Sending an anonymous message to an Illuminatus not prepared for it can be surprisingly difficult, even for another Illuminatus; the standard communications system simply doesn't support it due to the bullshit potential. For someone like Paul, with a great many normal-world servants, it's simple: just leave one of them a message and he'll give it to his master. To send one to someone as thoroughly ivory tower-ensconced as the Operator, they'd want to find someone who wouldn't give the message to anyone else. This meant Enforcers. Dropping it off somewhere in Northberg without being seen was difficult, especially after the latest attack, but still technically doable.

To send one to the Dominator requires a bit of creativity.

The tiny bottle-shaped vessel, powered by its little battery and coming in slow with its little propeller, constantly emitted "Please read me" in Morse code on a frequency seldom used by normals. The Dominator's hidden servants picked up on it when it was ten miles away, and chose to come to it instead of letting it reach the island. Wearing protective clothing, they dutifully disassembled the little device, cataloging and attempting to identify every part in its manufacture, analyzing the battery, the metal, and even the ink used on the tiny scrap of paper that served as its payload. They then sent the entire mass of data to their Dominator in one quick mid-priority message.

All the bottle had to say, in Enforcer handwriting, was "If you want to know why the implants worked in an unexpected way, why not ask the one who made them?"

The twins looked at each other, considering. Certain elements of the bottle's manufacture suggested it was made by a rogue. Which meant either that the twins were being suckered into something, or someone in the rogues really was giving them up. But it didn't match their experiences of the person in question. They knew Stark, and Jeremy knew Stark, and they'd talked about him before. Sure, they didn't have absolute proof that he wasn't, which is why he wasn't retroviral, but for someone like him... Fuck it. If it wasn't a trap, then they wasted time, of which they had plenty. If it was a trap, then he really was a rogue and the battle was on. Sarah had borrowed Paul's servant and taken her own to some ugly mission in Chechenya, and they'd be back in a few hours.

A lot could happen in a few hours. The message didn't speak of urgency, but this was instant priority, and who they were invading could probably detect Enforcer duplicates in seconds. They left a message for Sarah, Paul eagerly came with them, and in twenty seconds the three of them were blasting into the sky.

Fortunately, Wilt 'Stark' Columbus lived close by. A rural county in Northern California proved a good place to build and dig. On the outside, his home was an opulent mansion, with horse stables, a small private forest, and an airfield on the property; inside, it featured a deep basement where he did his research, the vast majority of it surprisingly fruitless. He followed every single plausible line of inquiry to its end, and since his line of work was the human brain, he couldn't simulate his experiments.

He was also clearly not expecting visitors, particularly not the Duumvirate. Sheer terror came across his face when the twins approached his door; he opened it wide and practically begged them to enter, as if desperate to show that he had nothing to hide. He was also not expecting them to give him a Northberg-style instant MRI, to check his own brain for implants or strange structures. He almost asked what they were looking for but plain fear kept him silent, as they descended past his basement into the bowels of his research center. Paul didn't like this place at all. Although none of them were visible without opening sealed doors at the deepest level, in a special ward past the offices and laboratories, most of Stark's experiments were human beings. This was the asylum that no one officially entered, and no one ever left.

Fortunately for Stark, he wasn't the one to be interrogated; his chief servant, Montgomery, would be quizzed instead. They chose to use the same technique they had earlier, but for this situation they reset the servant's implants. For the briefest instant, Montgomery looked shocked- but then he sighed in resignation. He sat at his office chair and did not flinch as the implant-resetter opened his forehead, the twins standing directly between him and the mirror on the far side of the room. He looked like he was waiting for something.

"Tell us of Stark's involvement with the people trying to usurp us," Howard commanded, by rote.

There was a smile on Montgomery's face. He had apparently been considering his answer to this question for a very long time, and said his reply with a maximum of pride. "He's their leader's master." The twins blinked and recoiled. What the fuck? "Oh, that stupid old bastard had nothing to do with it. I'm the one you're looking for." He then smiled wider, schadenfreude at himself.

