparently Gritzl's evil-genius control room. Among its various screens and specialized controls (some of which Sarah felt were just there to clutter the place- he could have done this from one screen really), it featured four torture-chairs, the fifth having been replaced by what had been a restraining shell. The occupant had been one of her Enforcers. The shell that Gritzl had placed around it immediately after capture had Faraday-caged out all transmissions. And then Gritzl had somehow let it know he was there, maybe he opened part of it or something to gloat over his captive...

And then the Enforcer had thought 'Primary target, unable to capture alive' and detonated the ten pounds of C4-variant it had on a twitch-toe trigger. The shell had the effect of a thick-walled pipe bomb. Chunks of meat and blasted steel were embedded in the walls, floor, and ceiling. Sarah had to take a good look at Gritzl's feet- half a shoe still on one of them- to ascertain that yes, in fact, this was the carcass of a man with normal genetics. No wonder there hadn't been much more than an automatic response. She took another second and a half just to gape at the idiocy- Gritzl, you fucking retard, what did you think this was, kids' TV? Then she shook her head and wall-jumped her way back up.

She looked at the mass of girls and decided to bring just the one, strange, girl with her and leave the rest for the cleanup crew; she'd parked them fifteen minutes away and summoned them with a few button clicks. She gestured and Ruby followed, a couple of other girls almost following but not quite having the guts.

Ruby stumbled a few times. "This dress-" Was instantly torn off in one bladed-fingernail swipe, with underthings ('He really was a sick fuck') ripped to shreds. Ruby kicked off the shoes and left it behind. "Never again," she said very faintly.

"How did you know I'd take you?" Sarah asked as she helped her come back the way she had originally entered, incinerating the glue with a steady low-power microwave beam, making sure none of the traps reset. Not a chance. All of them were of the explosive-bolts and chemical-ignition variety.

"Because that's what the other guy did." 'The other guy'? She must mean Paul.

"How did you find out about that?"

"Peter couldn't stop whining about it. He was all going like 'Oh, the Dominator's really overstepped his bounds this time' and 'he had no right to do that'.. bunch of bullshit." Ruby overdramatized Gritzl's voice quite a bit. Stupid of him to mention it. Stupid of him to give her hope. "I hope you made him suffer." The jet was still in the same position Sarah had left it, the Enforcer pilot not moving an inch. Sarah grabbed Ruby with one arm and grabbed the rope with the other, yanking once to get it to retract.

"No such luck. He was dead before I got there. Did he say anything else about the Dominator, or the Duumvirate?" Sarah answered after they were inside. "Return," she told the Enforcer, and enjoyed the quick 180 degree turnaround and subsequent blast-off. Mission complete, time for debriefing. She considered sticking around to support the cleanup crew, but they were retrovirals now; with a lot of warning, the defenses eviscerated, and the owner dead, they shouldn't need her help.

"N.. yeah, when he was pissed, he said 'The dumb-virut won't stop until we're completely stripped of all privileges!' Whole bunch of shit like that. He wasn't talking to me, though." Her voice was even more exaggerated. 

"Who was he talking to?"

"He was on his cellphone. Some guy named Bob."

Cellphone? Could she be so lucky? "Did it look like an ordinary phone?" Sarah asked very quickly.

"Well, yeah-"

Sarah instantly turned to the viewscreen, tapped into normal networks, and immediately began a search with tools normals will never have. It would make sense; if he didn't trust Illuminati communications, he'd try to lose himself among the normals; the only difference would be the encryption. If he was making calls from inside a sealed Illuminated facility, he'd have his own static relay, which would show as someone who never moved in the slightest, a set distance from a real cell tower. Gritzl's facility was at this site with only one nearby tower- shit, he might have ordered the tower built himself, he was so far from anything- so any calls made from that distance were him, but of course the normal records weren't set up for searching that way, and if he edited things at his cell tower this would go nowhere...

"Wait, you're not going to ask me anything else?" Ruby asked.

"Data can be deleted," Sarah replied curtly, working fast as she ripped large chunks of normal cellphone data and uploaded them to an Illuminati server, and then taking time to search through them with specialized tools there. A few lower-level assassinations featured a trace on someone war-driving through wireless networks, this was child's play in comparison... Aha. The towers identify themselves on this network, only a few random people make calls here, this one's got to be him. But the number he was in constant communication with was a complete false ident. The master list- a master list indeed- said that it was a relay, a resource jointly owned by five Illuminati. She turned on the viewscreen and commanded her newest retroviral, Richard Wickerson, to find out who Gritzl was talking to; if he called back with "It's a relay", she would be sorely disappointed. Why five Illuminati would want to share such a thing, Sarah wasn't sure, but it was clear that the rogue was attempting to lose himself in a group.

Unfortunately for him, he didn't understand that Sarah would gladly implant all five of them to find out who he was, and to hell with the political repercussions. She wasn't even sure the rogue was one of the five. Although it was, naturally, pretty much normal-proof, the relay's real security status was unknown; someone may have added himself as a sixth, and was probably busy purging away all traces of himself now, or possibly inserting false data to point the finger at someone else.

No matter how good at it she became, Sarah royally hated this wheels-within-wheels bullshit.

Still no answer from Richard. Good. It would have taken him seconds to come up with the obvious answer, but instead he had correctly assumed that Sarah had looked at the master list already, dismissed the idea of repeating the information, and took it upon himself to take the investigation further. This was the sort of self-directed servitude Sarah liked to see from the unimplanted. Sarah spent the time going over her 'known' information on Gritzl's lair, comparing it to what she actually saw in there, looking for intentional misdirection or missed detail among all the variances. Almost all of them fit into the 'couldn't possibly know' category, with the rest being changed after the data was collected. Especially the fucking map.

Richard's answer came back a full three minutes after Sarah asked him for it, with an even worse diagnosis: one of the Illuminati had been running it as an open communications relay for any other Illuminatus who wanted in. In fact, according to Richard, it was being promoted as a local terminal for exactly this: easy communication to normal-world operatives without a trace back to Illuminated holdings. ('Damn, could I have used that four years ago!') All the other party had to do was make up some normal identity and simply not register it in the master database.

No one can keep track of six billion people- not even the Illuminati.

There was no false promise of "well we'll keep looking and see what turns up" or anything of the sort. He was gone.

"What was Gritzl's relationship to this person?" Sarah casually asked. Ruby looked like she was almost asleep- wonder of wonders, how the hell did that happen?- but Sarah had to get the info while it was still somewhat fresh.

"I dunno, his.. friend, I'm guessing." Which could mean anything. "Gritzl never talked about anything real personal. He sure as hell didn't talk about us."

"Anything that really stood out?"

Ruby's bitch mode, dormant, was triggered and she reveled in it for the first time in weeks. "It all fucking stood out. How was I going to know to remember his fucking telephone conversations? If you want to know who this guy is so bad, why don't you just fucking call him up and ask him?" 'I can't believe I just said that to her.'

Sarah's logic overrode her snappy retort- What if that could actually work? It was an assumption that 'Bob' knew Gritzl was dead, but what if he had no idea? Sarah called Richard back. "Get into that relay, on my authority. Physically, severing the outside connections but leaving the inside ones up. No warning. And get me a voice imitator who knows the speech profile. We're going to give Bob a call."

Richard starting moving in a fast, deliberately efficient way, typing, reading, and talking at the same time. The hallmarks of a good servant. "Sorry, Sarah. There's no real physical component. It's just software connecting to a telco." Software would be inside somebody's house. "Would you make that a command to raid him?"

"No. Wait. So it's supposedly owned by five guys but it's being routed through one Illuminatus' identity?"

"Yes. The Illuminatus in question is Richard Flynt. He's advertising it as an open unlogged relay."

"Bullshit he's not logging it. But he'll un-log it in a second the moment we show up, rogue or not."

"Indeed. Hrm. We don't have a lot to go on with speech patterns. He's never made a public speech in his life and we don't have enough recorded conversations. It won't be perfect, but would you use an Enforcer?" Richard had taken the two requests of 'raid' and 'call' separately.

"Yes. Yes, I would." Not for the first time, Sarah noted how this would all be so much easier if direct Illuminati transmissions were logged. Not for the first time, she remembered that they would never permit the privacy invasion and not even she could force it.

Wickerson transferred Sarah over to an Enforcer, a ringback tone of "Everybody wants to rule the world" audible. Apparently Flynt had a sense of humor. Sarah made a sharp shushing motion to Ruby; the Enforcer would likely re-speak what anybody said.

The pick-up was within five seconds, and not an answering service as Sarah had envisioned. "Pete, what the hell are you doing? Didn't you go off-grid?"

Off-grid? Apparently they had an underground network of sorts and they figured Gritzl had escaped to it. But apparently that didn't stop them from being stupid enough to answer a call after they knew a raid had happened.

"Guess what? I got her," Sarah said, and the Enforcer reiterated with a voice that made Ruby twitch in surprise. What Sarah was text-messaging Wickerson with, however, would clearly define who got who: Find the owner of this voice, fully interrogate him if possible, and kill him.

"Oh my god. You actually killed Sarah."

I obey., Wickerson replied. Of course he obeyed. The reply was to signify that he would enjoy obeying.

"No. Alive."

"NO!" A combination of disbelief and awe. "You couldn't have! When the highers" (Hires?) "hear about this, they are going to send you up and make another one!" What was this guy talking about? But she couldn't hint that she didn't know.

"Bob, hold on a second. Don't you think we should keep this between us for a bit? Who are you going to tell?"

"Everybody! You really think we should put this under wraps?"

"If it wasn't Sarah I'd say no. Anybody in particular you want to get in on this?" Names, you bastard, I want names!

"Yeah, like Jack.. or Tom, or Bob, or Steve, or Rebecca, or Danielle, or..." He was obviously rattling off as many English names as he could think of, the panic in his voice evident. "Shit, shitshitSHIT!" Click. Sarah saved her maniacal laughter for when the Enforcer was off the screen- no sense in Ruby having to listen to Gritzl's voice do that.

Richard grinned the whole way through. "Oh, how I wish that was a full success!" Sarah exclaimed after she was done. Damn, she fucked that up. Maybe if she had tried something else, some other line of inquiry, maybe if Ruby had told her his mannerisms, but that would have taken time... fuck it, hindsight was like that.

"It could not have been done better. We have a good chance of getting him and I think Jack was a lead. Do you have any suspicions?"

"None," Sarah replied. "That's our problem, too many jacks, not enough aces." Richard smiled. Sarah joked rarely, and he treasured every time she did it, dreaming of one day becoming her part-time lover instead of just her servant. She said nothing further so he clicked off the screen.

Ruby stared at her, thoughts roiling with conflicting emotions: awe for Sarah's efficiency, pride in suggesting something that worked, and an overarching sense of shame at her own weakness. "You want something?" Sarah asked casually. One problem dealt with, on to the next. She was almost certainly expecting her new acquisition to begin the useless, normal 'healing process' of recriminations, memories, and various brands of blame and guilt. She had prepared nine different varieties of shut the fuck up should this process progress beyond its initial stages. She could not, would not, listen to a fucking word of that. The way Sarah solved problems was a permanent one.

"Two things. I want you to make me like you." Damn, everybody wanted the retrovirus!

"Well then, I've got good news!"

"And I want you to erase my mind." Ah. The logical reverse of Sarah's problem solving. At least the new servant favored a direct approach. It made them easier to train than the ones who seemed to think useless twists were necessary.

"Then I've got bad news."

"This is the Illuminati, right? You can't just scrub everything?" The not-so-latent death wish stood out, like a mole. She'd do anything to rid the past two weeks from her- even if it meant frying her own brain.

"I can, I just won't. Mindless servants are cheap, we make them in boatloads. If I want more of those, I'll just get some." Which she probably should have done earlier. Before the raid she had no idea that more than ten copies of herself would be anything but a waste. After, she figured she could use several dozen. Live and learn.

"From people...?"

"No, not from people. At least not anymore." That made her silent, as she realized the Enforcers she had seen in Gritzl's lair were never sentient. Sarah pondered taking the conversation further- but no, despite how Paul had done it, now was not yet a time for opportunistic servant-shaping. Shock-and-awe was a tactic for raids and blitzkriegs, not long wars or permanent relationships, despite getting them off on the right foot. ('Maybe this is what we ought to do every time. Good-cop, bad-cop the entire thing. Set up some shithole for them to suffer for a week, and then sacrifice a dozen Enforcers or so to do a convincing rescue.') Tempting, damned tempting, but if they were going to be real servants they'd figure it out sooner or later. Of course if she wanted to be devious, she could intentionally invite sick fucks to the Illuminati for this very purpose... nah.

It was an hour's slow flight to Northberg, Ruby wanting to make conversation but having no idea what to say. She was taken, and had no idea what that meant. At least it beat where she was an hour ago. The things she had said to her.. the things she had seen the girls doing.. the things she had avoided doing, only to feel the suffering in her brain as punishment.. she didn't want to remember it, didn't want to care. This mirrored, pretty-voiced killing machine had put a violent end to it. It was enough. It had to be enough.

The jet landed gracefully, and Sarah opened the door to step out.

"Um? Clothes?" Ruby asked, still bare to the world.

"Do you need them?" Sarah asked casually. Her servant was badly messed up in a great many ways, jagged rips in her mental state. Sarah intended to retraumatize her properly by cutting the fissures clean, then seal them back up with solid doctrine.

"I'm naked!" she shouted, confused.

"And why does that matter?" Sarah asked.

"What? Guys will be staring. I'll be like a slut." Sarah's face: nobody cares. "And won't it be cold?!"

"In Northberg Medical? I'm certain you can stand sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit for a bit." Most of it was kept warmer.

"Fine then, if it's so great, why don't you do it?"

Sarah believed that one of the cardinal rules of good leadership, eschewed by most masters but valued by the assassins, was not to issue commands you would not do yourself. There were obvious exceptions, such as particularly dangerous or specialized missions. This was not one of them. Sarah replied by taking off the mirrored garment- spy gear hanging off of it like technological cocoons- and tossed it right past Ruby's head into the back. The only thing she left on was the belt carrying her PDA. "Now let's go," she said, a bit of real authority dripping into her voice.

The concept of authority no longer meant a damn thing to her new servant. What did matter was how fundamentally this all shook her sense of normalcy and sane behavior. She liked that. If she could finish the job- send everything she thought was right crashing to the ground, destroy everything she cared about, burn it all to ashes- then what happened to her would entirely lose its meaning, and Gritzl would just be another mutilated corpse among.. how many?

"Sarah, how many people have you killed?" Ruby asked, walking alongside her, feeling the not-quite-cold metal on her feet, looking around at the men at the hangar as if to dare them. Wait, they weren't men, they were the same thing Gritzl had. 

"I have no idea," Sarah cheerfully replied. "Hundreds. I stopped counting a long time ago, and I'm not even sure how to count. Does that mean personally, by servants, or some other way? Does it really matter if I tell an operative or a guided missile to do it? Do Enforcers count? I don't even have a metric to base an answer off of." It had been ages since she had a chance to brag about it.

"Those Enforcers, you've got some too?"

Sarah gestured with a bladed thumb as they boarded the tram, Ruby just noticing the fingernails of death. 'God damn, I hope she never has to pick her nose.'

"Yup, my pilot was one and I invaded with some. Mindless servants by the boatload. Although I wasn't expecting him to have quite so many. They're made, or they're supposed to be made, here, and we track them." She sighed. "The tests will come back soon, but I don't think those were." The enemy having Enforcer production capability? Usually Enforcers were no match for sentient engineereds in any real fight, and the ones Gritzl had were slightly different and not as good as the Operator's latest models; if that was their state-of-the-art and the enemy was unable to merge their Enforcer variant with the Northberg kind, they weren't likely to catch up any time soon.

Sarah didn't care for 'usually' and 'likely' very much.

"Where are we going?" Ruby asked, noticing the lack of a rumble as they moved. The tram might as well have floated on air.

"To the psychologist."

"Oh, great."

"Have you had a problem with a psychologist?" Best to get this out of the way fast, another fissure to slice open.

"You want to know what happened the last time I went to one? I was told that everything I said would be in complete confidence, so I actually told him the truth. Then he told my parents everything and recommended this center for troubled girls or some bullshit, and there was some sort of 'car accident'," she said, waggling her fingers for quotes, "they found my 'body', and I was reported dead before I reached the 'center'."

"Well, this one is going to tell me everything, and he's not going to tell anyone else because I'll kill him if he does. He's also going to look at your body, in spite of himself. But he's not going to do anything and he's not going to suggest it, can you guess why?"

"Same thing, you'll kill him?"

"Exactly. You're getting the hang of this." Ruby understood. Her integrity and self-respect weren't protected by fabric. They were protected by force. And Sarah had a lot of force. So when they reached the psychologist's office, Ruby smiled at him, as if inviting him to try any of the shit that had been tried on her in the past.

Sarah spent the time doing more research, trying to figure out who Gritzl's friends were. The rogues couldn't be stupid enough to deal with each other in public, although checking up was a necessary gesture. She got a high-priority message from her cleanup crew and read it three times over, making sure that this wasn't some kind of misinterpretation. One of Gritzl's brain devices was something to precisely map every single neural connection and save it to a hard drive measured in exabytes.

"...send you up and make another one," 'Bob' had said.

Cloning. Of the he's-my-perfect-copy variety. The enemy had a fucking clone machine.

Sarah couldn't help but think of the implications, even if they weren't her business. Copying and using this new technology for themselves was the Operators' concern (and both Day and Night would be very concerned indeed). How long did the rogues have this? She remembered how, almost six years ago, three of their enemies had appeared eager to die and one of them had killed himself. But if they weren't the originals... She shook her head. This line of thinking wasn't her problem either. Long-term strategy was the twins' business, and business would shortly be booming.

Current problems first. "You and Paul sure know how to pick 'em," the psychologist said when he walked out of the room, a bit shaken. It was one of those days when he didn't know who was crazy anymore, and in his line of work that was a very bad thing. "She wants to destroy herself. It's not.. quite.. a death wish. She wants to obliterate her past, just forget everything."

"She told me as much."

"Well, since we're not going to do that, she wants to alter as much of herself as she can, and in her position I can't say I blame her. There are a whole lot of.. things.. attached to her identity in her mind that she would be better off without. She's looking for crimson hair, new face, new everything, she doesn't even want what she looks like now documented anywhere. And you should have seen the way her eyes lit up when we mentioned another experimental alteration, this one involving fire." Very careful misuse of dragon genetics had led to the same combustive-gas bladders available as part of the forearms and lower legs of freshly engineered humans. Now all they needed was a willing sentient for the final test, as Enforcers and the unwilling give poorer results.

"Give it to her," Sarah said, as if asking why he hadn't already.

He wasn't about to second-guess her.

Chapter 26

Luke almost expected four unfriendly-looking engineered faces to be waiting for him when he came home, but it was still early-AM, the twins and Paul fast asleep. Luke made himself a midnight snack of pork bologna on whole wheat bread, went to bed, and dreamt of nothing.

He woke up relatively early, seeing the twins and his master on the couch together, hoping that they didn't know or didn't care. Last night's adventure would be a stupid thing to suffer or die for.

"Why?" William asked, simply. Well, there goes didn't-know.

"..Because I could?" Luke replied, shrugging, trying for didn't-care.

"Paul... you never broke his freedom illusion," Howard accused. There was an edge to his voice that he never wanted to use with Paul.

"It's been a long time since I heard those words," Paul replied. "Luke, do a handstand and stay like that." Luke got the hint and instantly flipped over. Paul looked at the twins: See? Obedient.

"How stupid do you think I am?" Luke asked. He was facing the opposite direction and standing on his hands, but his voice was accusing anyway.

"Really fucking stupid," William said. Luke's arrogance was wearing his patience thin.

"Yeah, well you're wrong. I checked everything, read all the rules, even had one of Sarah's subordinates help me out. You think I don't know how you guys do things, what you've done, all the people you killed? I read a shitload of it fast, because I'm smart now. You guys made me fucking smart. I killed two people and didn't break a dime's worth of secrecy. Big. Fucking. Deal."

"You also went off on your own with equipment belonging to another Illuminatus with no permission whatsoever to perform a very unnecessary operation," William replied.

"Shut up! You two rule the fucking world, right? The whole fucking world. And you're standing there bitching Paul out about how his servant" There was the slightest hint of sarcasm in that word. "took less than a day with some goober's helicopter to do something you people do every day."

"An Illuminated jet-helicopter, actually, from an apparently loyal Illuminatus. You misled him about your authority, and if he cares to look up the operation, he will know what his vehicle was used for under our fucking authority. Furthermore, it's not 'you people', it's 'we'," Howard said.

"Fine then. Something that we do every day. Just tell me what you're going to do, ground me for a month?"

He was reminding William of the assholes in school, and that, combined with his influence on Paul, was really starting to grate on William's nerves. "There's only one punishment we use," he said, and tapped his sets of fist-blades against each other. Paul looked back and forth between them. He knew that his lifelong friend wasn't going to actually hurt his servant, but he didn't like this either.

Luke sighed. He was very tempted to say 'Okay, kill me' but he had things he still wanted to do. "Don't get me wrong here, all right? You guys are the greatest thing that ever happened to me, if it wasn't for you I'd still be in there, probably still.. fucked up like that. But you've forgotten that it's your planet. Our planet. The Illuminati's planet. You've probably been steeped in secrecy and illusions and all that stuff so much that you don't really know how much real power you have now." Luke marveled at how damn smart he sounded. They really did help him quite a bit.

"That is a very. Serious. Accusation, Lucas," Howard stated.

"Luke, you can stand on your feet again," Paul said, and Luke jumped off his hands and flipped in mid-air to look the twins in the eye, his head moving back and forth between them slowly.

"I'm sure it is. End of Secrecy can't be delayed, right? Has to happen when The Time Is Right, whenever that is." Luke was referencing a couple of treatises on the subject. "I know all about that, I told you I was smart now. You're not going to hurt me for telling you what I think is the truth, are you?" The twins were not. "Your jet alone can probably waste the entire United States air force. Those microwave satellites can cook the entire army and navy. Any Green Berets or other special operations shitheads are mincemeat to Enforcers. I can personally fuck a lot of them up. And I was never named Lucas."

William's temper was dwindling- it was still a rational discussion, after all- and he spoke more even-handedly. "Luke, you are simply wrong. A planet is a very large thing. If the entire Illuminati was united and engineered, you could possibly be correct. However, between the rogues and the fact that there is still only so much power we can muster at one time, attempting to end secrecy now may be a fatal mistake. We're immortal, remember? We can wait a few more years while we kill off our enemies and distribute the retrovirus. And you have no business going out and doing any unneeded operations on your own, so never do anything like that again." Properly, the Dominator should have had Paul say that, but didn't want to embarrass him like that.

"I wasn't going to anyway." The twins understood he was telling the truth; there was no one left for him to really take revenge on. He had more than his share of hatred for his former peers, but just being so much more powerful than them was enough.

"Shall we review the way you performed this?" Howard asked, sitting down on the couch and gesturing to the screen. William sat to his right, then Paul, then Luke.

"I just fried them, I didn't take care of all the details. I had some guy, some operative do that." Howard didn't bother turning the screen on after he heard that.

"Misleading him about your authority as well," Howard replied. But at least a real professional did the secrecy preservation. If there had been irregularities with that, they would have been noted.

"Look, you two got me on that, all right? Besides, he knew it was my parents. I'm sure he could figure it out."

"And that is exactly the problem. It makes us look like fools. Do you not see this?" Howard asked.

"Because I borrowed some guy's helicopter- jet-helicopter, whatever- and killed two lousy normals?!" The twins smiled ever so slightly at Luke's use of 'normals', but their body language was menacing.

Paul looked to the twins to his left, at Luke to his right, and did not like what he saw. The twins had never killed a sentient engineered and did not relish the idea, and Luke was still at least nominally obedient, but the tension had grown deadly.

"Luke, apologize," Paul commanded him.

"I'm sorry," Luke said after a second. Paul glared at him. "For doing this on my own." The glare continued. "...and for making you look like fools. Didn't know it was that easy."

Paul felt the right side of his body tingle slightly, his hair standing on end. "And discharge. Now!" Luke put his hands next to each other a foot from Paul's face, and there was a brief crackle of electricity. He hadn't really meant to charge up like that; it was becoming a reflex to tense situations.

Paul looked to his left. He wanted to say something pithy, but all that came out was, "What's with you two? Damn, you never act like this." What was with them, they all realized, is that they were pissed off, at people they're not used to pissing them off, a very dear friend and his servant. But any good servant would only act independently to serve his master's interests, not his own. "We're the only ones who knew that he didn't have permission. Do what you do best. Lie! Or if you won't, I will."

"What we do best isn't lying, Paul. Or even Dominating. It's killing," Howard said through clenched teeth. For the first time in his life he was actively suppressing his Dominator rage. The idea of him having to lie about something like that, to save face, because of what some servant did was infuriating. But if he had to do something about Paul (do something about Paul?!) and his errant property, he'd do it when he was calm.

"All right- hold it!" William shouted. "I can't believe we're having this discussion. Paul, we're not going to hurt you or anything precious to you over this. We probably will end up lying just because it's the logical thing to do, but I doubt anyone's ever going to ask. Fuck it, I'll make up some bullshit about how Paul ordered you to kill your parents as a loyalty test. But listen, Luke, you have no idea how thin the ice is here. Sure, the secrecy risk is tiny, but just killing 'a couple of lousy normals' is a tiny risk for nothing. One of the first things I wanted to do when I got here was to go kick somebody's ass, and there's still some normal-world asses I'd like to kick, but for the organization's sake I won't do things like that." Yet.

"Yeah. All right, I understand," he said, turning his head away. "Anal as hell!" he muttered sotto voce, without taking the other engineereds' superior hearing into account.

Oddly enough, Howard relaxed on hearing that, clear understanding lightening his mood instantly. "Luke, in your head, you know you are not the center of the universe. But in your heart, you've always felt you had to act as if you are, because of the circumstances of your upbringing and the necessities of your former life. Now you are here, which requires a far different line of thinking. Your parents were not important. They were literally not worth the time and effort it took for you to kill them. Even if you bothered some operative to do it, they would still not be worth the time and effort. In fact, the only reason Mr. Rhines was worth Paul's time is because he was an Illuminatus."

"Not that he could possibly have done all that shit if he wasn't," Paul added.

"So.. no, that's right, isn't it. My life doesn't matter." Luke said this casually, without anger.

William smiled at him, and his eyes glinted, seeming to shine of their own accord. "In the sense that you're thinking about it, absolutely not. You are an Illuminated servant. Your former life is an empty shadow. You have no rights, nothing you truly own, not even yourself. This is the price you paid, and you're not stupid enough to give us any bullshit about it not being worth it. Everything that you are, everything you will be, is here, with us, so long as you live, which will be quite a long time if you refrain from pissing us off." The twins chuckled. "Any and all grudges against anyone that you previously had are meaningless. There was no one you cared about that you left behind, but even if there was, he would mean nothing now. You are simply a mostly self-directed piece in our game, and enjoying much more real independence because of it." Luke laughed- put like that, it sounded contradictory, but it was true! "And, when the time is right, you will stand with Paul as he joins us in establishing the End of Secrecy. Now let's end this pointlessness and enjoy each other's company." William caused four controllers to pop out of the screen, and Luke put aside his general dislike of computer games to play the oldie-but-goodie Super Smash Bros. Melee.

As is often the aftermath of an angry conversation, the participants internally chided themselves for taking part in it. "I bet if Sarah was here, she'd slap us all silly for that," Luke said, and everyone laughed; the idea of Sarah slapping them, or her slapping anyone to any state other than dead was funny. Paul in particular didn't finally stop chuckling at that until twenty seconds later.

"Hey, Luke, why did you borrow a jet-copter instead of just using mine?" Paul asked.

"You have one?" The laughter bounced off the walls. "Oh gee, I'm sorry, I keep forgetting that those things are cheap!" Seriousness blended with sarcasm brought more laughter.

"You really don't understand what it means to rule the world, do you?" William asked. Ah, perspective. A great many fresh recruits, Illuminati and servants both, had similar problems.

"Do I want to?"

"You'll figure it out in due course," Howard said.

"You know what you should have done, though?" Paul asked as Luke's Pikachu got between the twins' characters and a few moves later was sent flying. "I can't believe you missed this one."

"What?"

"Thrown yourselves on their mercy because you're an orphan." Brief silence, then explosive laughter, although William ended up explaining the classic definition of chutzpah.

It was easily an hour or two before Sarah said from just behind them, "Nice match." Luke had let the twins wear each other down, splattered them both with something undodgable in context, then finished off Paul through the power of cheese. "While Paul's pet psycho was off plastering his parents, I was killing more important people." That was followed by an unspoken 'And?' She might as well have said that she'd drank water that day. "I found out that Peter Gritzl was a rogue." She pronounced that one very carefully, making it sound like the possessive, barely including the 'was'.

The look on the twins' faces wasn't worth it, yet.

"Would you like to know the details?" The Duumvirate glared at her in response. Sarah pulled out a small device that looked rather like a normal cellphone and pushed a few buttons on it. The viewscreen buzzed. "That would be me." Howard answered it and Sarah's face showed up on the screen as she looked into the cell's camera. A data transmission request was next, and he accepted it angrily. The Duumvirate did not like their girlfriend playing games with them.

Their expressions changed when they read the data in question.

"Sarah," William asked after a couple of seconds, "how the hell did you get this?"

"I did a bit more research on that guy acquiring the girls. He was using an emotional control device. Just guess who copied his basic design."

Two weeks was definitely long-term memory to the twins; Luke got it first and he looked at her in disbelief. "You mean that asshole copied that?!"

"Just the collars, those.. procedures were all his. Mr. Gritzl had.. different tastes. Even his traps were fetishistic." 

"Traps?!" Howard burst. Now the looks on their faces were worth it; it was such a rarity and pleasure to surprise them.

Sarah smiled. "You didn't think I could get all this just by asking politely, did you?"

William looked at her. "So you suspected him, then you raided him, and now you tell us he was a rogue after you already killed him." The twins were almost left speechless. Sarah had deliberately killed a member of their power base without even knowing he was an enemy. Unlike Rhines and many of the other low-level Illuminati slaughtered by the will of the Dominator, Gritzl was long-entrenched, valued in the organization, and had contributed a number of inventions and ideas appropriate to his level and standing.

"If he wasn't a rogue, would you have ever told us you did it?" Howard asked cautiously.

"Yes, but that's because you would have figured it out," Sarah said. Nobody raided like she did.

"How many other Illuminati have you killed and not told us about?" William asked. For the love of fuck! First Paul's servant, now Sarah?!

"None," she said truthfully. "The idea to do this occurred to me when you were doing your research," she lied. She knew they'd kill Matthew, and she knew they'd freak out less badly when she killed Gritzl if they already killed someone for similar mental problems. The things she did to save the twins from themselves and their damned politics. "Do you feel betrayed, Dominator?" she asked formally. The twins just glared at her in silent fury, torn between the absolute impossibility of killing their lover and the mother of their child, and the previously supposed impossibility that she would do a thing like this. "I've had to deal with him and his powerlust before, in person. I didn't understand what I was looking at then. When I saw that he sought power at any cost, and considered his technical experience, and you had already set a precedent by wasting that other fuckhead, it became a better idea to go after him and investigate than not to. Risk versus reward. I think you would have come to the same conclusion, but where you failed is when you thought he was just being male."

"We've already been accused of certain critical flaws in judgment earlier today, Sarah," William said, frowning. "He was a little bit smarter, a little bit more power-hungry, and only moderately more perverted than a lot of guys in this organization." The overtone was I don't like it either, but what am I going to do?

"And it's that little bit that pushes them over the edge," Sarah replied. "There are two sets of rogues. There's the originals, which we still don't know much about and which haven't done much of anything at all. Then there's the johnny-come-latelies, the people who joined after the original conspiracy." Gritzl had been in the Illuminati in the late 80's but hadn't been anywhere near as powerful or as savvy; it was unlikely that the rogues would have wanted him then. "Now, think- why would anyone join something like that? Considering our collective kill record, and the fact that every other engineered is firmly on your side, you'd think they'd realize it's a death sentence."

"Power. They're disenchanted with our hegemony and promised some higher position if the rogues take over. This is basic stuff," Howard said.

"I used to believe that, but now I disagree. I think they hate you personally once they find out what you are. It's your youth they hate, your energy, the fact they can't influence you as they can everyone else, that you are completely impervious to their methods of manipulation, the fact that you change their culture and their rules right out from under them, and, in their minds, dare them to stop you. Perhaps you don't know this sort of thing, you were intentionally trained not to know it because your predecessor wanted to make the perfect unmanipulatable force of justice, if such a thing can be said to exist here."

"Bullshit!" the twins blurted out simultaneously. "Quit insulting our intelligence, Sarah. We've thought about all this a while ago," William continued. "We're a threat to their sense of superiority, yes. We exhibit a tendency to rule with absolute dictates, yes. And since we're taking things to a more outright level than the past, so are they. Their reaction to our unimplantation would have been done a lot differently otherwise. They're just dumb enough to believe they can win."

"The reason anyone chooses to follow any belief system is because of emotion. One of their principal emotions is a sick loathing for everything they cannot control. Why did you take out Rhines?"

"Because he couldn't possibly be that perverted and still be a decent Illuminatus," William replied. "It reflected an overall mental illness."

"Is that an after-the-fact explanation?" Sarah asked. The twins bristled. They didn't like their motives questioned, especially not by her.

"Sarah, we knew that instinctively. The man was fucked in the head, believe me, I actually talked to him. He didn't hate me personally, in fact the sick fuck actually liked me.. probably because he didn't know me very well. But you're right, most of the people we've killed are like that, like Damien fucking Gladstone," Paul said. "People that broken can't make good Illuminati. Or good anything, for that matter, except maybe kibble." Paul's voice took on a certain angry note.

"You are on some level correct, that much is certain," Howard acknowledged to Sarah. "It was an emotional reaction, in much the same way an aggressive reflex to someone pointing a gun at you is an emotional reaction. But my question is this: Was your takeout of Gritzl spurred by pure logic, or gut instinct?"

Sarah nodded. "You got me. But we're getting sidetracked. What I was also getting at is that they feel the same way about you."

"The leaders, I'm not surprised. But the new ones? If they turn to us they can speed up their road to immortality. They have no reason to hate us. It doesn't make sense," Howard replied.

"I never said they were smart or that they had their priorities straight. Which makes me wonder what the rogue leaders intend. Because those guys are smart. Let's watch the evidence, shall we?"

The raid came first, Sarah starting at the physical entry and continuing to Gritzl's basement. She had invested ten grams of weight into a camera mounted in the center of her chest.

"You made it sound like you killed him intentionally," Howard pointed out when her recorder showed the scene of death. He also found Sarah's new acquisition interesting, but decided to save that for later.

Sarah shrugged. "How was I to know he'd be dumb enough to do that himself? I'm not even sure if he's really dead."

"I'm not sure if we're watching the same video, here. In the one I'm watching, he was splattered all over the walls," William said, raising his eyebrows in amusement.

"And with the information I have, I learned that these people can make very, very good copies of themselves."

"Fuck," Howard said. The implications... "Fuck, fuck a duck!" And screw a kangaroo! What was this, Official Illuminati Bad News Day?

"This is some major league bullshit, Sarah. Everyone we've ever killed could possibly be still around. Everyone!" William exclaimed, his hands animated as he talked.

"The Night Operator. The old one. The one who blew his brains out. I knew there was something fucked up about that!" Howard shouted, rolling his head back. "Oh, am I going to rip the shit out of him..." That particular cloud did have a silver lining. Howard had wanted revenge for his own implantation.

"James Baker, that other douchebag, the Bitches, the Bastard, the Bastard's son..," William reminisced.

The Bastard's son. Paul's heart squeezed particularly hard for a beat. Fucking Christ, not him, he was gone... "Luke, this is a standing order. If it ever comes to light that Damien Gladstone is still alive, butcher him. Your way. Take as much time as you'd like."

"I hear and obey," Luke said, smiling. No one asked why Paul didn't want to do it himself. The poetic justice was evident.

"Not even going to interrogate him?" Sarah asked.

"Like anyone but a complete idiot would tell him anything but misinformation. Where do they live, anyway? I mean, seriously, where do you hide that many Illuminati who can't be seen in public anymore?" Paul asked. And they would have to be hiding, completely. Faces and voices changed wouldn't do it. Someone getting the slightest bit of their DNA would blow their secrecy.

"Yeah, they're probably all in one place. All of them trapped in there, with either nothing at all or very little to command," Howard conjectured.

"Reminds me of Team Melee Starcraft," William said.

"That's that schizophrenic 1v1 mode," Howard remembered. His brother nodded. "Probably fun for normals, but boring for us. And even worse when more people pile on. The rogues in that situation? It'd be like a bag of cats."

"Or maybe they've just managed to accept that they're out of the game once their other-selves are killed," Paul suggested.

"Yeah, but they're growing old, and it's been years for some of them. Especially if Damien really was one of them. Pretend we don't know about it, just keep killing them, and see if we can find anything that looks like multiple people are running it?" Howard suggested.

"No, they know that we know," Sarah said. "Let's keep going."

"Did he actually have anything on that computer?" William asked.

"I don't think he ever put it on that computer. I was setting up his inheritance, so you two wouldn't need to divide his resources. Although he had a number of children, he had no heirs. For some reason he made them all into servants, and yes, he really did that himself. But also found in his file was a will, that most of his property would go to Quadrus Dominus, held in escrow by Xavier Burgard until Quad is old enough to claim it. Interesting."

"Insult and injury. Nice," Howard said, smiling. Disinformation that obvious was the Illuminated equivalent of a middle finger. "Although there will be people who don't like that one at all."

"He was a proven rogue. Do you think I'm going to tell the truth about how I found out to anyone but you? Who exactly is going to complain?" Sarah replied. Her organization unilaterally taking resources was a bold and divisive move, but not altogether unheard-of. For normal targets, they would simply request more than they needed and keep all of it; for Dominator's orders, they would retain a small portion of the target. The first two years of Howard's reign were lean times indeed for this sort of thing.

"I'm just curious what a four year old boy is going to do with a whole lot of teenage girls," Paul said. The twins chortled.

"Unlike some of us who just hand stuff like that to the first available warm body, I took them and will move them where I please," Sarah snapped. Like the ones Paul had rescued, many if not most would get a quick, merciful death. "Speaking of warm bodies, I suggest we end all recruitment."

"I'll guess how this argument is going to go," William said. "You're going to suggest it because of the fact that procedures and technology make it ever easier for a smaller number of people to control a greater, and the fact that the engineered youth coming out of Northberg is going to be far superior and won't contain any psychological deviants."

"And the fact that there are a lot of servants that can do practically everything an Illuminatus can. Is there anything to beat these arguments?"

"Yes," Howard answered. "The first is that we'll be seen as making a massive, unilateral power play and possibly alienate a significant number of older, more entrenched Illuminati. We're not terribly fond of most of them either, but they're still our power base. The second is that there are still a number of savants out there to be added to the gene pool, but insanity and genius tend to stick close together and it's not always practical to divide the two pre-recruitment. The third is that any recently-recruited idiot is an ant. If they're playing it as paranoid as we are, which they apparently are, the enemy leaders cannot fully recruit any members who joined since our unimplantation, because any one of them can be an infiltrator- they have to resort to cell structure and limited liability." That phrase took on a whole new meaning here. "If the new Illuminati know what they're doing, great. If they can't cut the mustard or they're doing things they shouldn't or they're simply not fit to live, then they die. Are you annoyed with having to do your job?"

"Yes."

"Don't be. Secrecy will end in a few years," Howard said.

Chapter 27

It is said that the best way to learn is to teach, and Sarah discovered the truth of this.

It wasn't a matter of fundamentals, skills, or what resources you can bring to a firefight; she knew all of that cold and she'd pioneered many of the latest developments herself. It was the unspoken assumptions about the role of an assassin-servant that she'd internalized at a young age and had to stop herself from saying out loud. She was taught to follow her role, performing specific acts. That wasn't right, or at least wasn't enough. She'd first learned how to take control of situations as Howard's servant, as the young Inheritor started to rely on her experience from the moment she was gifted to him. Then as an Illuminatus she'd learned to command greater forces, putting together the roles of many men under her charge to form solid teams and accomplish a great many goals.

She had learned from direct experience that the best sort of servant didn't merely obey. Any servant could do that, that was the definition of the word. A good servant anticipated her mistress's commands and understood what she wanted, not just what she said; this is why Sarah didn't even consider implants. Better servants relayed orders and worked with other servants to fulfill goals. But the best servants often didn't need to be commanded at all. They were simply fully informed of the situation and operated from there, anticipating everyone involved, including their masters, their allies, and their targets, doing everything they could to further the goals of the one they served, being able to accomplish important objectives from even the most limited initial role, should the situation demand it. This was the level of unity she and Paul had attained with the twins in fast situations, intuitively protecting each other and doing what needed doing at once, not even consciously thinking about it. It had been an Illuminated adage that servants were the hands of their owners, and as she taught this concept, she understood what that truly meant.

Ruby understood as well, even if she had a hard time following through completely. The concept was fairly simple if esoteric; it was Sarah who was hard to understand.

As Sarah patiently inculcated her servant, she realized that a small part of herself was always expecting to receive some kind of direct, detailed order, to be told to play a specific part for unknown reasons in the service of someone she'd never seen before. She hadn't been given orders like that for six years now. 'Karl, you dumb son of a bitch. You taught me all wrong.' But Karl had just been operating by the mentality of his day.

She intended to teach her more details immediately, but, as her servant Richard informed her that Flynt was going to a meeting in Bavaria, they had a field trip to go on first.

Shadowing Richard Flynt was laughably easy. He walked with purpose and never looked to his back. Dead silent, Sarah stayed one corner behind him, Ruby several meters behind her in super-soft shoes that made the tiniest of whispers when she stepped.

They didn't even need to wait for him to get where he was going; whatever secret meeting he had with his friends in the depths of the Bavarian headquarters wasn't their concern. All they cared about was that he was here, and he was alone.

Sarah tapped him on the shoulder and smiled at his reaction before grabbing him by the neck and holding him to the wall, still smiling gently. "Hey, Rick. Let's talk about what you've been listening in on."

"It's an unlogged relay! I swear!" he shouted.

She responded by squeezing his neck just a bit harder.

"What do you want me to do, just tell you what you want to hear?! You can go through my files, I'll show you..." He reached for the miniature laptop he had at his back, trying to pull it from between himself and the wall.

"That if they're accessed in the wrong way, they'll delete themselves? That they're stored in a very special place that won't come out in a full data dump? That they're not on your regular server period, but carefully hidden offsite?" Sarah suggested. She took the laptop from the man's back and examined it without opening it, paying meaningful attention to the earbuds attached to it, wondering what he listened to. She let him go and he fell to the ground in a choking heap. "Go ahead," she said, gesturing to his laptop. "Log in. But if you don't have any phone logs, I'll kill you for incompetence."

"I- what?" he asked, desperately, and Sarah knew on sight the difference between a man fearing for his life and a man fearing for his best-kept secret. He sat up on the floor, paralyzed. This was why he'd quit active participation in the rogues back in 2000 and prayed daily the engineereds would never know. Who wanted to fight monsters like this?

"She's new here. So logs, or I teach her what bones to start with," Sarah told him. What she didn't tell him was that the bone she would be starting with was his skull.

He capitulated, quietly. He was actually already logged in, perpetually connected through the general Illuminated network, through another layer of heavy encryption, to the one at home. One quick search and years of phone calls scrolled down, ordered by date and time. Jackpot.

"I swear that is everything." Yeah, but he swore before. "My own notes are appended. I just record numbers and voices and figure out who's who from those. Should I send it to you?"

"All of it. To me, personally," Sarah commanded, and Flynt fumbled through for a few minutes before finding a good way to copy the full files to a folder he could send them from, taking time to deactivate the land mines he'd left in his system to prevent exactly this.

"All right. It's sent. Absolutely everything." It actually was everything; there was a time to hold 'em and a time to fold 'em, and this fell under the latter category. "Now I've given you what you want. I ask something simple in return."

"We have no intention of letting anyone know about your little side business, Flynt. Anybody dumb enough to think you're not logging this shit deserves to be spied on. There's no favors here. There is one more thing, though. We're tapping in. You are to send any and all new calls to me." Flynt had originally intended to ask for the retrovirus. He decided to shut his hole instead. Maybe if they really did kill all the rogues, he'd get it, without calling more attention to himself.

"It'll take a day to set that up, I'm late for my meeting as it is..." Late for his meeting? Both Ruby and Sarah rolled their eyes at how much like a normal he sounded.

"By the way. When we interrogate them, we will ask them what calls they placed to who through what relays. If there's anything they did through your equipment that isn't here, or if we find you've edited anything sent to us, she will be back to kill you. Slowly," Sarah said, pointing her bladed thumb at Ruby, who simply smiled. "Have fun at your meeting." They left the room before he did, and although he wiped the tears from his face and walked out with a stilted gait, trying to somehow further emphasize that nothing had happened, he could not hide the fact that he'd been crying. Sarah didn't get the behavior of normals or even normal-born Illuminati half the time, and could not fathom why he acted as he did.

But Ruby knew why, even if she had no words to explain it with.

And then the hard-intellectual part of the training began, covering everything from weapons systems to obscure secrecy pitfalls. Ruby laughed when Sarah told her how she'd used copies of herself, and laughed further when she realized how Gritzl died. Once Ruby's retrovirus fully took hold, the physical part began, and the unique parts of her biology meant that there were many things she had to learn herself. This was all done in the assassins' base; the twins could survive without Sarah for a week, which was all it took to bring her servant from 'fresh meat' to a thorough understanding of the principles; more specialized training could come later, as needed. Sarah couldn't have asked for a better pupil, as Ruby swiftly learned the details of everything Sarah had to offer and accepted the merciless training schedule without complaint. Many mission-less servants quietly observed the lessons, a few recording for later study. Pedagogy was something they hadn't seen from their Lady before, and most of them learned things they'd forgotten or never heard of. Sarah's plane had left the twins' island with an extremely competent killer and her new servant, and came back with two extremely competent killers.

Luke sat down atop the cliff and thought. He did not yet zone out, as he usually did. He simply considered things he hadn't before, occasionally grinding his fist into his palm when he thought of something he didn't want to think about. He had almost expected to die for last week's impertinence, but since he hadn't yet he was contemplating how he would. Would he fatally piss off the twins, would he be sniped from miles away, or would he die in his master's defense screaming war cries? It would be no problem for him. Retroviral or not, Paul's 'friend' or not, he knew he was cannon fodder, and accepted it without complaint. And when he came face-to-face with Satan he would tear that fucker a new one.

This must be where Japanese meditation comes from, he figured. All those samurai contemplating death every day. Paul had recently handed him a copy of Shogun, and apparently 17th century Japs were like Illuminati, only far more polite and not as smart or vicious.

That was when he saw a burst of orange, and a girl with short crimson hair and a black suit leap fifteen feet in the air. 'I want to fuck that' was his first reaction, with 'How did she do that' a distant second. He ran down a steeper way than he had come up, jump-kicking trees to lose momentum.

Sarah looked like standards of beauty had gone into her creation. This girl looked like someone had started with 'killer', and added gender as an afterthought. Particularly her face, which was skin pulled over muscle and bone. Wait, wasn't everyone's face that? But hers actually looked like skin, muscle, and bone, and it was shaped in human patterns yet completely failing to come together in Luke's mind as a singular whole instead of collections of cells. The fact that she was regarding him with a complete lack of caring only amplified the effect.

This, of course, did not stop his penis, which considered her face a second-place or perhaps third-place alternative.

"Hey! You're hard to catch up with! I'm-"

"Luke. I know who you are,' she said, knowing this would be a problem long before she got here. And the very first time she uses the open ground for training and the exhilarating explosive jumps (store it up in the special shoes while running, then jump and ignite!), he shows up doing the same tired courtship dance she's seen so many times before. Murphy's Law.

"Yeah, I guess you would. Listen, if you-"

Yup, definitely a problem. Time for Plan A. She held up a hand, in the traditional 'talk to it, not me' gesture.

"Oh. Right. Ice princess. You know that you're going to be here for a very long time, so.." He trailed off. It looked like she was trying to show him something- wait, was that a hole in her hand or-

Fwoooosh!

In the first instant he saw red, he didn't know it could hurt him and so didn't move. A twentieth of a second later, he pulled away, screaming. Oh Jesus, his face, the whole left side of his face was on fire, she'd burned halfway through his cheek, he had to get out of there, get to some fresh water, get away from this crazy bitch--

The Duumvirate, however, was dealing with a more usual problem: a deal had gone sour. This time the agreement was between Andrew Wilkinson, a fourth level, and Toshi, an engineered fifth who still had relatively few holdings. It was a straight-across trade- all the servants in organized crime from Toshi, and de facto ownership of the Japanese Internet from Andrew. Toshi had no further use for the Yakuza (his late father primarily used them to perform hits without needing to use Illuminated resources; Toshi found it easier to just do it himself) and Andrew felt that corporation ownership was wholly overrated, mostly due to secrecy. Hence the straight-across trade.

This was, as he was finding, a poorly-worded agreement; one large corporation in particular controlled a small but significant swath of the Japanese Internet, but it wasn't an "internet holding" by his view- there was no way to easily separate the corporation's assets. He'd given Toshi the other corporations no sweat, but the boy had simply asked him where the rest of it was, and so he'd gone to the Duumvirate before Toshi did. Andrew was incensed- he was so obviously right that it was hard to explain- but didn't dare show it.

And the Duumvirate, equally incensed but hiding most of it, was quietly determining that they'd probably have to choke a bitch today.

"And maybe in some theoretical world, I would have access to this overarching control mechanism, but it's never existed and I've never seen a need for it, so just because one of your-" He was interrupted by Luke rushing directly across the space between the viewscreen and the couch, heedless of the authority, clutching his face and yelling in agony. "..the fuck was that?" Luke's door slammed and the twins looked at each other, then at Andrew, and started laughing.

"He had a request too, although likely of a more.. amorous nature," Howard said. Pause. "It was rejected." More laughter.

Andrew chuckled despite himself, taking a breather, reason flooding back. "All right. Never mind, I'll just break off the relevant part and give him that." No matter how hard it was. "But I want more from his end of the bargain. I wasn't kidding when I said that was difficult here."

"Then ask. But don't expect him to give it to you. He didn't know your internals and isn't obligated to care. This is what happens when you make deals and assumptions at the same time," William said.

Well, yes, strictly speaking that was true, but that kid should have- no, strictly speaking was the only interpretation the twins cared about. And the only one he could reasonably ask for. Why the hell did he call them up? They were going to kick his ass! He'd really stepped in it. Apologize, no, admit fault, hell no, just get the hell out of there before he fucked up even more... "Very well, Dominator." Click. Bitch-choking, cancelled.

"Poor guy," Howard said.

"Which one?" William replied, and they broke out in laughter again.

Chapter 28

Ruby woke up with a start, after playing the agent of chaos in her nightmares.

She wore pants to bed- the feeling of bare legs under fabric wasn't something she liked- and got up, went to the closet, reached for a shirt, and wondered why she was bothering. Who cared if the males stared at her bare breasts? Wasn't that one of the first things Sarah taught her? Some of them would stare at her anyway.

Instead, she took a shit, checked the Real News online edition for two minutes, and heard the sound of plates as she left her room. The Enforcers were never supposed to be heard- was some lamer trainee fucking up? She moved smoothly to the dining room and was startled by the sight- Sarah, in her usual white-assassin garb, had put down plates full of buttered, jellied toast and cups full of orange juice, just loud enough for her to hear. Luke's electrically-fried chicken notwithstanding, the twins had been eating either imported, stored, or Enforcer-cooked food for a week, and they'd enjoy a Sarah-made feast. "They make you cook for them?" Ruby asked.

"No, they do not."

"Then.. why?"

Sarah did not bother looking back to answer it, and kept her eyes fixed on the slab of deep-frozen pork in front of her. Rapid cuts with a beyond-razor-sharp blade made it into bacon. Sarah was happy that her servant trusted her enough to ask such questions openly, was unhappy that she needed to ask a question such as that, and decided on the quickest way to dispel her normal-world conceits. "Before I answer your question, you will answer mine. I have killed a great many people on behalf of my Dominator, before and during the Duumvirate, many without their prompting and some without their knowledge, as well as a very large number of other gruesome things. With that in mind, why does it startle you so much that I cook for them?"

The eggs were not actually ostrich eggs, simply the result of heavy bioengineering of chickens. These were to be hard-boiled. For eggs served on a plate, normal jumbos would suffice. Ruby stared at them as she articulated an answer. "Because killing's your job."

"Which does not preclude me doing other things and, in pure logic, is completely non sequitur. It's also not the right answer."

"All right- it's not the right question. What startles me is that it's something menial you don't need to! Why don't you have an Enforcer do it?" She was also startled by something a bit more pedestrian: 'Is she actually using her fingernails to turn potatoes into hash browns?'

"I can also have Enforcers do almost all of my dirty work." Sarah left the obvious logic unexplained: 'I don't because I'm better at it than they are. So too with this.' "Until you are able to adequately articulate your objection, I will not answer it."

"All right, here's some articulation. You are a First Level Illuminatus. You have a guy who works for you who's desperately in love with you. You can do what he wants, which is implant him and have him wait on you hand and foot. You can build your own mansion under your own fucking office. Why the hell do you keep coming back here?" Her tone began with casualness but ended with hard contempt.

"I'll do you one better." The boys liked that phrase, and it was so useful here. "Why don't I kill the Duumvirate in a way that makes it appear as if the enemy had done it, openly swear vengeance against their murderers, block all attempts to establish a new Dominator as part of the enemy plot, use my relationship to the late Dominator to keep his former loyalists, and declare myself Dominatrix of Earth?" 

The reply came so easy and naturally that it sounded pre-planned, which would make all of this make sense. Ruby moved her face to within Sarah's field of vision. Is that what you're actually going to do?, she asked, barely a whisper, as Sarah could read her lips.

