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.