The twins looked at each other, and back at Montgomery. He was the implants' inventor, after all; could he have found a prevention system for them?

"Punch yourself in the face, very hard," William ordered him. Montgomery's fist moved slowly as 'face' was said, did not change at 'very', and there was an additional push at 'hard' that slammed it directly into his cheek. The servant hissed, holding his bruised cheek, not used to pain. The twins looked at each other again.

"You don't believe me," Montgomery said, chuckling and wincing. He leaned back in the chair until it touched the wall. "The one true human genius left on this planet, and you're thinking 'Who is controlling him? How can this be?'"

"You're very calm for someone in your position," Howard noted. He himself was not calm. His mind was roiling with questions, none of which had happy answers. Foremost among them was how the fucking hell Stark could have let this happen. What, did he just not know what his servants did in their spare time, of which this one obviously had plenty?

"If you knew what I knew, you'd never get emotional again," Montgomery said, shrugging.

"We get enough nihilism from our friends' servants," William informed him. "Smugness is an emotion. You're smug because you get to play the role you've been daydreaming about since.. when?"

His smugness cracked like an egg, his voice shaking with hatred. "Since you were unimplanted. Before that, the role would have been that of your master." The twins looked at each other- he's unhinged- and contemplated the disturbing concept of this lunatic actually becoming their de facto master. "There is a certain RF signal that, if used with enough power, will make a certain circuit in some older implants jump, causing a reset." (Stark caught it some years ago when some issues with magnetic fields were discovered, thinking it a minor defect instead of part of any plan. The fact that Stark ordered him to quietly fix it instead of using it for his own advantage was just another signal to Montgomery that Stark wasn't cut out for this.) This answered a great many questions at once. They noticed he was being very free with information that important, which disturbed them even more. Here was the Black Wizard, and no wonder he called himself that. The twins had found their foe and suddenly, unexpectedly, won, in much the same way a novice chess player discovers he had not checked the king but checkmated. Was this, in fact, checkmate, or was there yet someone else behind him? In this organization there could be secret leaders piled to the sky.

"And what do you know, that presumably obviates emotion?" Howard asked, contempt filtering through his voice.

"That free will is a lie," he said, letting it hang in the air for a half second. "There is a determiner in everyone's mind; the self, the 'I', which the implants circumvent. What we consciously 'choose' to do is affected by this. Everything else in our brains is set by hard and fast rules of electrical stimulation. Every 'choice' you make is simply a matter of which set of train tracks the pulses take. You- Illuminati- know what a false dichotomy is. You know how people are controlled. But yet you insist that all the laws don't apply to you. This goes for everyone from the most ignorant normal clear up to you, Duumvirate." He couldn't say the word without expressing hate. "All sentient beings are this way. And there is no way to tell if it is a choice at all, or it is truly random and we simply rationalize everything afterwards."

William facepalmed, his forefinger atop his forehead and his after-pinky around his cheek. They knew their enemy had to be completely full of shit or he wouldn't be an enemy, but...

"No concept of self-programming, nor even of intentionally learned reactions or, really, of self-awareness. I'm ashamed you managed to elude us for so long," Howard said.

"No concept of logic. If you can switch tracks several times a second, you can go wherever you want," William added. How could this guy understand so much about the brain and so little about the mind? "And if you succeeded in taking over the world, what would you have done with it?"

"Imposed law. Real law, not this mishmash we have now. Society's rules for human minds, not whatever idiot happens to come up with whatever tickles their fancy. No more of this damned corruption. Needs, not wants. For years I'd hoped that you'd do this all on your own without help from me, that being created would make you lawful. He made you paragons of Chaos instead," he said with contempt, and spat. Howard blocked the spit with his palm and wiped it off on Montgomery's face.

"I swear to fuck, if you've been taking your morals from a D&D alignment table, I'm going to fucking acquire Gary Gygax and make him kick your ass," WIlliam said.