No. And that isn't answering the question, Sarah mouthed back identically.

"I have no fucking idea why you don't!" she hissed. "I'd.. guess because you care about them, but that still doesn't explain why you still act like their own personal bitch." Her contempt was unmasked.

"Ruby, how many places are set at the table?"

Ruby looked. "Six."

"Why?"

The answer was reluctant: "Because there's six people living here." 'Damn that crazy Zen-koan bitch. But if she's crazy, I'm probably crazier. And if I'm crazy, then probably everyone in the whole Illuminati is crazy. And if they're crazy then everyone in the whole fucking world is crazy.'

"And so, then, who are you truly serving?"

"You," Ruby answered decisively. Fuck if she'd buy into the commune bullshit here! Sarah's smile and chuckle let her know that she had, in fact, answered correctly. The seeming mixed message made Ruby wonder if this was an extension of the servants-as-hands business or if she was just being fucked with.

"The twins like thick strips but they also like it crispy. I've considered it basically unsolvable through ordinary methods. I leave it to you if it's possible."

A dark thought took her: she'd immolate the bacon, then not wanting to go through the whole business of being dealt with by Sarah, she'd point her palms at her own head and unload full force. It was not the first time she had considered suicide in that way.

Actually looking at what she had to do made her chuckle- the bacon was sizzling in its own grease! If she tried to crisp the bacon the way she was being encouraged to, she'd have an explosion even if she just tickled it.

All right, letting it boil in fat wouldn't help. No way to crisp it like that. Ruby poured the grease down the basically uncloggable sink and let it sizzle again, this time louder with a few exploding pops, some of which would have landed on her bare tits if she didn't dodge ('wow, she's right, I really don't have to give a shit'). Press the spatula down, push all the grease out of there, pour that down the sink again.

"Why so much?" Ruby asked, managing several pounds of it.

"Six large and growing engineereds after not eating for twelve hours or so, and you really have to ask why so much? Even when I think there will be leftovers, there never is."

"So what's in all this stuff? I know those can't be normal eggs, this bacon definitely wasn't normal, those pancakes don't smell the same.."

"The pig was killed a week ago, on this island, and those are barely touched biologically. What you didn't smell were additives. The hens were engineered. The pancakes are a certain rare brand that is still commercially available, with a few extra things I put in for spice. The cereal is entirely normal, although we go through it first for quality. The juice is normal pulpy," An agricultural-lord Illuminatus ran his own orange farm in his spare time, right next to his barn full of engineered pot. "and today the milk is from camels."

"Camels?"

"Would you prefer human milk? If I couldn't have shipped mine to Quad I probably would have put some of it in here and seen if they'd have noticed."

"Wait- Enforcers can lactate- or he could have- oh God-" Ruby zipped to the sink, dry-heaved four times in rapid succession, and zipped back to her work. It's a good thing she thought of that before breakfast instead of after, isn't it?

"There is no God," Sarah reminded her.

"You're telling me." Delete the thoughts- 'mindwipe, I still want that fucking mindwipe'- reboot the brain. "When do we eat?"

"You speak as if there's a schedule. The boys usually get up when they smell this."

"Heh, the boys." Ruby sat down and began to dig in.

"All men are boys. The men who haven't been emasculated, anyway, full of curiosity, adventure, chivalry, and testosterone. Take a man fifty years old; he develops a retrovirus and suddenly he's ready to take on the world, all by himself."

"The Operator's like that? I thought he was just a science guy."

Sarah replied by explaining the Operator's plans for world annihilation, to which Ruby's facial expression went from a grin, to incredulity, then slowly back to a grin again.

"Do the... boys know about this?"

"For the moment, the Duumvirate is keeping its options open." A glance by Sarah signified the entrance of said Duumvirate, who took a longer-than-usual glance at Ruby's breasts before nodding and focusing on their food. Ruby didn't care. If they were going to force sex on her they would have already done it, in which case she probably would have found a way to explode the entire mansion. Paul and Luke entered shortly afterwards, and Luke sat across from her, not hiding his intent in the least. He'd healed well; the right side of his face was slightly pink, with a single layer of raw skin. He ate like he was in a contest, a different hunger in mind. Tenacious son of a bitch.

But he made no moves at the breakfast table, instead choosing to discuss something less likely to get him immolated. "So it's been four years since Howard found out about his implants, right?" he asked, looking back and forth at the twins, unable to tell them apart.

"Close to it," Howard replied. "Right before our twelfth birthday." Their sixteenth was coming up shortly, and they intended to make it an enormous subterranean extravanganza, commissioning engineereds to build a facility in Antarctica specifically for the purpose, playing many variants of laser tag with any engineereds fast enough to pose a challenge. These lasers would be of the blue ten-milliwatt variety, not the microwave gigawatt.

"And you guys haven't managed to capture anyone alive who can be implant-forced to tell you who did it?"

"No. They, or rather their exact clones, have suicide implants," William told him.

"Wait, you can't just knock them out and remove them?"

"Luke, I assure you, you're not the first person to bring this stuff up," Sarah said. "Anything that artificially knocks them out, anything that messes with their body in any serious way- it'll kill them. Even if you hit them hard in the head, they've got something that knows that. I'm sure deadly false positives can happen, maybe already have, but it's an effective defense mechanism against people who want to capture them. Most specifically, us."

Luke was not going to be so easily bested. "What if they regenerated out?" The rest of them looked at him as Christians do at a Satan worshipper. Even Ruby wondered what had driven him to suggest something like that.

Howard took the lead. "You know how long the retrovirus took to fully modify you. In that time the enemy could activate them easily. We would have to administer it clandestinely, and then we'd have an enemy retroviral on our hands." Obviating their whole policy to begin with.

Luke still wasn't giving up. "What if.. what if the retrovirus they got wasn't the same? What if it was just regeneration, or.. what if it made them stupid? Not stupid, because they wouldn't remember so much, but slower? Easier to control?" This time the look of anathema was profound, mouths stopping mid-chew. The twins glanced at each other with a single thought- Holy fuck!- going between them. It wasn't just that Luke was suggesting pure heresy- a retrovirus to make people worse!- but the fact that he was right. His plan could work.

"That is the most diabolical plan I have heard of coming from an engineered. Not the best, or the most intricate- just the nastiest," Sarah said. Her overall opinion was that operational concerns must take priority over political ones. That chicken had come home to roost.

"You're fucking welcome," Luke replied. He understood how things worked around here by now.

"The Operator is not going to like that one," William noted. Dislocating his arms and legs was one thing, but asking him to do his job in reverse was something else.

"Doesn't the Operator do what you tell him?" Ruby asked. The Duumvirate didn't answer, letting it be a rhetorical question, but they did eye their friends' servants warily, not used to being in the presence of people more... ruthless? diabolic?... than they are. The twins were brutal, to be sure, but that wasn't the same sort of concentrated evil that Luke's plan had brought to the table. It was an embarrassment being out-eviled, particularly in a culture where 'good' and 'evil' were laughed off as normal concepts and people were held in respect for their vicious cunning. But the servants weren't really 'evil' so much as..

The Enemy. With the takeouts (Come to Engineered Takeout, where fresh meat is guaranteed!) of Rhines and Gritzl, the Duumvirate had acquired, not merely destroyed, a piece of their enemy, embedded in friendly, obedient (so far..) retrovirals who wanted the enemy dead for their own reasons. The twins looked at each other in simultaneous understanding, and started to nod.

"All right," Howard said. "We'll do it. And as a reward, you get to see the look on the Operator's face."

The look on the Operator's face was, indeed, a solid reward. Indignation, disbelief, and a sort of absolute, transcendental horror warped his features into a grimace, his red eyes squinty and contorted. "You want me to what?" he asked, in lieu of anything better to say.

"It is an entirely temporary measure, simply to counter suicide implants. Anyone who receives this retrovirus shall die," William said.

"Oh, I'll make sure of that. Those all will disappear from an engineered body within a week if they aren't set off. I'll give you the benefit of any sane doubt and it'll kill them in a month or so. Making them sterile from the moment it goes in, of course. And I'll be damned if I'm making a general version of this."

"Isn't a true Illuminatus the master of both?" Paul asked.

"Damn whoever wrote that!" the Operator exploded. "There's diseases I could make right now that would leave huge swaths of the population more compliant, with incredibly low secrecy risk. I won't, and it shouldn't take you very long to figure out why, and I assure you my personal feelings have little to do with it." It took the Duumvirate a fraction of a second to figure out one big reason; if 90% of the population becomes placid, the remaining 10% is going to think they're the Illuminati. "This? If anyone finds out I've made this, you better make some room on your island, because nowhere else will be safe."

"Does he forget who he's talking to?" Ruby asked.

"Only when he's pissed," Howard said casually. "If he did like it I'd wonder what happened."

"You're not supposed to like it, Operator," William added, using an intentionally gentle tone. 'You're supposed to do it. And if it's any consolation, you're also supposed to purge this thing from existence when we have no further use of it." Which would probably be after the End of Secrecy.

"Oh, believe me, that is a foregone conclusion. I'll have it ready in three days. Would you like to tell me your targets now?"

"We build our weapons, then we aim them," Sarah said evenly.

"Very well," the Operator said, sighing, and clicked out. Luke started chortling.

"I find it interesting that half the engineereds here have hatred towards that man," Howard said.

"I don't hate him. I just like watching him squirm," Luke replied.

"I don't hate him either," Ruby said. "But he obviously kind of thinks that he controls you. Can't you tell?"

Howard started chuckling. "But Ruby, they all think that. 'I'm the real Illuminatus.' 'They couldn't get along without me.' 'They might run things now, but our time is coming.' 'I have the real power.'" Howard's voice acting was fair, but an octave or two lower than most Illuminati. "I run an organization composed of experts, engineereds, and megalomaniacs. All three have their uses."

"So it's one-sixth of the engineereds here who hate him," William said. "And insanity and genius go hand in hand- that's part of why there's so much shock about the raids that took the two of you. We've had a man kill himself with robotic dolls... or, wait, shit.."

"Think he's not dead?" Howard asked.

"How are we supposed to know?" William replied bitterly. Exactly where were they supposed to start looking, outer fucking space? "They didn't even have to clone a sentient for Peter."

"You remember him?"

"Peter Brenk, yeah I remember! Don't you remember? You lost your fucking arm! Other than that, I don't remember much about him, though."

"Why would you not remember something like that?" Ruby asked, baffled.

"Why would we bother? At the time he was presumably dead," Howard said. "And we never met him, just his psycho-pit. A lot of first levels physically showed up. I think most of them wanted to do suicide prevention." Brenk was actually fairly well-liked, even generous by the organization's standards. He was very good at both mechanical engineering and normal manipulation, and usually threw in a lot of technological-gizmo freebies with his various deals.

"The alternative, of course, is that they wanted to cover it up," William continued. "And they would probably need the assistance of the on-scene leader, who was..." Some instant research yielded the name Donald Simpson.

"And you're not going to inspect him?" Ruby asked. Her voice almost never had emotion and betrayed no skepticism. Sarah was enjoying this exchange. 

"Go after a man who, five years ago, ran the on-scene operation presumably attempting to save the life of a man who may or may not be actually dead now, on a loose suspicion that said dead man could possibly be a rogue?" William asked rhetorically. "Unless they're completely incompetent like Mando was, they can orchestrate cover-ups in minutes. Sometimes even automatically. And Donald is not incompetent."

"We have to- have to- treat this like science. Coincidences mean absolutely nothing. Unless we know something, we don't know it. Otherwise we can follow blind leads and step on land mines from here to eternity," Howard continued, with more than one glance at Sarah. "And when getting evidence is an act of violent politics, hypotheses.. fail to readily form," he finished wryly. "Paul tries, but.."

"And I try regularly. You are right about one thing, Ruby- basic research is always worth a shot." Research of publicly available info never works, but, well, there's always that chance. The absence, or lack of detail, of said information- or its apparent fakery- would likely be a stronger clue than its presence. Of course, the initial and continuing use for it was for Illuminati to keep their stories (to the normals) straight.

"Speaking of which, I wonder what would make your servant stop trying to fuck me?" Ruby asked as if Luke wasn't there, raising her eyebrows at Paul as if asking him to command his servant out of it. Paul just shook his head slightly, as he figured an order like that would cause more problems than it solved. Ruby turned to Luke, gauging the condition of his face and various parts of his body.

"Pain won't work on him," Sarah told her, as she was clearly considering it.

"No.. you're right, it won't. I guess I'm going to have to try something a little longer lasting," Ruby commented, looking at his groin in a decidedly non-sexual way.

"What- what the fuck? You're going around.. topless and it's like you're-", Luke said, confused.

Her eyes went to his forehead. "Hmm, I don't see a towel... 'She's not wearing her burqa', the mullah said. 'She must be asking for it.'"

"Oh, fuck you."

"You wish."

"You know, I could find a way to stick you to your bed and rape you, even if it's the last thing I ever did," Luke said, and stalked off to parts unknown.

"I could call the right people and pull the right strings, and start global thermonuclear war, and it would be the last thing I ever did," Ruby replied evenly to his back.

Sarah had no advice to give. She wanted to tell her servant that she was simply following the mis-reactions that she had forced into her own brain as a response to the attempted conditioning, and should dispose of them as unnatural and misbegotten; however, that same counter-conditioning had awakened her killer instinct. "I love burqas," Sarah said instead. Expecting and getting the puzzled look from Ruby, she continued, "It's just a shame I'm too tall to pass as a native in one. For concealed weapons there's nothing that beats it. I could go for a big, fancy dress sometime if I'm ever in need of heavy weapons with a large ammo supply, but dresses aren't nearly as much fun. Oh, and by the way- you couldn't actually start global thermonuclear war even if you did pull the strings. The warheads won't actually work." Things like this were part of the reason why.

"I'll keep that in mind," Ruby replied, and mimicked one of Sarah's vanishing acts, only with less stealth and more fire.

The twins had been sitting on the couch the whole while, holding back, quietly listening, not wanting to disrupt the amusement. After the principal actors had left the stage, they cracked up in gales of echoed laughter, not caring who could hear them.

"I don't want them to know that they can kill random normals every so often as long as they keep that kind of comedy up," Howard said.

"You know what we need to do now, though?" William asked.

"Contrive a situation in which Sarah needs to bring heavy weapons and a large ammo supply to a formal occasion?" Howard suggested, deadpan.

"That, and send our favorite rage elementals on a mission which would logically require both of their skill sets and abilities, preferably in tandem. Sarah?" William prompted. Paul looked at his friends with a You're going to try to mastermind what? expression.

"That's difficult, because their abilities can be mostly replicated through technology. If I wanted a lot of fire or electricity for some reason, I'd use a flamethrower or a generator, and I could turn them up and down as I pleased. What you're really looking for is a situation where careful, fluctuating levels of both are necessitated, where there would be an advantage in using people with direct bodily control over those things," Sarah answered. Not likely.

Paul was sick of being left out of the act. "All right, then just bring Luke along on the next large operation you send Ruby to and let's see what happens."

"You know, of all the operations I've been on, 'Let's see what happens' has never been even a minor objective," Sarah replied.

"Well if you can't do that, then he really is useless." That statement by Paul dampened the mood considerably. "Isn't there a tradition here of not wasting servants? You might have trained her yourself but he's been trained here, and frankly, I'm not sure how much he even needed. You said that if I couldn't you'd find uses for him, anyway."

"So you think it's good for him to be sent into an environment where.. never mind. You guys wouldn't get the joke," Sarah said, giggling. "Now all I need to do is see if there's anyone in Utah who needs to die, and we'll be all set." The twins gave her a blank look. Paul got the joke, but didn't want it. "Never mind. I can use him, maybe in the next couple of days." She'd get him started with some standard fare she'd usually use a genetic normal for, get a baseline, then ramp it up.

"I've come up with that formal occasion, but it'll have to wait until near the End of Secrecy," Howard said.

"And I'll have to wait until you stop toying with perverted concepts just to spice up your sex life," Sarah answered, reaching into the twins' suits, grabbing both of them by the dick, and leading them both upstairs into their bedroom, leaving Paul alone still staring at the screen, wondering just how much of engineereds' behavior was governed by logic and how much by hormones.

"I think I better stick with Enforcers until secrecy ends," Paul said to no one.

Chapter 29

They found an appropriate mission for the servants in short order.

Carlos Abello was a social butterfly, the son of a rich businessman, and generally personable. He had a knack for social relationships, putting together his own maps of who dealt with whom when. He tended to talk to everyone, in multiple social circles, being generous overall and rubbing as many elbows as he could. But he'd made a mistake; he'd sent e-mail to one of Paul's servants, asking direct questions about the relationship between Paul's servant and the normals that servant influenced. Reading his e-mail outbox revealed that he'd sent a number of other such messages to other somewhat powerful functionaries in the region, in both the Colombian and Venezuelan governments as well as local trade organizations.

From his abilities there was the temptation to make him an Illuminatus, but the most basic psychological review suggested that he couldn't keep this kind of secret. In the old days he probably would have either been killed, driven subtly insane, or (most commonly) simply fed plausible misinformation and left to rot. With action-control implants it made sense to take him instead, particularly since Paul intended to expand his dominion over the local area and could use another decent schmoozer.

But shortly after he had sent the e-mail, he'd been kidnapped, and satellite recon had traced his captors to a compound thirty miles east of Yopal, in the Colombian state of Casanare. Paul had his locals, even a retroviral or two, but they weren't assassins by profession and it would take almost as long to get them appropriate gear as it would to send the personal servants. The timing was good for a pre-dawn raid; by the time the servants got there, it would be 3 AM local time. Paul and Sarah chose to send them alone, to drive home the point that they were the ones being relied upon and couldn't always look to their masters for help. Giving them lots of help and backup may improve the chances of this raid proceeding well, but it wouldn't help the next one or the ones after that, and those might be of much higher priority than some gang and some would-be servant.

Besides, this was normal stuff. Ruby only worried about one thing, which she asked directly the moment they stepped into Paul's aircraft: "Are you going to try to hit on me out there?"

He gave a casual shrug: Maybe. He went for what he thought was the emotional jugular: "Little girls remain chaste."

She looked at him with contempt emanating from her face, narrowing her eyes and shaking her head. "You'll say anything to try to get into my pants, won't you?" He dropped the subject.

They took the time to review their gear and the target. Their nightvision was not made of goggles, but rather a mostly-transparent layer of plastic over their faces, letting every color pass through except a certain spectrum of orange that it absorbed. That particular wavelength was lit by tiny LEDs in the plastic in response to infrared, giving them an effective way to see heat. Their suits were not only camouflaged, but matched the color and reflection of the local foliage, various leaf-like projections coming from their bodies to break their outlines, not quite a ghillie suit but serving the same purpose. Ruby had brought along a wide variety of knives. Luke had the conductive baseball bats he'd wanted, with the addition of being able to turn them into a large electromagnet. He doubted he'd make use of them today, but they were lightweight and good in a pinch. They left the nuclear weapons at home; strange burn patterns and very long-ranged projectiles would pose too much of a secrecy risk. Normal raiders would have used an assault rifle, but the engineereds wouldn't need long-barreled weapons as they didn't plan on doing any sniping themselves today. Accurate semiautomatic pistols and high-capacity magazines served their purposes much better.

The target was surprisingly fortified. The tiny village of Duncan had once been blessed with electricity, telephone service, and something resembling plumbing, but it'd been abandoned and taken over later; water was pulled in from a different source and the electricity was from a diesel generator, and they used cellular phones because the landline service was long gone. Some buildings were demolished, some foliage was clear-cut to provide fields of vision, and the entire complex was surrounded by a seven-foot fence topped with razor wire, occasionally merged with the walls of existing buildings to save money. This gang was serious and had been at this a while, then, possibly affiliated with FARC; the intelligence wasn't very clear. But it was certain that they would barely be missed if something sudden and violent were to happen to them.

They went to the Atlantic to swap jet and helicopter modes, and came in low, slow, and comparatively quiet, landing the vehicle in a dry creekbed. A cloudy day was bad for satellite reconnaissance, but they had their own sensory equipment to tell them that nobody was here. They left the Enforcer pilot to guard the vehicle and went with the other four Enforcers, silently hiking the uphill mile and a half between themselves and the target, slipping through the thick jungle of long-abandoned coffee farmland. The four Enforcers found sniping positions in the foliage, making a perimeter. They could snipe inwards, but that wasn't how these raids worked; for maximum speed and efficiency, Sarah's ideas always put the fast, dangerous engineereds heading to the center to exterminate, and the Enforcers to the sides to kill anyone who made it out.

They couldn't hide their own heat signature entirely, but their combination of superior binoculars and infrared-sensing faceplates let them see the guards long before the guards could possibly see them. They looked bored, but attentive; the fact that they weren't sky-high or drunk said something for the gang's overall morale. One man even looked worried, as if cursing himself for doing something stupid earlier. But they were just human, and relied on their own eyeballs, lacking nightvision equipment. There was also wind at the engineereds' backs; the combination of visual and aural cover meant that they might be able to evacuate their new target and make it look like he escaped on his own. Less cleanup that way. They turned on the cellphone jammer and started to sneak in.

There was a sense they had forgotten about, one not normally used by humans, and the loud, high-pitched bow-wow-wow-wow let them know what they forgot. Normally, when dogs bark, they are ignored; someone might call the dog back in, a few people might get annoyed. This compound instantly lit up in the first few barks, house lights turning on, the searchlight wavering back and forth. Ruby and Luke shared a sigh. There were things to make them scentless, they just hadn't taken the time to use them, not expecting this kind of response. These people really were serious. It didn't matter; there was always Plan B.

The generator went first, the armor-piercing projectile blasting through the engine block, and the burning machine ground to a halt, shutting down everything that wasn't battery-powered. Bullets proceeded to enter and exit heads, anyone in sight simply eliminated the moment they came into view. Ruby pyrojumped over the fence and Luke took a half-second longer to vault over it, the jagged wire utterly unable to catch on or cut through his clothes. 

Doors were opening, now, and through one two men and the barking dog were vislble, the dog rushing out and the men looking for something to aim at. Luke killed the men with headshots, and the dog with a single neck-snapping kick to the throat, which he didn't like doing. He could kill human beings all day every day, but killing a Doberman whose only crime was being loyal to the wrong side made him feel cheap.

They had both been trained in situational awareness. Every sound signifies something, every motion has meaning. There is a difference between the clicks of a telephone, a firearm, and a grenade lever being released. In the immediate chaos, they knew what each sound symbolized. And they could hear everything of significance: panicked footsteps, magazines being shoved into firearms, screaming which threatened to drown everything else out. Ruby tore open the door to the building full of whores, and solved the screaming problem. Now she could better hear where the shots were coming from: men terrified and shooting at nothing, although their AKs were starting to penetrate the building. She left the building the way she had come in and methodically shot them dead, her own steady fire providing rhythm to the cacophony.

But Luke, moreso than Ruby, knew what most of the sounds were from: aggressive males, led to careers of violence by their testosterone, their personalities, and the culture in which they lived. He had been one himself since he was eleven. He found himself predicting what they would do next, seconds before they did it, by their movements and the sounds of their breathing. That guy behind the two houses over there is going to open the gate and run- there he goes, the perimeter Enforcers have him- those three guys are going to blindly shoot from behind cover, but their wooden cover was no match for Luke's penetrating ammo. And that guy in that house over there just gasped in relief as he opened a hinge, which meant that he either found a way out or a larger weapon. Luke kicked the door down, laughed as he realized the hinge was to a somewhat hidden closet, and fired a few rounds in the direction of the faint breathing. Blood oozed out from under the door and the breathing stopped. There was the sound of something being unscrewed outside an open window on the other side of the small house, and the long zzzziiip of a cord being pulled. What the hell was that? Luke dashed to the open window and heard the throw- aha, that was one of those old-style potato-masher grenades. Luke caught it and smiled at the thrower; the young man inhaled and opened his mouth to scream, which was a perfect time for Luke to throw the thin end of the grenade, dart-like, into his open mouth, then immediately dive-roll away. He could hear both the sounds of the explosion and the ensuing tik-tik-splash of human brain and bone.

He kicked open the remains of the damaged wall and swiftly got involved in another gunfight. These people were actually able to put lead in his direction. But it wasn't comparatively fast lead, and he could move away from it before it reached him. The five normals could not do the same with his.

There was another round of screaming, and the sound of a large bonfire. No point in investigating; Luke knew what that was from. Ruby was having a Colombian cook-off. More men were running in that direction, and Luke chose to meet them, surprising them as he left the building. They barely turned before their brains were splattered, Ruby stopping her rush in his direction. Two more were running behind him, sure to fire, and he heard another two running from behind Ruby. Smiling, he decided to aim and fire at the two behind her, so she would fire at the two behind him; he ran at her, and then with a quick step that didn't register as a threat, he was between her arms, and her between his, and then he hugged her tightly, pressing her breasts against his chest. Her first reaction was to aim the guns at his head instead of breaking away, but she had accepted Sarah's training thoroughly and did not fire at allies; he used the opportunity to kiss her, full on the lips.

Perhaps it was the undischarged voltage coursing through his body, but his kiss actually tingled.

Then the moment was gone.

"In the middle of a mission? Really?" she asked.

"So what, they're all dead." Nothing moved.

"Not this one."

She had broken both of the man's arms with one bullet; instead of running he had feigned death, hoping that the strange assassins (who he thought might be American robots) would pass him by. Instead, Ruby grabbed him by the head, and asked where the target was, getting a flood of unintelligible Spanish for her trouble.

"Come on, asshole, you're the leader here, we know you speak English. Where is he?"

Another flood of Spanish, apparently littered with profanity and idioms, in an agonized, accusatory tone.

She sighed. "Donde esta Senor Abello?" she asked, not even bothering to pronounce it properly.

"Es muerto! Estabamos.," he gibbered. One hole in the head later, he became muerto too.

"'If the target's captors say he's dead, attempt to find evidence to verify or disprove that if possible before taking final secrecy measures.'", Ruby intoned. That was the direct colloquial interpretation of one of the guidelines, although she really should have left the guy alive to help prove it.

"I don't think that'll be very hard," Luke said, gesturing to a mound of dirt with a small cross on it, quite visible by the firelight. It looked like the work of people who don't usually bother with burial, but felt they had to this time. Shovels were lain neatly next to the ground. Ruby wanted to bring up something related to secrecy, but knew it would be just an excuse and got to work, wanting but not daring to bring a perimeter Enforcer in to help.

Digging is hard work, even for engineereds, particularly engineereds going as fast as possible. Fortunately the grave was shallow and filled with rocks; apparently they had intended to dig him up later, too.

They were expecting to find his head, and got his feet; the corpse was mostly Caucasian, the feet were well manicured, and the DNA sample quick-checked as him. Luke and Ruby looked at each other, shrugged, and were about to start secrecy procedures when a quick tap-tap came from their communicators: someone is coming.

They pushed the rocks back in with one smooth motion and dragged most of the dirt back in with three more, and retreated to the jungle, Luke reminding himself that he'd pushed his luck already and touching his co-worker's ass right now would probably get him unexpectedly immolated in a couple of days. There are no sexual harassment lawsuits in the Illuminati.

Three minutes later, a man and four Enforcers stepped out of a truck just inside the perimeter. 

Javier Garavito did not notice the corpse in the grave. He was too busy looking at the burning buildings and corpses not in graves, forcing down panic, reminding himself that it could have been any number of things. The entire excuse they gave him for Abello's death (and he knew it was just an excuse- they had him) was normal-on-normal violence, after all. Maybe someone here insulted someone's sister. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity, his group being confused for another. Damn it, and after he'd spent so much time cultivating them, too. He'd given them military weapons, leadership, money, even taught them to train their dogs to bark only at people and not animals. Who the hell could have done this?

Headshots. There were just too many goddamn headshots. He looked around at the corpses, trying to remember if he hadn't seen any of them before- they all looked the same to him, who was he kidding- or possibly blood splatters without an associated body. That would mean that his people had at least scored a hit. Maybe some hero type, someone with training, some bunch of British ex-pats or something, had decided to take the law into their own hands and slipped under the Illuminati's radar.

Besides, he reminded himself, an Illuminated group out here wouldn't leave without torching the evidence first. Maybe they decided not to, this time- or, his face froze in horror when he thought of it- maybe they were still here.

He had just considered what a bad idea bringing his Enforcers out into the open without infrared goggles was when one shot in four places rang out, hitting each of them in the back of the head and splattering him with Enforcer brains. Even before the two grinning teenagers rushed him, he knew he was well and truly fucked, and pressed the 'Oh shit' button he carried.

"Hey Paul, we got you a present!"

Oh, great. Paul was reminded of cats, who would gleefully bring all manner of small rodents to their master's feet. 'Look, look, a dead chipmunk! Aren't you proud of me?'

But Luke had brought home a rather large man instead. 'He's over the limit, throw him back', Paul almost said. Ruby was with him, so there had to be some purpose to this, right? Paul looked between the servants, raised his eyebrows, and shrugged. You two have an explanation, or are you just bringing normals home for dinner? Paul still had no desire to try long pig.

Javier started with bluster. "Illuminatus, I would like to know why I was brought here, of all places, for doing nothing but attempting to acquire a servant."

"Okay," Paul replied, pausing a bit. "Was this servant named Carlos Abello?"

"Yes."

"That's curious. Why didn't you report the acquisition?" Paul's voice was growing more and more inquisitorial. It inspired terror, but Javier kept his bluster up.

"Why didn't you tell me that you'd have people out there?!"

"Carlos was to be an independent acquisition of the operatives' group. Their leader took an interest in him. Since no one else ever made a note regarding him, he was deemed fair game. Had you never attempted to acquire him, you would never have known he was there. But now you're going to make arguments about how it was your area," Paul said, before he could get a chance to say just that. "So I'll let that slide. Luke, I know you're enjoying this interrogation, but tell me more."

"Abello is dead. He was buried by some death squad when we got there. We just found out when this guy showed up."

"Really? Wait, let me make sure I have this right. Did you know he was dead?"

"No! Well, not until they called me, that's why I came!"

"But you knew he was there. Was this death squad directly commanded by you?" It struck Paul that using a death squad for anything other than death was a bit of a misnomer.

"I have no servants in it. They're not owned by me. I use traditional finance methods. They think I'm a businessman." Was 'this is the way we have always done it' really a good argument against secrecy-break accusations?

"They're not registered to him at all," Ruby said casually.

"So instead of doing things the modern way, you ordered a normal group to acquire you a servant, not telling anyone, and not even letting us know you had a relationship because they were 'not owned by you'. And they fucked it up, and killed him," Paul said. He paused a moment. "How many Enforcers do you have?"

"I had four," he said. Luke smiled, and Paul got a pretty good idea of what happened.

"You could have ordered them to do it. It's like you're making a special effort not to let other Illuminati know what you're doing. I wonder what you have to hide?" The clear answer was something. Most Illuminati can keep poker faces pretty well, but as a retroviral Paul saw the tenseness and the facial tics. "You know, this is the Island of the Dominator. Not many people get invited here." No expression of relief in that, no happiness, not even an acknowledgment of the ironic humor.

"He was even more scared when we found him," Ruby said.

"There was dead bodies everywhere, you would have been scared too! Listen, I don't care what you think might be the right way to do everything, but I've been an Illuminatus a lot longer than you have and this is the way to-", he blurted out.

"Shut up," Ruby said, and sent a jet of fire past his eyes. He gasped and shut up completely. "And his Enforcers made no contact moves."

"Really? That's trained and automatic. You must have commanded them not to make contact," Paul said. "I wonder why?"

Sarah got bored and walked out of her room, having listened to the entire exchange. "You know, listening to this was pretty fun for a while, but I have a better question. What were you doing in Bavaria, three hours after you were captured?" she asked.

The look on his face was unmistakable: Oh, shit. Okay, so they were monitoring him, it's cool, he'd rehearsed this in his head. "I have a clone."

"You do? With the same apparent age and everything? Where was he created?"

"It was a deal I had made with Peter Gritzl." He proceeded to go into about two and a half minutes of utter bullshit, involving long-term dealings of which the clone was a small part. It would almost certainly match their publicly-recorded dealings, but there was no fucking way Gritzl or any of the other rogues wouldn't demand loyalty up front for something like that.

William decided that confrontation was the wrong approach and pretended to buy into it, and his brother joined in, all six engineereds hiding their disbelief. They asked him questions which he happily answered with more and more plausible bullshit, managing to avoid contradictions. No, he had absolutely no idea the guy was a rogue, he just thought that he was ahead of the curve with the cloning thing. Well, so what if Northberg didn't have any idea about it, surely there could be more than one medical facility, couldn't there? The location of the medical facility? Why, he had no idea, that was Gritzl's secret. Javier was so glad that the twins understood, but a mutual breaking of the facade was done when Howard grabbed a needle from a small fridge in the closet, handed it to Luke, and said that Javier had earned the retrovirus. Smiles shifted to disbelieving looks; disbelieving looks turned to head shaking; and then a final look of horror was on Javier's face as he realized his bullshit hadn't even been taken seriously.

"It isn't retrovirus, is it," Javier said slowly. He had a strong suspicion it would cause him a great deal of pain, and having seen (and dealt some) torture, he had no interest in experiencing any of it.

"Luke, don't bother," Howard said, as Luke was about to inject him anyway. "This is why there are suicide implants- but you don't have any of those.. do you?" The horror turning to resignation on Garavito's face was enough.

"No, those are only for the servant," William said, a wry smile on his lips. "And you send the servant to the meetings, functions, and committees you don't want to go to, so you can do what you love."

Paul looked at Javier as a man regards a cockroach. Now that they were all telling the truth it was inviting to cut loose. "Why the fuck did you go traipsing around in my backyard? Didn't you think I'd have security measures to deal with your species of nitshit? Did you somehow think it wouldn't reach you? What, did you think I'd stop at a national border or something? Do you think Sarah would? Who the hell do you think you're dealing with, asshole?" Luke started chuckling. Paul turned to the twins. "Duumvirate, your birthday is coming up, but he's my present." Paul slid down the railing. "C'mon, Luke; I'm going to show you how implants work."

"Dominator, this sets a precedent you can never take back!"

"No, trying to kill one of us with a railgun sets a precedent that can never be taken back," William said chillingly as Luke dragged him away. "Implanting the Dominator sets a precedent that can never be taken back. This is just icing on the cake."

"Is it just me, or did we get something handed to us for free?" Howard asked his brother. "Because that, itself, raises suspicions. What was he doing out there?"

"No, it was completely what they were talking about," Sarah said. "They caught him with his pants down, pretty much."

"Or, rather, you caught him in another guessing-game operation," William said pointedly.

"Would you believe it wasn't? I had no idea he was out there until Ruby told me. It's been nearly four years, guys, and Karl and I have been running operations this whole time- and almost ran into someone like him a couple of times, but at least their Enforcers made contact. Don't be so surprised that we find the one that doesn't is a rogue."

"Such idiots. Like that wouldn't raise suspicions," Howard said.

"Oh, I don't think he's that stupid," Sarah said. "He's just used to his own environment. Nobody tells anyone anything, they are laws unto themselves, and controlling normals through bribery is reliable enough for daily use. From his point of view, having Enforcers make contact would be like a beacon saying 'I'm here, come kill me'."

"No no no. Not anymore, Sarah," William said. "The autonomy is fine, the bribery hasn't caused anything but background noise problems, their normals in conflict can be good for secrecy, but we have ordered them to cooperate and talk to each other. Many, many times. Even if they hate each other, we are a group. Anyone who doesn't follow that gets the short end of the stick."

Howard touched his brother's shoulder gently, shaking his head. "They don't see it that way, Billy. Some of them have stopped coming to us because of it. They don't accept each other as allies or even friendly neighbors. They can't help each other up; they're too busy standing on each other's necks," Howard said softly. "And in that region, Paul makes it worse by being socially untouchable. They fight each other, one of them goes to him because they fear us, he gives them an equitable solution and scrapes some off the top, they go back to fighting each other. Retarded, isn't it?"

"C'mon Howie, don't get depressed. Isn't the whole point of having a Dominator so Illuminati don't do too much stupid shit to each other?"

"The problem isn't that they're doing stupid shit; the problem is that they're Illuminati at all. Even the ones who aren't rogues. Paul called it, so let's watch him rip the shit out of this guy's head."

Paul didn't bother with the same kind of theatrics the twins had used on Osama, implanting the man exclusively to himself, giving him the standard commands as if the guy really would be his servant forever. He played the interrogation by the book, gladly spending hours asking questions Enforcers would normally ask, exploring every nook and cranny of the man's knowledge, taking time to deviate from the standard paths when he thought the man might know something else. He used no torture and allowed Javier good food, clean water, and bathroom use; Javier accepted Paul's mercy and answered above and beyond what the implants demanded. The most obvious question of "Who else is in the rogues" was answered with only three names (other than Gritzl, who Javier really had known; Javier's alias was the 'Jack' that 'Bob' had talked about to Sarah) and a lot of pseudonyms; 'Bob' turned out to be another pseudonym and the other two had vanished the moment he had been captured. (Sarah immediately ordered teams to investigate the inevitable empty dwellings, expecting and getting nothing.) The pseudonyms of most of the other rogues were as varied and as well-thought-out as AOL screen names. The leader of the rogues referred to himself as the Black Wizard, a thing that made Paul and the twins laugh in surprise; considering the Illuminati's devotion to science and its color scheme, he was effectively calling himself the Double Nigger.

Other questions such as locations and plans were answered in detail, but most of the information was outdated or useless. The rogues, Paul figured, had suffered a surprising amount of stagnation over the last four years. Most of their plans were never acted on. There was some talk about organizing subgroups to devastate the holdings of engineereds and conventionally seize greater power, but those plans either risked the rogues' secrecy or resulted in one of the rogues losing something of his own and he'd never go through with that. What they really wanted to do was an insurgency, but there was just no way to bring that dynamic to the Illuminati. Javier told him that there was a base, somewhere far and remote, but since he didn't choose to go there he wasn't told where the base was. The implication was that it was somewhere jets and helicopters simply didn't go, and whether that was an underground Antarctic base or somewhere beneath the sea was anyone's guess. 'Bob' had used the word "up" so it might be the Himalayas, a very good place to hide things.

The location of the rogues' server was effectively random and very old school. Every day someone, somewhere, would hook up a server to some part of the normal Internet. Every day, each of the rogues would receive an encrypted message on their own normal-world email address, from a different random source, telling the central server's new location. Since Javier had pressed his 'Oh Shit' button, he was known to be captured and so had all his access instantly revoked and would no longer be sent anything, the server instantly taken offline until it was set up elsewhere.

Paul asked why the 'Oh Shit' button didn't kill him as well, and Javier said he had no intention of killing himself for anything at all.

Then there was the business of the clone. Gritzl really had gotten him that clone, but he had no idea where the clones were manufactured or who had done it, and he didn't even think Gritzl had any idea where they came from even if he hosted a brain copier. Odds were, only the Black Wizard knew, and he gave nothing away. But they learned what the clones were and something of how they worked; somehow the data from Gritzl's reader was copied, neuron by neuron, into the new being. In the process, a sort of biological implants were grafted into the new clone's brain, forcing it to be loyal to its original. At least now they knew how to identify rogue clones, but Javier was quite convinced that there was no way to scan people for them while they were still alive.

Paul had him answer Sarah's questions about the calls he had made, comparing them to Richard Flynt's database. She was satisfied when he confirmed everything as genuine, and more satisfied when he told her the rogues had no idea they'd gotten a hold of the call logs.

It was swiftly agreed that since the rogues knew the engineereds knew some of their secrets, there was no sense in not letting everyone else know too. Publicizing the information would, according to Javier, be devastating to some of the rogues' mentalities. "Hey, Javier? If we tell them that we learned who you were from Bob and not your own stupidity, think that might break them up a bit?" Paul asked.

"It.. could, if you knew their personalities and how to talk to them.."

"Well, you do! So you're going to help us write a press release telling everyone exactly that, in words they'll believe. Not right this instant. See, Javier, I like what you have, and although your rogue friends might know you're taken, they're not talking. So I'm pretty sure I can take your holdings before anyone else jumps on them, because I now have somebody who knows all about them and can take care of them for me. You don't get anything for guessing who that is."

"You can't do this," Javier said faintly.

But Javier was a rogue. They could do anything to him without any real risk of retaliation. "Just so you know," Paul said in a very gentle and kind voice, patting Javier on the shoulder, "you and your old friends aren't in a position to tell me what I can or can't do. Luke! Escort your new co-worker back home and help him integrate with my structure, and he can help write that release on the way out. Oh, and Javier? Unless it contradicts me, do what Luke says." Crestfallen, the new servant shuffled along as Luke, grinning, led him out of the room. "Good boy." The other engineereds watched the two leave, Luke hoisting the man into the jet-helicopter easily.

Sarah started clapping and gestured for her servant to start doing the same. The twins followed shortly thereafter. Paul turned and looked at them in startlement, his eyes widening as they clapped with inhuman speed nearly as hard as they could, creating a cacophony even through their gloves, for fifteen seconds straight before dying down.

"It's still bad politics to promote you, but that was a first level performance," William said.

"If you worried about your skills before, know this: You are doing it right," Sarah added.

"I'm sure you won't publicize all of this, but that should be in a how-to manual," Ruby said diffidently.

Howard just smiled at him. No more words were needed. The rogues were humiliated, the twins had gained ground in their war, and Paul was finally what he had strove to become.

Chapter 30

Luke woke up the next night with an assassin in his room.

He had no problem with that, because this one was pyrogenic, female, and without clothes. He did nothing in response, following the general rule of 'when a naked girl walks into your bedroom, don't discourage her'.

She pulled the covers from him with a smooth yank. Her hands started low and moved up his body, teasing, inviting, slowly and carefully as if she was preparing material for a high-danger operation. She straddled him, slowly lowering herself onto his now-swollen dick.

Jesus Christ! The inside of her vagina felt like someone had drilled a hole into a brick wall and lined it with dry sandpaper. And her hands were no longer just traveling along his upper body but had made their way to around his throat, starting to squeeze, threatening asphyxiation and immolation both.

He reflexively grabbed her wrists, pinching the channels shut. Idiot. If she loosed and oxidized now, her arms would explode and take his head with them. Instead, she bounced up and down, ignoring the pain of friction. Luke's dick felt like it was being skinned. You like this, asshole? This is sex with me. You really wanted me that badly? Fine.

Luke released her wrists- she almost fried him right there- and grabbed her breasts. Now they could both kill each other instantly. He'd send his kilowatts across her chest, she'd turn his head to charcoal. Instead, he began to grin. How many times had Paul told him about the Law of Unintended Consequences? He put his forefingers on each nipple in turn, sending a jolt through them, defying her to roast him into oblivion. Go on bitch, do it. He didn't speak aloud. Silence was to be savored, and this bed did not creak despite how hard they were using it.

It begame marginally more pleasant, feeling now like a scalding steam bath. Oh, you like electricity, huh? He put his hands on her ass and sent four hundred volts into it- her butt cheeks clenched and her feet shot fire. Oh, you do like it. He sent a more powerful jolt and they both came at the same time- she spread her arms wide to send dragon breath flying across the room- and then as he laid back, she removed herself from him and walked out of the room, leaving him to his ecstasy and pain, the only reminders she had been there the spot on the sheets and the faint smell of smoke.

She chuckled faintly as she left him. Post-coital somnolescence would have him out in minutes, possibly even before his regeneration pushed a couple layers of epidermis back on his dick. Her vagina hurt as well- possibly worse- but she simply chose to ignore it. ('And I did that just because I felt like it.') She hadn't done anything just because she felt like it since she was four.

She fell asleep easily on top of the covers and dreamt sunlit, expansive, relaxing dreams.

When she awoke, she felt three things. The first was the mild chill of sleeping without covers on all night. The second was a faint crust of dried sweat; she really should have showered before she went to bed. The third, as she got up, was the unmistakable knowledge: 'I'm pregnant.'

'How do I know that?' She could simply feel it, the same way anyone could feel a full bladder or the need to eat, subtle changes in her hormones telling her that her menstrual cycle had stopped, that somewhere inside her was a life not her own. She guessed the reason why she knew those things. (What she did not guess was that the Operator had a few servants making substantial strides in the realm of biofeedback over the past few months.) She sighed once, took the needed shower, got dressed (with a top this time, no more dodging grease), and went through the usual motions while pondering the subject of abortion.

If Gritzl had gotten her pregnant, she would simply have ripped it out of her womb the moment she became retroviral, tearing apart her own uterus in the process. She pondered doing it now. It would be unimaginably painful, but that didn't matter anymore, and it'd grow back. 'Maybe I should have asked them to get rid of it, period.' What would a death machine need one of those for, anyway? Never mind. It was just standard human equipment and she knew how to deal with it without blood loss and organ damage.

Luke and Ruby treated each other neutrally at the breakfast table; the twins figured they had simply come to some kind of mutual understanding and thus ended comedy hour. Ah well, it would have gotten stale soon anyway. Sarah knew something was up the moment she saw Ruby's face, and they were almost able to leave together unnoticed afterwards if not for the constant gazes of the males, who had figured that something sexual had happened from gestures and faint scents.

The twins asking Luke lurid details would have been impolitic; that was Paul's job. And Paul distinctly wasn't asking; he could either bring what he saw as Jerry Springer drama to a place where it didn't belong (even if it had turned out well for Jeremy and Kylie, that business between them was not something he wanted to see with himself or his servants), or he could deal with the new power structure caused by Javier's acquisition. Javier had been slowly turning his gangs into a paramilitary force which performed cross-border raids, not so much an actual threat as a pain in the ass. For Javier to suddenly try to talk them out of it would have been ineffective at best and a secrecy breach at worst, and some those gangs had ties to other gangs that no one controlled. Since their territory was across the border, Paul couldn't use the Venezuelan police and military to attack without starting a war. He asked a few other Illuminati with Colombian connections for help in getting rid of these guys before they became a real threat, and got one terse 'It's your problem now' from one and nothing from the others. Paul sighed deeply; he'd gotten himself too feared. Even though his regional peers had to accept it because a rogue was a complete outlaw, they didn't want to deal with anyone who had just made an Illuminatus his slave.

Paul could possibly use that slave and his own holdings to slowly turn the gangs towards profitable drug smuggling instead of less-profitable open violence, and if that failed he could always turn the gangs against each other.. but Paul wanted to solve this immediately, not try to mastermind something that could take months to finish and might not fully work. Even as a retroviral sixteen-year-old, he never liked the finicky, slow business of long-term manipulation. Besides, there was a fairly quick solution which wouldn't be terribly hard to pull off, there were only three groups that looked like an immediate threat, and these murderous, kidnapping motherfuckers had it coming. He wouldn't even need to ask Sarah for this, because now he had his own murderous, kidnapping motherfucker. He brought Luke to his room and started giving orders, making gestures to his screen. These people are here, here, and here, Javier says they plan to do this, this, and probably this, prevent them while keeping secrecy, etc, etc. "And no mess that needs physical or social clean-up this time. Make it look like they were taken by a government organization." Which would mean that his servant would probably just vaporize them the same way he had his parents; the latest fusion incinerator could fold up and was easy to carry. Exeunt Luke.

Complete disappearance was also on someone else's mind. "Sarah, I need one of your instant abortions," Ruby asked in the most casual voice she could.

A male master would have likely responded with either a no or what would come to be known as a Falcon Punch. Instead Sarah just looked at her and asked "Why?"

What, was she intentionally setting her up for a Snappy Answer to a Stupid Question or something? The words 'Because I'm pregnant' almost escaped her lips, but Sarah's expression showed that she was being more serious, and so Ruby remained mute for a half second. "Why do you take them?" she asked in response, confused.

Sarah chose the condensed version: "Because the Dominator and I don't have evenly compatible DNA. We didn't realize it at the time, but Quad was an amazing stroke of luck. The next one would probably be horribly deformed or possibly cancerous." She didn't talk about her nightmares of that: expelling from her body not a baby but a writhing, multi-limbed, multi-headed tumor. Or the other nightmare of having to rip out her own uterus because of it. ('And that absolutely can't happen, that's why we have doctors, it doesn't need to be pondered.') Her face and mannerisms never betrayed her thoughts unless she wanted them to. "Did you ask just because you thought it was a standard for assassins?"

"It's not?" Ruby asked in instant defense. Oh fuck. This was another one of Sarah's set-ups- only this time Sarah was setting her up to have a child. Now she knew she should have gone for an actual sandpaper condom. ('Why doesn't the bitch just order it?')

"No. What I expect you not to do is be stupid like I was and end up going into labor on a mission. But why would it be a standard? For you it will be an operational downtime of one week for safety in a bit less than three months, and.. that's it."

"It will be. You're ordering me to have it."

"Yes. You're practically begging me to do that, and for good reason- if you choose to have it, you'll feel responsible for whatever happens because of that choice, but it you choose to abort it you'll wonder what could have been. And all of this is mixed up with both sane emotions and retarded normal concepts that have no place anywhere." What meaning did 'pro-life' have for pros at death? How could either of them even say the words 'pro-choice' without laughing? "Giving you no decision is better, and gives us another valuable engineered. If you like, you can consider it repayment to the Operator for your changes; he'll probably want to see someone grow up with an electricity and fire combination."

"It'll have both?"

"Absolutely. The genes are fully dominant, and the retrovirus gave you both two copies." The genes each took up a significant portion of what would otherwise be junk DNA. The Operator would probably curse himself later for using up such valuable chromosomal real estate, but that was how science marched on. "Don't worry about that. After the colossal fuckup making me and the twins incompatible, I'm pretty sure the Operator learns from his mistakes."

"That's... not it," she said quietly.

"You are valuable to me, but I'm sure I can find a suitable replacement among all my other, less personal, servants for a week. But that's not it either, is it?"

"I..." Her head slumped a bit. She was going to have his baby. After she grudge-fucked him. The first time she does something she feels like in a decade, and now she either has to 'deal with the consequences' or kill herself, although Sarah would never use remotely the same words as one of those moral-sanctity-of-life hypocrites even if the effect was the same.

"Is it some sort of punishment? You carry around a few extra kilos for a few months and create a new person. Welcome to female reproduction. Everything else is taken care of by our support system. Where does the problem come in?"

Ruby had promised herself she'd try to adopt Sarah's aloof mindset, but this was just plain alien. But.. Sarah wasn't wrong. Every time she came up with an objection it was either the same sort of normal-world bullshit they were both trying to throw out of her mind as the trash it was, or inapplicable to her new biology, or forgetting about things like Northberg. Only three months, a third of a normal's gestation time, less than a pig's and more than a dog's. She wouldn't have to raise the child herself. The child's safe, stable, mostly-pleasant future was fairly well guaranteed. A pregnancy would do all of jack shit to an engineered after the milk stopped flowing, let alone the long run. (And normals, she reminded herself, don't have much of a long run.)

"There isn't one. Not here in this body in this society. But is there something else I should be learning here? Because I feel like I've been set up."

"Two slightly post-pubescent servants with a lot in common under the same roof with no other potential mates?" Every clause Sarah added made it sound more and more laughably obvious. She could have just ended it with 'Two slightly post-pubescent'. "I'd say the situation sets up itself. Don't look at me like that. You invited him."

"How do you know that?"

"Because if you didn't, we would be having a louder conversation about Paul's loss of a servant."

Said servant staggered in the door ten hours later at dinner time, taking off his shoes before he entered to avoid dragging bloody dirt all over his master's floor. "Oh Christ I never thought I'd have to plow down that many sheeple," Luke muttered. He started to go upstairs to change clothes, as even his stain-resistant clothing was splashed with various substances.

"Sit down and eat something before it's all gone," Paul told him instead, and he gratefully did just that, digging into the sauce-covered pork and shrimp with an inhuman appetite as his master hugged him with one arm. "You proved your worth out there today. Thanks, Luke."

"Going to tell us what happened?" Howard asked them.

Luke took a deep breath between bites. "Paul says, disappear three groups of people. No sweat. But, power vacuum. There were some other groups they were worried about who would have taken their place. So, I shot those guys with the first group's guns and made it look like a fight. There were so many different groups out there, they all wanted each other's turf, Javier never really controlled what they did, so eventually I just ended up killing all of them." He had killed more than five hundred people in total, reporting in regularly, telling his master over and over again that he could take care of it without more help than the handful of Enforcers he'd brought, using the jet-helicopter to hop from target to target like a frog of death. "There's a lot in the database, but if you want the whole details, forget it; I didn't record anything, and I don't write books or know anyone who does. It's all secrecy-good, it's what happens out there, and there's probably other other groups waiting to take their place."

"There are. My problem," Paul said. "Some of them I can get real control over, some belong to other locals. We'll clean this shit up." Paul would inform his peers that he'd used one servant for something that even Sarah would probably use several squads for, and make them talk to him through direct intimidation if all else failed. It'd probably be all normal-world settled in a couple of weeks, he'd have his local servants make it look like another coup attempt or something. More importantly, the twins had their sixteenth birthday party coming up soon; they elected to have it on his local South American turf, and fortunately they warned him in advance so he could prepare a nice secret area, misusing local Incan ruins for the purpose. He'd have fun with it, subtly reminding the twins of the temple-of-doom test they were required to survive before Howard was proclaimed Dominator. He hadn't been there himself for that one.. it was better if he didn't think about where he was when they were doing that. He, along with his servant, would rather think about food at the moment.

"Luke, you're going to be a father," Ruby said as Luke took a particularly large bite.

He did not choke nor spit out his food as she half-expected; he meticulously finished chewing it, staring at her. "No, I'm not." She opened her mouth. "No, I know what you mean, you mean that I got you pregnant last night. I'm not going to be a 'father', that thing doesn't exist here. The kid'll be raised in North Medical with the rest of the.. servants."

"Northberg," Howard corrected him. "And the disconnect isn't as complete as you think. You'll be a dad, you just won't be expected to act like one. Unless Paul...?"

