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.