"You're pathetic," Howard pronounced. "You talk to us of corruption and yet you used and promised things to the most corrupt, simply because their vision of power matched yours. You talk of law and you've betrayed everyone, particularly your master."

"You're not even unique. This whole time we thought that there would be some lord of an alternate mentality behind this, some sort of concentrated evil as an appropriate overlord of the lesser evils. You being a power-grabber like everyone else is comforting, especially since you're not very smart. You could have done quite a number of things. You could have even implanted Stark if you would have had the balls. In fact, if you were really a leader you could have taken over entire facilities." ('If he had done that during that attack on Northberg...') "Maybe even staged a real fucking coup. It wouldn't have worked against us, but it'd be a lot better than this shit," William said, with contempt. "You had resettable implants in all of us for two whole years. Why did you never do it?"

"We did!" he abruptly shouted. "I'm sure you remember Damien Gladstone, the little shit. His job was to get to you and reset your implants, all three of you at once if he could, or just Howard if he couldn't. He chose to do just Howard, the little coward, his fucking real self didn't tell the new one to just do it. But then he was supposed to make it home before calling you back up and giving you commands." The twins raised their eyebrows in wordless inquiry. "Because of your speed! Because of your godforsaken speed. After that nonsense with those ten Enforcers everyone was afraid of you, that you could interrupt him. And after you killed him, we thought that all was lost, and it was only because of his father's wisdom that we learned what we did." The twins chuckled. Damien's father's wisdom had earned him and his women a hole in their heads. "Oh, and I bet you want to know something else, why the Night Operator's neuroclone suicided. The Night Operator gave him criteria to commit suicide, and one of them was if you killed somebody else there." Montgomery bit down his teeth and immediately started to look to the side, as if to spit; William grabbed his head and turned it back towards him, holding his jaw shut for a moment before releasing. "So even though that son of a bitch's clone knew you still had no idea, he still had to kill himself. Stupid bastard never understood commands."

"Even after that, you still had almost two years. Why didn't someone else?" William asked, reviewing the events of nearly a decade ago, amazed that he had achieved such ends without knowing. If he hadn't done what he did to Damien- tricking him into letting Paul blow his brains out- he would have ended up in a situation he didn't even want to think about.

"Cowardice!" Montgomery blurted out, the question striking his emotions, the spittle flying out of his mouth for the twins to dodge. "Cowardice, weakness, fear, paranoia, and stupidity. There were so many times when we could've. Remember Michael Stevenson?" He had been the one to nearly kill the implanted William with a robotic double's command. "We were going to give him a transmitter, have him take you right there. But no, he said! He pussied out, was afraid of what would happen if you weren't taken, he just had to cover his own ass. Kill one, he said, worry about the other later. So I told them to go ahead with that plan, putting someone at that little engineered party to take you. But no! They wouldn't do it- after Michael already got started! They didn't trust the one I chose to be there to be the imprint. And some of them said, 'Oh, no, it's full of engineereds, we can't do it there.' And they kept saying these things, no matter what the situation. Even though it wasn't their own lives at stake! Even though they were at a remove, they had to protect their precious God damned assets instead of just fulfilling the plan!" His eyes rolled up with pure rage. "Some of them even believed it didn't work and they were being set up! Hesitation, unimaginably stupid lack of trust- and that was before you unimplanted yourselves. All this for something anyone could have done with a device no larger than a man's little finger." Paul gritted his teeth. Why the fuck hadn't they found it on Damien, then? Likely because it was disguised as something else or inside his shoe or something, and the agents weren't looking for anything before they disposed of his corpse. He sure as hell never knew about this. Although now he knew why Damien had made videos of certain things: so his original self could enjoy them.

"Speaking of which, where is it?" Howard asked.

Montgomery wanted to say 'Where's what?' He wanted to pretend he had no idea what they were talking about. And yet, the implants- the things he had invented way back in 1985- made him say, "In my back pocket," and the blood drained from his face.

"Give it to me." Montgomery placed it in Howard's hand.