"Not even going to go there," Paul said. "But Luke, really? Are you going to give up the whole concept of fatherhood because of a few assholes?"

"You don't even want to know.. if I ended up being.. look, I killed the old bastard for a reason, all right?"

"I'm sorry, I seem to have forgotten something," Paul said. "Your genetics are what, now? Your society is what? You live where, you do what for a living- you just got done doing what at how many frags per hour?" Luke didn't reply. "At least you're not bringing up the idea of it ending up with someone psychotic."

But what did he care? It wasn't his problem.

Chapter 31

Jeremy and Kylie had been married shortly after Kylie's retrovirus, in a small formal wedding attended by Illuminati young and old, including both their mentors and a number of other engineereds. Joey served as best man, Sally was one of a handful of bridesmaids (leaping six feet into the air to catch the thrown bouquet), and the minister was a LaVeyan Satanist. Jeremy didn't bother inviting the Duumvirate because he knew they wouldn't accept it (and was somewhat disappointed when they didn't show up on their own initiative), Sarah didn't respond to his invitation, and he didn't invite Paul because he was still pissed at him for his Jerry Springer-style mockery and annoyed that someone like that would live with the Duumvirate. Jeremy even favored attacking Paul whenever possible in the laser tag competition on the twins' birthday, and Paul had used his aggressiveness against him more than once. The two had patched things up since then, mostly due to Joey's influence and a few gentle prods by Kylie. Inviting Paul over for tea was his way of telling him that all was forgiven and they could be friends again.

Kylie opened the door for the visitors, and only the thinnest of self-discipline prevented their jaws from dropping. While Kylie was strikingly beautiful as a normal, her face wasn't absolutely perfect and her hips didn't have quite that shape. She looked like she'd stepped off a magazine cover, altered genetics taking the place of of image editing. Of course if she was still a normal her back would be hurting from the weights on her chest and she'd have a hard time walking in those boots. While both Paul and his servant did their best to pretend not to notice, a casual glance at the front of their pants could determine their opinions of Kylie's modifications. Sure, Paul knew, he could have as many women as he wanted and they could all look like that, and he wouldn't even need hard control as he could find ones receptive to the idea quite easily. But a genuine Illuminated girl, capable of controlling nations and manipulating events to suit her will, who intentionally made herself even more of a sex goddess? Jeremy had hit the absolute jackpot, and Paul's attempt at hiding his instinctive envy was no more successful than hiding his carnal reaction, particularly when she walked out of the room. He hated to see her leave but he loved to watch her go.

Paul's envy was also a reason Jeremy had invited him over. The smug smile said it all: Hope that crow tastes good. But it was all in good fun and Paul was prepared to eat a lot more crow than Jeremy was willing to serve up.

Sally, surprisingly enough, had her looks altered only to a minor extent. Kylie had given her only one real command when she went into the psychologist's room: Don't try to outshine me. But the psychologist had convinced her to take a different route, informing her that her freckles would be erased automatically (engineereds can't freckle), helping with slight alterations to her base facial structure, but letting her know that there was nothing wrong with being short and wide. So Sally was no longer chubby but stout, C-cup breasts and a small layer of fat over layers of muscle. She was surely stronger than any of them, and Paul found it likely that she could lift even more than a Dominator could without breaking her spine.

There was also a somewhat familiar scent in the room, very faint, somehow industrial in nature. Paul didn't comment, choosing instead to sit with Jeremy at a table and start talking business. Oh boy, Joey thought. Politics. Jeremy wasn't making him stand here and listen to things he knew he'd never fully understand, even retroviral. He silently slipped away from the conversation, gesturing to Luke to follow. Luke did, less out of curiosity than wanting to get out of that room. Having unobtainable tail (or so he assumed) wagged in his face once was quite enough.

Normal men would construct a shed or a garage to play and experiment in. Illuminati, with secrecy concerns and better excavation equipment, dig sub-basements. Once again Jeremy had aped his Dominator in style, although the elevator didn't go quite as far down and there was only one room as of yet: a room with several dozen firearms, all bearing the same odd shape with a thick, wide barrel and compact design, and a coated wall some fifty feet behind a series of lines drawn on the floor. Luke realized what he'd scented on Joey: burned explosives. Joey saw Luke sniffing and nodded. "Yeah, the new compound's not perfect yet and the air filter'll be in a couple of days. So, how many times have you been shot at?" he asked with a bit of a grin. Luke rolled his eyes a bit: What, are we comparing non-scars now? Joey hadn't been shot at, almost certainly- he was simply too nice. ('No, wait... this kid could probably be shot at all day and still be just as happy-go-lucky afterwards.')

"A few," he said hesitantly. If the target was able to shoot back, you were doing something wrong. He'd done a number of wrong things fighting Garavito's normals, but that was what hands-on experience was all about.

"Ever had to actually dodge?" he asked, standing just behind a firing line on the floor. 

Luke had to think about it. Did he? He didn't feel like he dodged, he just moved where the bullets weren't going. But that was the definition of dodging. "Yeah. A couple times."

Joey fired. The pellets embedded themselves into the wall in front of him instantly, cracking and tearing the ballistic plastic; the air shockwave was heard as an amazingly loud PAK! It took Luke a moment to grasp what he just saw. "Think you could dodge that?" Joey asked as the destroyed plastic was swept backwards like bowling pins and a fresh wall- must be more than ten feet thick- was lowered in its place. How much of that stuff could Jeremy have.. oh, they're melting and re-molding it.

"Um. No?" That was like something out of Ratchet & Clank, some kid's idea of a super sawed-off made real. It must have a hell of a kick.

"I couldn't either. It's okay, I can let you try it," Joey said, offering him the gun.

"Sure, I'll try." The weapon was relatively light. "Hold up.. are you implanted?" It came out almost as an accusation.

"Yeah. When Jeremy got me, he did it." Luke looked askance at Joey's casualness, and Joey misinterpreted it. "Jeremy's been my friend long before this." The hell?

"It might be a little late for this, but find better friends," Luke replied, firing into the wall to accentuate his point (it did have a solid kick, but not quite what he was expecting), and Joey sent the audio, sans gunshot, to his master upstairs. Easier than sending word-symbols, and carrying all of the spite.

Paul and Jeremy, two floors above, were leaning back, watching a normal movie on low audio with their feet sharing a cushion. Their conversation had quickly shifted to a larger political view. Understanding the massive pileup of Illuminati plots was fundamentally impossible without zooming out to larger forces.

"It's a matter of cultural trends. When the Duumvirate.," Paul was saying, when Jeremy suddenly raised a hand.

"I think it might be a little late for this, but find better friends," Jeremy said in a fairly good interpretation of Luke's darker voice.

Paul started chuckling. "I knew he'd say something like that!" Jeremy held up a hand again, as it was continuing.

"There is no possible way that I could find a better friend," Joey said with solemnity.

Luke was taken aback. "Do you know what you could have been, what you could have done? He's taken every piece of freedom you ever could have possibly had. And you're praising him for that. It's actually what you want." Disgust crept across his face like a cockroach, starting at the edge of his left cheek and moving inwards. Paul and Jeremy laughed at him.

Joey started chuckling. "Freedom. Luke- there are two ways it could have happened. Either Jeremy picks me up, or he doesn't. He does. I'm here. I'm retroviral. I do minor errands and test weapons, when we're not slacking off- and we do a lot of slacking off, actually. I help him rule. Now, compare. What would I be doing right now, if he didn't pick me up? I'm seventeen." ('Three years older than me, damn he doesn't act like it.') "I'd be in high school still. Worried about.. homework, grades, maybe a date to.. to some prom or something." He spoke of normal life like men speak of bad jobs, and the comparison between some random normal and his lovely, powerful assigned-girlfriend was obvious. "Looking for.. a college. Still living with my dad." The next words were straight from Jeremy: "I think you can appreciate not wanting that, can't you?"

The bile did not stop and the sarcasm rose. "And so you have retreated to this magical land of milk and honey, where all you must do is be your- heh- friend's bitch for all eternity, to enjoy the comforts of a perfect life. Truly, you have beaten the system."

"Luke, you idiot, I am the system now. So are you." Joey had a microscopic bad side, and yet somehow this.. fiend in front of him was inerrantly aiming for it.

Luke felt a hidden feeling, almost a calling, spring into action. This was no longer about conversation. This was about conversion. Sarcasm was unleashing Joey? Okay, add more sarcasm. Pile on a little Illuminati power, he knew enough had rubbed off on him by now, use the correct cadence of voice tone, lean forward just a bit and narrow his eyes. "Congratulations, cog, on your promotion to Head Cog! Now you can be turned less frequently and enjoy more polish. The only price, of course, and it's a real cheap one, is that no matter how much social upheaval or unrest happens out there, you will never be able to make your own real decisions in here. Ever." Luke would have been surprised to know very similar thoughts were in William's head roughly five years ago. Jeremy repeated the words with a bit of approval- Paul had gotten himself one hell of an acquisition- but Paul didn't like hearing them. He had been a servant just a few years ago, too. Being reminded of the percolating indignity was not a pleasant experience.

Luke's bile choked in his throat when he saw the peaceful, happy smile on Joey's face. Was he actually speaking to someone for whom that was a comfort?

"Technically, you can. Right now you're holding one of the few weapons that can kill one of us. And for all your hatred, you're not going to use it." Jeremy was surprised at the conversational gambit, but figured it was all right. Luke wouldn't actually... would he?

"No. What would be the point?" Of all Paul's various warnings, 'Don't do anything retarded' stuck out as the most sensible. Killing some fucked-up happy boy like Joey when Gritzl (or Rhines.. 'please let Rhines have a clone, so I can kill him') was still out there somewhere? Waging one-man war against everyone and everything was a very, very tempting proposition, but.. then what? And why the hell would he start here? If he was going to do that he'd start with the Duumvirate and work his way down. "The only one of us with a reason to do that is you, Joey. We might have different definitions of friendship, but my friends don't put shackles on my mind."

What he didn't know was that saying that amused Paul with extra schadenfreude, and tempted him to do it, a humor he borrowed straight from the twins. 'You know how I said I wouldn't implant you? Yeah... about that...' It wouldn't be anything personal, really.. no. It was 'Holy crap I can actually do that now, even to him, oh God he'd never expect it, that's awesome' to think about, not so awesome to actually do. Paul could bobble his sense of justice, but wouldn't actually drop it. If he did that, he'd start remembering Damien again, in increasingly vivid detail.

Joey looked at Luke with real pity. "You almost understand. It's painful to watch. Oh, and Luke? Just so you know, we're telepathic to each other," he revealed, tapping himself on the forehead. Luke's surprise was negligible. "He says they're both getting a kick out of this."

Which was also unsurprising. It would be like Paul to think it was funny, wouldn't it? Even something like this. Luke almost said something particularly hateful, but didn't want to make them laugh even harder... instead, he tried to imitate someone higher than they were, and took the long view. "Let's have this conversation again in fifty years." Fifty, a hundred, two hundred, on and on and on, forced to do everything your friend (oh Satan, was he ever starting to hate that word) told you to do, all the time, with no letup, no respite, not even in your own head? Luke had skimmed through both the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, what was that.. something about the mind making Heaven out of Hell? Was it even really Joey's mind now? Would it be in fifty years?

Joey just smiled at him. "Maybe I'll rethink it. Maybe he'll rethink it." He was interrupted by the elevator opening- holy shit, perfect timing- "But right now, I'm going to go do things with a girl who doesn't want to burn me to death," he said, still smiling. Fuck, did everyone know about Luke and Ruby?

Luke saw the conflict in Sally's eyes, the hesitation in her movements, the semi-forced smile of someone gradually deciding it wasn't that bad and she should just get used to it. 'Does he not see that? Is he blind?' But of course Joey saw it, it was just a problem to be worked out, and then they could all live happily ever after...

Luke's finger tightened in place- almost putting pressure on the trigger- if he squeezed, he really would begin one-man war, right now- he forced himself, with conscious effort, to wait until they had left before firing at the wall. He had made his Faustian bargain, after all, and there was no good reason to renege on it. "Fuck this place!"

All right. Forget the S&M bullshit- it wasn't the same as the insane crap he'd been through, not even close. He was in a room full of weapons deadly to engineereds. Sighing, he basked in the temptation for five seconds before looking at the varieties. Just the same design reiterated over and over again, the variety being in the subtleties and refinements. A couple had longer barrels, but the real nasty ones had short ones for wider spread- in fact the one he had just fired had practically no barrel at all, just a large hole. He looked at the computer and tried to process what he was reading.

The explosive was a gelatinous, plasticine substance, spread in careful patterns behind each tiny pellet. The expanding gas of a firearm barrel actually did very little to propel them past the initial blast, for reasons he didn't quite grasp. Things were mentioned about pistol shrimp and cavitation bubbles, with some quirk of physics that let them scale it up... "What the hell?" he muttered aloud. He'd researched firearms a bit in his spare time, these things violated pretty much everything... he read more, focusing on application rather than physics. Since one pellet and one piece of gelatin were one 'shot', there were even a couple of designs with variable-load ammunition, but you had to pull this lever or press that button or squeeze this other thing just-so to control the size of your next blast, and who wanted to do that in a firefight?

Well, hell! Some people didn't need to move their hands to send variable signals. Smiling, he entered a note- they'd be surprised as hell to have him actually giving useful advice, in the standard didactic style he'd gleaned from reading similar reports.

Make a variant that allows electricity to be sent through the handgrips, determining load size on a linear scale. Doing so facilitates ammunition conservation amid periods of maximum use. Additionally, this makes it impossible for enemies without electrical supplies to use the weapon.

Shouldn't he say more? Whatever, they'd get the idea. And he couldn't resist:

P. S.

He sat at that screen for a while, wanting to say something suitably insulting. P. S., fuck you. P. S., eat shit and die. No, they'd just laugh. P. S., cut the shit and just start torturing him. No, they'd just laugh more, and continue on their way. P. S., the more you torture him, the more you prove my point. Maybe.. but he wasn't, that was totally the wrong word, it didn't work like that here. But... wait, what was that girl's name?

P. S. Sally's horror only proves my point.

There we go. Practically guaranteed to cause some discord in the Jorgensen household. Satisfied, he saved the message, and went up the elevator. Where to go now? Paul and Jeremy were fine without him, Joey and Sally were... elsewhere, and he didn't want to meet Sally's mistress as it might end badly.

"Luke, come here," Paul commanded as he stepped out. Ah, right. No decisions for himself. Just like Joey.

"Jeremy isn't convinced you can move metal without touching it by your own power." A series of iron-containing objects were laid out on the table- a few used bullets, a couple of other shapes, some tiny bits of scrap. "Dispel his ignorance."

Luke drew his baseball bats, then in a fast, practiced move, put them handle-to-handle and slipped a long fabric-and-wire condom over them, forming a staff. Gripping the metal contacts, he kept up a steady full-strength discharge.

Nothing, at first- then a slight pull as he poured power into it- then he pointed the north side with his right hand and everything on the table, from five feet away, accelerated towards him and slammed into the end of his staff. The viewscreen's corner went rainbow. Jeremy felt his guns pressing into his back. There was a brief burst of mental confusion as-- holy shit, he can't be powerful enough to affect those?!

"Shit!!" Jeremy shouted, covering his head with his hand, a gesture Paul didn't quite understand but Luke did. "How's that even possible?!"

Luke flipped the staff around and depleted the field some- everything was still stuck to it, but the screen restored and Jeremy got his telepathy back. "Two main things for electromagnets: The number of turns in the coil so I can pour watts into it faster, and how much of a field the material can handle. There are a whole lot of turns in this thing, and it can hold a huge field." In his considered opinion, molecular materials development fucking ruled. Regular neodymium alloy was a joke next to this stuff. He could keep discharging into this until he started messing himself up.

"Fuck.," Jeremy said. "I think you can divert bullets." The obvious problem he didn't realize until it was out of his mouth, because he was mentally explaining to Joey just what the neural equivalent of slamming one's hands on the keyboard had actually been.

Paul started guffawing. "Yes," Luke said. "In my direction." Ah, how he wished he could actually wield a diamagnetic tool and tear things apart from afar. Physics, damn them, did not work that way. I am Volto! My right hand.. attracts! My left hand.. also attracts! Well, at relatively short ranges with suitably magnetic materials. He finished depleting the field and let the stuff fall back down to the table, disassembling his weapon back into its components.

Jeremy looked at him. "That.." Pause. "I'd like to say it's useful, but I can't think of a lot of actual uses for it." Maybe if you needed to fish keys out of a sewer or something? Everything else he could think of could be accomplished by simpler methods.

I can. "There's plenty. Sometimes just being able to pull some things and not others is worth it," Luke replied.

"Heh. We know about that," Jeremy said. Paul waved him off, and Luke knew where he wanted to go- the roof.

He passed Charles on the way there. The two were of a height, and in one glance the brutal, animose teenage killer and peaceful, servile old accountant discovered they saw eye-to-eye. On a great many things.

The roof was sloped by only twenty degrees, and he could dig in his heels and feel the May sun on his face. He laid on the tiles, dead to almost everything, leaving the window ajar so he could eventually hear his name while Jeremy showed Paul the weapons of doom.

Paul was glad Jeremy was the one responsible for testing them, even if he didn't like the new order of things that they represented. It was certain that the enemies had these weapons by now, and whether Barnum would be able to trace them after-the-fact meant little if the Duumvirate was a few white and red smears on a wall somewhere. Jeremy's servant doing the testing meant that the new ones were designed to engineered sensibilities, and normals might not find them as readily accessible; that could mean fractions of a second, which was an eon in combat.

They went back upstairs, and Kylie was waiting for them at the table, doing some business on her phone, and Paul felt he just had to say it: "Kylie, why exactly did you dress up to tease me?" For what it was worth, she was a married woman, even if it felt strange to think of her as that.

"No," she answered casually, "I always dress like this." Paul wasn't sure whether or not it was plausible. Did she really wake up every morning and put on a low-cut ass-hugging minidress, elbow-length gloves with slits for her nails, and calf-length boots with nine-inch ballet heels and another two inches of platform? Come to think of it, she probably did.

"Even so, it's not going to affect how I make decisions," Paul said, his tone somewhat apologetic. Jeremy smiled at him. "No, really. I don't think we're going to make any deals between us, at least for the foreseeable future, but whatever techniques you use on everyone else are just not going to work. Not on me. I have too much shit to worry about."

Kylie could say that she wasn't trying to affect his decision-making with her sexuality, but that would be transparent bullshit. She always dressed like that because it gave her a permanent negotiation advantage, and she and Jeremy even had sex in the middle of certain deals to throw people off-balance. She also didn't ask whether Paul was trying to convince them or himself. She smiled with one side of her mouth, mentally commanding her servant to fetch tea. "How about a different kind of deal. A story for a story?" she suggested.

"I have plenty of those," Paul said, chuckling. "Which one do you want?" He was curious what she wanted to know about the twins.

"Tell me how you got that servant of yours. The real story, especially what's been left out of the files." The public files didn't say much on the subject beyond 'This servant was acquired when this Illuminatus was terminated.' Paul hesitated, not for his own interests but for Luke's. Even telling anyone what he had seen and killed in there felt wrong. "Before that, tell me why you even got someone like that, what purpose could he have to you that someone else couldn't fulfill?"

That was an easy one. "Because he adds elements to my repertoire that I didn't have before. Why did you get a servant so unlike yourself?" Sally came in with the tea then, and Paul took a sip. He'd never tasted anything like it and wasn't about to ask for the brand, as it likely didn't have one.

"She needed a place. The school we went to was bad for her, she was tormented and pinched almost constantly, her parents were.. monsters, and she was practically begging for someone to take charge of her life and offering perfectly good service in return. She would have done anything for a friend. I took that deal." She looked at the smiling Paul. "Same thing?"

"Similar. I'll tell you the story, but it never got put into the database for a reason. It doesn't leave this household. Capiche?" They nodded, and Paul told them the story, leaving nothing out (including the initial reason for it), going deep into lurid detail, and focusing on how subliminally wrong it all was. Like anyone telling good horror stories, Paul was pleased when Jeremy and Kylie's skin crawled. The masters couldn't help but transmit some of it- Sally and Joey's skin was crawling even worse, Sally feeling an impending nightmare and Joey feeling like he'd been blindsided- 'Someone did that to him?' And while they were enjoying such a peaceful afternoon, too.

"O-kay," Kylie said awkwardly. "I guess I shouldn't have asked. And, a story from me..?"

"Why you aren't a servant. 'The real story, especially what's been left out of the files.'", he imitated, smiling.

"That's the first real question he asked me," she said, gesturing to Jeremy. "All right. The known stuff first."

She took a long sip of tea, considering where to start. "Charles was my grandfather's estate manager. When Grandpa died, Grandma died almost right after, and my dad had no idea what to do. He had Charles, of course, but while Charles is good with facts and figures and some other things, he's no good with leadership. My grandpa sat on the board of a million different companies, and my dad had no idea where to even start, he was about thirty at the time and had never worked a day in his life. He was confused, everyone knew it, and eventually a man came up to him, offering direction and guidance, competent help, all for the price of following a few commands and keeping a secret." Paul nodded. Faustian bargains were an efficient, well-known way of getting servants. (He wondered if that made him more satanic than Luke, which was a sobering thought.)

She arched back her shoulders for a moment, stretching her top. "So. Few years later, Rick takes my dad to this big party somewhere, whole lot of guys and their servants, and Dad meets this other servant, basically a whore, and takes her for about five minutes in a closet. She.. became pregnant. Her master.. for some.. reason, let her carry the baby but not keep it, my dad was the one who had to raise her." Kylie was an only child. "Almost sixteen years after that, my dad is killed by Roger Beck's assassin, Rick gets some help and takes revenge, I get the stuff, yadda yadda yadda."

She took a deep breath, making an O with her lips as she exhaled. "Now, this part.. doesn't enter your household. Or anyone else's. You'll see why."

"Lips are sealed," Paul said. He had no intention of giving away her secrets.

"Charles never was Rick's servant, not really. Roger managed to get him to hedge his bets in case something happened to Rick or my dad. And this was very early on, before I was born. Charles never quite told him everything, but Roger had inside information on Rick for almost twenty years." She paused for a moment, considering whether to tell the story in chronological order or otherwise. "Roger heard from Charles that Rick was going to do some sort of coup, or manage to take his resources, but Charles suggested that he could turn it to his advantage instead if he did this, that, and the other thing. It's technical if you want it.."

"I have enough of my own technical problems. Just keep going."

"Anyway, he didn't. He killed Dad instead, starting to do a takeover. And.. Rick and Charles started working together, seeing who could help. Charles calls up this engineered girl, Vicky.. Roberts, I think? I'm.. I was Robins, she's Roberts. Some geneticist at Northberg. Anyway, he calls her up, and tells her that Roger's going to end up taking me as part of some kind of deal. Roger was actually hitting on her or something, I don't know who said what but he was a dirty old man and it ticked her right off. So when Charles tells her Roger's going to start stealing a guy's stuff and raping his servant, she..."

"She flies off the handle. Splatters him," Paul finished for her. Jeremy chuckled and took a swig of tea.

"It was.. you wouldn't even... Something about spores. Something else about a dragon." Paul nodded, although he wasn't sure how he wanted to know those two things could be combined. Spores could be deadly and Northberg's dragon was not something even an engineered wanted to fuck with, even if it was still the size of a small child. "I'm not even sure if she believed Charles. Maybe she was just looking for an excuse. Anyway, he dies, end of Roger. This is where the shit hits the fan. Charles calls up Rick- right there on the screen- and tells him that if he doesn't make me an Illuminatus and give me Roger's stuff, he's going to take everything he knows about Rick and Roger, and make it public before killing himself." Paul's eyes widened. "Not public public, we're not talking about a secrecy breach, but all Illuminati. And remember, Charles was Dad's man for years. He knows everything." Paul finished his teacup and poured himself another. Jeremy and Kylie had good taste in the stuff. "I think Rick was kicking himself for not using implants, because he didn't have a choice. I got Roger's stuff, I'm still in some.. I guess you can call it long-term debt, especially to Vicky, but it's mine, and for secrecy he said I could just have the estate. Charles managed to keep all the stock and position stuff my dad had for me, too, some more secrecy there." Normal resources, but still valuable. "So, a lot of those companies that Rick and Roger were fighting over? Yup. I own them." She smiled wide. "But now the rest of it. That coup that Rick was going to do? He wasn't. Couldn't. And that stuff Charles suggested that Roger do? Unworkable. Roger's solution was obvious, my dad had to go."

"And Charles had known him for twenty years. He knew he'd come to that conclusion," Paul said, the light beginning to dawn.

Charles stepped around a corner then, having been listening around it for some time, holding his hands behind his back and smiling. Paul looked at the servant, pointed at himself, and drew a quick finger across his lips. They are zipped. Paul turned back to Kylie in wordless questioning.

"See, Rick and my dad had been talking about where I was going to end up. My dad.. if he wanted to keep me with him, he could have just said so. Rick would have listened." Paul nodded, as he had normal-world servants with their own children. "But he didn't. I think he just wanted me out of the house. Of course, before this I had no idea about any of this stuff. So, I was going to get sent away to some.. well, hopefully nowhere like you were talking about. But Charles wasn't my dad's, or Rick's, or Roger's. He was my servant, all along."

"From the day you were brought home, my lady," Charles said. Paul understood at once. He'd intended to ask the $64,000 question of 'What have you been doing with Charles to make him do these things for you', but understood the answer: Nothing. Charles simply liked being owned and controlled by his princess.

Kylie giggled at him, and waved him off. "He's so adorable. He was actually the one who suggested that I should find a boyfriend around my own age, someone established. He was to be young, capable, engineered, and preferably a personal friend of the Dominator. Jeremy was my second choice, but I figured you would already have all the girls you'd want," she said, with a faint, precise sigh, subtly chiding Paul for being such a hopeless virgin.

Paul knew that he could ask to have a threesome right then and there, and in all likelihood get it, Jeremy pumping Kylie from behind while she took his cock in her mouth, and knowing her she'd probably drink every last drop. It was beyond tempting. If he were telepathic with Luke he probably would have done it. "Then you made the right choice," he said instead. "I won't be led around by the dick."

Jeremy's smug look said it all: Your loss.

Paul looked back: Then I'll take the loss.

They returned to talking about more conventional politics.

Luke woke up from his half-trance, his black clothing warm to the touch, the shadows just a bit longer than before. Paul led him out the door, fresh from an adrenalin rush from some fast game or other, a smile wide on his face, gleefully waving goodbye to his fellow Illuminati. 'He's as much of a happy boy as Joey...' No, Paul wasn't the same as that. Paul had guts of his own.

"Paul... what the hell is wrong with them?" Luke asked as he entered the aircraft first, sitting in the pilot's seat and starting the engines.

"There's nothing wrong with them."

Paul and Jeremy had discovered something of a fractal nature with regard to Illuminated plots; the small mirrored the large in fundamental ways, but not others; you could group 'qualities' as taking hold more in small than large, and extrapolate out what was more likely to cause what in which size group, only having to know a handful of facts about the nature of the group. Some things were diluted (personal quirks, anything you don't want to show anyone else you nominally trust), other things (ideological purity, unifying belief systems, and things that were related to that but didn't look like it) purified and magnified, if occasionally simplified. A different understanding of the world, if not altogether fleshed-out yet, and unlikely to work on Illuminati who intentionally twisted their own organizations.

Ergo, Paul really didn't need his new epiphany marred by this quasi-normal shit. Although Luke was more of a challenge than an obstacle for him.

"You know what I mean." Paul was the Illuminatus, right? He shouldn't need to have it spelled out.

"The way they act towards each other is because they love each other," Paul replied. "Shouldn't that be obvious?"

Pilot's chairs don't swivel, but Luke instinctively tried anyway before turning his head and body to shoot a glare of malice. Pet the porcupine backwards some more, why don't you, oh enlightened one? "Do you know.. what hearing that makes me want to do?" he asked, gritting his teeth. 

"Crash the jet?" Paul suggested. Which was exactly right. Smash it full-speed straight down.

"How the hell.. then why did you even... who the hell are you, Paul? Who the hell are you?"

"Your best friend?" Paul offered.

Luke sent a jolt through the armrests. There was a brief -sshk- as some subsystems reset themselves as designed. Good thing there was no ejection seat. "Oh what the fuck.. Y'know, I thought I was the biggest asshole. Yeah. Sure. I'm nasty. I'm mean. I killed my own parents. What the fuck ever. Yeah, I know, you waste sick fucks. Good for you. You, all of you, pass around slavery, real, permanent slavery, like it's some sort of.. game, you just expect things to go your way, you just ask for things and get them, but it's more than just that.."

"Are you talking about all Illuminati, or just the ones you know?"

"Just you. The ones I know, I guess. Not the assholes, probably not even most of them. But you, Howard and William, and Sarah, and Jeremy and Kylie, and a whole bunch more, not just engineered, you do this. All the time, it's all over that special Internet. And I want to know what the hell you're thinking."

"Luke, how long is it going to take you to understand that we've transcended authority? It's like food. Yeah, we need food, but we don't have to farm it ourselves anymore, or fight for it, or not be able to control the diseases in it. The whole concept of it is now our bitch. And I think that if Jeremy got Joey today, he wouldn't ask for control implants, but, eh. Oh well." Luke was facing forward again but knew Paul was shrugging. No big deal, right? Right. "C'mon, Luke- think of the worst thing you can possibly imagine someone doing to someone else with control techniques."

"The worst thing I can imagine? You don't want me to say this out loud, I think I'd melt your fucking brain." Even he didn't want to say it out loud, which spoke volumes.

Paul chortled, and watched the clouds roll by, enjoying the view, and the faint interplay of the sun on the windows. Shame he couldn't open one. That's what he needed: A jet-helicopter with a sunroof. "Okay. Now imagine Jeremy doing it to Joey." Luke was expecting 'now imagine me doing it to you' and his brain took a sharp turn. Joey's innocent, happy-go-lucky trust, gone in seconds, asking why through a flood of tears. "You know why he won't? Because he doesn't have the equivalent of an eating disorder. Howard's still got a big book of control techniques, and I think it's replaced so it doesn't go out of date- you might want to read it. There's all kinds of shit in there, everything from the basic stuff like shackles and rope, to whips, drugs, Skinner boxes, all sorts of cult techniques, control collars, and finally mind control implants. But it turns out that, at this point, we don't even need them anymore. And I don't think we- the 'we' when you said 'just you'- ever really did. You might not believe we're above authority, but you should probably hope so. Because, really? If we're not? You're pretty much fucked."

I'm not, Paul. You might think I am. But I learned something today. So long as I have magnetic weapons, implants won't work on me. And I can turn off anyone else's implants, too- any time I want. What would it do to withdrawal? Only one way to find out...

But, friend or not, he couldn't have any idea of that. "No. I don't believe that. I believe we're all fucking crazy."

"Good enough for me," Paul replied, and watched the clouds flow around the wings. "So what were you thinking about up there all day? Impending fatherhood?"

"I don't.. think about anything when I'm doing that. And I told you, I'm not going to be a 'father'. Northberg obviously knows how not to fuck kids up. I know. He'll be a servant for one of the 'just you'." He looked to the side. His face twisted up. Might as well admit it. "Beats being 'normal'. Joey was right about that much."

Opportunity is now! "Then quit being it," Paul said in his best commanding voice.

"I... Yes, Paul," Luke said. And began to laugh.

Jeremy had intentionally diverted Paul from the unexpected message; if Luke felt he needed to send something in private, then private it would be. He smiled at the idea- hey, send it on to Barnum, that wasn't a bad move- and winced at the P. S. Sally saw the message, pondered the kind of person who wrote it, and she and her mistress had a five-minute period of psychic recalibration and reconciliation.

He also wondered what the magnetic field actually did. After a long conversation with both the Night Operator and Stark, a review of the technologies and circuitry was deemed necessary, and this flaw and possibly some related ones would be fixed in all newly-produced implants.

Chapter 32

A call from Northberg was always welcome.

A call from the educational department was unusual.

The fact that the caller was a five year old boy with pink hair was even more unusual, and a bit startling.

What startled the twins even more was the greeting he offered:

"Hi, Dad."

This boy had two arms. Howard took a fifth of a second to figure it out before he asked, "Is Carlie your mother?" Howard's one-moment fling had been a redhead. The white of the twins' hair is a pigment, not merely the absence of one. The laws of genetics and unintended consequences produced the result.

"Uh-huh."

"What's your name?" Howard asked. The screen simply said "Northberg Educational", not identifying the caller.

The boy became upset and the Dominator realized he had given serious offense. "You don't even know my name?!" he blurted in Latin. He looked like he was about to cry or throw a temper tantrum, things much rarer among engineered kids than normals. William felt a brief, guilty pleasure in not personally having anything to do with this. He dimly recalled Howard fucking someone at his eleventh birthday party, but William, then a servant, hadn't touched the Illuminated girl.

"I don't. Carlie and I never talked much. I wasn't told she became pregnant," Howard replied. Not finding out had been an error of omission (or perhaps an error of emission) on his part. She had clearly been after his DNA, after all.

"It's Stan. Stan Dominus," he said, pouting. The twins shared a glance. They knew very well that Quad was the only Dominus on record at Northberg. What had happened was clear: The boy had been named by his mother, and then changed it himself when he realized who his father was. He glared at the twins, tears welling up in his eyes, as if he expected them to know what he wanted.

This was a hard thing for the twins to deal with. People showing up on their screen and acting like five-year-olds were nothing new. The response to such generally ranged from 'Shut up and stop acting like a five-year-old' to 'Shut up and stop acting like a five-year-old before I kick your ass'. But when the caller was an actual five-year-old against whom no threats or intimidation could be used (unthinkable!), who had a serious grievance against the Dominator himself- that was a very thorny situation, and there was an awkward silence of about two seconds, the three of them waiting for someone else to talk, before Howard spoke up again.

"Stan, I apologize. You should have known this from the start. I should have realized that Carlie was going to have you," he said and got a No shit, Sherlock look in response. He could have followed this with 'Didn't she ever tell you?' but there was no way he was going to pass the buck, especially not in front of a child who was supposed to look up to him, especially not one he had directly sired.

Howard was about to ask the boy what he could do to put things right, before Stan burst out in Latin, "Quad gets everything! He gets all these fun things to play with, made only for him, because he's your son, and I never got anything like that!" Engineereds his age had IQs that could turn water straight to steam if they were Fahrenheit, self-control far higher than any normal kindergartener, and were taught the life skills they'd use forever in a way that was state-of-the-art, but still had the life experience of extremely well taken care of five-year-olds.

"Are you talking about the simulators and the toy weapons that require three or four arms to use?" William asked.

"Yeah, all the things that are just for him. Him and Tetrina."

"That's just because of their arms. There's going to be more four-armed people. The technical engineers need to know what one of them can actually use, and so they give Quad all that stuff so he can figure it out for them," William replied gently. The boy's lips were tightly pursed throughout- he didn't want to interrupt his father (accepting the two-as-one nature of the Duumvirate is easy for kids), and he understood the basic logic, but he still wasn't happy.

"It's still not fair," he protested. 'Life's not fair' was not an option as a response. The engineered youth were distinctly told that that was the way normals treated each other; engineered masters were to treat each other better than that. For the boy to learn even-handedness for the future, to correctly make hard decisions and judgments that could affect many thousands or perhaps millions of other engineereds, he had to have his developing sense of justice satisfied now.

To that end, one thing that had to be settled. "So, you're envious of him?" Howard asked.

"Huh?"

"You're jealous. You want what he has," William told him. Stan looked to his right, and then looked back.

"I didn't know there was a word for it," he said in Latin.

"You are invidious of him," Howard replied. Stan didn't know that Latin root either. It made a bit of sense; why would Xavier include something in the curriculum that wasn't supposed to, and seldom had, come up? Engineered kids were supposed to be raised with an entirely different concept of greed than normals.

"You should never envy your brother, Stan." Stan looked to his right again at something offscreen. "His four arms are because he was simply very lucky." Continuing that with 'so are you' never crossed either twin's mind. "Feel happy for him instead; he is, after all, your brother."

"Invidia has no place in our future," Howard informed him. "As a concept it is useless. For engineered society it is worse than useless. Does him having something that you don't make you any worse off, except in the phrase 'by comparison'? That shouldn't matter in the slightest. If you don't think you're getting your fair share of Northberg's resources, inform Xavier." Stan visibly chewed on the Duumvirate's wisdom in an attempt to swallow it.

There was a pause in the conversation; the twins didn't want to lecture and were about to shut the viewscreen off when another boy yelled, "Hi, Duuuumbracchi!" The twins recognized the speaker by the phrase. When informed of the first words he had said to his fathers, he decided to keep right on calling them something like that. "I didn't know either!" Two blue-sleeved left arms reached the screen's view.

"We just found out," William informed Quad. "Be nice to him. He deserves it."

"Okay. I will." Howard turned the screen off, leaving the boys to settle their own problems.

Quad's face twisted up and he looked at Stan like he had grown more arms of his own, or possibly another head. "You really ARE my brother?" he exclaimed in Latin. Stan had told him first, but Quad thought it was bullshit- they were slightly more similar than other engineereds, yes, but there were some big differences, too- Quad was different from everyone, and not just the arms..

"We have the same dads," Stan replied in the same language. "It's why I've been so jealous of you." The English word was alien in his mouth. Gelous? Like jelly (which he thought was spelled 'gelly') and gelatin? It made no sense. Another one of those English things.

"No, they're all jealous of me, you just found another way around!" Simple logic had been inculcated into them from a very early age, and Stan could not deny it.

"It's just- Fuck. It." Stan forgot who he had learned this conversation reset button from. Some servant, probably. "You wanna come with me?"

"Okay." They left the area, waving to the others. The door had been left open; some of them had overheard, smiled, and waved back.

What happened next was the result of some normal's idea; an Illuminated engineer had taken one look at it and immediately pilfered it, thumbing his nose at the normal requirements of a far thicker sole. The boys slammed their heels together Wizard of Oz style and a system of struts hinged out of the boys' soles at the heel, telescoping downwards, with axles telescoping out from that, connected to bearings, attached to wheel halves which telescoped out as well, stretching a specially-made plastic to form a single, solid wheel on the back of each foot; the axles and wheels' halves connected with a loud clack, the axles and bearings disconnected from their locked-in position, and in less than a fourth of a second the boys were rolling on wheels seemingly from nowhere. All in all, it was like something out of Transformers, which the engineer in question didn't deny. Five year olds loved that sort of technology, giving them something more in common with mechanical engineers.

"So, um.. what are you gonna ask him for?" Quad asked as they rolled along.

Stan looked aside for a bit, obviously not wanting to answer. "Quad, why didn't you believe me?"

"Because I thought you were lying!"

Stan didn't really know why that was funny, but he was laughing anyway and Quad joined in. "Hey, air vent!" Stan exclaimed as they reached a corner, gesturing to one in the opposite direction of Xavier's office, Stan turning to the right instead of the left and Quad following, puzzled.

"You don't want to talk to Xavier?"

"If I did, what would he say?" Quad shrugged with his uppers, then realized that Stan had learned something important as they pulled off the grate, climbed in, and pulled it back in with some bars on the inside. 'Know what will happen when you do things' was a recurring theme of their education. Did it have a name? Wait, they had been throwing around a lot of English big words at some point.. behavioral planning, behavioral... prediction, that was it.

The air vents were one of the kids' best-kept secrets in a world where secrets were priceless. It was a network of passages to anywhere in the complex. With gratings that snapped off and on easily, it was one of the most popular pastimes for engineered kids. There was at least one air vent at ground level in every corridor, and air vents above every room. Made of a specific grade of Illuminated steel and embedded within the walls, they didn't echo or clang in the slightest. They were usually warm, but it was a comfortable sort of warm, and the walls were never hot to the touch. There weren't any hand-holds on the inside, but that didn't slow down engineered kids any- the walls had good friction and the kids simply climbed by pressing their backs to the wall or doing a split. There was only one known injury; apparently someone had done something stupid, broken his (or was it her? Quad couldn't remember) leg, then held the bone back together and just laid there until he could limp off, never letting an adult know.

It was also dark, with the only light reflecting in from the outside. Both boys found it comforting, like burying themselves under a mountain of blankets.

They climbed generally at random, trying not to backtrack, helping each other through some twists.

"I know where we are," Quad said after a while, looking down a vent grate into a surgery room. He didn't like this section very much. He had discovered the vent system when he was almost four, and enjoyed the climbing, especially when he found he could get a break from everything in there. It gave him a place of his own to think and be alone for a while, and even if they looked for him, he knew no Enforcer could fit in there. The surgery section was one of his favorites; he loved watching normals be modified, especially since he almost never saw normals at all. Even the insertion of implants, an increasingly brief procedure, fascinated him.

On one particular day, however, he had overheard that the famed Paul had brought a servant in; he waited eagerly above the surgery rooms, rapidly crawling back and forth between them to see what would happen. He got more than he bargained for. The not-quite-grownup smelled like a toilet for some reason, and instead of the usual stuff like the eye work and the dentistry, Quad had watched the experts scalpel out wires, actual bloody wires, from his guts and his head. Was Paul's new servant a cyborg? Did wires grow in cyborgs, or was that even possible? Weren't cyborgs not real? He had a lot of questions about that which he didn't want to ask anyone and give himself away, searches yielded nothing relevant, and he remained fascinated until he went to sleep that night.

But that night he received a Grade-A, prime-quality nightmare, and had never visited the section again.

"Quad? You all right?" Stan whispered.

"Yeah. I was thinking. Let's move." Quad liked saying 'Let's move'. It made him feel like an action hero. They scurried- Quad propelling himself on the ceiling with his uppers and the walls with his lowers- until they heard a very familiar voice.

"But I didn't work on the embryo!" the Operator shouted, with much less professionalism than any of the kids were used to. "All she got from me was an engineered egg in her uterus. I assumed she had found an engineered boyfriend, I didn't know it was him!" Even engineered ears couldn't catch the response, and the boys scampered forwards to hear more. "No, I didn't check, and before you say anything about a duty to know these things, you know very well I refuse to discriminate between engineereds. I don't do any detailed work when the embryo has engineered parents, you know we need the sexual random factor. The embryo was dividing nicely before it got to me anyway. Your job is to handle the rest."

A sigh was a response, the voice Xavier's. "You know where they are now?"

"They're probably crawling around in the air vents or something." Stan and Quad shared a look. Had the Operator heard them? What the fuck, the Operator already knew about the vents?

"Well, I suppose if they're together, it's all right." Xavier sounded relieved somehow. "But fuck's sake, Operator.."

"I know. Let's not let this happen again." There was a click, the Operator went back to work, and the boys shrugged and moved on, neither of them fully realizing what the Operator was talking about.

They went in new directions intentionally. They really didn't want to come back any time soon; coming back might mean they'd have to deal with this, and they didn't want to do that. They climbed down some and moved in one direction for a while before they reached a lightless area save for a tiny dot far away, and stopped, sniffing the air. It was heated, significantly, yet a few wisps of chill came through.

"You think we can go this way?" Stan asked.

"Yeah. But.. go slow. There might be traps." Wait, wrong word, Northberg wasn't actually trapped.. "No, not traps, just falls."

They continued directly forwards towards the light, with the strange tenacity of the very young. The heat was all around them- not enough to scald them, but uncomfortable, offset only by the increasingly chill breeze blowing in their faces. 

More intense cold greeted them as they continued towards the light, and they heard it: A fan was blowing directly from the outside.

They figured it out. Northberg was largely bipartite. The kids' side, with the training rooms, also contained the medical wing. On the other side were the Enforcer production facilities and research areas. Apparently this was a corridor linking the sides, and if the faint noise was any indication, it ran parallel to the tram.

"All right.. run!" Stan suggested, and started sprinting towards the fan. Quad followed him as fast as he could, ice crunching under his feet. The air blowing into their faces was easily thirty below. They blasted past it, pausing to rest only when they could no longer see in front of them.

"Quad, how can you be- huff- slower than me?"

"More weight." But he was faster climbing. "Come on. Let's keep going." They continued into the unknown, finally reaching the end and following a great many twists and turns over research labs, experimental facilities, and one room that smelled faintly of maple syrup.

"This one goes straight up. I wonder if there's an intake here?" Quad asked, feeling the lack of a ceiling on a corner.

"I'm not feeling the wind from it. That was the nonhuman lab. You know what's around here, don't you?"

"Isn't this.. the dragon!" Quad whispered excitedly, and rushed after his half-brother, who was gleefully making his way up, curling his body and pushing hands-and-feet up, finally launching himself with his feet around the top corner- and doing a weird half-sigh, half-sob.

"What the hell's up there?" Quad asked, in the middle of a six-limbed split-climb.

"See it yourself."

Quad neared the top, pushed off with three limbs, grabbed the lip, pulled his body up, and understood everything immediately.

Stan was mildly distraught, a bit like a normal kid his age who was told that Santa Claus was bullshit, because he was standing at the side of a miniature auditorium, with very dim lighting and sixteen child-sized seats, folding movie-theater style. The mini-auditorium looked down into the dragon's lair, where six legs and two tons of scaly fire-breathing death curled up and slept.

"They knew we were doing this, but they couldn't stop us, so they put this in," Stan reasoned. "Somebody told."

Quad sat down in one of the chairs, which was comfortable indeed. "No, Stan. They knew from the beginning. The vents that open are on the floor, but the ones on the ceiling don't open, because they don't want any of us falling through. They built it that way on purpose. For us. This is like.. the last room, where they let us know it was all just for fun." Quad was speaking slowly, mixing English and Latin to get his point across, making sure he had everything right, learning word choice. Insinuating- or was that admitting?- that they had been played with, or toyed with, or manipulated in some way would have caused bad reactions, in both Stan and himself.

"Isn't Skyler still working on that map?" Stan asked, reluctantly sitting next to Quad, watching the dragon sleep. 'That map' was a three-dimensional construct of all the air vents in the complex. A rather ambitious project for a five-year-old, even an engineered one. "Think we should tell him?"

"We don't have to. I wondered why he stopped talking about it. It was this great big thing for him, you remember? He had it more than half done and then.. he was suddenly interested in something else. This is the reason."

"Do you remember if anyone ever asked?" Quad shook his head, shrugging with all four arms. "I wonder if there's other last-rooms like this? We've got to ask him. Still can't believe that they would do this.. check this out. You hungry?"

"Oh, they didn't-" They had. A dispenser for energy bars in a hard candy shell, a water fountain, and a discreetly-placed toilet hidden around a small bend. The boys used all three. It was excellent after that much physical activity, but not satisfying in any meaningful way.

"Why does it suck now?" Stan asked as he sat back down, Quad sitting next to him with a glum look. "If it was all just a game, we've beaten it. We can watch the dragon from the best spots ever, in real life." Quad fished for an answer, but couldn't find one for lack of analogies. Engineered kids were taught from a very early age that it was the normals' world that was largely illusion, and the Illuminati the only social reality. They just didn't have this stuff happen to them.

It was like watching Mickey Mouse take his head off to reveal a sweaty immigrant's face beneath.

It was like seeing a spot on a movie screen when you were engrossed in the movie.

It was like seeing the strings holding the angel up.

It was learning that your secret hideout was neither.

And to top it all off, the dragon was taking a nap.

They looked at it anyway. It was still less than four years old, only slightly bigger than Quad, curled up in its blanketed nest, its wings wrapped around it as its six legs kicked. The kids were expecting smoke from its nostrils, but real dragons only expelled flame from the pyrogens in their noses and mouths. "I think it's having a nightmare," Stan said, and they sat down to watch. Quad was hoping for a shout and for it to jump out of its roost, soaring- but instead it quieted down and breathed easier.

"First they get bigger wings until they're about eight," Stan said after a bit, wanting to share his knowledge the way normal kids did with dinosaurs. "Then the wings shrink and disappear because they start getting really, really big and couldn't fly anymore anyway." Stan still didn't understand why that was in spite of the offered explanations. It weighed too much, but couldn't it have bigger wings, why didn't that work? Airplanes did it. "Not 'under their own power', well who else's vox would they fly under?" Or was that what he meant? Stan wished that Goldstein had used Latin instead of English, which had way too many meanings for 'power'.

Quad took about five seconds to figure it out. "Not vox, facultas. A jet's, probably. Wings of steel."

Stan's eyes lit up. He had originally been visualizing a dragon along the lines of fantasy; that changed to a dragon with tons of steel affixed to its back, blasting away with fusion engines at Mach 7. "I want to ride it."

"Me too! Like right into the middle of New York City." Screaming normals, fear galore, mass panic! Streak into the side of a building and come out the other ready for more! A good way to spend an afternoon.

They spent the next fifteen minutes talking about what would happen if they actually did that before they got bored and started heading back. Knowing there were no pits in the long vent, they sailed through it on their wheels, adding extra speed near the chilly fan.

They never did talk to Xavier, instead heading straight back to their area, laughing, knocking on Skyler's door. The boy had clearly been engrossed in something, and raised his eyebrows at them.

"Hey Sky, you have that map of the air vents?" Quad asked, and Skyler looked away as if he didn't want to talk about it.

"Oh, that. Yeah, I kind of stopped working on that, I've got so much other stuff-" Some of the kids liked English, some preferred Latin in casual conversation. Skyler used a mix.

"We know why you stopped. The real reason," Quad said, with a Dominator tone in his voice. "Can we come in?" Skyler gestured and shut the door after the half-brothers entered.

"So the two of you went to the training room?" Skyler asked.

"There's one in the training room?" Stan asked. "There's one looking at the dragon."

"The dragon? They must have just made it. I went in there, I mean I was in the room looking, and there wasn't any air vent attached to the system, and no cameras. It was heated on its own straight from the outside."

"Was there any glass?" Quad asked.

"There was a mirror, but.." His expression changed abruptly. "One way glass. Should have known." There was some contempt in his voice.

"What's the training room like?" Stan asked.

"You know how there's those eight cameras- have you two ever been there?"

"They bring me down there like every week for weapons testing," Quad answered, nodding. The eight well-shielded cameras were almost the only things in there that weren't meant to get shot.

"Maybe once. Can't remember," Stan replied, the envy still not quite gone yet.

"Well, of eight cameras on the ceiling, four of them are used for recording things. The other four, although they might still record.. are controlled in there. They even put in snacks, a bathroom,"

"And a water fountain," Quad finished for him. Skyler nodded.

There was a knocking at the door. Skyler answered it, removing the sorrow from his face.

It was Tetrina, all blond hair and pink ribbons and lower hands on hips and loud voice as usual. "Quad, tell me where you went!" Quad flashed a smile at Stan- see what I mean?- and then turned to Tetrina. "I'll tell you, okay? But I've got to talk to Skyler first. So, just.. wait."

"Did you go somewhere bad?" Tetrina asked. The concept of 'somewhere bad' felt strange to even consider. But what else was there?

"Yes, Tetrina. I went somewhere bad. But shut up about it or I'll never tell you anything again. I'll be out in a bit, okay?" Quad closed the door, not bothering to hear from Tetrina vis-a-vis whether or not it was actually okay.

"So did you just quit when you found out?" Stan asked.

"When I just found out? Guys- secrecy about this, okay?" Skyler did, in fact, wait until the half-brothers said it was okay before he proceeded. "I cried. I mean I just fucking.. cried. I mean, here I was mapping all this shit out, just for the hell of it really, and it turns out the whole thing's a fucking.. lie." He quivered as he spoke, as if he was about to cry again.

"I guess that was a.." Quad fished for the phrase. He wasn't four anymore, he knew adult English, he heard it a lot, what was it? "an unintended consequence. It was meant as a reward."

"No it wasn't," Skyler argued. "It was meant as a disappointment. I looked the whole concept up. Normals are disappointed all the time. Normals our age, even worse, it's psycho. Xavier can't do that to us because we'd kill him so fast his head would fly off." His tone of voice revealed that he had harbored fantasies about doing exactly that. "But they needed a way to teach us that not everything is right and that some things we like are just bullshit. But that was dumb because most of us are never going to know about it," The training room and dragon were both rather far, to the tune of a quarter kilometer for the training room and more than a half kilometer to the dragon. Larger spaces aside, that's a lot of vent crawling. "we're just going to grow up and forget this childish bullshit," he said in a tone intentionally defying his age. Wow, he was pissed. Talking about it was getting his anger up. He was almost four when he first heard of the vents, older kids talking in hushed tones about seeing one Dominator badly injured, his brother's hands embedded in his chest. He had seen it for himself, the twins asleep and physically joined together. The sight had led him to see what else he could discover; now he no longer cared.

"So that's why you didn't tell anyone." It was that and the fact that Skyler was the one who had snapped his fibula in that fucking vent and kept his mouth shut, tightly holding bone in place as best he could despite the horrific pain for about an hour until he could try to walk again, in silent agony for more hours because he didn't really make the fucking bone ends meet up after all, not even telling anyone it was he who had broken it (too embarrassing) but rather choosing to spread the word that 'someone' had...

"Yeah, Stan, you want to tell everyone about the secret little rooms at the end of a bunch of stupid fucking air vents? You do it, but leave me the motherfuck out of it. Keep my door closed. I never want to hear about this shit again." Skyler was a little over six years old, an age at which normal children would be still learning to read and playing pretend. Skyler was working on a scientific trade that would get him into the good graces of another Illuminatus and himself the fuck away from Northberg Educational.

"Last question, is that training room thing on your map?" Quad asked gently. They'd all learned as toddlers that there was no sense in pissing another engineered kid off. Nothing good ever came of it.

"I deleted that shit. All copies. You're from the Duumvirate and Sarah, you want a map, you can probably beat it out of Xavier." Skyler turned to his computer in finality, and Stan and Quad left his presence.

Once they did, he actually did delete the map he had made, simply out of spite and rage. He returned to his studies, trying to figure out how the architect Dr. Morris Flatland had improved his technique over twenty years, using such thinner materials. Wait, of course- his technique hadn't improved so much, it was the molecular constructors that came into the picture; Flatland didn't grow up as an adult, the fucking technology did! Duumvirate's balls, Skyler could probably get out of here just by offering to help rebuild his older stuff to modern specs, but he needed to grab some solid-minded servants before he did... and if that old bastard didn't help him out, he'd find a way to get the power to start the business himself...

