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.