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.