"Well?" Tetrina asked as they left, with her lower lip out in a pout. 

'I know she has four arms too, but why does she keep hanging on to me?' Quad thought. Tetrina had just turned five. She had paid particular attention when the screen was talking about normal family dynamics. In her fantasies, Quad was the 'husband', although he could be nothing like the husbands she saw, and she was the 'wife'. She'd have him even if she had to construct high-powered magnetic fields to do it.

"Don't tell anyone I was at the dragon. There's a special way to get there." Now, Quad figured, she'd ask for directions, and he'd have a hell of a time giving them.

"Take me there sometime," she said instead.

"Um.. okay." What was with girls, anyway? Why did older males want them hanging around all the time? He knew the biology part, and knew it was supposed to be pleasurable at 'puberty' (a concept he only understood in the abstract), but he'd seen Tetrina's vagina before, and didn't understand what was so special about it or where the pleasure was supposed to come from. If you put your dick in, did candy come out? Was that why normals called each other "honey" sometimes? Eww. Piss and shit came out right next to that. He didn't think he wanted girl-honey.

She did not ask for a promise, having been taught better. She swiftly kissed him on his forehead, Stan laughing although he wasn't sure why, and ran off to play with her friends. Quad's face got red, although he really wasn't sure why, and went into his room, Stan following.

Quad did not contact Xavier. He called up the maintenance man instead. The unnamed janitor-cum-caretaker-cum-jack of all trades was more approachable, less cryptic, and decisively did not have that 'I'm going to influence the rest of your life' gleam that Xavier occasionally got.

"I apologize, but that information is restricted." was the response. No further explanation, and Quad and Stan were rather surprised.

Okay, Xavier would probably tell him, or make the servant tell him, or he could go to the Operator and rip it out of him, because everybody knew that the twins had beaten the shit out of him a few years ago and he'd be scared.. but no. Quad wouldn't go to higher authority, here. He was the higher authority. So, for this, he had to act like Dad.

"You have two options. The first option is, you give us a complete map now. The second option is, we rip your testes off and feed them to you." Quad understood, almost intuitively, the need for a constant voice, and switched between English and Latin, not caring if the servant completely understood.

"You might find that harder than you think," the servant informed him neutrally. What? Why? What was he trying to say?

Stan got it first; he was trying to say he was retroviral. Well, duh. Did he think they didn't see that? "And when your testes grow back, we'll feed them to you again."

The servant actually had particular orders regarding this. Certain classes of information were off-limits to the youth, unless they could use what they were taught- manipulation, threats, duplicity, intensity of purpose- in a sound and reasonable way. He was instructed to use his best judgment, and at this point not to give it to them would be criminal. Also, on a personal level, he had no intention of finding out what his nads tasted like, and no intention of verifying the data that suggested Quad was significantly more deadly than any other engineered his age. He sent the map and turned off his end of the connection.

The boys broke out laughing. "Feed you your testes!" Stan shouted, and pantomimed salt and pepper shakers. "Chew them thoroughly before swallowing!"

"Ah, but seeeenyor, sometimes ze bull wins!" Quad said in a horribly fake Mexican accent. That joke, like almost every other one passed around normal elementary and middle schools, had made its rounds in Northberg Educational.

Like most bits of information, the actual map was decisively less interesting than the processes they had used to get it.

Chapter 33

Six-year-olds show various states of emotion when being told that they're invited to an amusement park. Most of the reactions are joyous, some are phobic of vertigo. Some want to bring their friends (rarely imaginary, by that age) along. Some are just scared of crowds, or of coasters.

However, one thing normals will generally not hear is this:

"This fucking sucks! Fucking secrecy bullshit!"

His half-brother didn't quite understand Quad's anger. It was obvious that if normals were coming along, nobody could know of Quad's extra appendages. And it wasn't like the pouch in the sweater that held Quad's lower arms was confining or anything. All Quad had to do was keep them folded and it'd make him look like an ordinary, slightly pudgy, kid. Stan was more worried about the hair dye, which comes out on a certain chemical application. But what if it wouldn't come out? Or what if something similar to the chemical got on his head before he was ready? What if normals found out he had pink hair, teased him about it, and he fucking killed them all and got in trouble for it? These were not, however, fears he would let show in front of Quad. "Quad, what are you bitching about? It's the only way in for you!" Sometimes when Quad was discussing his arms, Stan would talk entirely in echo, both to alleviate his own jealousy (the concept was starting to feel wrong, now, just like the word did) and to remind Quad that he hadn't won everything in the genetic lottery.

"No it's not! Why don't we just wait and take it over later like Dad did?" More than half a decade ago, the Dominator had taken his friends to an amusement park, with unexpectedly violent results.

"We can't take it over, it's already run by an Illuminatus!" (The obvious logical mistake would be realized later, to great lamentation.) "And this is The Grand Opening! So are you coming or not? I'm going without you."

That last sentence clinched it. "Fine! But next time I'm going to tie up half your fucking arms and see how you like it! We'll call you Stanley, the One-Armed Cripple!"

"Whatever you say, Quincy!" Of all the retarded cover names. Quad chased Stan down the hall, the rubber of their normal shoes going slap-slap-slap all the way from their abode clear to the tram that would take them to the hangar, Quad jumping in as if the doors would shut the moment he dived through.

"I am going to get you if this turns out to be gay." Quad used mostly Latin in that, not caring about the grammar mixture.

"Hey, you decided to go, so if it turns out to be gay it's not my fault." This was entirely in Latin. The boys, still in the middle of the tram, found adjacent seats as it started to trundle. Snowy day, probably below -20 Celsius the way the snow stuck to the tracks before the heating system melted it away. It'd be about 10 degrees Celsius and overcast where they were going, which was fine by Quad. If he had to wear a sweater when it was hot outside, he'd say fuckit and declare the End of Secrecy right there.

"You'd be by yourself! And you'd tell me it was awesome even if it sucked! You'd tell that to all of us!"

"I would not! I wouldn't lie!"

"Yeah you would, you'd go 'I bet you wish you would have gone, Quad, I went on this jet-like roller coaster' even if all you got on was the spinning round thing because you were too short!" The boys had done fifteen minutes of Internet searching on the subject of amusement parks and loathed the idea of height requirements. Having to calculate inches to centimeters just added more insult; what, Americans still weren't using the fucking metric system?

"That's bullshit! There aren't even any height restrictions in this place anyway."

"How do you know?"

"Because I asked, Quincy! The guy owns it! It's a normal private park, not some loser public place."

"Don't call me that until we're in tard land! You could call me Quint if I had five arms." Quad's upper arms became animated as he talked, and his lowers squirmed irritably in their pouch. "I hate this fucking thing!"

"Then go without it and say you're fucked-up Siamese twins!", Stan snapped back. Quad was actually tempted.

The waiting vehicle was a standard Illuminati jet-helicopter, with the typical secrecy modifications. "I think our parents are in there," Stan said. Quad knew they'd be fake from tone and context; if the Duumvirate, Sarah, and Carlie had been coming along, all the kids would have probably known about it.

"Wait, parents? You've got to be fucking kidding me!!" One more straw; which would be the last?

"Like they'd let us in the normal world without them, quit being a baby! You know this shit!" Quad frowned but said nothing. "It'll be a couple of servants, we can just ditch them," Stan said as he climbed into the flyer, Quad following reluctantly, figuring that something else would terminally piss him off when it was too late to go back, possibly Stan.

"Actually," a voice from inside said, "I'm fourth level. And you can ditch me the moment you get in the door as far as I'm concerned."

Quad hurried into the jet with curiosity. The man looked to be about forty years old- solid face, muscle visible under sweatshirt, piercing eyes. "William Blakesworth," he said, offering each of the boys a hand to shake. Ah, the guy who had invited them. Quad used his left upper and felt his lowers protest that they didn't get a chance. So fucking annoying! The man's presumable wife was there too, almost certainly a servant, looking very much the part of a worried mother. She looked fat under frumpy clothes, which naturally meant (and even the six-year-olds knew this) plenty of concealed weapons and/or serious gear.

"So where's the others?" Quad asked, looking around for other kids. Maybe they were in different vehicles, with pretend-parents of their own?

"Actually, you two were the only ones who showed interest." So much for engineered unity. The brothers had talked to each other and assumed that everyone else would be up for it. Sure, they knew a couple girls weren't going, and yeah, even Tetrina didn't want to come, and Steve was kinda not interested, and Skyler, having had a few false starts, would be permanently gone in two weeks and really didn't give a shit, but...

"What about 'Shell and Chop and Mike-n-Ral and.. I can't believe that!" Stan shouted.

"It's true," Blakesworth replied. "Surprised me too." Quad didn't think the man was lying or hiding something from him, but he felt uneasy, as if maybe his other friends knew something he didn't. Stan didn't share the unease, just befuddlement. "I'm going to get this out of the way right now," Blakesworth said, as he flew the vehicle out of the hangar. Quad didn't offer to fly it, because he'd have to reach under the shirt and he was method-acting, learning to play the role of a normal kid. Which transcendentally pissed him off. Maybe that's why none of the others wanted to come. "I'm a spy. I'm indirectly working for your mother, Quad. I'm going to be-"

Method acting ends now. "Save it for someone who doesn't know what spies do," Quad snapped. "Tell me what he's doing instead."

The man was startled but quickly recovered. "We don't know. Sarah says it could be anything. He's just ordered a whole lot of different stuff that we never saw used, and it was all delivered to the same place, here on the amusement park."

Stan and Quad looked at each other with smiles. A secret base? Now that was an adventure worth having.

"What kind of stuff?" Stan asked.

"Electronics, mostly," Blakesworth answered, anticipating the question. "Some parts. Some stuff that might be for the amusement park, motors, gears, belts. Some normal paints, some Illuminated prefab stuff. Most of it was such raw materials that it could be used for anything. My guess is that he's building a factory- not the same kind we have, but something to crank out seemingly normal products with Illuminated designs. And that's what worries me." That wasn't the only thing that worried him, actually. His own son, three years old, was taking a nap after a brief meeting with dear old Dad. The boy had known only rudimentary English- Blakesworth found himself translating through an Enforcer to less rudimentary Latin- but he couldn't believe how much the boy understood, considerably more mature acting than the kids he had seen only a few years ago, visiting Northberg when considering whether or not to have children. The relative genetic advancement in that time had been slight; the learning speed was Xavier's doing.

And in a mere three years, his son- the little boy he had chosen to have- would be one of the minature (Hitlers? Napoleons? Stalins?) masters sitting behind him.

'My God, what have I done?' But he thought that every couple of weeks or so. Controlling international intelligence was just like that. He put it into the mental pocket he reserved for the rest of his moral qualms, a place known to UNIX geeks as /dev/null. After all, he was leading the sons of the Dominator into a situation where he might have to use them as influential capital. It wasn't as if he was going to try to use them as hostages- no one was that stupid- but simply being in their company could convince Bruce Joseph of his power if not his good intentions, and stay his hand if Blakesworth got caught.

Fortunately for him, the kids were too young to figure this out. "Do you know what you're getting us into?" Quad muttered to Stan very softly. The phrase was a favorite of Xavier's, minus the 'us'.

"I know exactly what I'm getting us into," Stan replied softly, but with absolute confidence. He knew normals, he knew Illuminati, he knew secrecy. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the piloting, for starters. Blakesworth was flying it himself. "You fly like a fucking buffalo," Quad said. The turbulence was not helping his mood.

Blakesworth turned, almost said something he knew would get him annihilated and held his temper to say "It's a windy day."

"Then turn on the autopilot."

He did so, gritting his teeth. He hated the concept almost as much as he hated being ordered around by anyone, let alone a six year old. "All right. It's on."

Quad waited about fifteen seconds, before growling, "It's not sufficient. Get out of the chair." Blakesworth entered the instantaneous deep thought that had led to his becoming an Illuminatus, and considered his options. He could say no, which might lead to humiliation or death. He could ask if Quad really knew how to fly, which could lead to humiliation or death. He could attempt to give them some quasi-parental homily, which would lead instantly to a humiliating death. Or he could get out of the pilot's seat, and take his chances. He chose the latter.

"No, I want it," Stan said when Quad moved forward, and Blakesworth had a brief, fleeting vision of the two boys arguing over who got to fly while they went down to a kinetic, fiery doom.

"Then take it," Quad said. The headphones wouldn't fit around Stan's head so he hung them around his neck, re-adjusting the chair as close as he could to suit someone almost three and a half feet tall.

"Secrecy. Ceiling is 4500 meters, top speed is two-fifty kilometers an hour, no course deviations, transformations or jet until we're twenty kilometers from land," Blakesworth's servant said in the usual half-casual operative's tone.

'No wings?!' But Stan had enough of bitching about secrecy, and killed the autopilot. There was a brief shake-up as the currents buffeted the craft, but those gradually turned into a rocking motion. Stan smiled a bit. He had only gotten to fly in reality just once before, and it had been windy then, too. He did not fight the air as Blakesworth and the autopilot did; he simply rode the wind, moving up and down until he found a height where the wind gave the craft a subtle rocking motion, actually moving it more than it had before, but the vibrations becoming stable and comforting. To Blakesworth it was a feat that ten years of experience, with more than a thousand logged hours, could not match. To Stan it was just another video game. Quad nodded in satisfaction, snorted softly in Blakesworth's direction, and began to doze off.

When he awoke it was to the thrummm of jet engines, and he nodded and dozed off again.

"Entering normal territory." woke him up a second time. Stan reluctantly switched seats with Blakesworth, feeling a pang of an emotion he did not recognize. They landed southwest of Goose Island, on a tiny paved island which barely had room to park the myriad aircraft coming. Since they came in jet mode, Blakesworth had to manage the tricky landing, cheating only slightly with the superior wheel brakes, trying to shake off the embarrassing idea that it'd be better if one of the kids did it. Had he known it would be like this, he would have gotten the seaplane modification.

A ferry would take them from the island to the amusement park; the boys entered and faced the glances of a dozen normal kids and recognized the operator as an Enforcer. A quick survey of subtle cues revealed no Northberg graduates in the bunch, who would have probably recognized them on sight. They moved past them first to the bathroom for a same-bowl same-time pissing contest, and then a few steps away to seats in the back.

Blakesworth sat next to them, plate tectonics on his mind. This was relatively close to Dominator territory, roughly 150 miles away. The same volcanic ridge that had produced the twins' island had also produced the tiny islands they were visiting. The whole ridge didn't even exist on any official maps. All of this area was, as far as normal governments were concerned, an out-of-bounds military-restricted area just like the Dominator's island was. The secrecy implications were concerning. What was Bruce Joseph going to do? Try to just play it off if someone started looking for it, as a simple inconsistency? Say the military recently sold the island and he was the highest bidder? That could be credible if done right, but he should have done that long before he had visitors. It only increased Blakesworth's suspicions, and made him glad he came in person. He, like his Dominator, wanted things done right.

And... they waited.

"When do we leave?" Stan asked.

"Probably when everybody gets here," Blakesworth answered.

"What time is it now?" Stan replied, eager.

"8:40." Blakesworth suddenly felt some regret at anger with the engineereds. He had come from a large family, of which he was the second oldest. Any long wait was always, always interspersed with a fair amount of whining, for ice cream or attention or anything else, at what always felt like the worst possible times, with his father snapping at the children and then his mother snapping at his father, his father defending himself, his mother saying something sarcastic, one of the younger children sobbing, his mother scolding the child, his father now insulting his mother for it... all of it exacerbating the problem. He judged smug superiority and the ever-present threat of instantaneous death to be less of an irritant.

"If it doesn't move by 9:30, we're going home," Quad said out of the side of his mouth.

"Sorry, can't do that," Blakesworth's servant said, shaking her head. Oh. Right. The adults were on a mission, and if normals saw two kids getting into an empty plane by themselves and it flying off, there would be questions. Quad's lower fists clenched at the ignominy and his own foolishness at not seeing it.

Okay. Stan had gotten them there early. So what? He'd waited before. His usual response was to doze off, but he'd already done that. He couldn't talk to Stan- not in usual voices about real things, at any rate. Would normals notice if they whispered in ultraquiet tones? Were they watching? Would they see it as suspicious? Fuck it. Secrecy was secrecy. Operatives had to deal with this shit all the time. Best to just shut up and daydream or something. It could be even more fun if the thing never moved, because then there might be some normal-world chaos, which he'd never seen in person.

Stan followed Quad's lead. He'd always been more patient than his half-brother. If he couldn't keep it up now, he was a loser.

What the boys didn't realize was that two young children not fidgeting and talking- like every other kid on this trip- was much more suspicious than almost anything else and a few of their neighbors wondered who had brought along the religious nutjobs.

"Okay! All right! We're not waiting for anyone else. Do you guys want to get there slow, or fast?" the Enforcer asked, in the tone of a cheerful normal, listening to the obvious and inevitable: kids screaming "Fast! Fast!" in a way that Quad found embarrassing and ridiculous. He found himself wishing he had a pouch for his upper arms as well, right along with his head. And to top it off, Stan was screaming with the rest of them, yelling "Go REALLY fast!" What the fuck, Stan?

And they did go really fast, kids screeching at the acceleration. Blakesworth reacted to it, reaching into a pocket before looking around and calming down. Quad felt himself pressed into the seat at first, and saw Stan giggling. Stan leaned over to his ear and whispered, very softly, "He read my lips, 'Enforcer'. Normal ones obey better if you do that." Stan had heard that second hand and had finally gotten the chance to test it. Then Quad giggled as well, despite himself. Being able to do that might make this visit a bit more enjoyable.

As they arrived- parked expertly next to a bright yellow pier- the other kids, and many of the adults, looked up at the tall coaster loops with awe and excitement. The boys, who had flown for real, were more amazed by the color scheme of everything from the bright orange asphalt paths to the deep blue pennants flying on everything for no good reason. It looked like what happened when you gave a two-year-old six rainbow crayons and a coloring book and told him to go nuts. Bruce Joseph was dressed to match, his face painted white with red cheeks. The only thing that wasn't painted was the faux-woodland at the edges of the island, and even that had its lawn mowed.

"Wow, it's all so.," Quad started and couldn't finish, lacking an adequate adjective. Stan was just amazed that anyone would dress up like a clown when not making a movie or something.

"The word you want is 'garish'," Blakesworth informed him. "Or maybe 'ostentatious'." What a paradox of secrecy. To roleplay the rich eccentric he was trying to be, Bruce had to be as obvious as possible. But a lot of this seemed excessive. This was supposed to be a private getaway, not the work of someone fired from the set design of normal children's films for being too crazy.

Bruce's mannerisms didn't help much, either. In cheery, eager tones, he told "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls" to follow him inside, and to remember that he wanted everyone at the main entrance at noon for a presentation. He didn't look at Stan and Quad, which they found strange- after all, he was the only one there who was qualified to know who they were. Did he not care, did he not know, or was he just pretending for secrecy? The fact that he didn't specially greet Blakesworth was reassuring, but he didn't even give him a second glance. It was as if he honestly didn't give a shit who his invitees were.

And now was singing something weird off-key and dancing, walking backwards half the time to look at the crowd following him. What was with this guy? The boys heard some normal say to his wife, "He's like Willy Wonka." That might have been helpful if either engineered knew who that was. He led them into the park, a wide entrance the only hole in an effective-looking fence topped with razor wire. Tents were all over, flying meaningless colored pennants, some weak-looking kiddie rides and only one particularly tall coaster in the distance, the entrance area surrounded by statues of clowns. Eventually Bruce bowed to the crowd, who walked around him as if in some ritual. Whatever. Quad crammed his upper fists into his pockets and wondered the real reason Stan had dragged him out here.

But since he didn't ask, Stan didn't tell him the answer: Superheroes.

Stan had acquired a number of normal-world comic books. Although he skipped through the ridiculous, unintelligible plots with disdain, one thing constantly struck him as a continuing theme: Secrecy of a sort. Stan knew that older engineereds (like Quad's real mom) pretended to be normal for missions, but that wasn't quite the same. Why would a superhero, who goes out in public to worldwide acclaim, be a normal for any length of time?

Stan constantly asked himself this as he tried to pretend his perception and speed were that of a normal's. He forced himself to look at things five times longer than necessary, and ran in what was to him a slow-motion gait, on the upper bounds of normal kids' speed, occasionally looking back at Quad, who wasn't pretending. A sullen walk was the same everywhere, and Quad kept his eyes affixed to the ground.

The answer, Stan realized, was that there is no reason. The comics were bullshit. Superman would never have spent time as Clark Kent, adoptive parents be damned. He could be out rearranging asteroids for fun, or tossing Lex Luthor into the Phantom Zone if he didn't really want to kill him, or any of a million other exciting and maybe useful things. Stan reluctantly realized that he'd seriously have to apologize to Quad for this. Later. He'd apologize when it was over. If he felt like he really had to.

He turned around again, about to yell at Quad to hurry up and stop sulking, but he saw the woman and her three daughters approach Quad, who intentionally didn't react.

"What's with the frowny face? The day's what you make it, so cheer-" Why do some adults think they approach random kids like this?

Quad turned fast- a bit too fast, but the normals didn't notice- and interrupted her with, "When the time is right, I will kill you personally," glad for the first time in his life that he didn't inherit the echo effect as Stan did, as he would have broken secrecy with it. The woman had no way of knowing he was being serious. But then he stared at her, and she saw his eyes. The boys couldn't tolerate contacts and the plan was to make up some rare disease to explain it. Not too big of a deal- Dominator William had been out as a normal for the first ten years of his life after all, and he didn't even dye his hair.

But at that moment, Quad's voice and eyes were enough to convince the woman that something was very wrong with this kid.

"Let's.. play over on the merry ground now, okay?" she asked her brood, actually saying 'merry ground', and they quickly got away, the woman imagining vampires who could tolerate sunlight, the girls saying something about "ad-a-rall" and "ay-dee-dee", whatever the hell that was. He'd made a mistake, Quad realized, although he knew he'd never be called on it. That was too close to a real secrecy breach.

Stan ran back over to Quad. "This isn't working, dude." 'Dude' was not a word he'd ever heard spoken, and he pronounced it a bit like "doody".

"No shit it's not," Quad said, his eyes affixing on Stan.

"Sorry. I didn't know it would be this bad. The big coaster has to be worth something." The last echoed word was emphasized but very quiet.

Quad sighed and headed in that direction, preventing himself from making high moon-jumps as he ran in slow-mo, Stan at his side, getting on the coaster's first run with a husband, wife, and a boy and girl years older than the boys but far less mature.

The operators were Enforcers, and Quad felt the coaster's restrained power. Behind the echoing of steel there was something he was familiar with, a device not operating at its maximum. If someone were to ask him, he wouldn't be able to explain how he'd know an engine he'd never heard before, but.. it sounded like it. Maybe he'd just figured it out- an Illuminatus had made it, it was moving at normal speeds, so it was by definition not operating at maximum. But he knew it could go faster.

And something else was wrong here, something really, deeply wrong, but he couldn't put his finger on what.

Coasters are supposed to be scary, but for other reasons entirely, and both boys played the part of screaming normal kids quite convincingly.

Stan and Quad had done the intuitive thing for kids: Jump on the biggest coaster first. Why only a few of the normals had done the same was puzzling. At least they could ask the Enforcer directly. "Enforcer, what is wrong with this thing?" Quad asked quietly once the handful of normals were out of earshot, using the most general terms possible.

"Nothing," it said. Too quickly. Like it had been told to say that.

Okay. Well, yeah, something was fishy, that's why they had a spy with them. "Dual use," Quad said. Stan looked at him. "It does what it looks like, and it also does something else. Maybe it transforms."

"That.. would be awesome," Stan said. "But in front of all these normals? I don't think so."

"Maybe William- Blakesworth, I mean- will figure it out and we'll watch it transform later," Quad suggested.

"Maybe while people are on it," Stan suggested, knowing it was silly.

"Especially if it becomes something completely different," Quad replied, giggling. They shut up, then; a lot of the other kids and parents had formed something of a group, and were coming to the coaster as one unit. They knew each other, then. What if someone asked Quad and Stan how they got invited here? Oh, right, their youth; they weren't expected to really know anything. Like nescient servants. They made a point of staying away from as many normals as they could and just going on the rides, most of which weren't really all that much fun. And going on the same ride more than once, now with a bunch of normals on it? Fuck that. Maybe coming here was a mistake.

They didn't want to eat, either. It wasn't like they weren't hungry after three hours, but all the food smelled somewhere between normal-inferior and horribly wrong. Did normals really eat this crap? Stan double-sniffed once at something that he swore he smelled in the medical wing before. Fuck that, too. No question: this little adventure was definitely a big mistake.

So, for lack of better things to do, they explored. Almost everything that wasn't a ride was inside a carnival tent, some of them exhibitions of art, some knick-knacks that normals might find appealing. They noticed that the whole place was fenced off with no other entrances than the south one, and that became a concern- why have a fence here? It's an island! What could they possibly be trying to keep out? Neither one of them could guess. They also realized there was an area that they couldn't get to without passing close between tents. The boys vaguely understood normal concepts of demarcated space; this is a path so you walk here, that's not a path so it's off limits. But there was no path to go to a small tent hidden in the far northwest corner, a semi-maze of other tents making a perimeter around it.

So they made sure no one was watching before they slipped in. There was a clearing and another tent, this one somewhat dug into the ground, nestled against the corner fences, the tents around it obscuring it from even the tall coaster. The entrance had a clown-robot to the side, which repeatedly waved its left arm up and down. The boys looked at the legs under the loose fabric, the arms, the articulation in the head, the subtle weight distribution of the body as its arm moved up and down. This thing wasn't bolted to the ground nor was it running off the local power generators. And it looked just like the statues at the park entrance- which probably meant they weren't statues at all. He had Enforcers, what the fuck did he need fully operable humanoid bots for?

They peered inside. From what they could see it was full of a variety of fun-looking games that they've never seen before: "Die Trying", "Bullet Hell", and a light-gun game called "Escape from Death Park", all with stepping stools in front so kids could see the screen better. If these were meant for normals then it'd be relaxing, maybe even boring.

But... they didn't want to go in there. Stan started backing away from the tent entrance and that creepy bot and talked in a very faint, nearly unintelligible combination of English and Latin, using hand signals, butchering grammar, and mispronouncing words. If they were overheard it'd take a professional linguist or another Northberg kid to decipher it. "Quad, fuck this, let's just.. go near the exit, wait until Blakesworth is done, and then let's get the fuck out of here. We're only kids to these people, it won't look too suspicious."

"I agree. Let's retrace our steps and go back the way we came," Quad replied, mangling his speech even worse and using more quick gestures. They stayed very close together as they retreated. Maybe- maybe- they were worried about nothing, and they were just being childishly paranoid about things they didn't need to worry much about. At six years old, the line between 'reality' and 'play' was still somewhat blurry, and a small portion of Stan's mind and an even smaller portion of Quad's told them that they were just being pretend-scared and that this was normal land after all, nothing could really hurt them here, and they'd be going home soon enough. But hot fucking damn, were they glad they had each other right then. If either one of them was by himself, he'd really be scared out of his shit, maybe even scared out of his wits which they so desperately struggled to keep. Quad was also glad he hadn't convinced Tetrina after all; she'd be crying right about now, and that might attract attention from whatever was in this place.

And to top it off, they had to go to the bathroom again, fear loosening their bladders and adding a new fear that they might piss themselves in front of normals. Somehow the concept of finding and using a toilet in this place didn't seem like the best of ideas. They couldn't even quite articulate what they were scared of, but by mutual assent they went between two tents to urinate. If Bruce saw piss on his tents and got mad, well, fuck him, it was his own fault for making everything so fucking creepy.

What they really wanted to do was hide, in a good enough spot where Quad could stretch his confined lower arms. But they didn't want to be in anywhere. They didn't want to be within this fence, for that matter, and they whispered suspicions that it wasn't meant to keep anything out. But they decided that walking out the wide-open front entrance wouldn't just look suspicious, it'd be suspicious, and the last thing they wanted to do was call attention to themselves. Normal kids, they understood, fluctuated in emotions like engineered two- and three-year-olds. So they'd just hang out near the entrance, visible to everyone (particularly Blakesworth, where was that guy) and pretend to be really bored of the place if anyone asked.

No one did. It wasn't long before they became really bored in truth. What time was it? Neither had brought a screen, and normal kids their age usually didn't carry the equivalent; a normal cellphone wouldn't get reception here anyway. That tower with the circle on top, the long things had moved, maybe they could use that as a clock? No, Stan remembered it from the comic books, that was a clock. Oh, so if one of those meant the hour, the other meant the minute, then it was.. well the hour one was between, but since Bruce hadn't given his speech or whatever, it was probably 11, the other hand was at the 3.. no, it must mean it's a quarter of the way around, so they calculated 11:15. They judged that way of telling time to be as screwed-up as anything else in this place.

They hated waiting, and they hated waiting here, and they hated that damn clock because now they just stared at it, wondering how many more times those hands would turn before they were finally out of here. Kids didn't get bored in Northberg. There was too much to do and far, far too much to learn for either of them to actually experience real boredom. Stan had heard somewhere- probably another comic book- that 99% of war was a cross between boredom and paranoia, with 1% pure terror and chaos. Standing here was the former.

The woman with the two daughters came around the main area. For a moment, Stan's stomach dropped- he thought that Bruce might have forgotten to get Enforcers with the correct normal-interaction routines. Then it replied and he relaxed; it was acting like a normal employee, answering questions in a very normal tone, having premade answers for the inane questions she was throwing at it: "How much is he paying you", "Is this just for today", and such. She asked it where the bathroom was, it told her, and she thanked it. You might as well have thanked your toaster, you stupid bitch. He really didn't want to deal with her again, or worse, have Quad deal with her, but she didn't notice them.

The crowd started filling in around 11:50. A few glances were thrown in the boys' direction, but no one asked where their parents were. Within minutes they were all absorbed in their own little worlds, yakking about how good they thought the food and the coasters were, their constant babble grating to the engineereds' ears. Didn't normals ever talk about anything real?

Bruce Joseph was right on time, the two hands of the clock pointing skyward, a pair of Enforcers carrying a miniature pedestal for him to stand on. "We're not all here, but that's perfectly all right," he said to the assembled crowd. He sounded happy, but something was very wrong with the way he was talking. "I'm so glad you all could make it here. I've got a very special surprise for you all. You kids want to see the surprise, right?"

No, Stan and Quad really, really did not want to see the surprise. Not at all. They wanted to be very unsurprised. They were quite bored, but given the choice, they wanted to stay that way.

But of course the gaggle of normal children screamed "Yeah, show us!" like a bunch of fucking idiots, and although Stan and Quad knew it'd be basically a secrecy breach to go 'No you dumb fuckers, you don't know what he really is and you don't know what you're asking for', it was practically on their lips.

"You sure, you all wanna see the surprise?" Some of the adults were encouraging their spawn to shout louder, which they did, to the engineereds' silent consternation. Speaking of adults, where the fuck was Blakesworth?

"Oooookay! Here's the surprise!"

The engineered boys watched it happen, motion by motion: This man was normal. Here he is, pulling out a revolver. Why doesn't anyone do something? Forgot, normals are slow. He's about to shoot someone, who? It looks like he's going to shoot himself. Is he? He's hesitating. Never mind, he's got pressure on the trigger- BANG! Which is exactly what the little flag on the other side of his skull said.

No less than three of the normals immediately reached for their cellphones. Two of them managed to open theirs, receiving zero bars. The same woman who had approached Quad earlier fumbled with her purse and dropped it, lipstick and coins rattling to the cobblestones, before she erupted in a high, hysterical shriek, as did a few of the other women and more than one of the men. Some of them started laughing, convinced this was a hoax. A few of the normals cautiously approached the body, but the boys stayed back, silent, looking at each other. 

Some of the kids and their parents had lost track of time or decided they didn't need to listen to the old guy give a speech, so they had gone to the roller coaster. Instead of slowing down at the top of a hill, it continued to accelerate, right off the top, before crashing down in a cloud of dust and twisted metal, sending debris flying.

Stan and Quad gave each other another, more frantic, look- We could have been on that. Stan had war at 100% completion now.

And that was when the Enforcers and robots came to life and began advancing on the crowd, taking slow, methodical steps. Quad and Stan were able to keep their distance, jumping back a few steps as the sentries to their sides moved forwards.

At least they weren't bored anymore.

One man attempted to flee out the turnstile exit. A powerful motor hummed and forced the turnstile sharply backwards, grinding his body into- and ultimately through- the one-way protector in a splatter of crushed bone and mangled flesh, squeezing crushed organs between flaps of muscle. A small sign lifted up and showed the word "No" right above "Exit". Another man, leaving his wife and kids to die, rushed for the entrance gate. An oversized pit trap opened up beneath his feet and he fell, screaming, to a fate the boys did not see. The words 'To Hell' were displayed below "Entrance". A woman, seeing their fates, tried to climb the fence and was immediately fried by a long chain of electricity melting her shoes to the ground the moment she grabbed hold of the chain link.

That was when the screaming in abject terror started, right before the Enforcers and robots started killing people.

That was the point, Quad knew, it was scary, it was obviously being done intentionally, he couldn't let himself get sucked into it or he was dead just like the normals. Step back, treat it like it's a game, remember the overcoming-fear stuff they ran you all through at age four and the advice the viewscreen gave you, that you have to be the most calculating when you want to be the most emotional. Bruce hadn't been expecting engineereds. ('This is death for normals. This won't work on me and Stan. We can survive this.') But he would never pretend to be normal, ever, ever again. He tore the concealing shirt from him, exposing his arms and chest and not feeling the slightest bit of chill.

"I swear I am not going anywhere without a weapon again," Quad said in clear Latin.

"Secundo," Stan replied. I second [this]. No more normal pretense for him either, and he would ritually burn those shitty comic books.

"I am Quadrus Dominus!" Quad called to the screaming, dying normals, flexing his limbs, feeling an island of joy in the ability to show what he was. "If you want to survive, come with me!" And he ran, away from the death, taking a single glance back. No adults had followed, but three normal kids had run, screaming, away from their parents; one had tried to catch the kid, only to be caught himself by a passing robot, who lifted him above its head.. and tore him in half at the spine.

The kid started screaming, naturally. "Shut up and run and cry later!" Stan shouted back and ran, away from the carnage, hopefully out of the line of fire. Clearly there was no sensible strategy for rounding all the people up, as there was no sense to any of this...

"There, we can turn them off!" one of the kids shouted from behind them, rushing for a tent with a sign marked "Control Room". Quad and Stan had seen that, but knew it was crap, especially after the other signs...

"It's not gonna fucking have Control Room on it!!" Quad shouted back. Weak or not, powerless or not, this kid was going to commit suicide before Quad had the chance to properly berate him. Quad and Stan rushed, but the kid had already stepped inside, and there was a loud crunching sound.

Quad felt the girl move to hug him and stepped away from her- he wasn't going to let anyone near him at this point. "I'm staying with you!" she shouted. He relaxed. She was still sane, and had good preservation instincts to boot.

There was a metallic clank-clank-clank sound coming from inside the tent, and a small robot, all gears and struts and wires, with the boy's head perched atop its neck, stepped out.

"FUCKING MONKEYS!" Stan screamed in absolute horror. It's a game, Stan, treat it like it's a game..., Quad mouthed. He couldn't lose his brother to this shit...

"I'm happy," it stated at a hundred decibels in a parody of a child's voice, the boy's mouth obscenely moving up and down like a ventriloquist's dummy as blood poured from it. "Are you happy? I'm happy. Let's be happy together."

"Let's be happy together," a whole lot of Enforcers and robots said at once.

While the girl screamed and babbled and the boy with the torn apart father started repeating "this is a dream" to himself, Stan and Quad cursed themselves for letting it signal the others. With simultaneous kicks- tearing a large gash across the bottom of one of Stan's shoes- they sent the thing flying. It crumpled in a heap, inert. The head stayed on. Stan and Quad ran twenty feet before Stan realized their onetime companions weren't running with them.

"Wait, what about them?" Stan asked, slowing a bit, still running far faster than any normal kid.

"Fuck them!" Quad shouted, knowing full well the Enforcers would catch up to the normals, and Stan rushed forward to avoid losing ground. He sure as shit was not going to let Quad get ahead of him here!

"NO!!! I'm staying with YOU!!" the girl screamed.

"Then keep the fuck up!" Quad shouted back, his shoes literally kicking up dust, before a clown Enforcer stepped in his path. Quad zipped between its legs and Stan simply ran around it with a terror-fueled burst of adrenaline; it didn't turn or give chase. It waited for the other girl, who tried to run around it as Stan had, and picked her up.

"Let's be happy together," it said, as it hugged her as tightly as it could. Blood sprayed from her mouth as her diaphragm collapsed and her spine was shattered, floating ribs jamming into her lungs. Stan and Quad heard a crack-tear-crunch and the other boy's screams. They didn't slow down, although they quietly lamented their would-be friends. That girl had real potential. It's just a shame they couldn't keep her alive long enough to have a chance at using it.. They turned several corners, looking quickly, trying to lose pursuit.

Stan looked around back and forth- did anything see them right now?- before taking the chance to roll under the canopy of a hot-food tent, followed shortly by his half-brother. Nothing moved except the red franks left rotating endlessly inside their miniature oven. They've passed this place before, but the smell was even worse now, obviously toxic. Poison- had to be. Normals likely would have no idea. Did the Enforcers actually get around to serving any of these deadly hot dogs, or was it just an oversight?

Quad wildly remembered that he had made a promise to kill a certain fat woman personally. It was certainly impossible to keep, now.

Movement outside the tent. Fuck- wait, it stopped? The boys froze, seeing the shadow of an Enforcer on the side of the tent wall, then more shadows, and more movement on the sides.

"Fucking shit. We are surrounded," Stan said, almost conversationally, realizing that trying to hide in a place like this was stupid. He'd been taught so many times that one serious mistake could mean death. Here he was, and here he had made one.

"Shame we don't still have that fat kid, we could use him as a decoy," Quad said. Wait. There was a way around this, these were normal fabrics, and there was a heat source... "Fuck it... burn!" he shouted, yanking on the edge of the tablecloth and pulling the machines down, sending poisoned sausages flying. He crammed part of the greasy linen into the heating elements and it started smoking before erupting into flame, with the smell of frying polluted fat. He pushed it against the side of the tent- fuck a duck, the robots were starting to enter, through the tent's entrance no less- and the thin canvas walls started to crackle and smoke. No time! Lift up the side of the tent, fuck, the Enforcers are making grabs, he somersaulted over that, fuck that was close, come on Stan... Stan completely freaked out, screaming. He jumped onto the outstretched hands of the Enforcers- they grabbed, their hands slipped, he just kept running, they took a step... and, with a flash of inspiration, Stan called back as fast as he could, "Come on, Tommy, let's get out of here!" And that actually worked, the Enforcers continued to stand there, as the fire grew, flames lapping up the top of the tent. "Come on, Tommy, get out of the tent!" Stan kept calling back, hysterically, as the boys ran and ran. This place wasn't that big, they had to find a way out at some point or be cornered... their hopes were immediately bolstered when they found themselves passing shredded robots and Enforcer corpses.

In seconds they found the cause: an anti-Enforcer weapon.

But it was in its holster, which meant they felt safe from it.

A large, strong man in black wearing sunglasses was its owner, kneeling and holding a fair-skinned woman. It looked like a love scene, with one arm was around her waist.. but the other was around her head because her neck was broken. "This wasn't supposed to happen," he told her limp corpse. "None of this was. God.. why couldn't it have worked out?"

"Because your master was a fucking nutcase?" Stan asked, louder than necessary, and the man turned to look, setting the dead woman on the ground, face weather-beaten and screwed up, black hair faintly specked with someone or something's blood. Fucking hell, did he kill her too?

"Oh.. I didn't mean this," he said, taking a few steps towards them, looking at Quad's arms as if he'd never heard of the boy, limping with his right leg. Not a recent wound either, which made Stan frown in puzzlement. Normals could take permanent damage without medical treatment, yes, but with Northberg around, why would any servant be a gimp? "We have to get out of here... the only way out is through." The way he said the last part, it was a statement of philosophy. 

A false one. "Fuck that bullshit," Quad said, looking around for more enemies.

"I'm sorry. We don't have time to argue." And with that, he moved with startling speed, hands outstretched, at Quad, certain that there was no way the kid could be as strong as an adult.

He was correct; Quad's small, moderately-muscled body had only one-seventh the arm strength of the man he would one day become- if he survived that long- and his little fingers could only hope to wrap around a single one of the stranger's. Quad danced back and his four hands blurred across the man's two, starting with the thumbs, grabbing, twisting, and wrenching, dislocating what he couldn't break. By the time the man started to jerk his hands back in surprise, his pinky fingers were firmly in Quad's crushing grip, bent at horrible angles. At that instant Stan silently gave Quad a permanent battlefield promotion from Brother and Best Friend to Awesome Brother and Best Possible Friend Ever, jealousy evaporating as if it were never there. He was so happy for Quad having those arms now, even if he didn't.

Both Quad and his opponent pulled as hard as they could and so they compromised. The man was able to bring his mangled hands back to his chest, spurting blood as Quad kept his pinkies. And then suddenly the stranger noticed something at his holster- a situation he had been thoroughly trained for- but by the time he could bring his mangled appendage to it and twist away, it was already empty, Stan pointing the weapon at his face.

"You're right," Stan agreed. "We don't have time to argue." BLAM. The gimp's head and neck were blown to bits and his body did a backflip, sort-of bouncing and skidding to a bloody stop five meters away.

It was the very first time either of them had intentionally harmed a living thing. The only training either of them had was the know-how to see an opportunity and act on it.

"Owned," Quad commented, tossing the severed digits aside. Good. Triumph, he needed some fucking triumph right now, because intentional or not, this place was really starting to get to him...

"Fence?" Stan asked, gesturing to the weapon.

"Fence," Quad agreed. A few of the enemies had heard the shot, and from afar their running was heard as a strange sort of cadence, slow robot thuds with faster Enforcer taps, with the rapid slap-slap-slap of engineered feet in normal shoes completely discordant.

"Penetrate, motherfucker," Stan begged it, pointing the muzzle inches from the chain link, then realizing his mistake (too small of a hole) and held it back a few feet.

The flechettes would have even penetrated if it was Illuminated steel; the chain link and electrified wire were of basically normal make and it flew to tiny slivers. Stan rushed into the hole first, firing blasts at a large swath of ground in front of him. "Why are you doing that?" Quad asked.

"Land mines!" Stan replied. Quad had never heard of land mines but got the concept of hidden traps, following Stan across a seemingly bare patch of ground fifty meters wide into trees.

"Don't think these are trapped?" Quad asked, scrambling up the trunk and its brachiated limbs with his four arms, ignoring the pain of climbing rough bark with bare hands (and digging into it with the nails on his lowers, for once accepting their use), noticing the brownish leaves scattered in his wake.

"Who the fuck else is going to get up here?" Stan replied, as they looked down to see what their pursuers would do. If the Enforcers and robots had projectile weapons they would already be using them. Stan did use his, knocking out about five with each shot. Blam! Blam! Blam! Click. "Oh fucking bullshit, it only had eight shots?" Weak sauce! Okay, okay, how many left? Three Enforcers, four robots. But that wasn't how many left, that was how many were coming after them at that moment... Stan, in a mindbending blend of annoyance and fear, tossed the weapon as hard as he could at the nearest Enforcer's head. It caught it and threw it back, hard enough to have broken Stan's leg if he hadn't lifted it out of the way.

Jumping from tree branch to tree branch, climbing upwards, agility the only thing between them and crushing death. An Enforcer was able to grab a tree branch in lieu of Quad's ankle; both boys stomped with screaming force, but couldn't break the hold; the other hand reached up, but the tree branch cracked, the Enforcer moved to another one, and by then both of them had managed to skitter upwards.

The robots.. the robots just walked under them, and stood there, hands outstretched upwards, infinitely patient.

Enforcers too heavy to get to their height, robots can't climb. Unless those fuckers started cutting trees down... Fuck, one of them was trying to climb the trunk itself, quickly and rhythmically making its way past branches. Quad looked around for branches he could use as weapons to cut open muscle, nerve, bone, maybe jam something into an eyeball, but this wood almost definitely would not do the trick, and suddenly there was a large KRAKA-BOOM of lightning less than three feet from their heads, a sudden smell of burning wood and burning brains, and that Enforcer was falling to the ground; another explosion of superheated air, a third followed by a deeper, longer boo-o-o-om, the roaring jet slowing from supersonic speed to hovering over them. They figured it out: this is what 'the cavalry' actually meant.

Quad noticed the strangest thing- the jet's VTOL thrusters did not point directly downwards. Instead, they pointed at an angle, and he knew why a second later: so the fast-roping figure coming down from it, blasting high-caliber pistol fire a foot from the boys, wouldn't get roasted.

"Hi, Mom," Quad said, with a mix of relief and dismay. Sure, it was great to be rescued from a horrible death and all, but really.. saved by his mother?

Stan cheered with echo, having no problem with that.

"Climb on." They did, both of them jumping and grabbing onto her like baby monkeys, and she pressed a button to pull them back up into the jet's bottom. Ruby flew directly over the amusement park and hovered there, eyes wide open for anti-air threats.

"Stay in the jet," Sarah told them, in that standard operative's voice that somehow would brook no dissent, and jumped back out. She had been suspicious of the whole damn thing from hour one, ordered a servant to satellite-spy the whole place through the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and the jet was off the ground within ten seconds of the servant's frantic call. In other words, she was the engineered equivalent of a mother hen. She would, of course, never tell them about this. It wasn't dignified. She couldn't have warned them off, either, not without something real to go on. Those kids' ethic, their structure, relied on them being above danger and fear, and above danger and fear they would remain, come hell, high water, or robot-wielding lunatics.

Quad and Stan were sort of miffed to be kept out of the action, they had just escaped the fucking thing after all- wait. No. She had said 'Stay in the jet', not 'Don't help her out.'

"Servant, stay over her," Stan commanded Ruby, who made no move to disagree. The boys sat back at the consoles, found that control-W meant weapons in less than a second, and played a brief, fulfilling version of 'Don't let the enemies get near the friend', high-intensity microwaves enforcing their edict.

"Careful with the robots," Ruby reminded them. She knew this was coming and loved the efficiency of it. Jack Thompson, eat your heart out.

"I know. I've played this before," Quad replied reflexively, the words leaving his mouth before he realized this wasn't quite a game. But someone was having fun; why was Sarah chuckling to herself down there, among the blood and the wreckage? What could she possibly be laughing about?

'Boys,' she thought to herself, watching the jet's lasers blow apart targets that weren't much of a threat to begin with, the silliness making her laugh in spite of it all. 'Six years old, and already with the overkill.' She came to the main building, blasted the doors permanently open, tossed a floodlight-globe in, tested for explosives residue (a gesture, that; even if the ground was packed solid with RDX, there probably wouldn't be a molecule outside), then carefully crept in and ended their fun.

Great. Just what would help her figure out what had happened here: Wreckage, of a sort of giant robot-clown-thing, and corpses, two of which were familiar. After she acquired Ruby she'd seen the need for electrical-override trap-springers; she threw several into the walls and was disappointed when nothing happened there. There was a computer, halfway through something, a blue bar going across the screen, apparently running the Illuminated operating system ACNOS. She didn't touch it. Blatant trap was blatant.

She tossed another anti-trap down the hallway and a weird dog-like thing, all steel and claws and protrusions, turned a corner and spat needles at her; she dodged with some contempt and blew it away with one shot, the bullet going down its throat. Yeah, this guy had issues. It reminded her of Gritzl slightly, and Sarah half-snarled, half-smiled. Did they know each other? Did he send his plans to the turkey who ran this place? At least the questions were there to be asked, now, when she could no longer take "he's already dead" for an answer.

Wait. No. It reminded her of something else. What? 'Come on, now is not the time to forget crucial shit, or you should just have nuked this place from a distance like you did with those dolls..' That's right. The dolls, six years ago or so. That was a dungeon she had no intention of testing herself against. But.. what? That guy was long since.. no. Even he could have a clone. Just fucking great. The corpses in this room were going to stay dead, why couldn't the enemies?

Echolocator showed no underground pillars of destruction, motion detector showed nothing, another antitrap in the vague direction of the computer set it off- electricity, arcing from the computer to the chair- while prerecorded clown-laughter went off. "Area's half-secure, need perimeter and cleanup crew," she radioed back to Ruby. "Check for stragglers, land and exit."

There were no detectable stragglers. She landed and the children followed her out. Sarah made a mental note that kids that age listened in a what-I-want style like rebellious implanted servants. Not that she could really command them operationally anyway. Fuck, why had they even come here, they were Northberg kids in the 21st century, what was so great about an amusement park? When Sarah was six she didn't go to an amusement park. (She did, however, go to a small carnival when she was nine. A man had a heart attack on one of the rides, with his wife and kids next to him and this big guy with his sweet little girl right behind him. And after that, there was the amusement park she went to with the twins...) She shook her head and began gathering up anti-traps, keeping an eye on the hall the dog had come out of.

The kids were whooping with exhilaration, Quad ignoring the chill wind on his bare skin. Victory! Oh, the stories they could tell! Everyone would be going "Wow, how'd you feel?" and Quad would say "It was pretty fun, can we do it again?" and they'd all have a big laugh. Maybe he and his half-brother could get matching "I survived the Amusement Park of Death and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt"s, with his having no less, never any less, than four armholes. (That had been a running joke in Northberg, too, with the kids inventing improbable scenarios: "I got thrown into the sun, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt!" "I fell into a jet engine, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt!" "I killed fifteen spiders twice as big as me, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt!") 

They walked into the building and stopped cheering.

Blakesworth was very dead. Whatever had killed him- the giant, probably- had splattered the walls with his guts, torn his right arm off at the middle of the bicep, and severed his head, which lay on its side, one eye half-closed, the other staring wide. Grotesque, but Stan had seen things just as bad and even done it himself today, and forcibly reminded himself of it to avoid turning aside. Quad turned, ostensibly to look at something else. They had treated Blakesworth like a bitch, and he had probably deserved it, but how were they to know they were doing that on his last day on earth? The treat-it-like-it's-a-game shield started cracking, and he saw a splotch of red, a familiar face, was she still alive--

No. Blakesworth's servant was dead about twenty feet away, two bullet holes in her chest, one directly through her heart.

"But I liked her," Quad said in protest. He was the prince of domination and annihilation! Shouldn't he get a veto in these things? 

Reality did not bend for him.

The T-Shirt thing really didn't seem like a good idea anymore.

He reached to her face and pulled her eyelids down. Now it looked like she was sleeping. His lower left fist clenched. He had been worried about waiting for less than an hour, just this morning. And they had been worried about having to act like normals for a day, after they knew it was coming. And they had been alert enough to be suspicious, but had not seen. And they had escaped, but had not preserved the Illuminatus they had come with nor his lovely, competent servant, whose name they had never learned. Could they have prevented this? Probably not. But they would never know for certain.

Speaking of things he didn't know... no, the hell with that, he didn't want to ask any questions. Not about what she was looking for, not about Bruce Joseph, not about that weird gimp. Northberg kids generally didn't think it as a rule, but fuck this, let the adults handle it, he wanted nothing to do with it, and he was getting the hell out of here. His half-brother apparently thought the same.

"We'll wait until you're done, Mom," Quad said, walking out into the wind and the cold, and Stan followed him without a word.

Chapter 34

Stan and Quad were mildly surprised at the Duumvirate's home, the angel island with the enormous green hill at its center. They'd heard it was lush but weren't expecting it to be so much better than the one that was more recently built upon.

They were also sort of surprised to find the twins waiting for them as they stepped out. This was the overarching, all-powerful Duumvirate. Why would they go out of their way to greet a couple of kids?

But the big surprise was the kind of questions the twins asked them and Sarah, using the main screen to look at a satellite feed, watching Sarah's operatives swarm the place. Why did the twins care about the normals so much to keep asking rapid-fire questions like how many there were and who was with them and whether or not the kids remembered any of their names?

"Oh my sweet fucking secrecy," Howard said when the questioning was done, running his hands through his hair. Dozens of normals rich enough to afford their own air transportation, parts of families going, some of them telling their friends about where they went. A fucking nightmare. "Did you know that the importance of things is not always the order in which they must be dealt with?"

"The two of you are much more important than this fuckshittery, but we have to deal with it now," William clarified. "Yes, us personally, it's that big of a clusterfuck. Want to watch?"

"No," the boys answered as one. Watching the twins act as Dominator, especially in this situation, might be an enlightening experience but neither of them was up for it. Besides, they still looked somewhat like normals. "Sarah, where's that soap?" Stan asked, and Ruby tossed the bottle in their direction, Quad catching it with his lower right hand. She led them to the elevator down as they overheard the twins start calling up a number of high-powered Illuminati at once, Sarah using a section of the screen to marshal her own forces.

The twins' basement was practically an underground mini-mall, and the kids smiled widely as the door opened, their attention immediately drawn to their right, past the pool. In the electronic moshpit that served as very old-school stress relief for frustrated Dominators, an obviously retroviral servant was loudly jackhammering a metal plate with his feet to the tune of rapid-fire electronic music.

Luke had intended to passively avoid them, dancing vicious sets of something with an average BPM of 800 and semirandomized high-Chaos steps rather than have to look small children in the face, a thing he loathed doing even as a small child. He was nearly finished and the kids obligingly watched the last few seconds of him trying to murder the sensors by stomping on them before he reluctantly turned to them. "Can I be of assistance, Masters?" he asked in an obsequious tone which practically needed a negative answer.

Quad stared at his face. He recognized.. no, it wasn't.. no, wait, if this really was Paul's servant and he didn't have the retrovirus then, and he was older now... "Did you ever have wires pulled out of your body?" he asked.