Howard one-hand clapped, summoning the nails, and pinched the tiny device between his thumb and forefinger, activating it and resetting the implants again while both of them got in his face, making sure that Montgomery was implanted for them. "Now if only you could get a good look at the mirror.. before I did this." One more pinch with the nails, and gone was Montgomery's hope.

"Was that the only one?" William asked. Montgomery answered in the affirmative, downcast.

Howard chose the most economical phrasing: "Do you have other contingency plans to make us lose?" Montgomery shook his head, groaning, sobbing now. How could he? He'd run out of plans years ago. All the real plans were done by others now. "Good! Now do you know what time it is? It's interrogation time!" They pushed him out of the room first, walking out, turning a few corners, and meeting an anxious Stark, who was having a pointed, if not very lively, conversation with Paul.

"Hey Stark, want to guess who's been running the rogues?" William asked. From the way he gestured it was clear. "You really should watch your servants better." Stark stared at him. That was a joke, right?

"Stark, turn around," Howard ordered him. When, befuddled, he failed to comply within two seconds, the twins said "Turn around, Stark." and he did. Was this to be his end? "And unless you want to lose them, order your Enforcers not to interfere with us," William added, and he did, too shocked to think.

Howard's original idea was to put his foot up Stark's ass. However, his brother joined in simultaneously, and the feet went sole-to-sole about nine inches into his rectum, tearing open his pants, nearly breaking his pelvis, and violating him from puckered-tight to Goatse in milliseconds. Stark fell over and screamed like a girl, clutching his torn sphincter, his knees to his chest, blood with shit chunks pooling from his anus. They wiped their feet on his back.

Montgomery's mood brightened- despite what was about to happen to him, he'd been meaning to do that for some time. He also had great schadenfreude visualizing his chickenshit comrades getting the same treatment.

The twins chose to interrogate him in the safety of the jet, Paul flying them home. They hadn't done a full implant-inquisition themselves since Osama, and they went through the process with particular attention to detail. First you ask for a name. Then you ask for the details of that person, what his relationship is to you and to each other person, who and what else he knows, and everything else you can find out. Then, and only then, do you ask for the next name and repeat the process. Doing this will give you an visualizable, concrete idea of who presumably knows what, and what real loyalties presumably are. Asking enough members of the organization will give you something closer to reality, but as leaders go, Montgomery was remarkably well-informed about the intentions, beliefs, and ideals of his Illuminated subordinates; he didn't store communications at all, preferring to keep everything important in his own head where he thought it was safe.

As it turned out, Sarah was halfway right. Almost all of the enemies had some personal hatred. There were a couple of oldschool mavericks like Brenk who were in it for simple power; it was almost a shame to have to kill them, as such categorical ruthlessness stirred feelings of sympathy in the twins. But the majority of the twenty remaining enemies had untold amounts of hatred; hatred for the twins' ideas, hatred for all engineereds and even the concept of engineering Illuminati, spitting out the word Duumvirate as a blasphemy.

And that was okay. The Duumvirate hated them, too.

Sarah was wrong about the idea of 'new' rogues. The only ones who were in on it were the originals who had been there in 1988 when the Dominator was born and implanted, except for Damien who was very young at the time. Gritzl was one of the very first, his powerlust driving him to conspire against the Dominator almost as soon as he was recruited. Later additions would have had nothing to offer the organization, and after the twins had unimplanted themselves the rogues didn't trust anyone to recruit, figuring that they'd be infiltrated if they did. The twins' policy of checking every new Illuminatus turned out to be meaningless for detection.

Some other discoveries were unsurprising in retrospect, such as the fact that Osama had been implanted by a rogue; the twins realized that they had fucked up with Mohammed, and should have went for the private implantation-vaporization routine instead of executing him in public. The business with 'Bob' and the cellphone ended up with Jacob Glenn (his real name) getting ostracized over suspicions and long-term internecine grudges, almost killed, and Paul laughed about that. Three of the five rogues who had masterminded the failed assault on Northberg, taking so many years and so much time to get closely-watched uranium from normal sources without being discovered by other Illuminati, had gone into a deep depression when their last desperate plan came to ruin. One had killed himself just after ordering his public clone to continue behaving as if he was not a rogue. The other two had become "worthless" in Montgomery's eyes and were in their secret base doing not much more than taking up space.

