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.