How the fuck do you know that? Luke pondered his next words between two competing emotions. The first was his intuitive understanding that telling these wonderfully bright, practically celestial sons of the Dominator anything related to that was a foul obscenity, something that they should not even need to consider, let alone comprehend. The second was his thorough wish that everything sacred was to be profaned and everything pure was to be corrupted. "Yes. There are some fucked up people in the world, especially in the Illuminati. You've probably never seen them at Northberg, but when you do see them you probably won't even know they're fucked up." You're looking at one right now, can you tell? "And what these fucked up people do and why is probably better not to know about, even for the sons of the Duumvirate." There. He hadn't told them a thing, but knew of no faster way to get them to tell him to fuck off with that information-limiting normal bullshit and curious enough to search the buried records for themselves.

"Yeah, we know," Stan said instead. "We just got done dealing with one." Luke inquired and they coated themselves with citrus-based cleanser before jumping in the body-temperature water, as they gave him a condensed version, enjoying the look on his face and his proclamations of how badly that guy was disturbed, mentally imbalanced, and inexplicably creative in the worst of ways; they found seats in the pool and scrubbed the awful normal colors out of their hair with the dye remover, turning the water briefly brownish (never again would they put that diarrhea on their heads) while he made a couple of statements relating to the fact that they were massively skillful and lucky to get out of there with all their body parts.

"Aren't you going to wash yourself, servant?" Quad asked, rankling his nose to signify that he could smell him.

Luke wasn't going to say no, even if the kid was trimming the nails of his lower arms with his teeth, so he stripped and stepped in after applying cleanser, leaning back in the seat. "You know, your parents never want me in the tub with them," he said, placing his forefingers close together in front of his face and indicating why with a few brief pops.

"Oh, nice! Paul made you an electrical!" Quad shouted. He knew at least one of the really little servant kids was an electrical, although she was too young to use her power for cool stuff. Wasn't she a combustive, too?

"Hey! Electrical! Let's see you do something with it!" Stan demanded, causing Luke to bite back a mean retort involving a Raiden-style fatality.

"Do I fucking look like your monkey?" he rhetorically asked instead, which of course got both kids nodding and answering in the affirmative. "Well, I'm not. I'm Paul's monkey." The kids were used to that kind of reply, having had similar short conversations with other kids' servants. They were definitely old enough to get their own, but neither had wanted one when asked; it just seemed like the wrong kind of responsibility. Sure, it was nice being waited on hand and foot, but they could get that from Enforcers and general servants. Having their very own actual person who would do whatever they wanted sounded like a great idea, but neither one wanted to promise that they'd want to keep anyone around except each other (well, except maybe Tetrina for Quad, but that was different..), and giving up a personal servant was just plain bad. So they chose to simply put it off indefinitely, leaning towards 'never'.

And it wasn't a personal servant who walked in just then, carrying two small folded-up bundles of fabric. The boys launched themselves out of the water, and the room reacted, dehumidifying, heating, and circulating the air. They wiped water and a few remaining flecks of dye on towels before unfolding their new clothes and reminding Luke that their aesthetic concepts were alien to his, as the two-armed suit was bright pink to match Stan's hair exactly and the other was bright blue, both with gradients from deep color in the center to white at the extremities, with the only visible stitching a Duumvirate-logo outline on the back, just below the folded-back hood. The fabric was as thick as the twins', better than normal Class III body armor against bullet and fragment penetration, even if that could still break bones. The boys giddily put them on and discovered weapon carriers in the attached coats, retractable blades on nails and fists, the retractable wheel system they had gotten used to, and pockets holding phones pre-programmed with their identities. Excellent. They agreed that they looked a lot like their fathers, and more importantly like real people and not a couple of fucking normals, even if their hair was cut short. The girls wouldn't like that part; they loved playing with Stan's pink hair. (Xavier told him to enjoy it, as he'd really want the attention from girls in half a decade or so.) They were interrupted by Paul's voice over the intercom: "Luke, center room."

"That's my cue," Luke said, making chimpanzee sounds as he left.

"All right, real clothes- check. Now all we need are some..." They left the swimming area and looked to their left, glimpsing a room chock-full of what they had promised to start carrying. "...weapons." Holy shit. Those couldn't all be real, could they? The boys rolled the fifty feet to the room, eyes lighting up at the sheer amount of awesome in it, and discovered a firing range before examining the front-displayed items with deliberate, elaborate care. Some of them were inviting in their excessive size and power (a couple of the bigger guns more closely resembled field artillery than firearms), but the boys refrained from having a shooting jubilee; after all, they were six, not three. They knew what they needed: something they could actually carry around all day.

Which they found hard to find. The warehouse-sized storage room had shelves usually stacked eight to ten high, in an area a good fraction of a football field, with clear super-glass floors showing more above and below. "They probably don't have anything made for us," Quad lamented. All these guns looked sized for large adults; this was the Dominator's room, and he figured he couldn't expect anything to fit their hands well.

"Bullshit, they've even got normal weapons here, you think the Duumvirate uses those?" Stan replied, rolling up and down aisles. This place had one or two of everything, from the simple and time-tested to the highly advanced to the wildly impractical. "What's the order? Bigger stuff up front, normal stuff in the back, two-handers over there, one handers here, I'm guessing it's spread stuff in odd-numbered aisles, or is it.. oh, there they are." The child-sized weapons were helpfully placed on the bottom shelf, so kids wouldn't have to climb to reach them. He almost said something about asking permission to keep the weapons, but closed his mouth in embarrassment. What was the Duumvirate going to do, say the kids couldn't have easily replaceable weapons obviously designed for them?

Quad looked at the selection. Although he enjoyed a great deal of snap-shot precision with a quick glance, It was easier to draw a bead from his eyes to his hands for longer shots with his uppers, and so he chose a pair of suitable pistols for those. The little guns fired a number of different rounds, all roughly the size of a .22 with the muzzle energy of a normal 7.62x25; he favored the depleted-uranium, as it had an armor-piercing jacket to make it an 'And the three heavily armored guys behind him' round. The gun's display case marked it nonchambered and caseless, but Quad vaguely recognized the first word and had no idea on the second. He'd never seen a firearm that needed brass that wasn't on a screen somewhere. He ran-rolled to the firing range to test one, loaded it, instinctively looked for the click-clack slider to chamber the first round, realized that's what nonchambered meant, and fired all ten rounds in each pistol directly from the magazine into the thick soft-armor target on the far wall in rapid succession, nearly laser-perfect in accuracy. Of course there was recoil, but eh, so what?

Stan came from behind him, an enormous smile on his face. On his hands were what looked almost like gloves with a steel front and back straps, five-centimeter barrels extending between his middle and ring fingers with the tiniest bit of insulation between them. As he clenched his last three fingers, the straps tightened around his hands; at the forefinger was a trigger. Quad stepped aside as Stan pointed his fists at the target and squeezed, two tiny explosive-tipped bullets obliterating the bullseye. "Huh? Why didn't it.." He looked at the weapons carefully, keeping the barrels pointed away from things he didn't want holes in. "Oh, there it is." The full-auto switch was by the thumb. He gave both a flick and emptied the rest of the 20-round magazines in a bit more than half a second with a BRRRRRAP, deepening the hole and prompting the range to peel back the first target and reveal another. "Woah. Okay. That is almost too fast." Sure, it'd make a few Enforcers dead, but what about the rest? Even he couldn't twitch-aim that fast. He'd keep it to single shot unless he needed to.

Quad looked at him askance. "Isn't that hard to use?"

"No way. This is perfect. It's just what I always wanted, but I never knew it." The only question was, to carry more ammo or not to carry more ammo? These magazines weighed roughly a pound, and Stan decided he could deal with another couple. Quad, on the other hand, wasn't going to carry more magazines of depleted uranium than he had to.

"All right, now I want something with a spread for my lowers."

"Well, you could just carry two, it's not like you have to carry..." Stan trailed off as Quad was giving him a look like he'd suggested an evening of cat rape. "Or maybe a two-hander?" he offered instead. That was an option. There was one particularly inviting anti-Enforcer room eraser, suitably downsized for small hands but still capable of local omnicide. Quad decided he didn't want any weapon he couldn't reliably aim away from his friends. Another mini-shotgun with a sensible choke looked nice, but that was almost small enough for a one-hander anyway, so Quad went for two slightly smaller ones, each with ten shots of depleted-uranium pellets with Barnum-pioneered explosive. He posed holding all four weapons up at once like a blue-and-white quadbracchal version of Rambo, and Stan laughed. A couple of tests with those- a fifth of a meter spread at 50 meters, not bad- and the boys agreed that they were finally armed properly. The only way they'd ever be out of reach of these guns is when they outgrew them.

"Hey, what about the stuff on the other floors?" Stan asked as they were about to leave.

"Up looks like napalm throwers and grenades, and swords, and that kind of stuff," Stan nodded, that's what he thought. "Down- you don't know those? See the lenses at the end? Those are lasers."

"Oh, duh." Lasers were awesome, and both kids had gotten many chances to play with them, usually in a reflection-less room at wattages that wouldn't melt their eyes out. (Blue-light retina damage was something they could regenerate before they would even notice it happened.) The good ones, that could actually burn through targets with a flick of the wrist, were also bulkier than they wanted to carry around all day; microfusion accelerators could only be so small, and radiation shielding only so thin. Their dads had carried around bulkier stuff at age ten, but Stan and Quad just wanted to be armed, not weighed down when running around with their friends.

They considered going into the arcade, but they had plenty of that stuff at Northberg and wanted to go explore the island instead. As the elevator doors opened to ground floor, they heard someone angry shouting about things they didn't comprehend. What was 'implied responsibility'? Either you were responsible or you weren't. What was that stuff about 'vassal authority'? A vassal was another name for a servant and could have no authority, by definition. He seemed to be speaking English, but the words made so incredibly little sense put together that it made Quad's head hurt. Was this guy really whining about having to do something for secrecy's sake? Everybody did things for secrecy's sake, that was how it worked. They'd dressed up like a pair of normals for it, and an adult was crying over having to order a few servants to cover something up? They walked around to see him talk, and he was a pudgy, scowling man, white face made of stretched lines and hate, obviously fake hair on his head. They also noticed the variety of other faces on the screen: generally annoyed ones, most old, only one engineered in the group, with a few inaudibly talking to other people off-screen and one resting his whole face on his hand as if he were trying to sleep. The kids had seen adults at work before. This didn't look like work, possibly because of the asshole yelling at them.

There was, however, one thing that was very clear.

"Nobody likes you, you keep talking about crap when there's important secrecy stuff at stake, and everyone else is trying to fix this and you're not, so why don't you just shut your fat blowjob mouth?" Stan yelled at him mid-tirade. More than one of the people on the screen broke up laughing. The twins successfully suppressed the urge as this was still serious business.

His face did something the kids haven't seen anyone's face do before. First it flushed to red, then grew purple. They could see his lower teeth, straight and perfectly even, sticking out like a monster's. "Listen to me closely, you blank freaks, and make sure your rugrats listen too. This organization is held together only by the good graces of the people who are in it. Maybe you don't care about things like that, sitting on that island, but we do. And we determine what is and isn't a problem for secrecy. And I would recommend not overstepping your bounds unless you want more problems." The kids' eyes went wide. He couldn't have said what he just said. Nobody said things like that in Northberg. Even the most enraged, screaming four-year-old wouldn't say something like that. Even the cautionary tales featured on the Northberg kids' screens never had anyone saying anything like that. This shit-eating cocksucking motherfucking goatblowing rectocranial retarded douchebag (and Northberg six-year-olds had many, many more words for people like him) had just taught the boys what it really meant to be profane.

And then- hesitantly- the faces on the screen began to change to apologetic ones, because the twins' faces changed that way. "I apologize for that outburst. Our requests of you are simply meant as suggestions. If you feel that us asking these things is beyond our authority, we apologize for wasting your time," William said. Stan and Quad looked at each other, unsure how or if to react. What the fuck?!

The man clicked off, satisfied, and the faces changed again, this time to everything from exasperation to rage. The twins clenched bladed fists in frustration. The man who had one hand over his face put two there. The kids had no idea what the gesture meant.

"Dominator," Donald offered tentatively, "you may wish to reconsider a refinement of your recruitment criteria."

William gave him a No shit look as Howard said "Thank you Donald, I came to the same conclusion." with face-melting sarcasm. This wasn't a terribly recent Illuminatus, having been in for four years. The twins took him for one more guy who started off well and ended up being driven mad by petty, self-centered powerlust. They'd use this experience to try to screen future problems out, but he wasn't anywhere near the first to make stupid threats and probably wouldn't be the last.

The kids were utterly confused. Wasn't he just.. didn't they just say...? "They were just humoring him," Paul whispered next to them. Both of them wondered why he used the word 'humor' as this wasn't funny in the slightest, but figured it out through context. They understood the concept of pretense quite well.

And now the adults were talking about how they really didn't need an additional issue in the face of their existing problems, and Stan saw clearly how he could help. "We can kill him for you!" Stan exclaimed brightly to various degrees of amusement and horror, mostly amusement.

"No, I'll handle that because he just threatened a secrecy breach," Sarah said. "Killing him might not be the hard part." Quad and Stan figured that his assassination might involve pretending to be normals again and a great much waiting besides, so they didn't protest. She transferred her end of the screen to her phone, opening up screen real estate and conversational breathing room, and rushed upstairs while the rest of the Illuminati understood that he would be dealt with and returned to the original problem. The kids watched for about ten seconds before getting bored. They understood a good deal of the principles in play, but couldn't follow all the minor, brief territorial squabbles over who was responsible for what and didn't know why they were arguing or why the twins were letting them argue like that. So they each grabbed a small slice of ham from the kitchen and went outside instead, putting their hoods up against the light drizzle.

Stan expressed his confusion as the door closed behind him. "If this is such a big secrecy deal, why are they each doing their own thing and why's Dad letting them?" he asked between bites. This pig was seasoned right.

"Yeah, it's weird, each one.. I think I get it. They all want to help out too, because if they help out it means that they're.. accepted as having a place, an ownership, in whatever they help out in." He took a bite and chewed while he thought. Wasn't that how it worked? Definitely, it wouldn't make any sense at all otherwise. "They're showing themselves to be responsible, and Dad lets them because it means that they're going to do everything they can," Quad concluded. Even if they weren't fully cooperating with intermingled forces.

"So it's just like we wanted to do. They're just like us, only they can't admit it," Stan said, starting to laugh.

"Yeah, that's exactly it," Quad said, joining in the laughter. "We're not the kids, Stan- they are!"  Their loud laughter attracted the attention of the local canines.

Seeing four strange dogs of various colors rush towards them very fast took the boys by surprise and their hands intuitively flicked to their newly-gained weapons. "Wait," Stan said. The front dog didn't look like it was going to try to hurt them, and it was giving playful barks and jumping in the air, running around them, the other dogs following. Quad sighed in relief. These were their dads', definitely, didn't anyone ever tell them not to start rushing at people like that? At least they were friendly, even to strangers.

But the boys could not be strangers to these dogs, and all four basked in their masters' kids' smell, sniffing repeatedly to enjoy it further, having recognized them the moment trace molecules had reached their keen noses, understanding them far better than words would convey. Chocolate, Negro, and Magma did not quite remember Stan's mother, not being retroviral on the twins' eleventh birthday; Fido had an immediate memory of the deep-scent underlying the very faint perfume of a certain girl so many years ago.

The boys had no idea of this, simply seeing engineered animals. They tossed their last scraps of ham, and the dogs chomped it out of the air. Quad looked in Fido's eyes and at his body. Fido was roughly one and a half times the size of Quad, the other dogs nearly as large. "I wonder if I can ride you?" he asked. Fido understood one meaning of the word 'ride' and that was in the context of going on a trip, so he barked in assent, puzzled as Quad gently started climbing on him, lower arms around his chest and uppers around the thick muscles on his lower neck. Oh, that's what the kid must have meant. Master's son was going to go for a ride, because Fido was going to take him on one. Stan wasn't going to let Quad have all the fun and so climbed on Magma the same way.

And then the dogs were running, under and between trees, easily twice as fast as the kids could possibly run, the drizzle turning into a wet coating on their hooded faces as their mounts zipped over and around obstacles, the undulating cheetah-like spines of the engineered dogs contrasting with the constant hammering of feet on wet ground, Stan pulling ahead, Magma splattering Quad and Fido with mud, the other unladen dogs simply running around the kids, pigs scattering away from the speeding canines. After a circuit of the island, over rocks and fallen branches, the dogs stopped at a tall tree, panting, the laughing kids dismounting. Fido shook himself and Quad did the same, Stan hiding behind the tree to evade the flying mud.

Quad gave Fido a long, loving pet with all four hands, looked up at the high, dripping branches, and pulled himself up onto one. He'd heard somewhere that their dads liked to do this when they were younger.

"You really want to climb another tree?!" Stan asked incredulously.

"Sure, why not? It'll be better than last time." It was quite nice not getting bark or sap on one's skin, and very very nice indeed to enjoy it without being chased by Enforcers intent on one's death.

"I guess so!" Stan exclaimed in Latin, and followed him up. Quad almost used his blades to aid his climb before remembering that this was the Duumvirate's tree and he didn't want to damage it. They sat on the highest branches that would support them, looking out at the small expanse of land and large, large expanse of sea in front of them. They saw a jet-helicopter elevate itself from the ground and blast off; they waved to whoever was in it. Probably just Quad's mom and her servant if she was on a mission to kill whoever that fat guy was. Quad did an upside-down hang with his lower arms on the tallest branch that could hold him, letting some wet grime drip out of his dirt-rejecting suit as the wind rocked him back and forth. "I wonder if they'll let us live here?" Stan asked wistfully. He could get used to this.

Quad was startled by the question. "Are you serious? I'm going back to Northberg. I don't want to be.. living with parents." The idea was something of a foulness to most of the Northberg kids.

"Back to Tetrina, you mean," Stan replied, holding on with one hand as he sat on the branch, relaxed.

"Oh come on, she's not even.." He trailed off and Stan laughed. "So what about you? Aren't you the one getting surrounded by girls? Do you want to be.." What was that word? Insulate was wrong, it was.. "isolated?"

"I.. yeah, you're right." Stan understood the word as being stuck on an island. Which, after all, this was. "And we are going to come home as fucking heroes." Not the shitty comic-book kind, either.

"No shit. They will take one look at us and go 'What the fuck...'" They laughed.

"Having fun?" came their dads' voice from below, who climbed up to sit on the middle branches, their size forbidding them to put their full weight on anything thinner. They'd finally reached their maximum about last month. The Operator, American by birth, had listed it as as 7'2" and 350 lbs, depending on what they'd done recently and who they'd last eaten; the kids estimated their height at two and a quarter meters and, were they to try to lift and carry one (they could do it together, with effort and leverage), would estimate them at about a hundred and sixty kilos each. The tree would be growing a very long time before the twins could climb back to the height they reached as ten-year-olds.

"Yeah! Hey Dad, we got some weapons from the basement," Stan yelled down.

The twins looked at each other, smiling. They'd wondered why the servants provided them with variants of every weapon known to normals and a great many that were not, even ones they couldn't possibly use. It was suitably ostentatious and awe-inspiring, so they never questioned it. "Good, hope you never need 'em," Howard called back up.

Quad laughed. "Don't you mean never need them after today?" he asked, scrambling down to sit just above them, Stan following.

"But that's the fun part," William replied. "In emergencies, you never know you need something until you need it. Then you're prepared for something like that emergency, and not something different."

"And before you ask, you can't be prepared for them all," Howard added. The kids chuckled at him; of course they knew that. "Now that we got all that secrecy shit out of the way, what, exactly, happened in there?"

The kids tripped over each other trying to tell the story, and the twins had them starting from the beginning, thinking about how they'd tell this to their Northberg friends. "I've got a better idea, let's tell everyone at once," Stan said, pulling out his phone. Quad did as well, and it took the boys roughly three seconds to figure out how to use them. Quad, hanging upside-down, called Tetrina; Stan, for shits and giggles, called Skyler.

"Hey Quad!" Tetrina's high voice came from the phone, and she was clearly confused. "Your phone's upside-down.. I mean the background's.. you're upside down!" she figured out.

"Yeah, he usually is!" Stan called back, Quad responding with two left middle fingers. "Okay, we've got a big story to tell you guys..."

"And they're not making it up, either," William said, nodding at the inevitable reactions of the Northberg kids on hearing the voice of their Dominator. "Go on. From the beginning. Slowly, in clear, detailed words that everybody can understand." It took them almost a half hour, in between answering the various questions, about the way everything looked, smelled, how Bruce acted and what he did. Everyone, particularly the twins, expressed gladness that the boys walked out of that with their flesh still attached to their bones. Skyler, in his quest for adult wisdom, asked about secrecy; the twins were more than happy to tell them all about the massive clusterfuck until a lot of them couldn't follow it anymore. Then Tetrina asked when they were coming home, and there could be no other answer but 'very soon'. They ate a scrumptious meal of pork, buttered toast, and lemonade before a Northberg jet arrived and Quad flew them home, Stan dozing off in the back seat.

Chapter 35

Another few months, another body of Illuminati to introduce as a group. The Duumvirate had come alone, this time; bringing other Illuminati along with them for this sort of thing turned out to be bad politics. Sarah and Paul had special positions, but it caused dissension if they were seen as flaunting them. They didn't like doing it. Despite the implantation of the Bavarian general servants, despite the fact that the railgun was more than four years ago, and despite the precautions taken against traps, they never felt truly safe in the headquarters. Not only was it a place purpose-built to conspire in, it was a place for conspiracies to unfold, and there was no changing that.

So seeing a generic-looking Enforcer standing just around a corner was a disturbing thing. The twins stopped for a moment, looking at it. It didn't move, which meant that something was wrong; Enforcers waited but never loitered. An Enforcer without immediate orders performed self-maintenance tasks (food, drink, sleep) or waited in a specified barracks area, not in a hallway. The twins walked up to it, almost wishing for the heel-wheels the kids had, and noticed it was with seven identical others, all of them standing just around the corner, not moving, not responding, not even getting out of the way of where the twins would presumably walk to. Something was definitely wrong here.

"Enforcers, what are your current orders?" Howard asked them. They didn't answer him. By tradition they didn't have to, and couldn't be expected to, but they didn't even acknowledge his question. His brother looked around, trying to determine if the Enforcers were meant to lure them into another trap. Nothing moved.

Howard pulled out his weapon and began waving it around; William got the idea immediately and did the same. Enforcers, as a rule, had very specific orders regarding friendly fire. Shit happens in combat, particularly fast and unexpected combat, particularly combat involving panicked, violence-inexperienced Illuminati. So Enforcer orders were almost never a lethal retaliation to life-threatening provocations, at least not in a public place; killing an Enforcer was moderate property damage; getting an Illuminatus killed with Enforcers could lead to the Enforcer owner's own demise. Howard was banking on the idea that the Enforcers had them in mind as 'enemies', and so would respond immediately to a threat from them.

The moment the aperture of one weapon pointed at a member of the Enforcer group, they all reached for their weapons at once. Short-barreled anti-Enforcer hand cannons, which looked like original Barnums.

The moment they reached for their weapons, the twins ended them, carving their arms and torsos with two long narrow-beam blasts, setting their clothing alight and leaving their weapons undamaged.

The twins looked at each other, understanding the enemy's plan at once: The Enforcers would wait at one end of the hall, the twins would be facing away walking down the other, and the pellets would be there before the sound of the Enforcers drawing their weapons, killing them both instantly without any chance of survival. Simple, unavoidable, lethal, and extremely hard to prevent.

Except they had prevented it, and they collected the anti-Enforcer weapons, informing the facility's rushing Enforcers of what happened. They then left to deal with the nascent Illuminati. Although they'd have to investigate the weapons' manufacture, refusing to interrupt their schedule for something as insignificant as a failed assassination attempt was particularly good politics, and impressed the newcomers greatly.

The only real problem was how to prevent future attacks of the same sort; they found the general-servant leader, and told him to ban any Enforcers not his own from leaving their vehicles while they were here, and then told him to keep the vehicles monitored. Other Illuminati wouldn't like it, but it was better than trying to ban the weapons. Just like that, all conspiring and physical message-passing in the Bavarian headquarters would either have to be done with sentient servants or in person.

There weren't a lot of good compromises when it came to the direct intimidation factor of doing it yourself. No one had yet invented a remote-body system to reliably fake being somewhere through Enforcers or robots, but there were such things as impostor Enforcers; Sarah already had her own, after all. Howard had earlier wished for clones they could afford to replace. He found getting his wish more than a little unnerving. Because of the risk of discovery, the twins resolved only to use them when they figured they had fairly good odds of walking into a trap.

Barnum had an extremely isolated, well-fortified headquarters in the most uninhabitable part of the Australian outback he could find, another 'military base' reserved for 'experimental projects', an Oz version of Area 51 that almost nobody had heard of and nobody went to. With cannons everywhere outside and who knew what inside, it definitely fell into the potential-trap category. Raiding him would have been one thing, but walking in without destroying anything would have been inviting him to kill them instantly.

Barnum was startled by their presence, unnerved by their formal, identical mannerisms, and when they told him they had guns they wanted him to investigate, he tripped over himself putting them into the machine he'd built for the purpose, getting more and more nervous as it reported null results. Apparently the internal parts of the weapons had been melted down and reformed, weakening them but annihilating his nanoscale identification.

"And why is that, Barnum?" one of the twins asked from behind him, after a brief pause. Sweat appeared on Barnum's brow. They weren't acting quite like themselves, and if they were trying to scare the shit out of him with that, it was working. Sure, he could kill them with any one of the dozen weapons embedded in the walls, but it would be the last thing he ever did and he knew it. He found himself wishing he had one of the rogues' clones.

"I don't know, I- I don't even know if I made these-", he sputtered out.

He looked back at the twins, and in desperation and fear, his mind played tricks on him- he found himself unfocusing his eyes like a Magic Eye trick, seeing a full image of one Dominator in the middle and two half-images to the sides. Even the way they stood was perfectly identical.

"You did make them," the twin Barnum saw with his left eye said, and the moving/not moving mouth of the figure Barnum saw in the center looked like it was speaking his doom.

"Don't kill me until I finish, okay?" Barnum realized that he shouldn't have phrased the request quite like that- they might kill him right after he finished, just because that's what he asked for. "I didn't tell them anything. They found out, like I said they might." What he didn't say was how they found out. They didn't find out by careful inspection of the weapons; they found out by asking him and reading his emotions when he lied. He was so bad at this he couldn't even hide those properly. "But I did put in something to stop them just in case someone used them on me. I have a device that can short-circuit the electronic triggers remotely. You have them so it's really easy to prove." The twins would wait until after the conversation was over to test it, and if Barnum had been lying, he would have been dead quicker than he could say 'dead'.

"You saved this just in case we came knocking. We could have died and unless someone else found out, nobody would ever have known it was you," the right twin said. Barnum nearly shit himself. That was the real reason he put the trigger override in. He figured that if someone was going to kill him they'd use something a lot bigger than his own weapons or just assassinate him with Enforcers in a public place, much like they had tried with the twins.

"Yes! Yes, I did, I thought of all this from the first, and I hope giving you this is enough to spare my life!" His explanation was plaintive, his own whining grating his ears. "I'm not playing games like some people are! I'm just trying not to get killed! And so is pretty much everyone I know!"

"They threatened you anonymously," the left twin said. He didn't have to have confirmation of that fact to know it. "You could have told us the same way."

"I thought about it. I almost did. But.. I figured that if they saw you using the device, then they'd kill me for sure.." It was then that Barnum realized how untenable his position really was. By having an infirm foot on both sides of the fence, he'd left himself open to falling in the middle and crushing his balls- a thing the twins might actually do. Being an arms dealer didn't seem to work as well in the Illuminati as it did in the normal world. Not when he could be killed by either side for selling to that side's enemies. He really was a failure as an Illuminatus, but since he was born into it there was no way out for him.

"You're suffering from a grievous failure of imagination," the right twin said. "You could have explained everything and we'd give you far more security once we started operations. They never detected the vulnerability, so you could have sold them all kinds of weapons, all vulnerable at the push of a button. If you had given them reason to rely on you, it would have been even better."

"But I can't! I'm not a confidence man like my father, all right?!"

"Then you could have contacted us and we would have found you someone who is," the left twin said, exasperated. The fact that they smiled at him for half a second before they said anything was really starting to get to him. "Your imagination just keeps failing. We are recording this, you know, and once it's no longer a secret we'll publish this for everyone to see. Also if something happens to either of us, it'll get published anyway, even if all we have left to publish to is enemies." That left Barnum absolutely no wiggle room. The twins had signed the enemy's death warrant on him, and they were the only ones who could prevent it from being carried out.

"Can you imagine the best consequence of that, or will your imagination fail you again?" the right twin asked with a slight smile. Barnum shook his head. He was in no emotional state to attempt to imagine anything. "Now that you've irrevocably thrown in with us, you're next for the retrovirus."

Chapter 36

Paul didn't know it, but he was in a classic pose: hands under his head, ankles crossed, staring up at the ceiling, deep in thought.

Daydreams had occurred to him throughout the day, interrupting his work: he'd confront the Duumvirate, only to be laughed off; he'd approach the Operator just before the End was announced and appeal to his humanity, only to be informed that all five viruses had been released; he'd approach the Operator right now and be given a scathing lecture on the value, or lack thereof, of human life.

That morning, the Day Operator of Northberg and the Duumvirate of the Illuminati had a very long, very in-depth conversation, most of which Paul had listened to. The Operator had convinced the twins to make his plan into their official long-term strategy, and they took very little convincing. The upshot had been that the Illuminati would remove all normal humans from the planet in the most efficient manner possible. Everything else- methodology, resources, caveats, strategy- was details. Paul had remained silent through the conversation, not wanting to give his moral opposition away. Was it moral to oppose utopia? And here it would be a true utopia, at least compared to the way things were now. Every two-bit dictator spoke of controlling the future to make a perfect society, almost always fascist, always unworkable. His dictator friends were not two-bit, their idea of perfection was a fundamentally libertarian post-scarcity benevolent dictatorship, and it could and would work. It just couldn't work with ordinary humans.

He made himself think the full question: With its religion, its stupidities, and its vanity, did the human race really deserve to live? Other Illuminati would have told him, doctrinally, that the concept of 'deserve' was pointless. Seven years of plans, acquisitions, and empire-building agreed; but he largely treated all that as a game, as he'd never even spoken to a normal in an official capacity. Paul recalled, with some fondness, how he had held onto Venezuela for so long, the threats he had made, the things he had said, using and misusing his unique position to scare off anyone else who might threaten this upstart. And then after the countercoup, the retrovirus, and the business with Javier, he and his servant had become quite feared by other local Illuminati and he hadn't worried about it much, leaving Jacques to maintain order. It was so much of a game to Paul that he had even used the country to send cheapened heating oil to America last year, not out of any humanitarian concern, but rather just to shut two particularly loud-mouthed Illuminati up, who were waxing poetic about the necessity of scarcity and subconscious mass punishment and other such dogshit, and getting into a rather ugly competition of who could fuck over random groups of poor people the most. When they had inevitably turned to him in complaint he had given them both a scathing lecture on controlling one's own ego and to quit using debunked ideas of seriously needless suppression, and did they even bother to ask the local administrators of the areas in question before they went on their anti-energy spree? (Shit, he'd have to make a note to take them out before the End happened. Who knew what they would do if they were still around?)

But it was one thing to be able to say "I and a small cabal determine world energy prices", "I order not only key assassinations, but targeted mayhem, upon local juntas with my own personal electrical Rambo", and "It's my oil; I'll do what I want with it." It was quite another to go along with killing the world. Not once had Paul used his direct power to kill people not involved in the taking and holding of power; he'd only ordered his servants to slaughter those who were trying to undermine him in some fashion, and most of those were just plain bad guys. Collateral damage happened on occasion, but Paul followed Illuminati doctrine to a T on this one, which dictated efforts to minimize normal casualties because those efforts also minimized secrecy clean-up. Killing them was almost always unnecessary because they were so easy to control. They would spend their lives living and dying for nothing, they would line up willingly to be slaves and pawns. For there to be a game at all- for there even to be such a thing as normal-world 'politics'- this had to be so. For fuck's sake, they were still killing each other over oil! With controlled nuclear fission having been discovered more than sixty years ago. If not for secrecy all he'd have to do is inject a bit of Illuminated know-how...

Paul's metacognition knew it was coming: Inject, indeed. All he'd have to do to stop the killing before it started is to reproduce that general retrovirus the Operator had created and put aside, and actually make it contagious. The Operator's Enforcers would arrive on the scene, release the disease, and infect no one. Or, better yet, he'd simply replace the deadly cargo the Enforcers was to carry. No, that'd be too risky to pull off, and the first plan gave him more leeway- he'd just have to know from the Duumvirate a few days before the Operator did, which was trivially easy to ensure. The only other thing he needed was his own personal geneticist squad, which would be a few acquisitions from a few high-end colleges. ("You know that retrovirus you just got injected with? Here's the general form of it, which you must make contagious. You have an undetermined amount of time before everyone in the world dies. Go.")

But, again, did humanity really deserve to live? The retrovirus didn't make anyone good; there was someone ten feet from him who could prove that. What about religion, sadism, cruelty, mindless greed? Would the masses, suddenly gifted with a few dozen more IQ points and regenerative immortality, toss off their old controls? What would happen when North Korea's masses found themselves far hungrier than before, and no longer quite so afraid of bullets? What would Mugabe do when his country started to read? Would the Sunnis and Shiites renounce Islam as bullshit? How about the Protestants, the Catholics, the Mormons?

The words that would save humanity were not "Eureka!" "We can", or even "Let us all work together for a brighter future". The magic words were "This is all a bunch of crap." If Paul could come to the reasonable conclusion that retroviral nescients would start saying that en masse- start putting each other's lives before their own ridiculous wants, start developing systems that work instead of wandering in circles like a horse chained to a wheel, tossed aside their useless notions and became more like those who had grown up engineered...

Paul laughed at himself. Was that his idealism's last gasp? He could come to no such conclusion. A global retrovirus would lead directly to global war, perhaps of the thermonuclear variety as they would build their own. End of Secrecy or not, the engineered populace would answer their growing demand for resources with vicious brutality, and the engineered instinctive prohibition against internecine violence would be suppressed simply because they didn't see their enemies as human to begin with. And if it did, it might apply selectively; an army unit ordered to attack a neighboring community might mutiny, with or without their commanders, leading directly to factionalization of the entire world. The United States would be toast. Some European societies and Japan would probably survive the experience, perhaps China, likely South Korea, Costa Rica, Venezuela, perhaps Cuba, definitely not Brazil or Peru. Islam would either implode or explode or both. Africa and much of India would go apeshit until enough infrastructure was in place to support food distribution. Or he could just fucking make a factory to use fusion power and trees to pump out enough energy bars for everyone...

Heh, the rest of the Illuminati really wouldn't like him if he went through with this plan, would they? Surprise, you no longer rule the world. Of course, if the Operator's plan went through, all they'd have is empty land. Either you get people who can't be controlled, or you get dead people. Paul figured the entire End of Secrecy concept, as originally planned, was bullshit. Coming out and seizing direct power and not having global chaos? Hey everybody, we're your new masters? "Are you fucking kidding me?" Paul said aloud. What had the rest of the Illuminati been imagining? More importantly, what had they been smoking? The only way in hell that would play out is the brutal-repression way, with Enforcers on every street corner, in an extra-extra-realistic version of Half-Life 2, and who the fuck would want to rule a world like that? Either the Operator exterminates them and engineereds take their place, they're brutally repressed (probably until engineereds take their place), or they become engineereds and likely start killing each other, messing up all of society for potentially centuries to come, perhaps in a fundamentally irrevocable way.

Although, maybe if Paul got the Operator to tweak it to increase the protective instinct, drop the aggressiveness, make them more.. no. Hell no. Either they'd be real engineereds or fuck it.

If only he knew what the hell the normals would do! But that was unanswerable without a test, and there could be no clinical trials of this bitch. If he did it to an adequately-fed isolated community on, say, Tuvalu, they would probably live in peace and harmony until they realized they were being experimented on. No existing large area could be surrounded, no people could be moved to an island; the nature of the test would fuck up the results.

Not soothing his conscience any was the fact that he could do this right now, if he wanted. No need to wait. Everyone's End of Secrecy plans were fucked anyway.

And not soothing his sense of logic was the fact that giving the retrovirus to everyone flew directly into the face of the necessity of avoiding enemy retrovirals. The retrovirus sure as shit wouldn't make them friendly.

But it was either that or millions of five-year-old girls puking blood until they choked to death.

He went to sleep, and could not remember his dreams.

The next morning, he woke up with a fiendish, mercifully brief headache and unusual amounts of hunger. Damn the breakfast table, and damn Sarah's delicious meals. He had to make sure that he had absolute discipline over his trapped-rat mind before he talked to the twins at all- but if he avoided the table in favor of other fare, that would be decisively suspicious anyway.

He slid down the rail in the usual manner, and approached the breakfast table with decreasing amounts of trepidation. Sarah eating, Ruby setting out some specially-grilled bacon, the twins stuffing their faces. The daily routine. He was just about to actually chill out when William asked him, "So, Paul, how's plotting to stop us?"

"What?" Paul sputtered out instinctively. The twins were not fooled. "How the hell do you think I'm doing that?"

"How about 'We could tell you were doing it when you left the room', or better yet, 'we knew you would do it the moment he said the word 'remove'? I'm kind of surprised you didn't say something," William replied.

"Would it have helped?" Paul asked, casual replies on autopilot.

"No. Cooked up any good plans?" Howard asked, as if in simple curiosity.

'Oh sweet Jesus.' God, no, they were his gods, he couldn't lie to them, he loved them, but if he didn't stop following them and start being a grade-A bullshitter right now because he was an Illuminatus, god damn it, the whole world, everyone on the everloving motherfucking planet, was completely doomed-

"It's written on your face again," Howard said. "You promised yourself never to betray us, and you don't think you can let everyone die, especially the children. Moral impasse, get the dynamite. Spill it. Order of the Dominator."

He told them everything.

"It wouldn't have worked anyway," Howard replied around a mouthful of omelet.

"General retrovirus self-modifies, Paul," William said. "Shares parts of itself with mitochondrial DNA, uses some of the main cell code, makes a secondary version that actually does the retroviral part.. it'd be a pretty good breakthrough if they didn't have faster analysis now. Even if you got around that, you really think something can spread among 6 billion people without mutating even once? It's hard enough just stopping that inside the body."

"We could give you enough of it to play Schindler if you'd like, but that's not what you want, is it?" Howard asked. Paul shook his head. He couldn't. Because then everyone who died would be someone he let die, and a lot of the ones he saved would be complete orphans.

"How's this for morality?" William asked. "Quad can't live in the same world as normals. Picture him on the playground undisguised, or in a mall. You think that will change if the normals' DNA does? Imagine if you were born several years earlier and never met me, and grown up in the ass end of nowhere. Imagine if you had no idea you were getting the retrovirus, no concept of what a retrovirus is. You're smarter, but the first twenty-five or so years of your life are spent believing a book that's two thousand years old. Maybe you'd learn something about DNA. Maybe you'd start seeing the people you didn't like as being mutated badly because their attitudes changed, and then suddenly the group you hate but isn't supposed to really exist shows up? C'mon, Paul! You're not this mythical retroviral person, you're you! Of course you know that normal taboos and engineered DNA don't mix! And it sure as hell doesn't do the world any favors trying to twist logic to make the earth flat!"

Paul started to cry, in growing, heavier sobs.

"I thought you had a servant whose existence prevented that," William said.

"I thought he did too," Luke said. Although he'd never match Sarah or Ruby, he'd become adept at casual stealth. "You actually made him cry? What'd you do, sodomize a three year old and serve it for breakfast?" He gave a meaningful glance to the bacon.

William beat out his brother by instants: "Hey Luke, we're going to kill almost everyone on the planet."

Luke pumped back an elbow in the traditional 'YES!' gesture before sitting down to eat. "With what, nukes? Microwaves?"

"Disease," Howard replied. "Paul, what are you going to do with him once all the stragglers are mopped up? Sarah, what about you?" The twins had been discussing this last night: What would all the Illuminati geared towards normal-world activities do, particularly the professional killers, once there were no normals left?

"I have no idea," Sarah said immediately. "I was thinking about archives." The twins looked at her quizzically. "Of the normal world. Everything that might have had historical value before it all gets wiped off. And then.. I don't know." An alien invasion would have suited her and much of her staff perfectly.

Paul thought about his answer. Maybe give him to someone in engineering, but.. no. Let him make that decision once his usefulness to Paul was gone. Paul could grant him that. "Luke, once there are no more normals I'm letting you go. You can stick around if you want but I don't think I'll have any servants after the End." Luke just nodded. Ruby shot a quick glance at Sarah, who gave a quick shrug. "I don't know what I'll do. Probably just screw around for a few years.. no, I won't be able to. Because once there's a million engineereds you guys are going to be swamped without some hierarchy." This was directed at the twins. Luke looked suddenly more grateful; bureaucracy in any form was not his idea of a good way to spend eternity.

"So Paul, you think that after plotting to foil our plans, we're really going to make you viceroy?" Howard asked.

"Yes."

"Good, you're right." He took another big bite. "Quad's pretty fucked, though. He's made himself army general, and there's not going to be a whole lot for him to fight."

"Are you saying that anti-insurgency is easy?" Sarah asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Sarah, let's see what we've got. Worst case, 10% of the human population survives. We destroy their bases, any visible military equipment, all of their technology, their food supplies. There's no population to blend into, no laws of war, and they'll be killing each other. We just blast the stragglers down," Howard replied.

'Oh boy, Howie miscalculated the normals again. Good thing that won't matter soon.' "Food supplies is bullshit," William said. "Don't even bother. With 90% dead there's stored food for years. But we have Enforcers and.. shall we say.. antipersonnel engineereds." He noted the three half-smiles. "The Enforcers are the big one, though. We can just make more and more and ferret them out and not care about how many of ours die. Insurgencies work against oppression. They don't work against omnicide. Quad'll have a few months, maybe a year, of fun and then go do something else like the rest of our killers will have to."

"Hmm. Sarah, if you want archives you have it, but you'll have another primary job for a while: Retraining. Everyone in your organization," Howard said.

"Ooof. Looks like I will need servants," she replied, with a glance to hers. "But that'll be the first time in a while that I'll have control of something difficult."

Whatcha doin', Paul? Just sitting at the table, eating some food, listening to some guys and gals planning to kill the world? How's that treatin' ya? Taste good? Cool, cool. "You know, if you don't like listening to this, you don't have to," Howard told him.

"If you miss anything, I'll catch you up on it," Luke said amicably.

Fuck you, Luke. "Okay, then. I do have other things to do. Have fun being Kilohitler." Exeunt Paul.

"That's about right, isn't it?" William said as he left. "Six million, six billion."

"But only to the Americans," Howard replied. "To the Brits we'll be killing six milliard people. Different number system."

"Ah. Did not know that. But I wish he had a better sense of perspective." William looked around the room. "News, killers: Big galaxy. Eventually, six trillion people. Maybe six quadrillion, which apparently makes us Gigajesus." Laughter. "But that's the thing. These will be engineereds. Our culture. Our social structure. There won't be any more killing. And I don't want it to start. But if it does..."

"We're not going to have prisons," Howard said. "Intentionally, permanently, harming another engineered can have only one punishment." Temporary harm was an oh-well thing. Theft couldn't even be touched upon, at least not yet; in the current system, even engineereds occasionally 'stole' things from each other as part of the game of Illuminated control.

"So they're not going to be quite so retrained after all."

"Can they keep skills dormant a thousand years?" William asked. "It's not like we can have standing police, either. But it's the will of the Duumvirate. No killing your brethren or you die yourself. And all engineereds are brethren, no matter how different they are." Even if they're engineered for life on other planets.

"I think they can handle it," Sarah said. "Justice system?"

"You're looking at it," Howard replied. "Although to be sure, what we're worried about isn't 'justice' as normals understand it. Murder, brain damage, life destruction? That kind of thing will be.. next to never."

"It's resources that'll be the problem. The environment. Finite-planet stuff," William clarified. "Understand, and this is something that Paul does understand, every engineered has his own ideas about how to make the world a better place. Generally these ideas are similar. They may differ in details. Such as where to build certain things and what species to put where. They'd never tolerate government, but we need bureaucracy." Of the active, decision-making sort, not the institutionalized sort that exists only for its own benefit.

Ruby looked around at everyone else. "Planning too far in advance?" she offered.

"No such thing!" Howard replied brightly. "But you do have a point." With that, the twins left to go turn on the screen and talk to Quad, Sarah following. Luke and Ruby looked at each other, shrugged, decided it wasn't their business, and went to go do other things.

He caught Stan and Quad as they began a game; they, too, had just finished eating. The kids shunted the Duumvirate's image to the top right of their screen and kept the game in the middle.

At nearly eight years old, they were out of Northberg but still inseparable and still living in the Canadian wilderness. They'd melted down Gritzl's hellhole to build their own personal palace, which beat their fathers' for ostentation and size even if they didn't have the local ecology to match. Quad had some minor holdings of his own, as did Stan, but that wasn't their real business. Along with helping springboard new engineereds from Northberg into various positions, they were force multipliers. Arguments suddenly seemed to have a lot more weight with them around; wheels were a whole lot greasier, non-engineered opponents substantially easier to deal with. They functioned as more of a mini-Duumvirate than anything else, increasing the efficiency and will of an engineered mafia, although they didn't see themselves as that and didn't function quite the same. There were a handful of tough nuts who that approach didn't work on at all, but they could be worked around, and a couple of them- just two- had rugs pulled out from under them, holdings suddenly made null, blindsided. Neither called the Dominator for it. One was wise enough to congratulate the engineereds on their victory and request the retrovirus, but that was only the Dominator's to grant.

"Hey Dad. What's going on?" Quad asked.

"This is secret between us: We're going to kill the normals with disease," Howard said.

"Told you they'd go for it," Quad said to Stan, who nodded and shrugged. The twins blinked. He'd guessed? Yeah, it was sort of an obvious move in a way, but still...

"Doesn't put any dents in your plans?" William asked.

"No, we planned for this to be the plan," Quad answered. "Disrupting military structures and supplanting government is the easy part. There's some organizations that'll crop up but we can just infiltrate them. Since we're killing them, the real problem's the holdouts, but that's covered too."

"Enforcers and raids?" William asked, surprised that the kids had already started discussing plans to kill the normals, Quad apparently having appointed himself his parents' general as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It made sense, it made too much sense. They didn't have to be told. They just figured it'd happen, maybe one got the idea and told the rest, but with their current breeding rate it was an inevitability. The born, Northberg-educated engineereds simply didn't see nescient normals as anything other than an unnecessary obstacle or an infestation on what was rightfully their world.

"Mostly. Some fuel-air, some water-based, some other stuff. It's all just options, not concrete yet. You guys making this public?" Quad asked, his four hands rapidly flicking on two controllers. Apparently whatever he was playing was uber-hard mode even for him.

"No. We might see some unexpected reactions if we did," Howard answered.

"Heh. I can't believe the normal-born still buy that we're not going to do it sooner or later," Quad replied. And Illuminati rarely did things later when sooner was an option.

"You might want to look at what's out there for contingency plans. Really shows what a lot of these guys think," Stan added.

"All right. We will," Howard replied, conceding that the kids were one jump ahead of them. "But remember to keep everyone misdirecting. I don't think a lot of the normal-born will like this." One in particular didn't. "Tell your friends: Keep the long-term plans going, even if they aren't."

"Got it," Stan and Quad said in unison. The twins clicked off.

"They might be ours, but we really can't be seen playing favorites with info," William reminded his brother.

"Yeah, we can't. And we haven't talked to a lot of them in months anyway," Howard replied. "It's a good day to catch up with everyone." Informing all the engineereds personally about anything, with all the extra conversations and information exchange, was an all-day job. Speeding up their speech rate made them sound like Enforcers, but hell, it's not like they were talking to normals. Yet another problem that soon wouldn't exist ever again.

Luke popped out of the trap door like a satanic gopher, resting on his elbows, his feet dangling below. There was a strange smile on his face, and he looked at Paul with a glint in his eyes. "Ethical problems, Paul?" he asked with some sarcastic disbelief. "The Duumvirate said their eventual intention is to be Gigajesus after being Kilohitler. There shouldn't be any more killing after they're done here, and they'll kill anyone who does. They told all the other engineereds about the plan, and I don't think any of them had a problem with it." He did say he'd catch him up on it.

'Oh great, Basement Cat.' "Yeah. That's no surprise. Luke, if you know any way to stop this, I order you to tell me."

"Stage a coup of the entire Illuminati. Use false-flag attacks to kill the Duumvirate and Sarah and the Operator, then kill whoever else you wanted to implicate, then kill the Operator. Then put some encapsulated retrovirus in the water supply of the countries you want to survive." Luke spoke in the completely even tone of a standard operative, but his expression didn't change.

"I meant something that I can actually do."

Luke chuckled in a deep bass for reply. ('God damn it, when the hell did he go from screaming rage-ahoy hateprince to chuckling, lurking Cthulhu?') "Do I need to point out how stupid you're being?" Paul looked at him, annoyed. "You said earlier today that I'm free when all the normals are dead. Now you want to ask me how to save them?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," Paul said with hot anger. "You are obligated to answer my demands to the best of your ability, without regard for the condition of any of my servants. Do so, immediately."

"This plan is directly supported by the Dominator. Disabling or circumventing it would be a betrayal of the Dominator. You have stated that you cannot betray your Dominator. Therefore it is impossible unless one of those things is wrong." The words coming out of his servant's mouth made sense, but didn't match what he was actually communicating.

"God fucking damn it," Paul said aloud, not so much as being told what he already knew but at Luke's cold logic, apparently his imitation of the twins. He remembered the conversation between his servant and Joey, remembered how- Oh fucking Christ, now Luke was trying to convert him!

"Let me fucking guess. Your next statement is about how I'm going to have to become something else in order to accomplish my goal. I will not, Luke. I will not betray my best friends- not even you. Power itself does not corrupt, and if it did, I sure as shit wouldn't be letting you talk to me from there like some kind of evil prairie dog." More chuckling. "Now, do you have any beginnings of a plan that does not involve anyone I care about, including engineereds and the entire population of this fucking planet, getting hurt or killed?"

"I have none," Luke replied, in a tone that signified he didn't think any existed.

"Then get the fuck out of my sight until tomorrow." Luke bent down to leave, chuckling. "Wait. One more thing. Never try to use this kind of manipulation technique on any engineered kid. If you even start, you're dead. Even after I let you go." His servant nodded, still chuckling. "And I order you, right now, to tell me what the fuck is so funny!"

"You can't be good, Paul. No matter what you do." He opened his mouth to continue further- the fact that Paul was even trying was the really funny part- but closed it and left. Paul stomped down the trap door after him.

Well, that definitely was not productive. Accumulated stress was making him feel sick to his stomach. Maybe he should do the opposite- just give up and give in. It was just him, after all. He wasn't losing anything of personal value, except his Illuminated holdings. Monopoly money. Post-secrecy, he'd have as much land, social power, and production ability as he could ever want- he, along with millions of other engineereds, would be able to build paradise on earth. And, as the twins had been nice enough not to remind him, in a hundred years everyone he was trying to save would be dead anyway without a retrovirus. Sterilization, then? No, killing them all was more humane. Possible futures coalesced further; even if 10% of the population survived the blitzkrieg, the inevitable clashes between them and the Illuminati, retrovirus or not, would cause more misery than if he had simply let them expire.

The problem truly was fundamental: A growing engineered population and the normals had even less chance of coexistence than the nineteenth-century expansion of rapacious America and the native societies. This time, though, there would almost certainly be no reservations.. well, perhaps some truly native societies- if any survived- that were simply considered animals as part of the ecology. Other than that, what could healthy, intelligent, productive engineereds want sickly, stupid, useless humans around for?

The only way out was retrovirus for everybody. Either fuck up the world, still killing many, causing anarchy for centuries to come with lasting damage- or let Kilohitler omnicide happen and regrow pure.

'I can't be good, no matter what I do.'

"Fucking crap!"

Fuck it. It was like trying to draw a box with an X in it without lifting your pencil or overwriting the same line. Looks simple, physically impossible. "Hey Luke, sorry about that," he called down the trap door. "C'mon, let's go downstairs and play some DDR." And they did, completely enjoying themselves, Luke finally managing to AAA that one damn 850-BPM song he'd been having trouble with (it was just a 40-foot difficulty, but had way too much Chaos), and then doing it on doubles. What had Paul been worried about again? Oh, right, omnicide. Eh, no big. It wasn't like anyone would get mad at him for letting it go.

Chapter 37

What had originally been a simple land dispute- land, of all things- had evolved into a five-man clusterfuck of epic proportions. The various friendships/rivalry between all five of them only made it worse. This thing had festered for years, with three servants who didn't even know who their masters were. Every time they untangled one holding, it was tied to this other thing, which was done by this contractor in normal land who was owned by this Illuminatus here, but those servants were really part of... The fact that one of the participants was Donald only made things worse. There was also no easy-way-by-force out of this mess; all five of them were behaving as expected and had mutually come to their Dominator in good faith.

But they didn't call it the military-industrial simple, now did they? What the twins thought would be a 45-minute process, tops, was stretching into three hours with no end in sight; they found themselves wishing for something, anything, to just make this stop. A message from Northberg, oh goodie, and he even bothered to use the top-priority indicator. If the Operator was part of this mess...

"We're under attack."

The message was not echoed back and the petitioners didn't hear it; all five drew back in shock when they saw the twins move with alacrity. "Northberg's hit, send everything now," William shouted at the screen, as Howard yanked open the opening in the couch that held their favorite weapons. A second later, Paul and Sarah were out of their rooms and leaping down the stairs, armed.

"Servants?" William asked as they hauled ass to the jet.

"Training recruits. No time. Go," Sarah replied. Howard made it to the cockpit first and instantly slammed on the engines; everyone else buckled up and hung on. G-forces, secrecy- all of it be damned. Massive pillars of hot fusion exhaust shot from the back of the plane as it rocketed into the sky, slamming all of them back into their seats as they fought furiously to keep some blood in the front of their heads. Sarah contacted the island and told the servants to join ASAP, then found out which of her forces were in the area (practically nothing- shit!). William did the same thing with engineereds- they all heard the Operator's call but apparently none of them could get there sooner than the twins. Paul checked the satellite feed of the area, swearing when he found out the microwave death-beams weren't in the right part of their orbit to use here and it was too damn cloudy to see crap anyway, trying to determine if they should forgo deceleration and strafe the attackers, or slow down and try to establish a constant defense.

The answer was neither. A break in the clouds- "Shit, they're already inside!" he screamed, prompting Howard to simply stop caring and blast the engines as hard as they would go, pure rage preventing him from blacking out. Warnings screamed, first about acceleration and then about air friction. Normally he would have went to the stratosphere to even try going this fast- Mach 12 and rising, any normal craft would be in small pieces by now- but fuck it, if the metal ablated it fucking ablated, Northberg wouldn't fucking ablate... at one point he realized they really were going to shake apart or burn to a crisp, and, swearing, pulled back on the throttle.

William switched tactics and started trying to call Northberg sub-systems. The Operator wasn't available. Xavier was too busy moving babies to talk. Everything else was either confusing ("You saw them carrying something, what?! Okay, they're carrying multiple things, that doesn't help...") or getting outdated fast. All hell was breaking loose down there.

"We're going to pass it!" Sarah shouted.

"No we're not," Howard grated. Ten minutes, it was taking them a whole ten minutes to get there, any damn thing could happen in ten fucking minutes... "Because I'm doing this!" He yanked on the control stick in a way that it was never meant to be yanked at these speeds and blasting the VTOL thrusters as well. The Illuminated jet spun a dizzying half-turn, wrenching the structure against the airflow, causing more warnings to blare as he fought for control, and through power and precision they were pointed directly backwards- and upside-down as well. Fuck! ('Note to self,' William thought. 'Put forward-facing thrusters on jet.')

Then he gunned the throttle again. "Any hostiles outside?" he screamed as they were sent into their seats even harder.

Paul struggled to answer him through the black haze he found himself wallowing in, desperately trying to get enough oxygen to his cortex to identify friend from foe. Well, if it was standing around and not interfering with the invasion- "There- there- that's support, that's not friendly!" Engineered reflexes found targets through the pain and disorientation, and the lasers blasted the emplacements, immolating equipment and Enforcers, as well as two missiles aimed at them. The speed of light is like a train, Paul thought incoherently. It always wins.

And then suddenly they were moving at sane speeds again, Howard stopped the fire pillar and flipped back around, and in seconds they had a hard, VTOL-assisted landing just outside the closed hangar, some of the holes blasted in it bent inwards and some bent out.

They leaped out of the jet, spreading out to see around every corner, and the smell of a room full of freshly dead Enforcers hit them. They had experienced this enough times that it no longer smelled like slaughtered pork or fresh liver, particularly with the faint smell of used explosives lingering. Immediately they rushed inside the largest holes- big enough to stroll through- and got what they expected- no living hostiles, a room full of blown-apart dead meat in two sets of uniforms, the other aircraft in the hangar with pieces falling off, blood everywhere. No ambushers? No one to spare to try to kill the Dominator now that he's out of his metal shell?

Gunfire to the right, along with a low growling noise and a loud thump, but the kids were to the left. Fast decision- "Sarah. Paul," William said instantly, gesturing down the hallway to the children. They moved. The twins moved towards the center tram themselves, looking down the right hallway to see more corpses, some of them halfway cremated. An immense jet, more than twenty feet long, of bright orange flame sizzled from a bend in a corridor to a room, lighting up something inside it and cooking off ammo. The twins recognized jets like that. An Enforcer's head and gun-holding arm reached around from its cover, and Howard cut it off with one thundercrack beam. Immediately attention was on them- several Enforcers, in uniforms he didn't recognize- and carefully angled microwave shots dusted them in a single sweep.

The dragon peered out from the corridor, its left eye coming into view first, then its mangled, shot-up right. "Duuummmviraaate," said a voice that could never have come from a human throat. Bullets had torn holes in its flesh and ripped apart its wings, and it walked with a terrible limp, its middle right leg barely able to bear weight, its articulated forefingers flat on the floor. Nose to thick tail it was roughly as long as the twins were tall. Uninjured it would have been majestic. Badly injured- and some of those holes in its face had barely missed its brain- it resembled a wounded dinosaur, thick red blood oozing over green scaly skin. "They sought something in that room," it said, ignoring the pain. The twins immediately rushed towards the room in question, a pre-processing room for research acquisitions. "Did not push further, they failed", the dragon was saying, but the twins were already there, but held their fire-

And they were very glad they did. A four-year-old servant boy was the sole living creature in the room, both his wrists bleeding and at unnatural angles, an anti-Enforcer weapon still clutched in one of his twisted hands, a huge hole in the ceiling marking his entrance. Tears dripped from his eyes, but he smiled a forced smile on seeing his Dominator, obviously in agony and refusing to express it. A dozen dead Enforcers, shredded to gibs, surrounded a large, blasted device that had obviously come in with them. It was a wonder the weapon didn't completely tear it apart, what could it be made of? "I got the drop on them," he said in one quick breath. He had fired the weapon more than once after the first shot had broken his wrists, shattering every bone between his fingers and his forearms.

It took no time for the twins to figure it out- the kid had blown away the whole room from the air vent, the recoil far too powerful for his own bones. He'd scurried through the vents until he found Enforcers he could 'get the drop on'. Since this cluster was assigned to guard the bomb, and not running around, they met the kid's criteria and he had done what he thought would protect his future master, not even knowing the plan.

But what the hell did the enemies carry in? A five-foot rough cube with a single keypad on the side, was it some kind of- oh holy shit- if it was subcritical it could be leaking radiation, who knew what the actual design of the damn thing was- get him and get out- if this kid hadn't been here they would have been fucking nuked-

Okay, priorities- one, stop nukes from going off. The plan was obviously 'Lure the Duumvirate in and blow the whole place up', so it was safe to say that if any enemies with nukes knew they were there, it would have been detonated by now. Priority two, get the kid to a safe place. Problem: there was no safe place. Okay, scratch that too. Priority three- well, shit, they were expecting a bigger fight this way, they'd sent Sarah and Paul down the other way, maybe there was more?

"No more enemies on this side, right?" Howard asked the dragon. If there were, they probably would have come out by now.

"None I hear or see," it replied.

William wanted to carry the boy but figured it would be a bad idea, pulling him out of the room instead- by the forearm, past the broken wrist- and shutting the door. "Protect that room, then," he ordered the dragon, and rushed with his brother down the hall.

Quiet- strangely quiet, too quiet, kids' voices- Xavier and the Operator would get high praise for keeping the kids alive. Smell of blood, whose? A head peeked around a corner for a split instant and a six-year-old shouted "The Duumvirate's coming!" Cheering followed. The twins turned the same corner, seeing part of a massacre at the far end of the hall, and got their answers as they turned the next one.

The kids rushed towards the twins, still cheering. Sarah, Paul, Xavier, the Operator, and other adults were on their phones and PDAs, trying to get intel and security, both of which were in short supply. More than a hundred dead bodies were piled high at the entrance to the kids' ward, some of the invaders having apparently been shot dead the moment they turned the corner, others pulped by blunt objects, still others mangled beyond recognition. There was a minigun- why the enemy'd brought that, they'd never know- on a wheeled platform. It had been decimated before it could possibly be fired, the kids' fingersnap bullets ripping apart its workings and hopelessly clogging the barrel. Anti-Enforcer weapons had been fired late into the battle, slaughtering the stragglers. Some of the bodies were Enforcers in three types of uniform (the kids' had their own), none were children themselves. Some were normals. Normals! Who had worn the heaviest armor their master could bestow, thick black Kevlar-variant plate and helmets with thick face glass- and a nice, long strip of exposed neck in between. Fools! The twins laughed aloud. Most of the normals had been jugulated, naturally, the kids seeing the exposed weak point and placing their tiny, fast "training" bullets into it, over and over again. The only smart thing the enemies had done was attempt to use some sort of grenade, but they had to throw it around a corner.. with their arm. Which explained the missing hands on a couple of the corpses. The Operator had apparently taken the chance to get down and dirty, blood up to his elbows and bodies with various parts mashed to hamburger. Xavier's feet showed the same effects. Their Night counterparts were there as well, but hadn't had the chance to get involved either. 'Oh, Xavier, with your clean hands but dirty feet,' Sarah thought. 'Is it symbolism you're after? Do you not want to maybe break a finger punching something unexpectedly tough? Or are you a fan of the martial art that encourages exactly this?' (The second was true, which led to the third.)

The twins had always envisioned themselves coming to the rescue if something this happened, but ten minutes had been far too late. Well, they did rescue, the dragon and maybe that other kid. Fuck it, you mount your counter-raids with the Duumvirate and fusion-powered rocket planes you have, not the ones you want or wish to have at a later time.

The normals had brought some squad automatic weapons (almost a big a joke as the minigun, really, the kids had slaughtered its carrier before he could even bring it to bear), some standard normal assault rifles, some combat shotguns. But the Enforcers had carried anti-Enforcer weapons of their own, and a few of those would have decimated the entire hall.. but instead they had to use the shotguns, as evidenced by some dead friendly Enforcers and a few of the kids having pellet-sized rips in flowing clothing. Why?

"I had asked myself why you gave me and Xavier the override procedure," the Operator said, shaking his head, relaxing somewhat. These were original Barnums, the trump card finally played. There'd be no situation in which the Operator could ever possibly use it, he had thought, so why give it to him?

He's relaxing? Thinks it's over? It's never over, Operator. You of all people should know that. "There was a nuclear weapon in the other side," William informed him, and panic mode resumed. And that was when Sarah got a call from her servant that she had just shot down a nuclear missile aimed at them.

"It's a fucking trap," Luke had said eight minutes before, almost casually, as he went through the one-item pre-flight checklist: Start the engines. Helicopter rotors ascended the craft to fifty feet before the jet alone was enough to keep them aloft and the rotors folded back in. ('What a waste of metal that is when we really need to move,' Luke thought. 'Somebody in the Illuminati must have really liked Transformers.') "They just have to be big damn heroes." Which, he figured, would get them turned into an heroes sooner or later.

"It is predictable," Ruby agreed, bracing against the acceleration.

"They want to lead from the front. Seriously, if I was them? More engineered servants, and make them do it. We should be in that plane, not them."

"Then you'd get to be the big damn hero. But we should do the opposite."

"Are you saying we should just tell them no." He wanted to, how a part of him so deeply wanted to, but he decided he'd rather stay alive for the time being...

"I'm saying we should take a longer route. Follow the.. 48th parallel, twenty miles from the coast, go in a straight line there at the.. 53rd parallel. And stay just below the clouds." The damn clouds. High, fluffy.. and in the way. She needed line of sight, lots of it, preferably in visible wavelengths.

Luke smiled. He had considered betraying Paul in a more direct way- many, many times he had considered it- but this kind of subtle passive-aggressive subversion wasn't his style. But for Ruby to suggest that... "Well, we won't be there in time to do anything anyway." He did take the course proposed, angling up the nose of the plane. "What are you looking for?"

Good, he wasn't a complete moron. "Do you remember them telling us about the missiles?"

"Yeah, Paul mentioned that.. I thought that was dealt with. We have defenses. Northberg definitely does, or it should."

"Unless the first target of their attack was the missile defenses. In which case they're going to get rained on."

"And your best guess is boats."

"Yes. Just follow the route, I'll worry about the scanning."

"Yeah, unless they see us first, and just wait." Well, she suggested it, he was just listening to her. It made sense, but seemed damned unlikely, especially since it was a tactic that had failed before. If the twins started asking questions.. Slight disobedience was never his style. It would be something, though, if she was dead-on right, and the missile came from too far north for them to do anything about it. Then he independently came to the same conclusion that she had- the twins were surely calling in other engineereds, at least one of them lived on an Aleutian Island (he'd seen the girl a few times), and she'd have a chance of spotting the missile on the way there herself. A slim chance, but..

He focused on flying- just below the clouds, not terribly hard, although it made for some lurching ups and downs a few times- when a thundercrack of air came from below him and something enormous exploded in a bright flash about thirty miles away, ten degrees to his right. Very faintly, he saw the symbol for radiation appear on his HUD. But there wasn't any serious EMP, no mushroom cloud... "You shot their dirty bomb!" Holy fuck, she was right.

"Dirty- radiation leak?" She checked the plane's Geiger, hearing a series of occasional sharp pops. Yup, that was traces of gamma all right. "Damn, it probably wasn't dirty before I hit it. That was a nuke." Luke figured out what must have happened- she'd melted the hollow sphere of plutonium and predetonated the damn thing.

The vessel that had launched the Trident-variant was a couple of hundred feet beneath the sea, and so thought it was safe from detection and attack. Another long, loud thundercrack, a bright flash of plasma, and a massive explosion of steam later, Ruby informed her mistress that they had blasted a nuclear-missile submarine and would do what they could to patrol the area for more, for the time being. Fifteen seconds later, Sarah acknowledged and ordered them to go straight to Northberg now, as Canadian and American militaries would converge on the area, all of their submarines would be ordered directly home, and a full-on sonar sub hunt was being orchestrated, ostensibly as a military exercise. And with the hope that no normal found the predetonated nuke. Secrecy cleanup would take days, possibly weeks.

Ruby sighed and Luke changed course. The military exercise was being overseen by Donald himself, who they had little choice but to trust at this point. But fuck, normals? Sure, aircraft were shit at finding Illuminati-modified subs (she was surprised she could hit the one she did- he had to get too close to the surface before firing), few engineereds could get to boats any time soon, and normals had numbers, but.. normals? Fuck it, Sarah knew what she was doing.

It was a shame they weren't there to watch the twins freak out. The consensus at Northberg was that if the enemies had more missiles they would probably not be by sea, but rather by land or air, and they were beside themselves sending out orders to trace and track all movements of anything large enough to fire missiles from. Military records were immediately searched, Sarah's squads would cover as Canadian military and go hunting on motorcycles for suspicious trucks or installations, and anything civilian that showed up would not get the usual "military installation here" warnings but blown up preemptively.. all of that was just frantic searching. But what else could be done? The enemy had fissile material. And they had just come incredibly close to dying by both Plan A and Plan B involving it. Plan C (D? E? F?) had to be nipped in the bud similarly. Was there an ICBM somewhere? Hell, the Illuminati could construct a long-range artillery piece in man-portable sizes, go anywhere in the wilderness, and have an Enforcer out there with U-235 or plutonium on its back right now! But they would have done something when they learned that Plan A failed, same as the submarine had, or maybe there was no communication at all. 'Nuke them, and then nuke them again, just to be sure.' It made sense. The four of them (and the kids- the younger kids were standing right there listening to their Duumvirate talk about them getting bombed) agreed, if it was going to happen, it would almost certainly be happening already or within the next minute.

Paul had freaked out as well, but his guess was that it would be another one, already there. This was a very Illuminati thing to do; let the twins think they had blown up two of them, relax, and then suddenly a hidden enemy's backpack bomb goes off and turns all the engineereds to radioactive carbon in one strike. So he had dragooned everyone he could find- Xavier, Xavier's Enforcers, Xavier's Night counterpart, even some of the kids- into a massive search of every nook and cranny, and every item the enemies had brought, and hope like hell he'd get the drop on them (that kid's phrase was so apt- get the drop on, indeed) before they could go Allah.

It didn't happen. It took a half hour before they even began to relax, but no missiles were found, no nuke-artillery was assembled, no backpack bombs were discovered, and Plans A and B were apparently, for the time being, all the enemy had. Most of the engineereds who had flocked there left shortly after exchanging greetings and fears. Panic mode subsided into information-gathering and post-op mode.

Prisoners had been taken. Two Enforcers with implants reset informed them that they had been created specifically for the purpose with no real information on their master- they did not even know where they had been created, but it sure as hell wasn't Northberg- and one very stupid, very clueless normal who readily babbled all of the non-information he was fed, before and after implantation. (He met his end at the Duumvirate's hands within an hour. "Your job was to come here and kill these children, without knowing anything about who your employers or your targets were, and you did it just for the promise of money?" "Yes." Crunch-splat.) The enemy had demonstrated basic competence; nothing they had brought in had any evidence on or in it as to where they were.

Adam, the four-year-old who had saved all of their lives, had wondered why there were casts being put on his wrists instead of a bullet in his head for disobedience; Xavier had told the children to stay together, but he had rushed to the armory and grabbed an anti-Enforcer weapon instead, aiming to thin the ranks of the enemy before they threatened the life of his future master, immaturity combining with the instilled sense of duty. The twins could have said anything, but went with a pragmatic approach- they asked the similarly-aged masters if anyone wanted him, and out of the chorus of "Me, me" gave him to who Xavier decided was the most compatible. ("But how can I serve?" the boy had asked in Latin. "My hands are broken now." They would regenerate in a few days.)

The other kids regaled the twins with mostly gloating, save for the ones that got their shirts torn, one sweet little girl crying about her dress being shot through ("I shot him in the fucking balls for that right before Xavier punted his head off.") The normals had peered mirrors around the corner, SWAT-team style, only to have them shot out of their hands immediately. The grenades were flashbangs, particularly mean to engineereds' sharpened senses, and some of the kids complained about them having that, and it would have been much worse if the normal actually had time to throw it: "I could still see a flash with fingers on it a minute later!" Other grenades were used, with similar results. What happened next wasn't entirely clear- apparently the attacking Enforcers had orders to prod the normals forward if they balked- and then everything else was blood, guts, and chaos, which the kids sniped into while Xavier and the Operator rushed in with enraged speed, the kids being extra careful not to hit them in the back. Adrenaline, pure indignant fury, and the act of overwhelming their opponents created a battle glee. "Don't tell the Operator I said this, but he looked like he was actually having lots of fun," said a kid in mixed languages, who had obviously been having fun himself. Sarah recognized his face.. oh, he did take after his mother there. Jeremy and Kylie had been fertile; this must be their first, Jack.

Luke and Ruby had used some available downtime to check up on their daughter. (Paul said nothing. Luke had apparently changed his mind about being a father, and Paul wouldn't press the point.) At three and a half Ophelia stayed where ordered and didn't participate in the bloodbath. She also didn't speak very much English, and her parents barely knew a bit of Latin, so communication was slow and laborious, all three of them tripping over words and occasionally using Enforcers to translate. While the girl understood violence, she abhorred it and tried to minimize what had just happened. When asked about her own interests she had mentioned her developing powers, which she demonstrated carefully, almost as if she was afraid to use them. (She was, however, impressed when her parents showed jets of flame and blue pops of voltage in front of her with no fear at all.) She was very polite, seemed to lack anger or impatience, hugged both her parents in turn, and.. and...

...and generally gave the impression of one of the many, many beaten-down children both of them had seen in normal land, through subtle physical cues and behavior patterns. But it wasn't quite that, was their impression wrong? The girl was engineered-progeny after all, taught like the rest of the servants, they couldn't possibly be doing evil shit here?!

Fuck it. Xavier. He'd gone back to his office. He'd give answers or he'd be charcoal.

They walked in on him at his computer- a mammoth thing, with multiple monitors and even multiple mice, keyboards, and other controller-like input devices- and he looked up slowly, as if he was expecting something. "Our daughter, the perfect, sweetest little angel. Why is that?" Ruby asked immediately, her cadence and tone precisely matching the Dominator's. Xavier smiled slightly. How would she react if he told her most of the master kids tried that on him at least once?

"Hm. I was wondering if you'd notice," Xavier said instead, leaning back in the chair. He'd noticed the juxtaposition long before and had imagined this conversation, although not the circumstances leading to it. "Imagine if you had no experiences in the world. And every time you got mad- you lost something, you missed something, whatever, you screamed and cried about it- you hurt yourself? Maybe you burned or shocked yourself a little bit. And it wasn't coming from something outside your body, it was part of you." Silence, for a moment. "Very young children cry with their whole bodies," he explained needlessly.

The Law of Unintended Consequences. No one was immune. No one.

"So she tortured herself," Ruby said. "In baby-size doses. And you didn't do anything about it."

"And doing something about it would entail what?" Xavier replied. "The idea was that she would learn to master it naturally, the same way you did. And all the clothing we have here is electrically insulated and practically fireproof." That had been true years before she was born. "She was given toys to develop her abilities. Would you prefer that we restricted them in her formative years?" As intended, that cut like a knife.

"And you do nothing to.. change her," she replied.

Xavier looked at her like she was a fool. "Of course we do! We raise children. And if you equate anything we do here with whatever idiots you have known in the past, I will take that as an extreme personal insult." Luke almost said it anyway, just to be extremely personally insulting.

A brief staring contest, in which Xavier just stared them down while Luke and Ruby looked for signs of something in his eyes, an evil they could recognize. It wasn't there. Oh, there was something in his expression and body language, but it wasn't that. Xavier had no perversions, no intention of raising anything but solid servants and gleeful masters, just.. that damn quality that their own masters had.

They turned and walked from the room, swinging the door behind them solidly shut, to give their daughter a short-but-memorable education in how and when not to care if it hurts. (And when Ophelia did things right- when she used the powers like her parents did, when she used caution this way and not that- it turned out not to hurt at all.)

Xavier started chuckling to himself, pride welling, having not only won physical combat but psychologically bested tough opponents without even needing to bring authority into it. He seldom did. He was the architect of new society, after all, and didn't have to resort to such low tricks. Even in his position, he almost never had to say a straight "No" to any Illuminatus-to-be over the age of three, and paradoxically even less to the servant children who were simply taught to never ask. For the Illuminated ones, it wasn't a matter of 'limits' so much as it was a matter of basic sense, laws of physics and suicidal danger and whatnot. Then again, his job was easy in that respect- kids everywhere wanted the world, but this was the only place on Earth where they were expected to have it. What they would make it would be a reflection of what he made them.

Speaking of architecture...

He finished sending various parents letters of 'hell broke loose, and we aren't telling you jack shit, deal with it' (there is no PTA in the Illuminati), opened up a retooled version of AutoCAD, and began making sketches. He was proud of the ventilation system even if Skyler, since moved out, hadn't been (and he knew about that, and he also knew that if he ever gave a single hint that he was spying on all the kids' conversations, he would get very owned very fast- he promised himself he'd stop, but this was his best method of finding out how well he was actually doing in preparing the kids for real life), he loved the organic growth, he'd grown quite fond of the overall setup and it was starting to develop its own history with its quirks (such as being part of a medical facility), but it all lacked a certain.. design. The growth was good, the base wasn't quite right. It took him about fifteen minutes to realize that what he was designing wasn't so much a change to Northberg as it was a whole new educational facility, and they wouldn't be building one of those until the End of Secrecy... and then all the hidden defenses and emergency escape routes he was putting in would be completely worthless, as in the future society who the hell would do it?

('And that's what was being said before this latest attack.')

Xavier put the new building aside and focused on the one he was in. The kids could deal with a little inconvenience. Although it'd give the crawlable vents' real secret away earlier ('probably better that way'), they'd love them in their rooms. The weapons were something he wrestled with for a while ('all it takes is one kid too young or just not thinking right'), but they needed something that would kill real enemies even if it posed a risk to each other, he couldn't in good conscience leave them anything close to defenseless... and the next attack might come totally without warning.

When Stan and Quad had sworn never to be weaponless ever again, they had meant it, and Xavier only put up the most token of resistance; how could he possibly say no when they had almost died from lack of firepower? But the Dominator's kids had left Northberg a year after that ('and fuck, do I wish they were still here when this went down') and the other kids hadn't followed their lead, thinking them overly paranoid- then. Engineered kids only need to be taught things once, and most of them had become just as possessive of their weapons- some were even more, clutching their firearms like a teddy bear and more than a few would probably need one to sleep tonight. (A couple of Xavier's servants had made sure that the younger ones didn't actually cuddle it when sleeping, so they wouldn't squeeze the trigger while having nightmares.) But fuck, these were still small children and although they readily understood 'deadly' not all of them quite understood what could lead to 'deadly'. Keeping the kids safe was his...

Wait. Of course. 'Keeping the kids safe' was exactly backwards. To protect Northberg's charges, he had to make the kids more dangerous, giving them an iron grip on their own survival. Stan and Quad had not even come close- not once!- to discharging their Duumvirate-granted weapons for childish reasons. They carried them but never used them, choosing instead to use the provided weapons on the target range; their real weapons, they had declared, would be used against real enemies and them only. Their brush with death had sand-blasted their naivete clear off their psyches, and done some similar things here. Xavier pondered sacrificing some normals or Enforcers to stage something like this every so often, making death kindergarten an actual class. It wouldn't work- one of them would get clued in sooner rather than later, especially if they realized the enemy was aiming to be dodged or miss- but it was a nice thought.

What he needed to do, ultimately, was educate them about the truths of life and death from this fundament in a more coherent way; if the kids could learn it, he could teach it. Which was what he should have been doing from the beginning. They needed to be taught the basic realities of their existence as soon as they could possibly understand them. Trying to shelter them from that was normal-originated bullcrap. And so when they needed guns, they would have guns.

('And then the next nuke will probably work anyway.')

A lot of the kids followed the twins out all the way to their jet, some of them running and rolling alongside the tram and almost keeping up, a crowd of mostly four-year-olds. A couple managed to get in the tram with them, forcibly quieting themselves to hear something from their Duumvirate. The twins merely smiled at them, and it was enough; the kids waved as they reached the hangar and entered the jet, Luke breathing a heavy sigh. "Finally, privacy. Okay, I've got to tell you something."

"Private? This ought to be good," Howard replied.

"Actually, I need to ask you guys a question." The twins raised their eyebrows at him. "What the FUCK is wrong with you?!", he exploded, preventing a 'say it, don't spray it' situation by engineered tongue reflexes. "You learn Northberg's under attack. Do you let someone else handle it? Do you let your servants do it for you? No! You fucking haul ass over there as fast as possible, waiting for nothing and no one, not even knowing what's going on, your all-powerful asses jump in the jet and go, just like that! It's like if the President jumped into Air Force One to head towards the towers as soon as the first one got hit!" His electric fists slammed against the soft cushion as they displayed mild amusement at his tirade.

Sarah chuckled, softly. She'd thought similar things, once. "Oh, that's nothing. You should have seen him fly." She described Howard's Mach 15 Immelmann turn.

At age 14, he would have thought it crazy-awesome instead of just plain crazy. Four years of maturity, experience, and Paul had taught him to look before he leaped, a concept the twins apparently denied utterly. "The fuck.. there's no fucking modern society in the world that does this. The last time top honchos went on the front lines themselves was what, motherfucking pre-Christian Europe? You two walk right into this shit face-first, guns fucking blazing, and then you go 'oh shit we walked into a fucking trap'?!" He sputtered, looking for phrases, and found a good one out of several. "This kind of shit is what these people do, you know that! Hell, I get this fucking asshole telling me not to do anything stupid all the time!" he continued, shoving his forefinger almost under Paul's nose. "And you're smiling, like it's some kind of fucking- for fuck's sake! What?! The fuck?! Is wrong with you?!" He saw the twins subtly shift into the intentional relaxation of their pedagogic mode. ('Saddling up that fucking high horse again.') "Please. Lecture me. I've got to hear this." He then leaned back into his seat and placed his hands on his lap, as if he were taking notes.

"You've probably given the most solid description of the conventional position we've heard in some time," William began.

"And it's conventional for good reasons," Howard continued. "You don't expose your king in chess, you don't let your president walk around without bodyguards, you don't let your Roman dictator walk into a room full of unfriendly senators unless you want him to get stabbed 23 times."

"We are not kings in chess," William said, with force. "We are not presidents. We are not Roman dictators. We are the masters of this whole world. We live in what's effectively a fortress, and we armor and arm ourselves with everything we and our supporters know. We answer only to the laws of physics, and even those we turn to our needs."

"There was a time that we acted like we were invincible, because we pretty much are," Howard added. "Then there was a time we were afraid, because we felt we could not anticipate the future, or influence it enough to protect ourselves. But now? We reject both. We protect what we want to protect, and we destroy what we want to destroy. If something turns out to be more effective than our power, if that future comes to pass, then we will die. But to hide, to fear exposing our selves to the world we control, when we most need to control it? Never, servant. Not in our universe."

There were times Luke wished the retrovirus didn't grant him such an intelligence increase. You can't un-understand something, much in the same way as you can't unsee a man's exposed lower intestine or unexperience evil shit. "And you can't add five minutes travel time in not taking crazy risks, because that would mean you aren't the absolute manifestation of power in the physical world, and something you could have physically done, and wanted to do, you didn't do. Right. No, it makes sense. So the only way to keep the two of you fuckers alive is to do everything possible to prevent futures like that from taking place, doing everything the way you want it done, before you can go there and do it yourselves."

The twins smiled widely at him. An independent servant had independently figured out the logical conclusion, that the act of 'doing things in your master's stead so he won't end up doing them himself' was the fundamental basis of any loyal servant. The fact that he displayed no cowardice of his own sealed it: he really did have their interests in mind.

Luke, for his part, was waiting for them to say something like 'You've figured it out, then, servant: all Illuminati and their servants belong to us, your goals are our goals.' Then he could come back with 'No, fuckheads, my goal is to keep THIS asshole's friends alive.' and hopefully, maybe, possibly knock them off their high horse before they really did get themselves killed, possibly creating a future in which some real douche controlled everything. And his own life was cheap. But instead they said absolutely nothing and he let the conversation die, having no hope of convincing them to at least pretend to be sane.

Ruby was nervous about this. Anticipation of anything these two did was not a skill she had. From her perspective, their train of thought ran a straight track in non-Euclidan geometry- some of it inspired, some of it innovative, some of it batshit insane. The way they conducted themselves was far from her experiences with the testosterone-fueled petty, demanding douchebags she had known, which was her only other reference point for power (and Paul acted too much like the twins when expressing it- no help there). Well, that and Sarah, but she didn't express power in any recognizable way at all. She just analyzed situations and had things done, period. 'But I don't need to anticipate them, they don't control me directly. I just need to anticipate her.' And that was a lot more comforting.

But what puzzled the servants the most, even though they knew they should be used to this shit by now, was the fact that everything went back to 'the usual' the next day. Precautions were taken, yes. Facilities gained an extra level of outside surveillance, laser and projectile defenses were upgraded, paranoia was more concretely applied, materiel like the destroyed sub and the dead Enforcers were investigated, and conclusions were drawn: mostly that they couldn't properly conclude anything related to the identity of the assailants. The only things they truly knew were that the enemy had its own Enforcers, developed on a separate line entirely from the standard models (the Operator considered them completely inferior and refused to incorporate any of the enemy's modifications), they had access to military facilities (as so many Illuminati do), and that they had a small supply of uranium, which they may or may not have exhausted. Nothing else happened; the Duumvirate made no official proclamation of any kind, the Operator made nothing but statements of fact, and although it obviously made Page 1 of the Real News it was little more than a summary of known events (with some mild word-choice bias towards the heroism of the engineereds) and some speculation into enemy motives. The servants, amazed, were informed that there was no way for the twins to politically take advantage of this crisis any more than they had the initial one. There was no extra crap about "with us or with the rogues"; that much was already known, anyway. The twins did get a few well-wishings and congratulations for their success in Northberg's defense, but that was mostly standard ingratiating fare. There was none of the social scarring that would have occurred in the normal world after this kind of attack, successful or not. If any other Illuminati were surprised by this, they didn't show it.

But engineereds don't scar, Ruby reminded Luke. They just regenerate.

Chapter 38

Sending an anonymous message to an Illuminatus not prepared for it can be surprisingly difficult, even for another Illuminatus; the standard communications system simply doesn't support it due to the bullshit potential. For someone like Paul, with a great many normal-world servants, it's simple: just leave one of them a message and he'll give it to his master. To send one to someone as thoroughly ivory tower-ensconced as the Operator, they'd want to find someone who wouldn't give the message to anyone else. This meant Enforcers. Dropping it off somewhere in Northberg without being seen was difficult, especially after the latest attack, but still technically doable.

To send one to the Dominator requires a bit of creativity.

The tiny bottle-shaped vessel, powered by its little battery and coming in slow with its little propeller, constantly emitted "Please read me" in Morse code on a frequency seldom used by normals. The Dominator's hidden servants picked up on it when it was ten miles away, and chose to come to it instead of letting it reach the island. Wearing protective clothing, they dutifully disassembled the little device, cataloging and attempting to identify every part in its manufacture, analyzing the battery, the metal, and even the ink used on the tiny scrap of paper that served as its payload. They then sent the entire mass of data to their Dominator in one quick mid-priority message.

All the bottle had to say, in Enforcer handwriting, was "If you want to know why the implants worked in an unexpected way, why not ask the one who made them?"

The twins looked at each other, considering. Certain elements of the bottle's manufacture suggested it was made by a rogue. Which meant either that the twins were being suckered into something, or someone in the rogues really was giving them up. But it didn't match their experiences of the person in question. They knew Stark, and Jeremy knew Stark, and they'd talked about him before. Sure, they didn't have absolute proof that he wasn't, which is why he wasn't retroviral, but for someone like him... Fuck it. If it wasn't a trap, then they wasted time, of which they had plenty. If it was a trap, then he really was a rogue and the battle was on. Sarah had borrowed Paul's servant and taken her own to some ugly mission in Chechenya, and they'd be back in a few hours.

A lot could happen in a few hours. The message didn't speak of urgency, but this was instant priority, and who they were invading could probably detect Enforcer duplicates in seconds. They left a message for Sarah, Paul eagerly came with them, and in twenty seconds the three of them were blasting into the sky.

Fortunately, Wilt 'Stark' Columbus lived close by. A rural county in Northern California proved a good place to build and dig. On the outside, his home was an opulent mansion, with horse stables, a small private forest, and an airfield on the property; inside, it featured a deep basement where he did his research, the vast majority of it surprisingly fruitless. He followed every single plausible line of inquiry to its end, and since his line of work was the human brain, he couldn't simulate his experiments.

He was also clearly not expecting visitors, particularly not the Duumvirate. Sheer terror came across his face when the twins approached his door; he opened it wide and practically begged them to enter, as if desperate to show that he had nothing to hide. He was also not expecting them to give him a Northberg-style instant MRI, to check his own brain for implants or strange structures. He almost asked what they were looking for but plain fear kept him silent, as they descended past his basement into the bowels of his research center. Paul didn't like this place at all. Although none of them were visible without opening sealed doors at the deepest level, in a special ward past the offices and laboratories, most of Stark's experiments were human beings. This was the asylum that no one officially entered, and no one ever left.

Fortunately for Stark, he wasn't the one to be interrogated; his chief servant, Montgomery, would be quizzed instead. They chose to use the same technique they had earlier, but for this situation they reset the servant's implants. For the briefest instant, Montgomery looked shocked- but then he sighed in resignation. He sat at his office chair and did not flinch as the implant-resetter opened his forehead, the twins standing directly between him and the mirror on the far side of the room. He looked like he was waiting for something.

"Tell us of Stark's involvement with the people trying to usurp us," Howard commanded, by rote.

There was a smile on Montgomery's face. He had apparently been considering his answer to this question for a very long time, and said his reply with a maximum of pride. "He's their leader's master." The twins blinked and recoiled. What the fuck? "Oh, that stupid old bastard had nothing to do with it. I'm the one you're looking for." He then smiled wider, schadenfreude at himself.

The twins looked at each other, and back at Montgomery. He was the implants' inventor, after all; could he have found a prevention system for them?

"Punch yourself in the face, very hard," William ordered him. Montgomery's fist moved slowly as 'face' was said, did not change at 'very', and there was an additional push at 'hard' that slammed it directly into his cheek. The servant hissed, holding his bruised cheek, not used to pain. The twins looked at each other again.

"You don't believe me," Montgomery said, chuckling and wincing. He leaned back in the chair until it touched the wall. "The one true human genius left on this planet, and you're thinking 'Who is controlling him? How can this be?'"

"You're very calm for someone in your position," Howard noted. He himself was not calm. His mind was roiling with questions, none of which had happy answers. Foremost among them was how the fucking hell Stark could have let this happen. What, did he just not know what his servants did in their spare time, of which this one obviously had plenty?

"If you knew what I knew, you'd never get emotional again," Montgomery said, shrugging.

"We get enough nihilism from our friends' servants," William informed him. "Smugness is an emotion. You're smug because you get to play the role you've been daydreaming about since.. when?"

His smugness cracked like an egg, his voice shaking with hatred. "Since you were unimplanted. Before that, the role would have been that of your master." The twins looked at each other- he's unhinged- and contemplated the disturbing concept of this lunatic actually becoming their de facto master. "There is a certain RF signal that, if used with enough power, will make a certain circuit in some older implants jump, causing a reset." (Stark caught it some years ago when some issues with magnetic fields were discovered, thinking it a minor defect instead of part of any plan. The fact that Stark ordered him to quietly fix it instead of using it for his own advantage was just another signal to Montgomery that Stark wasn't cut out for this.) This answered a great many questions at once. They noticed he was being very free with information that important, which disturbed them even more. Here was the Black Wizard, and no wonder he called himself that. The twins had found their foe and suddenly, unexpectedly, won, in much the same way a novice chess player discovers he had not checked the king but checkmated. Was this, in fact, checkmate, or was there yet someone else behind him? In this organization there could be secret leaders piled to the sky.

"And what do you know, that presumably obviates emotion?" Howard asked, contempt filtering through his voice.

"That free will is a lie," he said, letting it hang in the air for a half second. "There is a determiner in everyone's mind; the self, the 'I', which the implants circumvent. What we consciously 'choose' to do is affected by this. Everything else in our brains is set by hard and fast rules of electrical stimulation. Every 'choice' you make is simply a matter of which set of train tracks the pulses take. You- Illuminati- know what a false dichotomy is. You know how people are controlled. But yet you insist that all the laws don't apply to you. This goes for everyone from the most ignorant normal clear up to you, Duumvirate." He couldn't say the word without expressing hate. "All sentient beings are this way. And there is no way to tell if it is a choice at all, or it is truly random and we simply rationalize everything afterwards."

William facepalmed, his forefinger atop his forehead and his after-pinky around his cheek. They knew their enemy had to be completely full of shit or he wouldn't be an enemy, but...

"No concept of self-programming, nor even of intentionally learned reactions or, really, of self-awareness. I'm ashamed you managed to elude us for so long," Howard said.

"No concept of logic. If you can switch tracks several times a second, you can go wherever you want," William added. How could this guy understand so much about the brain and so little about the mind? "And if you succeeded in taking over the world, what would you have done with it?"

"Imposed law. Real law, not this mishmash we have now. Society's rules for human minds, not whatever idiot happens to come up with whatever tickles their fancy. No more of this damned corruption. Needs, not wants. For years I'd hoped that you'd do this all on your own without help from me, that being created would make you lawful. He made you paragons of Chaos instead," he said with contempt, and spat. Howard blocked the spit with his palm and wiped it off on Montgomery's face.

"I swear to fuck, if you've been taking your morals from a D&D alignment table, I'm going to fucking acquire Gary Gygax and make him kick your ass," WIlliam said.

"You're pathetic," Howard pronounced. "You talk to us of corruption and yet you used and promised things to the most corrupt, simply because their vision of power matched yours. You talk of law and you've betrayed everyone, particularly your master."

"You're not even unique. This whole time we thought that there would be some lord of an alternate mentality behind this, some sort of concentrated evil as an appropriate overlord of the lesser evils. You being a power-grabber like everyone else is comforting, especially since you're not very smart. You could have done quite a number of things. You could have even implanted Stark if you would have had the balls. In fact, if you were really a leader you could have taken over entire facilities." ('If he had done that during that attack on Northberg...') "Maybe even staged a real fucking coup. It wouldn't have worked against us, but it'd be a lot better than this shit," William said, with contempt. "You had resettable implants in all of us for two whole years. Why did you never do it?"

"We did!" he abruptly shouted. "I'm sure you remember Damien Gladstone, the little shit. His job was to get to you and reset your implants, all three of you at once if he could, or just Howard if he couldn't. He chose to do just Howard, the little coward, his fucking real self didn't tell the new one to just do it. But then he was supposed to make it home before calling you back up and giving you commands." The twins raised their eyebrows in wordless inquiry. "Because of your speed! Because of your godforsaken speed. After that nonsense with those ten Enforcers everyone was afraid of you, that you could interrupt him. And after you killed him, we thought that all was lost, and it was only because of his father's wisdom that we learned what we did." The twins chuckled. Damien's father's wisdom had earned him and his women a hole in their heads. "Oh, and I bet you want to know something else, why the Night Operator's neuroclone suicided. The Night Operator gave him criteria to commit suicide, and one of them was if you killed somebody else there." Montgomery bit down his teeth and immediately started to look to the side, as if to spit; William grabbed his head and turned it back towards him, holding his jaw shut for a moment before releasing. "So even though that son of a bitch's clone knew you still had no idea, he still had to kill himself. Stupid bastard never understood commands."

"Even after that, you still had almost two years. Why didn't someone else?" William asked, reviewing the events of nearly a decade ago, amazed that he had achieved such ends without knowing. If he hadn't done what he did to Damien- tricking him into letting Paul blow his brains out- he would have ended up in a situation he didn't even want to think about.

"Cowardice!" Montgomery blurted out, the question striking his emotions, the spittle flying out of his mouth for the twins to dodge. "Cowardice, weakness, fear, paranoia, and stupidity. There were so many times when we could've. Remember Michael Stevenson?" He had been the one to nearly kill the implanted William with a robotic double's command. "We were going to give him a transmitter, have him take you right there. But no, he said! He pussied out, was afraid of what would happen if you weren't taken, he just had to cover his own ass. Kill one, he said, worry about the other later. So I told them to go ahead with that plan, putting someone at that little engineered party to take you. But no! They wouldn't do it- after Michael already got started! They didn't trust the one I chose to be there to be the imprint. And some of them said, 'Oh, no, it's full of engineereds, we can't do it there.' And they kept saying these things, no matter what the situation. Even though it wasn't their own lives at stake! Even though they were at a remove, they had to protect their precious God damned assets instead of just fulfilling the plan!" His eyes rolled up with pure rage. "Some of them even believed it didn't work and they were being set up! Hesitation, unimaginably stupid lack of trust- and that was before you unimplanted yourselves. All this for something anyone could have done with a device no larger than a man's little finger." Paul gritted his teeth. Why the fuck hadn't they found it on Damien, then? Likely because it was disguised as something else or inside his shoe or something, and the agents weren't looking for anything before they disposed of his corpse. He sure as hell never knew about this. Although now he knew why Damien had made videos of certain things: so his original self could enjoy them.

"Speaking of which, where is it?" Howard asked.

Montgomery wanted to say 'Where's what?' He wanted to pretend he had no idea what they were talking about. And yet, the implants- the things he had invented way back in 1985- made him say, "In my back pocket," and the blood drained from his face.

"Give it to me." Montgomery placed it in Howard's hand.

Howard one-hand clapped, summoning the nails, and pinched the tiny device between his thumb and forefinger, activating it and resetting the implants again while both of them got in his face, making sure that Montgomery was implanted for them.  "Now if only you could get a good look at the mirror.. before I did this." One more pinch with the nails, and gone was Montgomery's hope.

"Was that the only one?" William asked. Montgomery answered in the affirmative, downcast.

Howard chose the most economical phrasing: "Do you have other contingency plans to make us lose?" Montgomery shook his head, groaning, sobbing now. How could he? He'd run out of plans years ago. All the real plans were done by others now. "Good! Now do you know what time it is? It's interrogation time!" They pushed him out of the room first, walking out, turning a few corners, and meeting an anxious Stark, who was having a pointed, if not very lively, conversation with Paul.

"Hey Stark, want to guess who's been running the rogues?" William asked. From the way he gestured it was clear. "You really should watch your servants better." Stark stared at him. That was a joke, right?

"Stark, turn around," Howard ordered him. When, befuddled, he failed to comply within two seconds, the twins said "Turn around, Stark." and he did. Was this to be his end? "And unless you want to lose them, order your Enforcers not to interfere with us," William added, and he did, too shocked to think.

Howard's original idea was to put his foot up Stark's ass. However, his brother joined in simultaneously, and the feet went sole-to-sole about nine inches into his rectum, tearing open his pants, nearly breaking his pelvis, and violating him from puckered-tight to Goatse in milliseconds. Stark fell over and screamed like a girl, clutching his torn sphincter, his knees to his chest, blood with shit chunks pooling from his anus. They wiped their feet on his back.

Montgomery's mood brightened- despite what was about to happen to him, he'd been meaning to do that for some time. He also had great schadenfreude visualizing his chickenshit comrades getting the same treatment.

The twins chose to interrogate him in the safety of the jet, Paul flying them home. They hadn't done a full implant-inquisition themselves since Osama, and they went through the process with particular attention to detail. First you ask for a name. Then you ask for the details of that person, what his relationship is to you and to each other person, who and what else he knows, and everything else you can find out. Then, and only then, do you ask for the next name and repeat the process. Doing this will give you an visualizable, concrete idea of who presumably knows what, and what real loyalties presumably are. Asking enough members of the organization will give you something closer to reality, but as leaders go, Montgomery was remarkably well-informed about the intentions, beliefs, and ideals of his Illuminated subordinates; he didn't store communications at all, preferring to keep everything important in his own head where he thought it was safe.

As it turned out, Sarah was halfway right. Almost all of the enemies had some personal hatred. There were a couple of oldschool mavericks like Brenk who were in it for simple power; it was almost a shame to have to kill them, as such categorical ruthlessness stirred feelings of sympathy in the twins. But the majority of the twenty remaining enemies had untold amounts of hatred; hatred for the twins' ideas, hatred for all engineereds and even the concept of engineering Illuminati, spitting out the word Duumvirate as a blasphemy.

And that was okay. The Duumvirate hated them, too.

Sarah was wrong about the idea of 'new' rogues. The only ones who were in on it were the originals who had been there in 1988 when the Dominator was born and implanted, except for Damien who was very young at the time. Gritzl was one of the very first, his powerlust driving him to conspire against the Dominator almost as soon as he was recruited. Later additions would have had nothing to offer the organization, and after the twins had unimplanted themselves the rogues didn't trust anyone to recruit, figuring that they'd be infiltrated if they did. The twins' policy of checking every new Illuminatus turned out to be meaningless for detection.

Some other discoveries were unsurprising in retrospect, such as the fact that Osama had been implanted by a rogue; the twins realized that they had fucked up with Mohammed, and should have went for the private implantation-vaporization routine instead of executing him in public. The business with 'Bob' and the cellphone ended up with Jacob Glenn (his real name) getting ostracized over suspicions and long-term internecine grudges, almost killed, and Paul laughed about that. Three of the five rogues who had masterminded the failed assault on Northberg, taking so many years and so much time to get closely-watched uranium from normal sources without being discovered by other Illuminati, had gone into a deep depression when their last desperate plan came to ruin. One had killed himself just after ordering his public clone to continue behaving as if he was not a rogue. The other two had become "worthless" in Montgomery's eyes and were in their secret base doing not much more than taking up space.

What was also unsurprising was the number of rogues who had simply bailed out in 2000. There were 49 when the twins unimplanted themselves (Brutus was not counted, killed by the Anarch just before); upon their triumpant return about a third had evanesced, dropping the number to 35. Upon the creation of the retrovirus five more had walked out immediately- and, according to Montgomery, surprised that the others didn't leave as well. Not only membership but participation had dwindled, a few of the rogues almost dropping out while still retaining nominal membership, the others unable to compel them to keep participating without the whole thing being exposed. Fear and disillusionment had done most of their work for them; actual killing of their foes (or their foes' public clones) had played only a minor part. What's more, the best of them- most of the ones in it for the power and not for hatred- had been the ones to go. The twins noted that it was rather like squeezing a cult to death; the mostly-sane ones leave first. And like most cults, the mostly-sane ones weren't the ones at the top, and now the leadership had almost no one left to lead.

This also posed a unique problem; should the twins go after ex-members? The answer was "If so, let's do it later." Nineteen generally-unorganized Illuminati who no longer posed a direct threat weren't something to worry about. Similarly, they felt almost as if they should thank Dr. Kravinger, the nuclear physicist who had decided to abandon the rogues and cast his lot with the rest of his consortium. If he hadn't bailed when he did, the railgun in the wall (which actually was a rogue-generated plot and not some maverick) would probably not have been a railgun, the Northberg plot happening years early, the twins ending up as fine bits of radioactive dust.

The rogues' private clones were well-hidden indeed. They had chosen a boulder in a crater on the side of the Moon facing away from the Earth, sneaking themselves up one at a time in carefully mislabeled rockets, constructing a small nuclear reactor to serve their power needs. Which crater it was, Montgomery intentionally didn't know. He waxed on at some length about the arguments that were had: many of the rogues wanted to use the fuel to try an earlier nuclear strike instead of what they eventually did do. He also waxed on at length about how badly they needed to copy microfusion and were never quite able to do it. That agreement between the twins and the Consortium had been very smart indeed.

But what surprised the twins most was the creator of the Anarch. The previous Night Operator had used an exceptionally elaborate plan nearly two years after choosing to fake his own death, creating a sentient Enforcer to be presented as a gift, and tricking another Illuminatus (whose name Montgomery didn't know) into giving him the resources to create it. The other Illuminatus, however, thought he had the upper hand by making sure that the sentient was created Dominator-loyal; the Night Operator chose to pretend to accept this but had the Enforcer transported to him instead, using normal transportation due to intense paranoia. Said normal transportation ended up falling over a cliff, and the why of that was unknown to Montgomery. From what Montgomery gathered, the helping Illuminatus utterly wigged out and covered his tracks the moment he had heard about the raid on the Dominator, correctly surmising that he might be implicated otherwise. Montgomery judged it to be one of the most fucked-up operations he'd ever heard of. On this, he and the twins found common ground.

"Oh, fuck me senseless," William said after some thought. "We should have figured this out earlier."

"Oh?"

"Remember Barnum?" Howard thought for a half second. Barnum, what did Barnum do? Barnum with the special electronic override...

"It's the exact same shit!" he exploded. "So unless two guys had the same idea, Stark.. or somebody, knew it was theoretically possible. Probably a servant. And we never knew where Barnum came up with that. The tiny piece of information we needed, and it was lost in the fucking cracks for years. Fuck, Billy!"

"Care to implant them all for the real answers?"

"Now that we've actually stopped the rogues, it's not worth it... fuck, it's so nice to say that. C'mon, let's chant this. We've stopped the fucking rogues." Once the twins could reasonably assume that no one else was immediately plotting to kill them, the retrovirus would be disbursed, fusion restrictions could possibly loosen, and a great many Illuminati would find themselves in a better position to make more grandiose plans.. probably stepping on each other's toes and pissing the twins off afresh. But that was how things worked, and it sure as hell beat the current situation.

"Aren't you counting your chickens before they're actually hatched?"

"As if they're really going to survive our plans. We've stopped the fucking rogues."

"We've stopped the fucking rogues," his brother agreed. "We've stopped the fucking rogues!" they chanted together, realizing how silly it was, Paul joining in. "We've stopped the fucking rogues! We've stopped the fucking rogues!" Montgomery attempted to melt his own brain with the depths of his rage and indignation.

"These fucking rogues, anyway," William added after a bit.

"Agh, I know there's a good chance of that, but did you have to bring it up? Aren't I the one who usually does that?"

"But that's why I did. Because it's your turn to be the relieved one, and you need it, so I'm the killjoy. One of us has to do it. Or Paul?"

"No no no," Paul replied. "Leave me out of this one. I don't want to stomp on any of you guys' fun. The railgun twit was probably just some lone nutjob. Let's celebrate for right now, and just find and kill him as an afterthought. Sound good?"

"Yeah," William agreed. "I've love to just hand this to Sarah.. but we shouldn't just leave her to it without help."

"No. We really shouldn't. Come on, let's call her up and make some plans," Howard said, and did just that. "Sarah, we know who the rogues are, and we have their leader. Any ideas come to mind?" Paul couldn't help but chuckle. What a way to announce it. But this was Sarah and she might just pull something out immediately.

The question took her utterly by surprise before she could think it through. "Come to mind? With unknown-location duplicates who might break secrecy in revenge? Nothing comes to mind." Of course she'd spent time pondering it, but wasn't expecting to actually acquire their leader...

"Not unknown anymore. They're on the dark side of the Moon," William said. A pause of a half second. "Literally. Worry about those later, they're already isolated. Go for the public clones first." She nodded in agreement, her thoughts catching up to the Dominator's words. The rogues' public clones would surely be watching anything going away from the Earth and might have ways of sending warnings.

Her brain churned, discounting what she didn't need to concern herself with anymore- the rogues were identified, the rest of the Illuminati could generally be considered a non-threat now (inasmuch as they ever could) and part of the support structure, she still couldn't know what Montgomery didn't or whether or not they really would break secrecy... "I suppose you don't have a plan of your own?"

"Not at the moment. By definition this is your department. Where do you want us?" Oh boy. They were relying on her again. They'd reached their second decade of life, weren't they getting a little old for this? But it was, after all, still her department and would always be.

"I could do simultaneous raids, split us up, use teams of.." She stopped, shaking her head. That plan had way too many contingencies, and she really didn't feel like sending however-many engineereds into the domain of however-many rogues of questionable sanity who were likely to act like cornered animals. Gritzl was quite enough. "They have no idea you took their leader?" she asked, looking past Howard's shoulder at Montgomery.

"None at all," Howard replied, grinning.

Okay, this was very similar to one of the best scenarios she had thought of, she'd actually sat down and daydream-planned this out at one point before she decided it was futile.. what was her best idea? Oh, yes- that one. Straightforward, with basic psychology and sound use of overwhelming force in a controlled area. "I'm going to pull a lot of operatives for this and I'll want some trustworthy Levels." The phrase still felt like a contraction in terms. "You know that formal occasion you wanted me to get dressed up for? Looks like you're getting your wish. Can you get their public selves in one place?"

"If I couldn't command Illuminati, who would I be?" William asked rhetorically. "We have their leader although we probably shouldn't use him except as a counter. I'm thinking 24 hours. Local midnight in Bavaria. Makes it look urgent, but not hasty."

"Another mass meeting?" Howard asked. "That takes me back."

"I don't think we want to. All six thousand, some of which are engineereds and some of which might get the wrong idea when the butchery starts? We could try to move them into another room while we're there, but, c'mon, Howie- I think we can do better."

"We can. But they'll ask their friends. So we'll have to..." About fifteen minutes carefully revising minutiae with Montgomery's unwilling help and a few pointed questions by Paul produced the final result.

The rogues got this:

There is a meeting being held on September 20, 12:00 AM, Bavarian local time, at GHQ. Every Illuminatus is expected to attend. You may ask anyone you like if they are coming to the meeting. If they fail to acknowledge that they are coming to the meeting, or if they say that they are but suggest they are not, you must report them, immediately, as a traitor.

Everyone else got this:

This is a test of loyalty and competence. There is a meeting being held on September 20, 12:00 AM, Bavarian local time, at GHQ. You must act as if you are coming to the meeting and give no hints that you are not. You may ask anyone you like if they are coming to the meeting. If they fail to acknowledge that they are coming to the meeting, or if they say that they are but suggest they are not, you must report them, immediately, as a traitor. If anyone asks you what message you have received, you must report the following: (A copypaste of the previous message.) Any other Illuminatus who reports seeing any other message is a traitor and you must report them as such. Under no circumstances are you to actually come to the meeting! Whatever your reaction to this message, do not respond to it.

It would be interesting, to say the least, to see who reported whom. It was actually better than getting just the original traitors; anyone in close contact with them could also be rounded up to be disposed of at leisure, and it really did function as a test of loyalty and competence. Stupid, but tolerably so, people would likely tell their inner circle the truth, but those weren't likely to be real enemies. Anyone actually calling people would be immediately suspected, either as "you're trying to get me in trouble" or "this guy must be the Dominator's target". There was the chance that someone would try to fake evidence showing that someone else called them with it. Smart people would tell no one, call no one, and assume that their friends were smart enough to do the same. The engineereds would likely call each other with both the truth and bullshit, just for kicks, until they broke out laughing. They wouldn't be alone; the twins had given the do-not-reply order specifically for the inevitable amused responses. And if anyone was conceivably stupid enough to come to the meeting uninvited... there couldn't be anyone left who was that dumb, could there? Paul promised to grow a Charles Darwin beard for a while if there was.

"And now for the hard part," Howard said. "How are we going to prevent them from noticing nobody else came?" William pursed his pale lips. Paul gritted his teeth. They spent much longer going over scenarios. They had to expect that their enemies would at least suspect a trap. Best case, some would come early and some right on time, and the later ones would be in constant contact with the former. Worst case, they'd send a point man with memorized countersigns, ostensibly on some business or other there, hours in advance. If the crowd- and six thousand was a crowd- didn't start filing in, he'd get very nervous very quickly. That struck a lot of plans: kill them in the parking-garage hangar, kill them as they came in, kill them via satellite as they started taking off.

"Big group just isn't going to work," Paul said. "We need to break them up."

"Mini-meetings," William said. "You should have said that before we came up with this."

"No, because we need this. The big meeting is to say what can be said publicly." The twins began smiling at him, recognizing the stroke of genius at work. "Because there's a limited timeframe between now and then, and there might be a lot of questions, we have to put them into small classes to brief them on something really important that others might not get to know, because we trust these guys." The smiles grew larger. "And because of that careful timeframe, secrecy, whatever, we can't have it like it usually is with guys coming in whenever they want."

"Not all in the same group," Howard said.

"Oh, hell no. But close. Some guys start at 7:15, some guys start at 8:00. And we make it actually interesting and only say kill when they get there. So all we have to fake is maybe a small crowd of guys who don't want to say what they're doing, and 45 minutes or so of plausible bullshit." 

The servants had come to Sarah halfway through and they had all been listening, watching the plan weave itself together. "Strange. You're different when you're amped up. I can't think like that," she said. "You guys start out with one thing and then somehow it evolves to a whole different phylum."

"It's an iterative process," Paul said. 

"Yeah. Tell me about it. At least you guys don't ask me to un-kill people." 'No, wait, assassins, we didn't really want him... err.. never mind.' "But I want to think one up my way. If they really don't know then we have all the time in the world." And if they did know, any plans were pretty much fucked. Which is what they were all expecting, really. "While you're on the way, you guys can use your boundless creativity and we can use our boundless cynicism," Laughter from Luke. "and we can compare notes." Click.

"More than eight straight years of this, and she doesn't even blink when it's finally over," Paul said.

William smiled at him. "About a decade and you just figured out how different she really is?"

"Or maybe she's expecting more from somewhere else," Paul replied.

"She's not, and even if there are, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. This is it, Paul. These fuckers are dead," Howard said with finality.

"We know who they are, and we know how to kill them. It's going to be easy," William casually agreed.

"NO!" Paul suddenly blurted out. "Don't say that! Don't ever fucking say that! Damn it!"

"Everything will go according to plan. There are no unknown unknowns. Nothing can go wrong," Howard said with a grin. Paul made a strangled -Ghhrlrrrkk- sound deep in his throat. Sure, there wasn't any such things as bad juju or tempting fate, not really, but for fuck's sake Howard...

"They're just words, Paul," William reminded him, chuckling.

"Yeah! Words that signify thoughts that result in mistakes!"

Howard hugged him gently. "After this much time, after this much frustration, after this much hate from other Illuminati and retrovirus politics and all the other shit we didn't need and the fact that they fucking put implants in my fucking head, do you really, seriously believe that we're going to fuck this up?"

Montgomery, nearly forgotten, raged silently. All that effort, all those years, all that work, and all he got was being on the wrong end of his own implants to a practically certain doom, watching people he hated with all his might celebrate their victory. Almost two and a half decades after the fact, he realized that he should have never invented the damn things in the first place, that he should have lied to Stark and said it was utterly impossible.

The twins returned home to smiles, affirmation that their plan was probably the best of some good alternatives, a solid amount of basic work setting things up, and an intense feeling of relief. They tossed Montgomery in the isolation room and went to sleep early, as they had a great amount of ass to kick in the morrow.

They woke up very early in the morning to find a new servant accompanied by the crew sent to take him. Gary Gygax turned out to have metastasizing cancer at the time, so his acquisition was trivial; a quick body replacement, a retrovirus, implants, and an ass kicking later, there was a reported death in the news, a lot of sad D&D players, and a promise William made good on.

Paul just had to ask. Without any mention of omnicide, the twins and Sarah were, in fact, Lawful Neutral, Sarah's servant was Lawful Evil, his servant was considered NE instead of the CE he was expecting, and after a brief description of his ideals and exploits, Paul himself was considered, amazingly enough, Lawful Good. By the standards of people who went around slaughtering things for personal gain, anyway. A great number of Illuminati including one of the rogues wanted him, and the twins agreed to grant the new retroviral to one of the retroviral Consortium members, an experienced Oriental Adventures fan who wanted him both as a GM and to give him a taste of his own medicine.

They checked their messages and were pleased and mildly surprised to find no reports of any kind. Perhaps everyone had finally gotten the hint, but that was doubtful and too much to ask. The only message they found of particular interest was that Daniel Westham was going to send them some help in the form of fitted spacesuits that he'd been working on for a while.

Then they were gone, flying high and fast to the Bavarian headquarters, asking several dozen questions along the way and on-site. Everything was in place, and everyone in the local general-servant management expressed an encompassing feeling of It's finally fucking over. Please let this be the end of it. The endless paranoia and mistrust of the past near-decade had aggravated Illuminati who inevitably took it out on them. They welcomed the day when the people they were ostensibly serving would just stop being assholes about everything from meeting rooms to aircraft parking, particularly since the servants were retrovirals and thus smarter than their clientele.

A handful of rogues and a number of actors showed up roughly at the same time for the first seminar. Most of the actors were actual Illuminati, most of those retroviral and a few not, with some additional servants pretending. Some of the participants didn't know which were rogues and which were other actors, but that was part of the point; they were there simply to flesh things out.

The twins watched the rogues' body language whenever they could, expecting something to go very wrong in a hurry despite their earlier bravado. The rogues were all well-disciplined enough not to give anything away, all of them acting like nothing was wrong even in close proximity to the Duumvirate, to the point that the twins started to wonder if Montgomery hadn't tricked them somehow. The twins' enemies did not even crack a smile when told that they were so highly unlikely to be rogues that they were trusted enough for this secret knowledge: a true invisibility system, capable of moving photons in such a way to leave no visible trace. The 'technical' discussion was at the end of the seminar, the rogues with no scientific background at all being the only ones there long enough to hear any of it, as it was the Illuminati version of Troll Physics. Before then, they'd be bamboozled by a carefully-designed presentation, multiple very experienced Illuminati and their even more experienced servants having developed every bit of it. (The fact that they were promised a retrovirus in return for their absolute cooperation motivated them a great deal.)

The fact that the audience was so far from the speaker should have given it away. Had any of them been close enough, or the room been darker, they would have noticed it was a variant of the standard monitor-false-image business used in vehicles, which used glare and tinting to mask the lack of depth. Combined with some very careful angles and fast movements, the illusion was nearly perfect; in a sense the system really did provide invisibility, just not a type effective in the real world. By the time the floating-head Enforcer showed up ostensibly wearing a full-body suit of the stuff, the rogues were all enraptured, both by the idea of real invisibility and the idea that the Duumvirate was dumb enough to trust them.

Of course, it actually was a floating head. Extremely thin strings (seen by most of the engineereds, who were far too disciplined to even snicker) held it up as it moved with the cadence of a walking Enforcer.

'Magic tricks. Normal kid stuff,' Sarah thought with utter disdain as her presentation began and she followed the script. 'Years upon years of searching for them and now we're fooling them with magic tricks.' Sarah thought she understood at least the basics of powerful-stupid by now, but every time she saw it she was appalled afresh. How could men with such power be so utterly gullible? And this was how they were going to spend the last hour of their lives. Believing nonsense in a room full of people who wanted to kill them, following along blindly like idiots, occasionally staring at unobtainable tits and legs. Like sheeple.

The Enforcer at the back of the room gave a hand movement- everyone who was in the rogues was in the building, so if any shit went down it was an option to begin slaughter and chase down the remainder. The plan had gone off without a hitch. Easy, almost too easy. Sarah played it out to the end, letting the bullshit flow for a few more minutes before the Enforcer gave the last signal and the game ended.

"To go further in the applications, it can be made in large sizes as well. Jets with contrails are out, but given a quiet propeller plane you can adequately be dead," she finished, instantly whipping out her trusty dual pistols and scoring messy headshots, having planned every twitch well in advance. Yup, these were definitely rogues all right; there was a bit of plastic visible in one of their brain stems, everything above that having been turned to pink mush.

One of the heads went splat before she put a bullet into it. A teenager sat grinning, his elbow covered in blood, brains, and a few small bone fragments where he had sent it into the skull of the rogue next to him. He wanted in on the action, period, and whose kill it rightfully was didn't concern him.

"I guess you recognized him?"

"Never saw him before. Saw you target him," he answered.

"Good call." She flipped open her phone. "They're dead here. Status?"

"Dead," Ruby replied, and there was the crackling of burning flesh in the background. "Dead," Paul said. "Tortured," the Duumvirate replied, and Sarah heard the beginnings of a scream before they clicked off. The guy's suicide implants would kick in, surely, but the twins were going to find out when, just for revenge and kicks.

Hers wasn't the only active phone; every Illuminatus in the room had one out, glaring at each other, overhearing each other's conversations, and more than a few zipping out of the room to avoid being overheard, resources being of a higher priority than washing someone else's brains off their clothes and hair. The Duumvirate had done this intentionally; a nice fun grab-bag free-for-all on the resources left behind, open only to the participants; the masses of calls they'd get later were worth it. Sarah had her own phone ring several times due to the requests on the assassins' organization to take the old servants or other ronin, and had one face-to-face conversation with the implanted-Illuminatus who had asked for a takedown, granting it easily (pssh, couple of ten-year-olds for that) but reminding him that he could probably have done it himself with his new powers.

The news traveled at the speed of light, the rest of the Levels wanted their retrovirus now, and the twins had to set a pre-connection message of "No, not yet" due to heavy amounts of spam, dozens of individual Illuminati thinking that they were important enough to merit asking the question and receiving a positive answer. Rogues or no rogues, some things never changed.

But before they would give their power base what it wanted and needed, they were determined to wipe out the enemy organization completely, and that was a different proposition entirely.

Chapter 39

Sarah quietly feared that the data of where the rogues actually were would be totally unavailable, and that she'd have to actually go searching for the base by sending something up to look for it; her experienced, methodical squads rapidly proved her wrong. Apparently not anticipating that they could and would inspect absolutely everything, the rogue's clone had left the information on a USB thumb drive in a locked file cabinet in a little-used part of his home, carefully shoved between two papers of no import, the real data steganographically hidden deep within other files of no import. Apparently one of the rogues had been spying on the others, sending data home to his public clone. Within ten hours, a message was left for the twins; when they woke up the next day, they learned that the rogues had their base within the Tsiolkovsky crater, embedded deep in the massive central boulder.

Shortly thereafter, they got Daniel's gift and his call, a transport helicopter depositing a large black hexagonal cylinder at the same time his smiling face came on the screen. "I was originally going to save these for your birthday," he said. "I didn't think you'd have an immediate need for them." He sent a few gigabytes of technical data as he talked. "Tell me if there's anything wrong with the joints, that's the most tricky part."

"The joints?" Howard asked, a bit skeptical. Please, no incompetent engineereds. Not now. "Shouldn't that be one of the most basic things?"

"Not at all. Especially not for what you guys need. Doing it right with spacesuits is finicky." The twins waited for him to explain, and he just smiled and clicked off instead. He was obviously playing with them, but why? He was retroviral, his father had done excellent work for them in the past, and he was clearly loyal; what was he doing?

Luke was inspecting the package dropped, a hexagonal cylinder with a suit hooked on each face, sizing making it clear which was for who. There were, in fact, times where it was nicer to be remembered than forgotten about. He smiled; the suits were black, almost perfectly black save for the clear (to visible light, anyway) faceplates and some small points. Probably a technical reason for that, but he enjoyed the aesthetic anyway. They looked like the sort of powered battlesuits found in fiction where mercenaries battled horrific beings from a distant star.

He grabbed one, disengaged the connectors, and felt a surprising heft. Could he carry all six? Sure, he'd just have to stack them up like so, and pick them up- c'mon, he could lift a lot more than this- and Paul was kind enough to open the door for him. "These things weigh a shitload." He set them down gently on the floor.

"Then how does he expect us to fight in them?" William lifted up one of the two in his size. No wonder Luke had trouble carrying them in. One was a hundred and twenty pounds, easily, and somewhat bulky in areas. "I'm not going to believe that he forgot that inertia's not weight." Even if Daniel had free fall in mind, they would be pushing the whole mass back and forth as they moved, although with the thickness and likely composition of the strange deep-black steel, they wouldn't have to dodge anything smaller than a fifty-caliber antivehicle bullet. Carrying themselves and their suits on the Moon, they would have about eighty pounds of gravitational force pushing them downwards.

Howard inspected his closely, his industry-standard paranoia active. It looked subtly menacing, its carefully crafted design one of implied threat. The thing could be an elaborate trap and he could be meeting some horrible doom the moment he put it on. But that would imply that Daniel had intended to kill him, which was ridiculous; if he had really intended that, he had access to microfusion after all. "Fuck it. Let's try this shit on."

The twins undressed and opened them up carefully, leaning them upright against a wall. Large slits were in the steel plate, letting them lean back and put in arms, torso, head, legs, thin padded fabric between flesh and solid steel. The helmet fit like a hood, faceplate and flexible neck piece swinging over to seal with the chest. The gloves and boots were part of the suit, and they started wondering about the relevant joints- the wrists and fingers in particular felt swollen, as with arthritis. They couldn't have just gone with fabric? Once they were fully in the suits' HUD activated automatically- 'nice touch'- and they stood up as men of deep darkness, twisting their hands around and moving their arms. Full range of motion, Dan hadn't had anything to worry about; the only thing they couldn't do was put their fingers together all the way. The faceplates were practically invisible, save for a few symbols and percentages on heads-up display. They heard everything as if they weren't wearing helmets at all, a great number of tiny speakers next to their ears for directional hearing. Their left wrists featured screens and they used the main screen to synchronize the suits to the network.

Luke took a cautious, unseen step back. Whatever these things were made of, the suits were emanating magnetic fields with the twins' movement. But that would only make sense if... his earlier guess was right. He waited for them to figure it out.

"It doesn't feel like it weighs anything," William said, speakers unmuffling his voice. Actually, it felt like it weighed less than nothing without being buoyant. What was the trick? He sat down on the couch, got up again, and it made a sharp skerrrrk on the carpet as he pushed back from it. "The hell? I didn't..."

"Oh," Howard said, grinning and chuckling, bared teeth visible through the faceplate. Of course the fucking thing looked subtly menacing. He was meant to wear it into combat, after all. "Oh, yes. Let's test these.. outside." He opened the door very carefully, and they strode out into the sunlight, the other four hurrying to get theirs on.

Paul's faceplate clicked on over his laughter, which was swiftly sent as encrypted radio. "Spacesuits, right. These are spacesuits." His 'spacesuit' had a number of barrels extending from the arms. Designated Heavy Weapons Guy again. He didn't mind. It was a good role to fill.

"They are suits. They function for the wearer in outer space," Ruby said. "I'm surprised we're not reading the manual."

"That was my first thought," Sarah said, "but I don't want expectations. Technical data can always be read later. I want to see how intuitive they've made it."

Ruby took that as a command. She looked at her palm briefly, pointed her arm at nothing, and opened her palm sphincter, squeezing her pyrogens as hard as possible. Immediately a sixty-foot jet of combusting gases shot out, enhanced further by fusion-generated heat, brightly illuminating everything in a sharp, yellow-orange glare. She held it for two seconds, her own fuel providing a miniscule contribution to the blaze. Her HUD informed her that she had 99.9 combustive/oxidizer mix remaining. Her latent pyromania danced for joy as she did the math in her head: thirty straight minutes of high-temperature charbroiling, far more than she could ever possibly need in any one situation. Shit was going to get burned the fuck down. She leaped- put all her power into it- and holy fuck her feet exploded and she was high in the air, looking down at the top of the mansion. Oh crap, this was meant for space, not a gravity well like Earth's. She was going to make a crater unless- she forced fire into her feet again, it seldom helped much normally, but now she was on a cushion of flame, controlling her descent slowly to the ground, draining combustives for reaction mass (reduced all the way to 99.6%, now), landing on a patch of what was now charcoal and ashes.

"If they made that for you..," Luke said, holding his hands apart an inch, and at once there was a flash of bright blue. He opened his hands gradually wider, and a long plasma arc of electrons and ionized air flowed from his right to his left, the pure glee on his face invisible in the electric glow and the darkened faceplate. His maniacal giggling was audible over the radio despite the energetic crackling.

They started reading the details then, learning about the customizable combination of vocal and gestural commands that drove everything from water/carbohydrate recycling to communications to laser emission. The commands were seldom actual words, the gestures never anything they would make by accident. William set his fusion laser to full power and pointed his arm downwards at a patch of beach he knew had nothing of importance under it, and stuck out his forefinger, ring, and after-pinky; instantly the air in front of him exploded into bluish-white plasma, causing his faceplate to darken at once and his HUD to warn him about too much heat in one place. He turned it off immediately and there was a deep, smoking hole surrounded by dark glass. A few two-inch squares on his back began to glow bright white, waste heat pouring from him. Of course they were black and not mirrored; in space, there were no good options but to radiate the heat, one small area at a time.

"Maybe our front lawn isn't the best place to use these," Paul pointed out.

"Maybe our planet isn't the best place to use these," Ruby replied.

"You're not kidding," Howard said, reading the specs from the screen in his wrist. "The fuel is concentrated deuterium, there's no neutron source. The maximum power output for ours is fifty gigajoules a second. Paul, yours gets two hundred gigajoules a second." Paul looked down at his arms with fascination and horror, arms to kill armies with. The twins' original Micro, at five hundred megawatts, was a small normal power plant's worth of photonic death, blasting holes in anything, melting, reflecting, burning and boiling everything it touched. He was walking around with four hundred times that. Did the building-melting satellites even have that much output? He'd have to check.

"Why worry?" Paul Ghostbustered. "Each of us is wearing an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back." Forget burning holes in walls. He could incinerate Staten Island if he tried.

"And I bet I can run more than 88 miles an hour in this," Luke added, trying just that, his feet carving furrows in the ground where he took his long, leaping steps, not so much 'running' as 'stomping himself forward'. He backflipped to return, feeling the suit's generated fields even through the thick Faraday-cage insulation. A magnetohydrodynamic fluid that looked like mercury and behaved somewhat like Silly Putty flowed through unseen tubes under the thick metal skin, contracting to mirror almost all of his muscles. The lag between his actions and the suit's response was less than half a millisecond, practically negligible even for engineereds. A great deal of the technologies and innovations involved were previously unheard-of, particularly the materials that were painstakingly developed from the ground up, an enormous amount of effort expended in making the armor resistant to Barnum-style anti-Enforcer weapons while still dissipating heat, inventing molecular structures that previously didn't exist. The amount of technical skill, scientific research, and overall use of resources surely far exceeded those used by the Manhattan Project back when normals (with all-too-mild Illuminated oversight) first learned how to utilize fission.

And some late-teenager only slightly older than him had masterminded the whole development process, from initial design to final production, and had planned to give it away as a birthday present. He'd never get used to this.

It was a vindicating thing, a nod to what he felt was a tenuous grip on sanity, when the twins felt somewhat as he did; they had called Daniel back up and asked him how and why he had manufactured something this advanced so clandestinely.

"Why wouldn't I have?" Daniel asked in response. "My dad gave me the business six years ago, and I didn't need to outsource for anything." He shrugged, smiling at his Masters as if he were teaching small, beloved children an important lesson. "You've been fighting, investigating, settling disputes, doing all your necessities as befits your station. C'mon, Dominator. I know nobody ever tells you this, but please, lose the rarefied atmosphere, it makes you look like a culture shock victim. Your business is politics and dirty deeds. My mind's been working on making us more powerful. What do you think I've been doing this whole time, sitting around with my thumb up my ass?" The twins didn't reply. He was obviously right, he was all too right, and if all the Levels thought like him there probably wouldn't be a rogue problem to begin with. If he wanted to be smug about it, that was fine by them. "Duumvirate, your business is reactive. You find threats and respond to them. But us? We have to be proactive." His tone suggested he'd been having that argument with a lot of other engineereds- that they needed to stop sitting around slacking off and just doing the usual crap while waiting for the twins to make the world right, and that they all should have been as technologically aggressive as Daniel. The twins nodded in agreement.

But the way he talked.. "So you're coming with us?" William asked, raising an eyebrow.

"No, I don't think I would, even if I could." The twins raised three more eyebrows. If he could? "I was one of the first true partials, conceived right after you were born. The Operator did well- I'm faster and stronger than any normal." Which meant nowhere close to you. "And I've got the whole regeneration and immune system, too." Which meant no retrovirus for me. It was obviously a sore point for him, and the twins didn't press it.

"Well, then," William said, about to click off, "I hope you enjoy the kids asking you to make this for them now." His father had his hands full making the jets for engineereds that the Duumvirate had ordered nearly a decade before.

"Actually, I can't. At least not that they can keep wearing for more than a couple of weeks. Half-centimeter growth spurts fuck everything up. Those suits are fitted to the millimeter. What I'm working on now is an expandable version-" he wiggled his wrists and fingers around, just as the twins had- "but fitting this to usable armor? Fat chance." He smiled at the twins, mouth half-open so they wouldn't think the conversation was over, considering his next words carefully. "Duumvirate. Some of us would have it that you are our head, some see you as our heart. No. You are our feet, in the boots of justice. I speak for all of us here: Go, my dear Masters, stomp upon our your and our enemies, and we shall bring to you the future." He nodded solemnly, and clicked off.

The twins shared a soft sigh at the subtexts. The first was that Daniel considered them to have authority but not true leadership, but that was par for the course. The second was a re-affirmation of the deal between civilized sentients and their appointed authority figures: your job is to perform the tasks of violence, for the good of all of us. The third, however, evoked the promise the twins had made to each other: that they would go to the future together.

They were genetically engineered superhumans wearing power armor about to embark on a fusion-powered jet to fly them to the far side of the moon, and they still sought the future.

But to get there, they had to clear away the ghosts of the past.

"Well, justice feet?" Paul asked, grinning. "You heard the man. Let's go kick some ass."

"Wait," Sarah said, and they turned to look at her. She took a deep breath, audible from the speakers, and began to talk operational details.

"First off, I would pick a spot almost identical to the one they did. The Tsiolkovsky crater is uniquely defensible. There's an enormous boulder in the center, nothing to hide behind for a low land approach, and sniping spots a hundred kilometers away from the base." No atmospheric refraction, no wind, no air friction, the bullet drop one-sixth of what it is on Earth. Sniper's paradise. Emplaced on one side of the 180 km-diameter crater, she could hit targets on the other. "My first order of business would be to have a series of long-range sensors and weapons embedded in the central boulder, and additional sensors and defenses placed along the rim. I would also deploy a network of microcameras along the surface, particularly in the few small craters. And I mean micro- the resolution would be basically nonexistent and it could hardly be called a camera at all. But so what? It's the Moon. Anything unfamiliar moving is obviously hostile. Tremor sensors would also be obvious, because again, there's no local wildlife to set it off. Then I would dig underground, planting lots of kinetic and explosive weapons under the surface, which I would leave effectively untouched. Anything or anyone moving towards my base that thought it was hiding would be blown apart from below. Anything that tried to set up shop around the rim would be blown up as well. Since I have the entirety of the underground to work with, I could put pretty much anything down there. This is assuming that the invaders aren't coming in high, which would be suicide because anything visible would be laser and projectile bait in an environment without secrecy concerns."

"Nuke it from orbit?" Luke suggested. It was, after all, the only way to be sure.

"Everything it from orbit, shotgun style, to disrupt the defenses, then go in the holes we just made, make more holes, and hopefully destroy their defenses without destroying information about them," Paul said. That was fairly basic. With their power armor they could survive jumping through melting-titanium temperatures for the split second it would take them. "Come in behind a lot of rock. Quick, simple, clean, not much they can do about that, and the robots can just lift off from here and they can throw anything we want them to, rocks, thermobarics, fusion. Carry all three, bomb when we need to." The robots would easily be there first, of course. Even engineereds in power armor couldn't take the thirty gravities of acceleration an engineered-built machine could. Illuminated manufacturing had changed beyond what was previously thought reasonable; said robots could probably be produced inside of four hours, as a normal child may put together Legos. Daniel would probably start producing them in one hour, just to prove that he could. "Luke, you know what we need, go order some." Luke was back on the screen with Daniel in a few seconds; Paul's guess was right and Daniel promised a small fleet to be available for use long before the twins' jet got there, even if it was being initially launched in normal-looking rockets for secrecy reasons. The only problem was the scandium, Daniel said, but who cared? This was to end a war.

"And where would you suggest we strike?" Sarah asked, a small smile on her face. This was, hopefully, the twins' last normal-born threat, and it had a straightforward solution. She really shouldn't have to play operational babysitter for them anymore in any capacity. If the rest of them couldn't get this...

"Well, not the obvious dome-bait," Paul said. "Although we should spare a rock or two to blow that up anyway. But that boulder in the center? It's either a double-bluff or not a bluff at all. Bet you that really is their base, all of it, not just some defensive outpost."

"What leads you to that conclusion?" she asked, perplexed.

"Think about it. You expect them to have a secondary fake, and their real base is somewhere else, maybe not even in that crater but still on the far side of the Moon."

"And that would be too difficult to achieve?"

"They still don't have controlled fusion," Paul reminded her. "You're thinking how you would do it- and you do," he said, gesturing to her armor. "They'd either have to completely hide all evidence of working on the surface of the fucking Moon, or dig through miles of solid moon rock without it. Sure- possible. But without leaving a trace? Really? Them, up there?" He shook his head. It just wasn't plausible. "And the guy's records being faked? Possible. It's possible for them to have sent back a fake feed from the telescopes, it's not like we're going to go check the software in person or it'd matter if we did." The servants and twins were listening to this table-tennis argument with interest. "We have evidence they didn't try. Look at them, Sarah. Think about how they see the world, how their organization has worked. Do you really think that they can resist the temptation to keep detailed records on each other? His clone was probably just pissed that the telescopes couldn't watch the Moon a hundred percent of the time." Those were still a normal piggyback, and governments didn't send up enough spacecraft for that to be possible, particularly not between the Sun and the Earth.

"If he really wanted that information he could have ordered up enough."

"He could have, but then his fellow rogues would be asking him why he did that. They didn't know about the feed, of course it wasn't sent directly there. So they think that the first bluff will work, because they had no idea that one of their members would be crazy and stupid enough to keep records on their travels."

Sarah almost asked why he would do something like that. It was the Illuminati equivalent of Scholar's Mate.

"Guys?" she asked, looking at the Duumvirate.

"Paul wins this one, Sarah. Second base it is, robot guard, full throttle, if nothing's there we just keep looking," Howard said. "Fido!", he called out, and the speakers tripled his volume. In seconds, a streak of white darted out of the trees towards them, barking in recognition, followed by other streaks of retroviral canids. Something important had to be going on for his master to yell that loudly, Fido figured. And something was obviously going on- what were they all doing in metal shells? And what was that smell of fire, and the sharp tang after a lightning strike?

"There you are!" Howard said, not daring to touch him. Way too fucking easy to hurt him wearing this, and even with his reflexes he didn't want to risk it. "You don't want to come with us." Dogs have fur, and rely on smell. A dog in power armor would go crazy.

"We're going to be gone for a very long time. We will be back," William said, reaching out his hand and letting Fido lick the metal.

Fido understood four things in that sentence: 'gone', 'long time', 'back', and the apologetic nature of the voice. He also understood the general meaning of 'you don't want to come with us' but that, like most things humans said, made little sense. Of course he wanted to come with them, everywhere. Why would he not? And, like any good dog, he would wait for his master as he had done so many times before. He barked a single time, barked at the other dogs, and ran back into the forest with them.

They turned to their friends, their smiles visible through the glass. "Like everything else we do, this could very well get us all killed," William said.

"Shall we risk it, one final time?" Howard asked, as if offering a vacation. 'No' was not an option. Sarah simply waited. Paul smiled back at them. Ruby was wondering why they hadn't left already.

Luke chuckled. He still firmly believed that their willingness to go themselves was insane. But it was a glorious insanity. It was, after all, their war and their world. He knew very well that if the rest of them had been killed, the twins would still go, just the two of them, in full defiance of anything that suggested that the world did not belong to them. And here he was, gladly defending their ultimate transcendent ego with his own life. He laughed. "Let's get off this fucking planet."

"All right, then. Sarah, we leave the flight to you, Paul, astrogation," Howard said as they entered the plane, carefully moving their increased bulk into the seats. Astrogation. The word flowed off the tongue, and it was a word they'd hope to hear many, many times in the future. It was something engineereds would be doing a lot of in the next million years.

Paul did some math, considered the problem, and almost said something about fuel concerns before he chuckled. The jet (and here Paul had to remind himself that they just called it that; it was really a fusion rocket with wings) had enough delta-V to take them straight to Mars at a tenth of a gravity, and that was before adding booster rockets. Going to the Moon was just a straight shot with as much acceleration as they could possibly want. "How fast do you want to go?"

"Fuck it- let's do three G's," William said. He was tempted to say more, but this would take a while and he didn't want to sit under more for that long. The twins started rotating their seats to face forwards and everyone else followed.

"All right, that'll put us at.." Math, math, where the hell was the Moon right now and what would be their turnaround time, oh of course there was a program for calculating things like that, just be careful with the controls when one false move could shatter the whole thing... "about two hours, so we'll have to aim for..." Fuck it, he didn't have to figure that out himself either, just run this little thing here.. ah. He wasn't used to having to worry about concepts like right ascension and declination, but at least it wasn't on the other side of the planet right now and it would only move about 1° in its orbit. He oriented Sarah towards a point roughly two Moon-lengths in front of its path- almost straight towards the Sun- and the jet tore out of Earth's gravity well like a bat out of hell.

The jet had a function to synchronize the internal pressure with the external pressure; Howard laughed as this was the first time he had seen a confirmation message in his life. Yes, he was sure he wanted to render the internal space uninhabitable to unsuited humans; the jet had no airlock, so there was no sense trying to keep it pressurized if they were going to open the door on the Moon. As they rose past the exosphere, less than a quarter inch of specialized plastic came between them and hard vacuum. There were no air tanks on their suits; carbon dioxide, exhaled water vapor, sweat, urine, and feces were all reformed back into edible carbohydrates with trace elements returned, drinkable mesohaline water, and oxygen. ('Great, now we're all eating our own shit', Luke thought) They could last without opening their faceplates for several weeks until they died of a lack of vitamins the suits couldn't make, an omission to be rectified in some future version.

After confirming a few tidbits of what they could do, what they could tolerate, and what they had to avoid, they flew in silence, having nothing to say and not sure what was worth saying. They were isolated, now, the network connection unable to tolerate the increasing lag and packet loss from its nearest node. This was the twins' first time so far from Earth's gravity well, and they took the opportunity to look outside. The front camera showed almost pure blackness surrounding the bright white circle of the Sun, behind them a tail of extremely fast, glowing plasma exhaust obscuring a steadily shrinking blue-and-white orb, nothing but empty space and stars at the sides. Paul relaxed, smiling, taking the acceleration as a comfort, reclining in his seat. How could he say he was happy, almost the happiest he'd ever been in his life? It made no sense, they were about to do something extremely dangerous in unfamiliar territory controlled entirely by enemies, the environment more inhospitable than anything on Earth. And yet.. and yet, even if he did die, it wouldn't even matter. If he was going to go, this is how he'd want to do it, on an adventure with his best friends, defeating the enemies that had been a pain for so long, closing one era and opening another. It was as if he was leaving his worries back where he'd come from. Surprised at himself, he thought of the omnicide the twins were going to commit and realized he didn't even care about that; when he thought about children, he saw Quad, Stan, Ophelia, all the Northberg kids, flying with everyone else he knew towards a new, wonderful dawn. Everything he'd felt when he first got the retrovirus flooded back, enveloping him. He'd found his truth. He fell nearly asleep against the crushing acceleration, a smile on his face.

His reverie was interrupted by a buzzer from the screens- a robot had caught up to them and was requesting permission to install a limited program, as it placed itself somewhere visible to things above both the target area and the near side of the Moon. Daniel'd had his Enforcers cook up a simple, tinkertoy API for fast nuclear death bots, the little machine serving as a relay for the payload-bearers that would shortly start accelerating in a long hook to impact the far side. Now how did this work? Oh, just the very basics, a bunch of pre-made routines bolted together on top of existing control schemes, most of the program having been uploaded to the little bot in mid-flight. Goddamn, that guy was good at his job. Deceleration time happened a moment later, Sarah choosing to turn the jet around instead of relying on the reverse thrusters. Three gravities on one's back is better than upside-down.

They were nearly at their destination when the bots could start seeing the inside of the vast crater, large anti-air artillery atop the boulder, other things coming into focus at the rim. Sarah picked out most of the targets, electing to flatten the domes with medium-sized rocks, throwing large rocks at the anti-air pieces and then using a medium fusion bomb to waste a great deal of the boulder's top, picking off a number of suspicious ridges at the rim with even larger bombs as there was a lot of territory for hidden emplacements.

Against accelerating, targeted, heavy meteors, the anti-air defenses were helpless. By the time the enemy missiles could reach the side of the incoming rocks, the rocks had already come so close that their aim was deflected by just a few dozen meters, kinetic weapons breaking them up but doing next to nothing against their terrible momentum. The bombardment made craters that normals would have given names to. There were two large, visible doors embedded at an angle into the great central boulder's south side; both got hammered. "Looks like Brenk's running Tomb of Horrors," Paul said before he explained the fake-entrance business. The cameras accompanying the fleet of ships were good enough to spy tracks, furrows, and moved material in front of an outcrop of rock on the southeast side of the boulder- that was the real entrance, and the doors embedded there got only a little rock. This was a raid; they were there to invade and explore, not bury the evidence and a possibly still-functioning system. This time they had to know their enemies were destroyed.

By the time the engineereds were done, there was very little man-made that was even visible, and the cameras themselves came to crashing ends on the surface. Sarah wanted to dig a deep landing spot, before the twins informed her it wouldn't work the way she wanted. Too much heat.

Less than fifteen minutes after the bombardment, they had come around the moon's south pole, approaching the area low and slow, lasering anything that looked like too much of a good sniper spot or in any way suspicious, Sarah's paranoia at maximum. They landed in a hundred-meter-deep crater ten kilometers from the entrance, set some autodefense routines on the weapon systems of the 'if it's not emitting a friendly signal, blow it away' variety, and took one small step to the unforgiving surface.

Chapter 40

They pondered leaving someone to protect the jet, but didn't; it was far more likely that they'd need the sixth down there than successfully evade an artillery strike. Besides, they'd told the other engineereds where they were going; they could make it to the near side and signal for rescue, even if it would entail a possible secrecy breach. They leapt out of the crater to see a shining selenic hellscape, no Earth in the heavens, nothing but a horrifically bright Sun above (the faceplates darkened almost immediately in response) and many more craters below, steep, jagged walls at the far horizon. The skin temperature of their suits rose slightly in the overhead sunlight, a single square on their backs glowing bright red to radiate it away, the dark, dusty basalt beneath their feet more than a hundred degrees Celsius.

And normals had once dreamed of living on the surface of this place? The twins expressed the opinion that they had to be out of their fucking minds and got universal agreement. You either got underground to mine titanium and enjoy low gravity, or you got the fuck out.

They watched all possible angles as they moved, running and jumping erratically and looking backwards frequently, eyes watching all sides and particularly the massive rock formation towering high, high above, some pulverized rocks from the earlier attack still slowly tumbling down. Ten kilometers wasn't far at all, not in power armor and making enormous leaps, hurtling themselves almost at random to avoid things they'd never see coming. Paul's earlier elation returned as he soared in the airlessness, in a way he'd only dreamed of before. The Moon was no fit place to live. It was, however, a fit place to play.

It came as no surprise that the entrance was covered in rubble, one particularly large chunk of boulder blocking their path. Paul, laughing, picked the multi-ton wall of rock up and deftly tossed it aside. The fist-sized rock they had used on the entrance was going more than four hundred thousand meters per second when it hit, more or less annihilating the outer doors, but leaving the airlock itself mostly intact and revealing a second set of thick blast doors. 

There was a brief discussion: they could try to rewire it open, they could try to force it open, or they could do the smart thing and blow it off its hinges from a safe distance. They chose the latter, turning metal and regolith to white-hot ooze, and suddenly the entire door flew off, flipping end-over-end, a wave of visible air smashing it out as the group dodged, a loud whoosh audible before the silence returned. The heavy door careened into a crater and bounced before settling to a stop, the air from the hole petering out. Sarah used her corner-mirror to check inside, saw nothing but blackness, and the twins cut loose with full-strength blasts before stepping in, the faceplates quickly shifting from dimness to vision enhancement. Infrared would have been nice, but they would be making too much of that to see anything useful.

The corridor was fifteen meters high by fifteen meters wide, extending a hundred meters before ending in a glowing half-melted wall of steel-braced regolith. Far, far too large. This was the Moon, oxygen was at a premium here even if they did have a way of getting it out of the rock. There were only a couple dozen rogues up here, unless they'd been breeding which was highly unlikely. Why the fuck had they built so damn big?

For one thing, it played havoc with the engineereds' strategy. There could be railguns, or anything else, in walls, floors, and even the ceiling. The only rational option was to destroy everywhere they could possibly be as they came in, a scorched-earth plan to annihilate any traps smaller than a deep-buried, extremely large IED. Fortunately the enemy hadn't mirrored the surfaces; that would have made things difficult indeed, as they only had so many solid projectiles to fire. There were two more smaller doors they also destroyed, revealing one large storage closet full of spacesuits, and another full of miscellaneous supplies.

They could only fuse so much deuterium before the residual heat started to build, and they'd cooked so many of the walls, the whole place was starting to heat up and more squares on their backs were glowing, making them look like walking checkerboards. "Atmosphere would be nice, think we can get it?" Howard asked, watching the temperature of the radiators ever-so-slowly drop. Less sharp shadows were good, cooling was better, and actually being able to hear sounds was the icing on the cake.

It didn't seem possible, given what they needed to do. Actually trying to open one of the great doors in such a way that it could be closed again was suicide. Duct tape and something thin and tough would be the way to do it, but they hadn't brought any duct tape ('Note to self, always bring duct tape') and they didn't trust anything the enemy would keep in storage. Ruby pondered melting regolith to seal a smaller hole up, but she didn't know this stuff well enough to even make a good attempt. Maybe if the air cooled it as it escaped, no, it'd just blow it away, but if she..

"Yes we can," she said, and directed her lasers at a section of regolith near the door, cutting the corner, making a hole small enough for them to duck through. She broke through the other side and the engineereds stood in the path of the escaping gas, letting it drop their temperature as if fanned by a cool breeze, jamming their hands and feet into the ground and walls to avoid getting blown away. "Okay, next door, I want a big piece of metal." The tunnel itself was cooled by the air as it escaped into outer space, so they walked through it cautiously, the others starting to understand her plan.

There was another blast door, right there, sealed tight. Why put it in such a place? It was less than twenty meters away from the one they had cut the corner from, and there wasn't an airlock here. Ruby, having taken point, told everyone else to get back and started to blast the side- immediately the door itself exploded, slamming through the hallway at enormous speed, Ruby dodging back into the hole as metal slammed against metal, another gust of air following in its wake. At least they hadn't been disappointed; there were traps here after all. She started lasering walls and dodged back again, one long, thin projectile slamming into the rock a foot from her arm. Damn this single-file hole, might have been a bad idea..

"Fuck a duck," Luke said, both him and Ruby darting back and forth in the cramped space to administer more hot death to walls and taking another wall-embedded railgun out before it fired. Ceiling and floor, but nothing there.

"That son of a bitch," William said, looking at the hole in the rock. The railgun with its fast, armor-piercing projectiles had worked before, so the rogues kept right on using it.

There were doors roughly five meters apart along the walls, most of them melted, some collapsed. A spacesuited hand came out of one, as if in surrender, and someone started to step out-

"No, it's not-", Ruby shouted, seeing it more clearly, all of them dodging back as she lasered it. The robot exploded into a volley of shredding needles, the engineereds avoiding most, a handful glancing off their armor at angles. More robots came out of more doors, and this time Sarah and her servant found room to throw grenades before ducking back in. Damn, this was just too cramped- they came out slowly, Sarah liquefying everything she suspected, and Ruby went through with her original plan. The section of destroyed door she picked up must have massed two thousand kilograms; the suit let her tote it over her head almost as if it were made of styrofoam, her feet leaving indentations in the rock. She placed the door section over the hole and held it there, melting some of the regolith with her flames ('good thing they're pre-oxidized') for a good if slightly imperfect seal. "Okay, open the next door, get some more gas in here, and I won't have to hold it."

They saw the air first. There was a left turn at the end of the corridor, the door must be leaking there- and now they saw its bulk, the entire door literally turning the corner, reflecting- the twins dodged into a room- "Fuckshit!" Howard exclaimed, jumping back from the room with his brother before a piston slammed down, crushing the ceiling before that entire room exploded, sending shards of rock and a ball of flame into the hall that they leaped away from, undodgable thumb-sized rocks rebounding off their armor. Could they all dodge back into that hole-

And Paul was blasting it with his autocannons, expending ammo with abandon, tearing mirrored steel to shreds, blowing apart the jet motors that were propelling it. Suddenly a huge gust of wind burst through the moving door, sending its pieces flying (more things to dodge, damn..), a wave of air slamming into them and blowing them back, the clanging sound of bouncing steel a surprise to the ears. Ruby's plan had worked; the air pressure had pinned the door piece against the wall, almost completely air-tight, like a vacuum cleaner holding a piece of plastic.

"Hello. Please let me out," they heard on the other side of one of the half-melted doors, in a rogue's voice that they recognized. "Hello. Please let me out." Over and over again, in the exact same tone. They knew quite well what they'd get if they opened that door.

"Well, we've got sound now, are you sure we want it?" William asked his brother, suddenly very glad there were six of them there, wishing they had brought eight or ten.

"Sarah, does this place serve a useful purpose, or is the whole thing a trap?" Howard asked, thoroughly creeped out.

"Little bit of both," Sarah answered, recalling Gritzl's hallways. But those hadn't been anywhere near this bad, and Gritzl hadn't been able to prepare this thoroughly. "Those bedrooms were real bedrooms, but the occupants ran before we got here."

"With crushing ceilings," Howard added. It was obvious who ran the place. Brenk must have his own personal reign of terror up here. Sorry, if you're running a reign of terror anywhere in the Solar System, the Dominator gets to join in too. Them's the rules.

They performed the same ritual as they turned the next corner. The hallway was easily four hundred meters long, and they took time to carve and burn as many walls as they could, fusion fuel less of a concern than a trap they might have missed. Things in the walls, ceiling, and floor satisfyingly melted and exploded, proving the continued worth of their strategy. A surviving railgun on the far end of the hallway went off, but a 6000 m/s projectile from 400 m away was almost leisurely to dodge.

This hallway branched in a four-way junction, continuing for twenty meters on the left and right before ending in doors, the group staying around cover while blasting these walls.

"Straight," William said. His logic was simple: If they found reason to start running out, he wanted to run in a direction that directly led somewhere presumably cleared of traps. Sarah almost suggested that they split up, but knew the idea would get vetoed and probably for good reason. It didn't matter if they were each a walking tank with redundant firepower; you did not split up in a place like this.

They crossed the junction quickly, all of them suspicious that perhaps one of the half-melted doors was itself a projectile and there was nothing behind it but explosives.

When they were halfway down that hall, the shooting started.

So many shots coming so fast, the wide-angle autoshotgun encompassing more and more of the hall, and the spread on that thing- Howard found himself in the firing cone and intuitively dodged to the ground before he realized that he wouldn't drop quite so fast here- and there was a loud, solid CLUNK as one of the flying pellets struck him in the back of the head with enough force to blow open concrete and shatter bone. William blew off the tip of the barrel, but the damn thing was firing at an angle so he had to fire another armor-piercing shell, this time blasting partway through the wall to hopefully take the rest of it out. It stopped firing for now, but- 'Oh shit, Howie-'

And Howard got up, putting an armored hand very gently to the back of his hood-helmet, feeling the centimeter-deep indentation where the pellet had hit him, chuckling. 'Billy was right. The next one got me in the head.' He'd felt the impact like catching a fast rock with a pillow. The armor was designed to bend and not break when struck hard enough. Were he wearing a regular spacesuit, he would surely have had his skull blown in; the grazing hit against the thick steel had simply ricocheted away, failing to penetrate.

"Fuck," Sarah said, pressing herself against the side of the wall. This was an awful place to be, and whatever was shooting at them was obviously built fairly solid. She wanted to get closer and nullify its spread, but that was likely suicide. She wanted to go back but that would more easily put their entire bodies in that guy's firing cone. Maybe if they retreated fast enough and just blasted their way through the regolith, or she could throw a fusion bomb in there-

"Do you hear me, Paul?" an unfamiliar, amplified voice called out, and they took the chance to dart backwards out of the danger zone while this guy talked, blasting plasma and projectiles to cover their retreat. "I think your color suits all of you, but especially you. They might have put you in master's clothes and given you a master's position, but we both know you don't deserve either of those. You'll never be more than just a pretender. Because in the end, your Dominator is nothing but a genetics project, and you're nothing but a servant." Who the hell could that be?

No, it was obvious. There was only one person who would say those things to him. "Damien," he said softly, and instantly Luke was moving, rushing headlong into danger in violation of all the advice he'd given, pushing off a solid section of wall with his hand for more speed. "Luke-", Paul started, but remembered. He'd given Luke explicit orders, once. Now those orders would be carried out or he was going to lose a friend right now.

Luke did what none of them wanted to as the thing started firing at him- he jumped above the waves of pellets, an act which could leave himself vulnerable and airborne for far too long- but he'd jumped hard enough to immediately kick off the ceiling as he glimpsed his enemy, a titanic humanoid mech of mirrored steel. Headless and more than ten meters high, it boasted two enormous gibbon-like arms hanging from the torso, standing up on two squat, long-footed legs, surrounded by advanced batteries bolted to its body in clumps. Multiple hydraulics spoke of redundant systems; this was a machine designed to both sustain and deal damage. Although it had its own attached weapons, a series of larger guns were strewn around it, the right arm having dropped the destroyed autocannon to pick up another, the left bearing a massive automatic grenade launcher that was slowly pointing towards the hallway. Two point-defense turrets on its shoulders started to look up at Luke before he melted them with quick, angled shots.

Wary of traps, Luke spun, raking the walls and ceiling with full-strength microwave death, making an enormous wave of plasma as he plummeted to the ground. By the time the computer-assisted targeting of the enemy machine had angled the right arm high enough to aim at him, he'd already slammed into that arm and was grabbing the mirror-steel skin.

An electrical arc immediately went into his hands, down his feet, and into the floor. Damien started to laugh. He'd known that they'd do this if they could. These genetically engineered nonhumans were so fond of getting up close and personal. It was a simple matter for Brenk to install a defense that would cook them the moment they touched him. His laughter subsided as he realized he wasn't the only one laughing. Suddenly there was more electricity- lots more, off the scale- and the right arm's circuit breakers tripped and it went dead to save the rest.

Luke kept right on laughing. Damien's zap was barely a twentieth of the juice he could dish out in this suit, let alone take. He saw the other arm target him with the grenade launcher- far, far too slow, the motors simply unable to move that much metal in time- and Luke pushed off the right arm and dived to the floor, slamming feet-first into the ground next to its right foot. It tried to shock him again as he lifted it off the ground, his own feet dug into the rock by the effort, the mirrored steel creaking and buckling, dozens of megagrams of mass forced into the air as the far smaller, far stronger machine worked its will on the larger. Luke sent the whole thing tilting forward over the long, flat left foot and it crashed to the ground in slow motion face-first, its left arm trying to push it back upright. He climbed onto its back and it tried again with the electrical defense before sputtering out. He found the entry hatch; the handle came off in his hand so he simply summoned the claws and jammed his fingers into the steel, peeling it back like a can of sardines, ultimately breaking the hinges and revealing Damien, lifting the terrified young man out by the neck and showing him to the rest of the engineereds like a trophy.

Paul barely recognized him. A combination of growth, low gravity, and lack of sunlight had not been kind to his body and his complexion over the last decade. Who he had known as an arrogant, vicious asshole had become a gangly, pale, helpless, writhing bundle of sticks, held aloft by someone who was more than his match in every sense.

"No," Luke said, "I'm nothing but a servant."

He held on to Damien's neck, grabbed his left ankle, and discharged. Fast, angry electrons surged through Damien at once, instantly frying his clothes, charring his skin, and stiffening his body. What feces was left in him was propelled out by steam, boiling blood exiting from every normal orifice and a few new ones. Muscle and bone alike burned under the continuous lightning strike. Luke tossed the corpse at the far wall backhand as hard as he could, and it came apart like an overcooked turkey fired from a cannon. 

Paul laughed. Sure, he could have told Luke to take him alive, but... why? Dead is dead, wasn't that what he told him? There's no coming back from dead, that which is dead can't hurt you. And this time Paul's former tormentor really was dead, a pile of charred meat and blackened bones up against a wall in a lunar cavern, left to rot far from the rest of humanity.

Sarah worried about a self-destruct device in the thing, and Luke tore it open searching for one before the rest of them could take chances with their lives. They continued down the hallway and reached the corner. "I know you have a habit of blowing apart the walls of every corridor, but please don't do that to this one," an unfamiliar, amplified voice said. Sarah took a quick mirror-stick glimpse around the corner in both directions. Same as every other hallway, with a large set of double doors at the end of the right. These were more ornate, hydraulics and gears visible. To the left was another heavy blast door.

"Then come out," Howard ordered at top volume. Sarah watched the door open, staying behind cover that she could never be sure was cover, Paul watching the same mirror. The apparatus on the doors was both decorative and functional; the gears started turning and the hydraulics pulled the doors back. A man wearing a gold-visored spacesuit walked slowly towards them, arms and hands splayed in surrender.

"There's oxygen, take it off," Paul commanded him. The man dutifully stripped piece by piece, leaving himself clad in only a thin suit with absorbent underwear. An Enforcer or robot that looked and acted exactly like this would be a masterpiece of engineering. "That too." He knew he saw the face before, but it didn't match.. who was this?

And he stood there naked, hands still splayed. "Leave it all behind and come here," Sarah ordered him.

As with Damien, a decade on the Moon had not been kind to his physique. There was no chance of him hiding combustibles in his fat or muscle, as he had Ethiopian levels of both. He walked towards the group and took a sudden step back- the floor was far too hot. "You can put your boots on," Sarah said contemptuously. He did and came back, looking around at the oven the group had turned the hallway into, parts of it still visibly glowing even in the light from the other halls. "Ruby, go check him." He stood there sweating as Sarah's servant inspected his boots, rectum, and body, carefully poking his guts and under his ribs searching for metal or explosives. "Clean," Ruby said, despite the fact that he was very unclean indeed.

"Brenk," William said upon seeing him, contemptuously. Of course, Paul realized- the decade hadn't been any kinder to his face than it had Damien's.

"Will you be magnanimous in victory?" Peter Brenk asked, puppy-dog eyes plaintive. "Spare a defeated dungeon master?"

It was all the twins could do to avoid shattering their faceplates with their palms. "And to think, we already implanted Gary, too.," William muttered as if he really was talking through his hand.

Sarah glanced at them. C'mon, guys, time's still at a premium. "Yes," she answered him, placing the instant-implanter to his forehead. Fifteen seconds, a lot of screaming, and a half-cup of blood later it was done. "You can't lie and you can't withhold information. Anything else that can kill us?" she asked Peter.

"Possibly," he said, still reeling from the sudden transition between extreme pain and relative painlessness. "Did you really bomb everything you could see on the surface?" She nodded. "There's more pitfalls in halls you didn't go down. There's a few false walls you never found out about, too. You take the path you came in and you won't trigger anything. And of course, my room in there? To the gills. You probably guessed, but I really wasn't expecting the armor." Neither were they. Daniel would get major commendations. "There isn't anything dangerous in those clothes and the air tank is just that."

"Where are the rest of you?"

"They're mostly right here. No traps," he answered, knocking shave-and-a-haircut on a section of wall. The regolith slid open, and the faces that stared back at them were wide-eyed and terrified, especially the ones they recognized on sight. The old, old Night Operator. The Bastard, whose son had died a second time, and his Bitches, their lard-bedecked faces almost begging to be gloated upon before killed. Howard's Daddy had hated these people since the then-Inheritor was very young. Their public clones had insulted the new Dominator right before he had killed them.

"Brenk, you traitorous son of a fucking-", Damien's father started, his red face unaffected by his long time spent in this pit, his body run to pure obesity by low gravity and lack of exercise instead of skeletonizing the way his son and Brenk had. The extra weight didn't much affect Howard grabbing him by the neck and slamming him into the wall not quite hard enough to kill him, burning his back against the half-molten rock.

"You," Howard growled. Gladstone, choking out his screams, batted helpless hands against the merciless grip.

"Fuck you, and fuck your worthless son," William snarled, so mad he punched a deep indentation into the wall. The soft organics and porous calcium between his fist and the wall barely cushioned the blow, his arm nearly to the elbow in bloody lard. Howard, chuckling, stepped back and let go of the man, who stayed in place impaled on William's forearm before William tore his arm out sideways, sending fat, muscle, and a great amount of blood spiraling through the air in the low gravity. He only hoped there was no afterlife and no reincarnation for this piece of shit or his progeny, as he didn't want either of them to exist in any form. Let them be permanently deleted from reality.

If the twins killed them all like that, this was going to take too long. "Ruby," Sarah said, gesturing, and her servant immolated their remaining foes all at once in a wave of fusion-accelerated fire, extremely volatile gases becoming heat and carbon dioxide, flesh and organs becoming more of the same, ash, soot, and black skeletons the only remains. Sarah looked at the twins almost apologetically, but one prisoner was more than enough, she didn't want to stay here any longer than was operationally necessary even if they had the trap master, and none of them could blame her. "Any more?"

"There's three who left, probably for the emergency shelter, but that wasn't well-protected. I tried to tell them- they're dead men walking," Brenk said, a nasal whine creeping into his voice. He strongly suspected that so was he. He made a mental note to do his very best to avoid pissing the twins or any other engineered off for the foreseeable future, hoping that they would fundamentally accept his surrender.

"Ruby. Dead men not walking," Sarah said, and her servant was gone in a few jumps of fire.

"Get your clothes back on," Howard ordered Brenk, glancing at Sarah and moving his head: We're done here? She nodded. The rogues were confirmed dead, they had a prisoner, this whole place was a deathtrap. Time to get the fuck out.

Brenk complied immediately, still talking. "The only thing left for you to worry about is the nuclear pile," he said, gesturing to the doors on the other side of the corridor. "I'm no nuke engineer, but they shouldn't be able to make that go critical if everything was done to spec, but- well- you know them," he said, as if he wasn't one of them to begin with and as if he wouldn't have overseen every last one of the traps. "Can you imagine that some of them wanted it with a hydrogen center? When we told them it wouldn't work the way they thought it would, a few actually asked to spare uranium for a bomb. As if we could. Or if I'd want to."

"No plans on going out in a blaze of glory?" Paul asked, helping him with the spacesuit.

He scoffed at the idea. What good was an epic self-destruct device if he wouldn't survive to watch it work? "None. If I had a getaway plan I'd've used that, but where would I go and how would I get there? 'Twas bad enough just getting here in the first place," he said as he finished putting his gloves and helmet on.

"All right," William said. "We're getting out of here," both twins finished. There was an argument for dealing with the nuclear reactor now, but fuck it- Sarah was right, they were here to kick ass, not tempt fate.

"Talk and move," Howard said, the question burning. "Why, Brenk?"

He'd expected the question and gave his rehearsed (actually rehearsed- he'd practiced in front of a mirror) answer, every word true. "Because I could. The world has no meaning except what we give it, and we're only here once. I wanted to make things more exciting, to alter the world from its course, to end the monotony of Dominator rule. So when they came to me and said that they had a plan to implant the Dominator, of course I went along with it. I did have my own plans, but I never hated you the way the rest of them did. You were always just my chosen opponents in the game I decided to play." He found the neologism the best way to phrase it: "Duumvirate, I did it for the lulz." They digested what he said. Just that, then. Not the deep perversions of the foul, nor the searing hate of the power-mad, nor the quasi-religious insanity of the self-centered authoritarian, nor the desperate flailing of someone fearing that the world will be pulled out from under him, nor even a personal grudge. An intentional choice, made early on for no other reason than to influence the course of events. Brenk had led Montgomery and the rest of the rogues to believe that he was just in it for the power, which wasn't quite wrong and wasn't quite right.

Brenk was jogging too slow. William picked him up and started running, the rest following. "We were engineered, Brenk," William said softly as the armor propelled him. "You had no idea what that meant at the time, the world we'd build, the things we'd create. You could have had it all, you could have built thousands of your dungeons for us to play in, but you chose the side of idiocy, ignorance, and fear. It's we who influence the course of events. Not you."

"We," Brenk said, shaking his head as he watched his final line of defense pass by. "Us. That wasn't supposed to happen. Ending up opposing your whole kind was probably my biggest mistake, but that's not the biggest.. flaw.. in this game of ours." He took a deep breath, as if trying to find a way to explain the ineffable, without saying something that he thought would get him killed outright. "There's not.. supposed.. to be two of you. It shouldn't have happened that way! And I couldn't fix it. No matter how I tried, I couldn't make it so there was just one of you. It wasn't.. fair." Ah. He was crazy, then. Just not in the way they had thought. He hung his head in abject defeat. The twins were inclined to show mercy, perhaps let him live for a while after the End of Secrecy and have him build something that was actually fun, his creative insanity treated as a rare resource before he died of old age, the weird crap (like the repetitious robot still begging to be let out) used in an entertaining spooky-house environment instead of actually trying to kill engineereds.

Sarah's servant, however, was not so inclined. Even years later, even with low gravity altering her real target's stride, even with him in a panicked lope in a now-antiquated spacesuit hoping to reach the jet and somehow take it over to save himself from certain doom, she knew his gait and his mannerisms. There was no question. With no sound to warn them, none of the three turned around as she blasted towards them; the other two never knew what hit them, their heads flattened together into brain pancakes with bone-and-helmet flakes. She tapped Gritzl on the shoulder, smiling.

She would cherish the look on his face for the rest of her life.

"Awwww. You think you're a big boy, don't you?" she said, touching helmets to transfer sound. She hadn't turned off the communicator and the others wondered what was going on. "Big boy wants to dress up like a spaceman. Sorry, but you're just a little boy and shouldn't be wearing those grown-up clothes." She tore it from him, yanking off the helmet and ripping the suit, boots, and gloves right off his body, leaving him exposed to vacuum and direct sunlight. A gush of quickly-freezing air rushed out of his nose and he gasped helplessly, slowly falling to the searing-hot dust, squinting in reflex as his eyes started to freeze, his sweat instantly evaporating to a thin icy film, his right eardrum rupturing with a spray of purple, freezing blood. The others had figured it out and the riotous laughter of Luke drowned out their chuckles. "Looks like baby needs his ba-ba," she said, opening the valve on his air tank and shoving it in his mouth, his stiff hands clasping it, desperately and hopelessly trying to get any of the air down his throat before it escaped. He floundered with it for fifteen seconds before shock and asphyxiation finally rendered him unconscious. Ruby stomped on his head and wiped it off on his body.

"If you're done, get the jet next to the entrance," Sarah ordered her, and in moments she reached it and did just that, the rest immediately climbing in with Brenk and a couple of extra air tanks for him in tow.

They came back much slower than they had gone out, at a leisurely one gravity, interrogating Brenk thoroughly to make sure he really was the last. There was only one real question remaining, and William asked it with a smile on his face: "So, Brenk, we got a little message in a bottle telling us where to look. Who do you think betrayed you?"

The blood had been draining into his head from a gravity he was not used to, and outrage caused it to flood his face. "I don't know!" Who could have possibly...

"Were there any threats, serious arguments, or organizational changes recently?" Howard asked.

"No, none of note, and Ivan Petrovich autoeuthanized three days ago, but it couldn't have been him. For him, everything, and I mean everything, was about his progeny. He was terrified of his lineage being supplanted by yours. That's why he joined in the first place. He was a very old man, he had no duplicate, his kids were all he had."

"Really?" William asked, smiling. "Then let's take a look at his family tree when we get back to Earth."

Brenk looked offended. "When his grand-daughter married last year he swore he'd do anything to save her and her kids from you, and I know he was not lying."

The twins looked at each other, faces wide in smiles, tears in their eyes from the hilarity. He didn't know.. he really didn't know... they started laughing, then Paul, then Sarah, then Luke and Ruby, and the whole jet fairly shook with echoed, amplified laughter.

"Okay, okay, stop, stop," Howard said, quieting his friends and himself down. "Peter, are you aware that Northberg Medical openly and willingly provides neonatal genetic services to any Illuminatus who wishes them?"

"No, there's no way that she'd..," Brenk started.

"That she'd what, Brenk? That she'd turn her own kid into a genetically superior being instead of leaving it a normal? That she and her husband would go 'Yeah, let's not leave our kid well behind the curve'? That she'd be as devoted to her family as her grandfather, a man who she thought was dead years ago?" William asked rhetorically.

"There is a way, and she did," the implants made him say despite himself.

"And I bet you were all making mouth noises about attacking Northberg again," Howard said. Brenk started to sob into his arms, tears collecting at the bowl of his helmet. Ivan was determined to protect his genetic line, even if altered. How could he have missed it? How could he have been so stupid? "Oh, you weren't all wrong. You knew his motivations perfectly. You just forgot to check what the circumstances were." And then there was more laughter, slow and chuckling, and Brenk withdrew into himself for the hours it took to return to the planet.

They made their re-entry over Antarctica (thruster-braking, not aerobraking) to avoid secrecy concerns on deceleration. They wouldn't need to worry about those much longer, either.

Chapter 41

The very first thing the twins did upon re-entering Earth's atmosphere was give Daniel Westham a promotion to first level for saving all their fucking lives with his armor. He thanked the twins, graciously accepting the unmasked full-on gratitude he'd expected before. It was a shame the concept of levels had been so deprecated during the twins' reign. More than a decade ago, it was common for lower levels to be treated with less respect, given worse deals, and even withheld information from. The new egalitarianism improved efficiency by far, but it also left the Dominator bereft of useful gifts for incredibly beneficial Illuminati. (Daniel didn't care. Just having a symbol of direct respect from the Dominator and a place in history was more than enough, as it gave him a permanent, concrete edge in any future negotiation.)

"Bastard," Brenk muttered under his breath after Daniel was off the screen, rage surfacing despite his predicament. The twins looked at him. "All those advantages he gave you. As if you didn't have enough. What a waste." He regretted the words the moment they left his mouth.

The engineereds didn't hide their contempt. If he wanted to die so badly.. "Yeah how about fuck you, Brenk?" Paul asked.

"Or how about no talking until we land, Brenk," Sarah said. "I think I know someone who'd like to meet him for a while."

It was a good choice. There were a lot of places the Duumvirate could go for a victory lap: Northberg, Bavaria, various other bases and homes. Quad's palace, now home to more than a dozen young Illuminati, was even more ostentatious than the Duumvirate's home if not quite as refined. Even with the North Pole tilted towards the Sun, here above the Arctic Circle it was still fairly cold, the sun at the horizon but not setting for months. The jet landed in half-melted slush directly in front of a pair of great double doors, ten feet high; they opened and a crowd of preteens came running out to meet them, covered feet going slosh-slosh-slosh in the muddy snow to see the conquering Duumvirate and their captive. In many ways the kids looked like they were fresh out of Northberg, all bright smiles and bright colors, but these kids were even smarter, more Machiavellian, and more unified than the ones of a decade before, and everyone from Quad to seven-year-old ('almost eight!') Susie in her warm pink dress was ready to own the world.

Brenk stepped out first, his helmet under his arm as a normal astronaut, looking at the kids and obviously not understanding what they truly were. He was followed shortly by the twins, who were given shocked looks by a few of the kids; they pulled their faceplates and helmets back behind their heads, folding the neck back and letting their hair out.

Richie, having celebrated his eight-and-a-half semi-birthday just last week, found himself confused at the sight. "Why's it black?" he asked. His own suit was a blend of medium-to-light greens, and as he stood on the soft ground it looked as if he had grown there.

"It has to be black, for the heat," William said. The boy looked confused further. "Reflective paint works in both directions, read your thermodynamics." That didn't help. Fortunately, Richie had his friend Ricky by his side (the names were why their friendship had started) who knew more than a few things about space travel and the associated hazards. Ricky, glittering blue, leaned in to whisper him an explanation. "But before we get into that, this is Peter Brenk; Peter, this is Quad and his household. Brenk, I'd like you to explain yourself to him," William commanded, smirking. This ought to be good.

Peter knew the four-armed boy was the Dominator's son, but where else did he- oh shit, that's right, two of these kids ended up in one of his scenarios. He hadn't intended that. The intention was to get rid of the nosy William Blakesworth, pull Bruce Joseph out of circulation (even if the Duumvirate did know by then that he had a clone) and cause a destablizing minor secrecy panic in the process. He'd wanted to attack secrecy itself even more, but was aggressively voted down by the other rogues. Now he wished he had broken it completely, simply out of revenge; but if anyone here had any idea of that, he was toast, and he desperately hoped they'd never ask. He also hoped he could endear himself to these kids. "You kids all play games, right?" General assent of the 'No shit' variety. "I used to. Tabletop roleplaying, Atari.." ('Of course they don't know what that is') "Video games, of all kinds. But that was before I became an Illuminatus. Since then, I've been playing a different game. You see, despite how realistic a game world might seem, if it only exists in its little box, what's the point? It doesn't matter how realistic it looks, it's not meaningful because it's not real. So I decided to play reality instead, to.. oppose the existing power structure, before the Duumvirate was born, because I wanted to affect things, to change things. And since history is written by the victors, well, I guess I can just say now that I played the villain." Brenk felt a great deal of relief, as the kids were smiling at him.

"So that whole business of the amusement park..," Quad started. Fuck, this is what he had told himself to survive in there. To treat it like it's a game. To know that his enemy had done the same thing was both vindicating and maddening.

"Was me just being imaginative in my villainy. Yes." The twins quietly raged behind Brenk, still burning with the memory of the massive amount of secrecy cleanup that one required. But the kids smiled wider, as most of them liked the opportunity to see what was effectively a normal-TV bad guy in real life.

Brenk was slightly taller than Quad, so Quad abruptly forced the top of his head down with his upper arms to see eye-to-eye with him. "You're right. It's only meaningful when it's real." He looked over Brenk's shoulder to the twins. They nodded: Go right ahead.

Quad grabbed Brenk's shoulders with his lower arms and under his throat with his uppers, pushing his body downwards and his head upwards. A combination of desperate self-modifications and long-term weakness had led to Brenk's spinal cord being held together with more cohesiveness than his spine was to the other bones in his body. Quad was expecting decapitation and got massive rhizotomy, Brenk's vertebrae hanging off the end of the skull like a tail. A couple of the kids looked away from the spectacle. Brenk's mouth moved for half a second before he realized he was dead.

"Sub-Zero wins. Fatality!" Stan shouted, having never heard of Goro, and most of the kids broke up laughing. Quad whipped the head around by the spine in a hammer throw, and bounced it off the exterior wall to more laughter.

"Now let's see Daniel's armor!" Susie demanded, and the twins pondered how best to show them. Air turned to plasma from super-powered lasers might blind their unprotected eyes, the twins were already strong and fast, and armor's toughness wasn't something you demonstrated while wearing it.

Luke decided not to blind them and showed a low-powered electrical arc, grinning and causing some envy. Ruby boost-leaped thirty meters into the air before using hands and feet to land on a cushion of flame, to great applause. Howard pondered lifting the jet, but saw another opportunity. Smiling wide, he picked up Brenk's corpse by the ankle and gave it a fast, mighty heave in the direction of the water, sixty kilograms thrown like one. It tumbled end-over-end, legs and arms pirouetting, blood from the neck flying in all directions for engineereds to dodge, a wonderful example of ragdoll physics made meaningful by its reality. It flew more than two hundred meters before landing with a splash, and as they watched it fall they noticed a series of dorsal fins bobbing up and down, blowholes opening at regular intervals. One of the orcas changed direction to examine the corpse. Tetrina, having watched the mutilation and disposal of Brenk, found herself concerned with the welfare of living beings: "She's not going to choke on that spacesuit, is she?" The boy who had asked about the black-body suits assured her that whales were smarter than that.

Then the questions came, lots of them, from genuine Illuminati who were also inquisitive, perceptive children. What happened up there? What did they fight? Was that actually a dent on the back of the Dominator's helmet? The twins chose to answer them by having the group upload the suits' records to the public database. "Enjoy the show," Howard said. "Everyone, we'd love to stay, but we have a great much to do now that the rogues are dead. If you like, we'll come back when the current business is over." Of course the preteens liked, even if his tone said that might be a while.

"It's the End of Secrecy, isn't it? That's what we can do now that they're gone!" Richie piped up.

"It would be impolitic for me to tell anyone about the End of Secrecy before I tell everyone," William replied, and the kids knew Richie had guessed right. Some of them with normal-world holdings decided to stop worrying about long-term plans. The twins started to turn to leave, and the kids rushed forward to hug them before they left, and they very carefully hugged the kids back with their nuclear arms.

Chapter 42

"Montgomery."

The servant sighed when the twins came into the isolation chamber, leaving the door open for their friends to watch. He knew they'd win, once they took him. Brenk's fantasies about killing them with traps could never be anything more, not against these superhumans. He'd been eating the bread and nutrient bars the island's servants were feeding him, drinking water from the sink, wondering why he was bothering. He sat on the bed, looking up at the Duumvirate, waiting to die.

Howard spoke very slowly, very clearly, talking as much to his friends as their captive. "We've been mulling over what you said. The best time for you to reset my implants would have been when I was away from Billy, at that one party. You could probably have found a way to pull me aside from the other engineereds, then- I was ten, and unknowing. But not away from Sarah. He was going to do this in person, the way you wanted, correct? And his first command- as it always is- would be for me not to hurt him." Montgomery nodded. "He would then have had to directly command me to command her not to hurt him, either. By the time the second word left his mouth, she would have already choked him- she wasn't allowed to kill Illuminati then- I would have dropped her standing orders, he'd be a corpse, we would have unimplanted ourselves, and assuming we survived, we would have had this conversation almost a decade ago. If it had been done over a screen, same thing, only with a turned-off screen and a jet ride. Possibly Damien could have pulled it off because I wouldn't have taken him seriously soon enough, but he was what he was and he died for it. Twice. Other than him, your subordinates were right; our speed would have pre-empted it. It's only because of the extreme caution of your group that this has gone on as long as it has." There was one lie in that, one which none of them wanted to admit. At the time, his servants wanted him dead for what was done to them. Howard would have tried to unimplant only himself. And, without support, he would have probably died screaming.

"Go on. Gloat some more, damn you," Montgomery said, shaking his head. "Or just kill me now. Go on! Do it! What are you waiting for, you have your precious future for as long as it lasts!"

"Actually, as soon as you tell us one last thing, we're going to let you go," William said. Montgomery stared at him in disbelief. "Explain in detail the nature of implant withdrawal."

"Beings with a central nervous.. no.. it's.." He wracked his brains. There was so much technical data, but he didn't have his notes on him and that would be regurgitation, not explanation. "The animal brain is designed to work as a unit. Memory, instinct, consciousness- all are supposed to be a unified whole. They're not always unified, especially not in people, and so we get things like addiction and unexplained desires. But when we override the conscious- shunt it off, replace it with orders- it becomes much worse. Grand mal worse. That's what causes it, the disconnect between conscious and subconscious, between wants and needs, between ego and unresolved issues, and believe me, for servants there's a lot of those. Effectively, the mind battles itself to the death with the brain as its battlefield." The twins weren't sure whether or not any of this was real or it was all complete bullshit. At least Montgomery believed it, and it was at least somewhat related to experimental evidence.

"So why don't people die the moment they're implanted?" Howard asked.

"They did!" Montgomery replied. "For the longest time they did! It took me forever to figure out how to suppress the effect, to put a constant command for the brain not to wipe itself out. I used to tell Stark that people were already dead the moment the damn things hit their forebrains. But this was a week after he used them on me so he thought I was just being angry." The twins smiled as they figured how it happened. Montgomery said 'They work now', Stark said 'I have a good way to test them'. Didn't the Evil Overlord's Guide mention something about not putting your engineers behind their own traps?

William had a suspicion. "This 'constant command', it doesn't always work fully, does it? Not on everyone. Not all the time."

"We had some difficulties at one point, but our test subjects seemed to be surviving. Other than a few nightmares, we didn't have anyone experiencing further effects." His eyes widened as he spoke, as William was scowling at him the moment he said 'nightmares'.

That answered one old question, then. The fucking things didn't work right, and probably never could, and that was why William had suffered two straight years of nightly screaming terror. "Oh, I'm going to enjoy letting you go," he said, enraged. "Hey, Sarah! Mind getting something to let him go with?"

"Let me go. To Hell. Right. One last joke, huh?"

"Oh no, no, we'd never use that kind of euphemism. If we wanted to send you to Hell ourselves we wouldn't need anything to do it with," William reminded him.

Sarah came back almost immediately, holding an implant extraction device, and Montgomery's breath caught in his throat when he realized what it was. Howard smiled at him and spoke as if talking to a small child. "Hold very still. After all, you wouldn't be free if you were still implanted, would you? So it's time to let you go." Smiling as well, William placed the implant remover to Montgomery's forehead and activated it. The moment the implants were detached from his forebrain, Montgomery fell down off the bed into a sitting position, staring wide at a point two feet to William's right.

"Stay back!" he screamed, scrambling backwards away from something that only he could see, hitting the wall and not feeling it. He was in his own world now. "Get away from me! You're not- AAaaaaaAAaAagh!!" This was all being recorded, and his warbling high-pitched wail would be played back for amusement later. He continued to scramble backwards into the wall, no longer using his legs. "No! No! Aaaaaahh! AAaAAAaah AAaa-" His arms stopped working as well. Then his voice. Shortly thereafter, his lungs and heart. The twins left the corpse to be disposed of by servants, most likely through canine digestive tracts.

"Now that the last of them are gone, we have something else to deal with," William told his chuckling friends. His tone was so utterly formal that masters and servants alike stopped abruptly to look at him.

"Sarah. Paul," Howard said in the same formal tone. "We, you, and your servants are going to sit on that couch and make a number of hard decisions. If you have any needs you should take care of before then, take care of them now."

"Ruby, get some food ready. Quick to cook, quick to eat. I'm taking a shower," Sarah ordered, walking upstairs. The armor did not perfectly absorb sweat.

"Yes, Mistress." Quick-cooked bacon, eggs, instant oatmeal, and microwaved hot chocolate would take her about five minutes, with some of the cooking heat coming from her hands.

"Luke, go check my holdings and make sure nothing's going to interrupt this," Paul commanded. He had an inkling of what the hard decisions were going to consist of. Despite his agreement to near-total omnicide, he still considered himself human enough to tremble at the thought of what the twins were planning. He needed several baths at once but could only take the one.

"At once, Master," Luke said, smirking just a bit. Going over Paul's limited holdings properly involved a few thorough, rapid-fire Q&A sessions with a few servants.

The Duumvirate showered, used the bathroom, and put on comfortable robes before sitting down on the couch to get things ready, letting Northberg know that they were going to start giving authorization for a whole lot of retroviruses soon. They opened up window after window of information, knowledge, and facts, all about different unengineered Illuminati, as masters and servants switched places for hygiene, Sarah in her white suit and Paul wearing socks and comfortable pants with his Duumvirate-logo T-shirt, all perfectly white, the servants in pitch black. They all ate together, hungrily but in total silence. Then, as one, they got up to sit down on the couch, the Duumvirate in the center, Paul and then Luke to their right, Sarah and then Ruby to the twins' left. Six keyboard-mouse arrangements were extended in front of them on trays, and six mouse pointers, all subtly different, availed themselves on the big screen. The only reason they ever used this all-for-one setup was when a great much business had to be done at once.

"Sarah, Paul, Luke, Ruby," Howard said, still in formal mode. "We are all going to the future. The engineered humanity is going to the future with us. Today, and possibly tomorrow, and possibly for the next week, we will decide who else to bring with us, one by one."

"If any of you have any opinions, observations, or anything else to help us make that decision, or if you find yourself unable to continue, you are obligated to speak up," William added. Sarah and Paul would be invaluable, of course, but it was the servants the twins really wanted, as ferrets for the kind of evil the Duumvirate did not want to see in their coming utopia.

"Am I to assume that anyone not going to the future will have his future cut short?" Paul asked in the same formal tone.

"Yes," William said, and Paul exhaled in a long sigh. This was going to be ugly. Paul had intuitively known since almost a decade ago, when he was twelve years old with a brand new white suit, that some sort of harrowing practically had to happen. He'd wanted to get rid of some bad apples before the End as well. He just didn't know it would go down quite like this.

The twins started with the ones they thought would have the most certain answers. "Donald Simpson," William said. No one had problems with him and so by mutual assent he got to live, and William copypasted his name into a file available only to them and the Northberg leadership.

"Wilfred Garcia," Howard said, glancing at Paul.

Paul's breath caught in his throat. If he said anything like 'kill', it would be accepted at once, and his old enemy would be in his grave before too long. And yet, since the coup attempt all those years ago, Wilfred hadn't so much as said boo to him, staying far out of his way in every sense. He considered asking the twins about what their criteria were, but he knew the answer quite well. "He's fairly decent at playing the current game," Paul said instead. "When you change the rules, he'll be able to play by those just the same, so he's qualified to come to the future with you." Paul wasn't sure whether he agreed with their 'future' phrasing, but chose to use it as a mark of respect. A few seconds of research revealed that Wilfred had mostly consensual sex with women and ran his businesses mostly evenhandedly, with eyes only to his own real gain and not some twisted ideal. Or so he let be known about himself, but actually investigating almost six thousand Illuminati at once was an impossibility. The twins were tacitly surprised at Paul's mercy, but Wilfred got to live.

"Vernon Stuart," William said. Sarah smiled- they remembered him! She had also used him as an object lesson for Ruby, and smiled wider as she watched her servant open logfiles in rapid succession, highlighting a section of a conversation.

"No future," Ruby said. "This is why." The highlighted section, as part of a discussion about human genetic advancements, read:

he even mentioned using African genetics -- can you believe it? As if anyone would want that!

"That is stupid," Howard pronounced, his formal persona cracking just a bit. Genetic engineering made racism less than meaningless. When not constructing DNA from whole cloth, the Operator and his cohorts had used genetics from Caucasians, Africans, Mongolians, gorillas, swine, bison, electric eels, salamanders, and flatworms in their drive to build a better humanity.

"He's serious?" William asked. "He's not just joking or telling his correspondent what he wants to hear?"

"He means what he says," Ruby replied. The name went into a killfile of the sort pertaining to Operations. This list would determine who was destined to receive a different virus. These targets would be given theirs after the real retrovirus had been distributed; by the time the first victim knew what was really happening to him, the last victim would already be injected. The twins were no longer concerned about secrecy breaches as vengeance.

They decided to do the guy he was talking to next, and he, too, landed in the killfile. Some were decided very quickly (a couple as 'Why isn't this one retroviral already?'), others took several minutes, and one particularly wealthy owner of diverse holdings took a full fifteen minutes for the kill-no-kill decision to be made. It turned out to be no-kill; the twins determined that he was trying to be a true Illuminatus, the master of both sides of everything. A lofty goal, perhaps unattainable in practice, but dreaming big was something they wanted in their future. The kill ratio was about one in six; as expected, most of the heximation was being carried out by the servants pointing out chains of behavior that signified serious problems with their subject. Paul asked for only a handful to die and most of those were swiftly emphasized by his servant. Sarah only chose to kill a few times, most of it being from very old grudges and things that never made it into a database, and so a few old pedophiles and demanding blowhards were scheduled to bite the dust. The twins only chose to leave one person in the past themselves, someone of questionable sexuality with a bad tendency to demand that the Dominator allow him (?) some sort of seniority bias over young engineereds, acting on some bizarre idea of what constituted fairness. Most of the people they personally wanted gone were gotten rid of earlier that day.

The adage was true: The measure of a person was found in how he treated those beneath him. A flattering, bootlicking coward would show up to certain venues with a servant with not-quite-hidden bruises, and tugging on a few investigative threads revealed hints of him successfully threatening others into not contacting the Dominator for certain disputes. That was an absolute no-no, and a reason to kill him immediately, but they just put him on the no-future list instead. The one after that was a man who had implanted his own wife the moment he was inducted into the Illuminati, and ordered a lot of S&M gear shortly afterwards to add to his existing collection. In public the two appeared comfortable together. The consensus was that she was totally into it and he had no interest in seriously hurting her or anyone else, so he'd see his next birthday. He apparently had a female counterpart, and that kind, gentle, grey-haired manipulator of landed nobility didn't even bother with implants for her young husband, married shortly after she joined. She had certain ideas of how to clothe him. There were publicly-available pictures, funny and slightly disturbing, made better and worse by the fact that he apparently liked it. It was screwed up, but nobody's 'Okay, put an end to this shit' trigger went off, and if they killed everyone who was simply screwed up the twins would own a very barren planet indeed. She was highly competent in her daily business, and occasionally went out of her way not to piss off engineereds. It might have been fear of ending up like Rhines or simple prudence, but it was clear that there were things she thoroughly understood and so she would survive. The imagery would be different with her having eternal youth.

Then there was another woman, who oversaw an enormous amount of prison work camps in multiple industrial countries, contemplating on an obscure but public diary that she was sad that newly engineered servants wouldn't stay castrated, but happy that she could do it more than once, just as soon as this rogue business ended and she got her retrovirus. The servants didn't even need to open their mouths, saying it all with simple looks. "Yeaaaahh," Paul said.

"Yeaah," Sarah agreed, click-dragging the name to near the top of the doomed list.

Paul remembered someone else with a problem and mentioned Rick Cream's name. He attempted to sign the death warrant without an explanation, but the twins were having none of it.

"You made a promise, but we have to know the reason," William said, the formality intentionally ice-cold and distant. "You're not the one breaking the promise, because we're not giving you a choice." Paul understood why they were being so hard, even if he didn't like it. His dear friends were still the Duumvirate, and they reserved the right to turn absolute authority on and off as they pleased.

Paul told them a condensed, short-sentences version of everything involving Rick, Kylie, and Charles. If the mood was better there would have been a great deal of hard laughter. Luke finally understood what he had in common with the old servant: ruthlessness. Rick's assholery earned him a slow elevator to Hell.

Over time they faced a dizzying panoply of men, women, and a handful of unengineered children and teenagers. The kids and teens all got to live, minus one incredibly ugly-minded girl who reminded Paul of Damien. Only a couple of the older ones were recruits, and the parents who had chosen not to engineer the born Illuminati (and hadn't already been killed by their pissed-off children) all ended up futureless, Luke and Ruby competing to see who could ask for slaughter first.

What Paul found surprising was that the group didn't argue once. He found no fault in any of their decisions, and they found no fault in his. He was expecting to speak up to contradict a death. But every time, there was detailed evidence that the subject was simply no good as a person, and the servants practically had a doctorate in broken-minded authoritarian psychology, and so Illuminatus after Illuminatus was consigned to doom.

After three hours they had decided the fates of two hundred Illuminati, taking an average of less than a minute on whether or not to individually execute a controller of the world. Of the roughly 6,200 Illuminati, only about three hundred were engineered, the majority of them young. That would mean another eighty-six hours of straight work assuming they kept up the pace. Paul found himself wishing that they could go faster and mentally cursed himself for it.

"Okay, can we take a break? Maybe go downstairs and play some games or something?" Luke asked, his head roiling.

"Yes," Howard said immediately and started pushing trays back towards the screen.

"Good, I can't.. think anymore. We've been.. doing stuff all day, you think this might have affected our judgment?"

"Somewhat, but in a good way," William said, dropping the formality. "We can't do a full investigation on them all, but we already have more than enough information. Anyone smart enough to hide everything from our eyes and the public records is smart enough not to be a problem later. We can't know what's going on in their heads, but we can't know and we have to do this anyway, and we're not going to start implanting now. Maybe we're all tired, but for this we have to go with our gut, our subconscious when we look at the evidence. It's not like finding rogues."

The elevator took them down to the basement, and they stepped out to walk to the arcade. Howard said, "In theory, even if we don't have time for a full investigation, we should still have enumerated in detail what we're trying to keep and what we're trying to lose, and then base our decisions on some defined metric. But that's coarse-grained digital when what we want is analog. It's like trying to use a machine to check the air when you've got a good dog."

"A dog that's probably going to be put to sleep soon." Everyone stopped in their tracks when Luke said that, turning to look at him. Suddenly the air was more cloying, their sense of fatigue much worse, as if a nightmare were about to poke its head into the waking world. "I really wish you hadn't said that it's good for us to go with our gut. And I really, really wish you hadn't said that our detection or whatever is as good as a dog's nose. Because my gut is telling me that when you have detectors like the two of us who are sort of from something you don't want in your future and who understand it all too well, what you do is you use them to finish off the last of the fuckheads and then you get rid of them for a clean sweep." They were in the middle of disposing of mean, ugly-minded Illuminati, bad to have around, who had served their purpose and were no longer of value. The disposal of similar servants was trivial by comparison.

The blood drained from Paul's face. "You.. really think that, after.. after all of everything, that I'd.."

"Don't tell him it doesn't make sense," Ruby interjected. This had originally been her concept, said in confidence some years ago, that there would be a day that they were unneeded, and they would not be released to anywhere but the grave.

"Yeah, it makes sense.. for various values of sense!" Paul looked between the two servants. The twins said nothing, and Paul didn't like that. Sarah said nothing and under the circumstances he liked that even less. "Okay, wait, everybody just wait, this.. let me think," he yammered needlessly. "If.. I actually did that, then by the same criteria that we were using up there to determine who lives and who dies, I'd have to kill myself right after killing you. Christ with the cross jammed right up his ass, that is something we don't want in the future!"

"Will not happen," Sarah told her servant, as if asked about some operational detail. Ruby turned to the twins, about to ask for confirmation, but their slight smiles reminded her that it wasn't their business. Masters are responsible for servants, and she and Luke weren't their servants.

They played together. The game of choice was a motion-controlled co-op warzone, the sensors being accurate enough for real-time dodging and punching. Six made it slightly crowded on the screen if not the spacious playing field, but it was doubly wonderful for the fact that nothing would be unstoppable or unfair. Not worrying about dying in real life was a nice addition, too, but they knew this game and even with extra enemies on a very hard difficulty, six players was a ballstomp as they intuitively, immediately covered each other's asses.

Once they were done they found how badly they needed to sleep. They had a long day of extermination tomorrow, and the five after that if they worked at the same speed for 14-hour days. They didn't like the prospect, but delegating wasn't an option.

Paul opened the trap door between him and his servant when he reached his room. "Luke, get up here. You're sleeping with me tonight."

"What?!"

"You heard me. No, this isn't about buttsex. You and I are going to sleep in the same bed, and if you truly think that I'm going to get rid of you when this is over, I command you to fry my brain in my sleep." 

Luke sighed, elevating himself with one hand. Paul's command was either very clever or very unthoughtful, but he'd missed the same thing earlier. "You're not going to get rid of me after this. Even if the Operator's viruses kill ninety-nine point nine percent, the other seven million are going to be a pain in the ass, and like we said before, for that you need slayers." Luke lay in Paul's equally-comfortable bed for the first time. 'Of course it's the same,' Luke thought, pulling up the sheets and putting his hands between his head and the pillow. 'Everything's maxed out for everyone here. Even the servants. That's their future.'

Was Paul really going to sic his pet sociopath on the remnants of those who had looked up to his servants' servants, ordering him to systematically butcher men, women, and children alike in humanity's last pogrom, the only concessions to mercy speed and painlessness? Of course he was. "So it would be after that, then. But even though I've never lied to you once, you still think I'm lying now."

"Come on, we both know how this goes, it's important that you don't lie to me so I can do my job right. You only need to tell me one lie in my life."

"That's.. no, I get it now. It's because of what we've been doing, that you actually decided that you need to die. That's what happened, isn't it? Your detector went off on yourself, and you're projecting- onto me!" Luke started to reply but Paul overrode him, outraged. "You see this?" he asked, sticking a thumb into the neck of his Duumvirate T-shirt and waggling it at Luke. "You see that emblem on it, you see what color it is? I decide what happens to your life. We decide how all this ends, and you know damn well who I mean. So no, you are not allowed to sacrifice yourself for whatever you think is our goal. 'Get rid of us for a clean sweep.'", he imitated with sarcasm. "I own you!" Paul laid down his head on Luke's chest, sharing the sheet, their faces inches apart. "And I say, I am letting you go do whatever you want when there's no more normals to worry about, and if you don't think you can live on this planet after that then you can move to Mars!"

"The world a mess," Luke replied, reluctantly placing his arm around his master, tacitly admitting that Paul was very right on all counts. "Does that count as getting rid of me?"

"No." Paul went to sleep shortly thereafter without his brain getting fried.

Chapter 43

Joey, do you trust me?

The question, asked after a decade together and mutual telepaths for half of that, was needless, almost offensive. Of course I trust you!

Good. Get dressed, we're going somewhere. Don't think about where, don't think about why. And don't worry about it. It was 9:00 at night, and both had had a full day, the women asleep and Joey woken up by Jeremy's thoughts. Joey refrained from asking questions like 'Why now?'

"You know that 'don't worry' is in that list of counterproductive commands, right?" Joey asked instead, as they walked towards the aircraft.

"I know," Jeremy replied, giving a mental shrug. "But just.. trust me. I don't want you thinking at all about this. I'm flying. Don't even look out the windows." With 'Don't think' commands, some servants would be forced to kill themselves. Jeremy's thoughts had enough undercurrent of 'I'm trying to keep you safe' to prevent that. Joey tried his best to accept the orders, choosing instead to lose himself in video games as his master flew, pretending that he was somewhere else. The worst part was that Jeremy was sealing his mind up tight, the standard chatter slammed off. 'He said not to worry about it, so I won't worry about it.' Easier said than done.

In a couple of hours they had arrived, the hangar they had landed in instantly familiar the moment Jeremy opened the door. Northberg?!

Yes. This way. And pretend it doesn't matter. They took the tram to the medical wing, Joey trying to force himself to be calm. 'He's going to modify me somehow,' he realized despite himself, knowing that whatever modification was in store, he couldn't do shit about it anyway. Jeremy completely controlled him, after all. And he thought he'd given up worrying about that so long ago...

They reached the same room in which they had gained their telepathic implants, and saw the Night Operator smiling as they walked in. Joey's fears all came out in a flood: 'He's going to modify my emotions, he's going to alter my brain.' Jeremy mentally moved him down to the table in which he had lain before, the Night Operator silently pulling out an anaesthesia mask in pre-arranged agreement. Joey remembered that the rogues had brain-modifying techniques, realized that the Operator had probably figured out how they worked by now, and wondered what Jeremy would turn him into- but wait, Jeremy wouldn't do something like that, the only other thing he could be doing was-

You're unimplanting me, aren't you, he thought before he slipped into unconsciousness.

"He figured it out at the end," Jeremy said as the Operator sterilized Joey's forehead. "I kind of thought he would."

"Like I said before, I wouldn't have done it like this," the Operator replied, his implant device deftly cutting open Joey's skull. "Would have been better to warn him long in advance."

"Other than the whole 'getting cocky' or 'getting worried' business, he knows what the twins saw." When the Dominator had unimplanted himself and his servants, the withdrawal had manifested itself in horrific nightmare imagery, including skeletons, some sort of enormous canine, and a massive one-eyed lump of flesh with hundreds of powerful tentacles. "I don't want his imagination subconsciously making things worse before this even gets started."

"Well, he's your servant," the Operator said, shrugging, folding back pieces of Joey's skin, skull, and dura to attach a different device, copying the neural connections and encryption key to new, telepathy-only implants. "And I'll tell you again, and I want to be very clear: There is a very good chance that he is going to die. And if he does, I'm not responsible." The Operator wasn't just trying to protect himself from retribution. The act of killing a sentient engineered was distasteful, and it even felt morally wrong, a concept he thought he'd abandoned long ago. So it was Jeremy's decision, and Jeremy's problem, and he was here merely as a facilitator.

"Admit it to yourself, Operator. This is research to you." There was truth to that, as well. The Operator swapped the implants in two quick motions, applied regenerative paste, and put Joey's forehead back together, administering gaseous antidote through the same mask that had knocked him out.

"Yes. And dead guinea pigs seldom give useful results," he said, gesturing to the other bed. Jeremy laid down, trying to relax, opening up his mind and waiting for Joey's anaesthesia to wear off.

thud

"Oh, we're home," Joey said, looking at the mansion, a combination of Kylie's New York home and Jeremy's original one back in England. It was daytime, with bright, cool sunlight shining on them, the mansion's windows reflecting it and the grass green as ever.

"Heh. I guess we can call it that," Jeremy replied. "You do know where we are, right?"

"Yeah. Still don't want me worrying?"

"Not at all. I want you kicking ass," he said, walking up to the front door.

"I have to be careful how much ass, it's the inside of my head after all." thud "Damn, that's annoying. Wait, why are we walking?" he asked, cancelling gravity for both of them. "Hey, careful, there's something on the other side of the door." But Jeremy opened it anyway, and an enormous swarm of rats attacked him at once, each one with too many limbs, too many tails, and far, far too many teeth. "Jeremy-" But the rats' bites and lunges were passing right through him as he laughed, stomping and smashing them by the dozen, feet and hands a blur, some of them getting past for Joey to incinerate with white beams coming from his hands.

"I'm not the one who got unimplanted here. What do you think they can do to me?"

"Oh. You're invincible. That might help."

"I don't think I can win this for you, though," Jeremy replied, floating into the massive living room, the elevator in an impossible spot in the center of the room. thud "Damn, that brain-interrupting thud is annoying. Think the twins mentioned that, too."

"Yeah, let's put a stop to it. Open," Joey told the elevator, and it did. He gasped and took a step back when he saw what was inside.

It was Jeremy, but not Jeremy. It swirled with dark energies, its teeth fangs, its presence a series of evil imaginings and nightmare terrors. "Hello, Joey," it spoke in a voice that was Jeremy's through some kind of awful, distorting filter. "Didn't you know how this would end up? I'm going to have such fun with you, for the rest of your-"

"No," Jeremy said, pimp-slapping it with a powerful backhand, breaking its jaw. It looked up with wide eyes, unable to understand who or what this interloper was. It lunged a claw through Jeremy's chest, and when that accomplished nothing it tried to lunge past him at his servant.

"I said no," Jeremy reiterated, choke-slamming it back into the elevator, its eyes bulging out cartoon-like. "No." He punched it in the face and its head exploded, ichor and gibs covering the walls of the elevator.

"Oh, geez," Joey said, embarrassed that something like that was in him to begin with. "I could have just erased that, you didn't have to bother." He did erase the corpse and the mess.

"We both know what that was. You understand why I had to be the one to kill it." Joey understood.

"So, let's see.." There was a button going to a sub-basement they never had, and Joey pressed it. The elevator wanted to become a trap just then, to form spikes and crush the occupants, but Joey didn't let that happen even with a thud striking his senses.

The door opened, and Jeremy's laughter echoed off the walls of the enormous dome, a football field high and wide. For inside this great room of steel and threat was a tiny little monster no more than two feet tall, its one puppy-dog-like eye looking plantively up at Joey who had teleported to it, its one puny, feeble tentacle making its little thud against the ground. Joey stuck his hand inside the monster's mouth, and the razor-sharp teeth did nothing but gum and drool on his fingers. "Sorry, little guy, but you can't exist," Joey told it before he tore it in half, promptly erasing the blood and ichor, leaving a foul stench and then not even that.

"Okay, that was even easier than I expected," Jeremy said, still laughing. "Was that really it?"

"Yeah, that was really it. No more thuds. Can you tell me why now?" The 'why' was the secret-keeping and the timing. Joey knew why Jeremy had chosen to do it at all; his master worried about mentally lashing out at him one day, giving an undeniable command they'd both regret. In an eternity, every possible eventuality was a certainty, and the only way to prevent it was to make it an impossibility. The concept of Joey rebelling simply didn't exist for either of them anymore.

"Oh, yeah. The reason I didn't want you to know in advance was because I didn't want you getting cocky, or getting worried, or pre-inventing some more evil shit to fight." Joey got that. It was his imagination, after all. "And the reason I decided to do it now is because of some new information.. Here, I'll just show you." Jeremy formed a projection setup and sat down on empty air, the lights dimming and reels clicking as he replayed the last question the twins had asked Montgomery.

Joey sat down and shared a bag of popcorn with him, nodding and understanding, and wincing in mock-sympathy as Montgomery died screaming. "It looks like he saw something chopping off his limbs. Wonder what that was?"

"Don't know, I'm just glad you didn't have it. Although it probably would have been.. a two-foot-tall..." He started laughing again. "The battle between your ego and your unresolved issues! We could have been hunting for dust specks."

"I'm not that perfect. But I'll get there." Self-effacing laughter. "It's over, but we're still..."

"I think the Operator's going to let us sleep."

"Then why don't I show you around?" Joey asked, forming a door that said 'Joey's Memories' and opening it wide. Jeremy, curious, followed him in.

Chapter 44

The pruning took three weeks, not one. The Dominator's household simply couldn't keep up the pace for that long, especially not when dealing with Illuminati who they've never heard of before and whose motives were unclear. It didn't matter, as the bottleneck was on the Operator's end. Making individually-tailored retroviruses for hundreds of Illuminati at once was a daunting task, requiring the psychologist to spend just as much time as the twins per person. He wouldn't be told who lived and who died, blithely giving retrovirus suggestions to people who would get nothing but an early grave.

Still, Paul couldn't remember the last time he did so much hard work at once, and reminded himself that futureless assholes or not, these were still people and he was obligated to pay full attention to each and every one of them, even if their idea of a good time was to re-enact with their servants what Damien had done to him, only with more capsaicin. Those sadists died, without exception, and Howard reminded the group that it wasn't for the welfare of the servants but rather the whole society. One particularly interesting hardcore masochist had ordered his servants to do those things and worse to himself, causing all six engineereds to scratch their heads; the verdict was that he was severely mentally broken and killing him was more a mercy than anything else. There was a woman who did those things, but far less intense and only to other Illuminati; her clientele was slightly pruned, but she'd still breathe air. Another guy, under careful investigation of call-downs, turned out to enjoy being treated like a little normal kid in private; he was competent in business, Luke just laughed at him, and he got to live. Another surviving woman had a similar fetish, and since the two didn't know each other the engineereds were half-tempted to anonymously bring them together just for the entertainment value.

But beyond sexual fetishes and similar fun stuff was a horrible undercurrent of narcissistic evil that the twins were determined to expunge before it could ruin their world. This was much more difficult to identify, even for the servants. Making things worse was the fact that self-centered authoritarianism had previously been heavily encouraged as part of the general stability of the Illuminati, and often coincided with many traits considered positive, such as Epicurean hedonism and self-determination. It was a matter of the base questions: What would this person do with unlimited manufacturing, lots of servants, and fusion power in a generally anarchic environment with a benevolent dictatorship at the helm? Was this someone they wanted on their planet at all? Would this person be a boon or a detriment to everyone else in the world, on a biologically equal footing with the younger engineereds but with advantages of seniority and experience? If no one was sure the answer was almost always 'live' if their subject seemed to know what he was doing. They were surprised when Paul gave two 'kill' suggestions in a row, the assholes who had attempted to starve normals of heating oil just because they could.

Eventually it was over. The twins, by themselves, went over the kill list once more and found no flaws; fuck it, get rid of 'em. A couple of the intended victims didn't show up for their 'retrovirus' and Sarah hunted them down like dogs. Another man had figured that there was a kill list, but incorrectly determined that he was on it; Sarah solved his fears by injecting him at gunpoint, and he'd never live that embarrassment down. The twins enjoyed two weeks of growing relaxation; as so many people were enjoying being engineered, there was a holiday from disputes and ill-will.

The holiday ended when they declared a meeting.

The twins sat on their thrones at center stage of the familiar, enormous Bavarian auditorium, Sarah in the front row with the other first levels, Paul in the back as the fifth he still was, no room for servants. They gave a deep, warm smile to their freshly retroviral audience, all loyal, all sane, all massively powerful. Here were the people to grant them utopia.

First things first. "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Illuminati!!", the Duumvirate yelled full-blast, echo and power pouring through the microphone and the speakers. They'd rehearsed their introduction on the way there, and both twins spoke as one. "We are pleased to announce that there are no more threats to our power. The rogues who conspired against their Dominator are all thoroughly, truly dead. Seeing you all as the new race of humanity gladdens our hearts." That was an understatement. "Look around yourselves, see your fellow Illuminati next to you, know that our organization has been successful. For today is the day we have all been waiting for, and before we announce anything further we want you to see your fellows as you never have before. Sit in the present for the moment, and know that you are going to the future with them. And if you have anything to say to us, now would be the time." There were a few calls of 'Thank you, Dominator!' a brief, heartening chant of 'Dom-i-nus! Dom-i-nus!' and a loose 'It's about time!' followed by laughter.

Gates looked behind him. Something was wrong, it was clear something was wrong, and they hadn't all been so immersed in their newfound power not to notice. "Where's the rest of them?" he asked loudly, suspecting the answer as he hadn't heard from some of his business partners the day before, their mainframe access cut off just as they started to realize they were deathly sick. One had communicated by other means; he had assumed the man was a loose rogue and didn't reply. At least his kids were safe, even if he felt they should be up there with him in front, not sitting in the back with the rest of the fourths and fifths.

The twins examined their cellphones. "All Illuminati are here today," Howard replied. It sunk in. Fists clenched. Jaws dropped. Faint, agitated conversation came from the back. Heads turned wildly around, looking for people, hoping their friends were there and their enemies weren't. Many expressions of relief were seen and heard. Gates stiffened up- he knew it, he knew the Dominator probably hated the people he did business with, and he didn't like them very much either but he could use them. Now what the hell would he do?

He stared at them, almost accusing, fear mixing with disbelief. "How the hell did you do it?" he grated out, the old geek turned badass, no glasses now, his eyes piercing, his wide smile turned into a foul grimace.

"You know when we said that all Illuminati will get the retrovirus? We lied," William told him casually, away from the microphone and not nearly loud enough for most of the room to hear. Many engineered ears picked it up, though, and it was repeated back in moments, astonishment and paranoia growing. A couple dozen laughed or grinned in vindication; they predicted this was going to happen when the Dominator announced the new retrovirus policy.

"They got something," another first level said- shit, who was that? Either he just now seized first level.. no, he simply didn't look anything like he used to.

"Yes. They got something," Howard said away from the microphone with the heavy implication that it was what they deserved, and said no more. Some of these new retrovirals had already figured it out, but mentioning it out loud here would kill the mood.

Another woman stood up, and Howard recognized her from a decade ago, despite her apparently dropping fifty years of age and her fat transmuting to muscle. Rebecca Adams, first level Illuminatus, manipulator of souls, her mother a Holocaust survivor. Now she would help oversee another one, a final solution for final solutions. "How do we..," she began, but then stopped short. "Oh. I understand. We don't have to worry if we all really have it," she finished, sitting down. (She'd planned to say every word of that once she realized what had been done.) How did they know that the purge was over with, that they really had been judged worthy and they had nothing to fear? Because there was no way the twins could or would kill more than five thousand retrovirals, many of them with engineered children.

"I know damn well I got the real deal," a second level said, standing up and spreading his arms wide until he was generally recognized. He had taken a goodly number of extras: retractable claws, electroplaques, quadbracchalism (his lowers still ended in stumps at the elbow; it'd be a few days), a powerful, still-growing prehensile tail which flexed irritably behind him. The twins tried to recognize him and failed; he'd changed absolutely everything about himself. "Why, Dominator?!", he yelled, his newfound echo providing a boost. "Why now?! Why all at once, do you think we can just take what they had without a problem, do you plan to hand it out.. or is it something else?" Chatter, some of it harsh, some of it jubilant, some of it smug with foreknowledge, some of it absolutely amazed, rippled up and down the seats. They weren't about to- could they really- was it the right time for-

"Because," the twins began together, their smiles growing larger, each one raising a bladed fist to the air in final triumph, and the auditorium grew deathly quiet. The Operator and the engineereds had finished all of their preparations. Now it was time to bring all of the Illuminati in, to do what must be done to erase the old world and bring in the new.

Normals, we bid you farewell.

"We declare the End of Secrecy!!"