What was also unsurprising was the number of rogues who had simply bailed out in 2000. There were 49 when the twins unimplanted themselves (Brutus was not counted, killed by the Anarch just before); upon their triumpant return about a third had evanesced, dropping the number to 35. Upon the creation of the retrovirus five more had walked out immediately- and, according to Montgomery, surprised that the others didn't leave as well. Not only membership but participation had dwindled, a few of the rogues almost dropping out while still retaining nominal membership, the others unable to compel them to keep participating without the whole thing being exposed. Fear and disillusionment had done most of their work for them; actual killing of their foes (or their foes' public clones) had played only a minor part. What's more, the best of them- most of the ones in it for the power and not for hatred- had been the ones to go. The twins noted that it was rather like squeezing a cult to death; the mostly-sane ones leave first. And like most cults, the mostly-sane ones weren't the ones at the top, and now the leadership had almost no one left to lead.

This also posed a unique problem; should the twins go after ex-members? The answer was "If so, let's do it later." Nineteen generally-unorganized Illuminati who no longer posed a direct threat weren't something to worry about. Similarly, they felt almost as if they should thank Dr. Kravinger, the nuclear physicist who had decided to abandon the rogues and cast his lot with the rest of his consortium. If he hadn't bailed when he did, the railgun in the wall (which actually was a rogue-generated plot and not some maverick) would probably not have been a railgun, the Northberg plot happening years early, the twins ending up as fine bits of radioactive dust.

The rogues' private clones were well-hidden indeed. They had chosen a boulder in a crater on the side of the Moon facing away from the Earth, sneaking themselves up one at a time in carefully mislabeled rockets, constructing a small nuclear reactor to serve their power needs. Which crater it was, Montgomery intentionally didn't know. He waxed on at some length about the arguments that were had: many of the rogues wanted to use the fuel to try an earlier nuclear strike instead of what they eventually did do. He also waxed on at length about how badly they needed to copy microfusion and were never quite able to do it. That agreement between the twins and the Consortium had been very smart indeed.

But what surprised the twins most was the creator of the Anarch. The previous Night Operator had used an exceptionally elaborate plan nearly two years after choosing to fake his own death, creating a sentient Enforcer to be presented as a gift, and tricking another Illuminatus (whose name Montgomery didn't know) into giving him the resources to create it. The other Illuminatus, however, thought he had the upper hand by making sure that the sentient was created Dominator-loyal; the Night Operator chose to pretend to accept this but had the Enforcer transported to him instead, using normal transportation due to intense paranoia. Said normal transportation ended up falling over a cliff, and the why of that was unknown to Montgomery. From what Montgomery gathered, the helping Illuminatus utterly wigged out and covered his tracks the moment he had heard about the raid on the Dominator, correctly surmising that he might be implicated otherwise. Montgomery judged it to be one of the most fucked-up operations he'd ever heard of. On this, he and the twins found common ground.

"Oh, fuck me senseless," William said after some thought. "We should have figured this out earlier."

"Oh?"

"Remember Barnum?" Howard thought for a half second. Barnum, what did Barnum do? Barnum with the special electronic override...

"It's the exact same shit!" he exploded. "So unless two guys had the same idea, Stark.. or somebody, knew it was theoretically possible. Probably a servant. And we never knew where Barnum came up with that. The tiny piece of information we needed, and it was lost in the fucking cracks for years. Fuck, Billy!"

"Care to implant them all for the real answers?"

"Now that we've actually stopped the rogues, it's not worth it... fuck, it's so nice to say that. C'mon, let's chant this. We've stopped the fucking rogues." Once the twins could reasonably assume that no one else was immediately plotting to kill them, the retrovirus would be disbursed, fusion restrictions could possibly loosen, and a great many Illuminati would find themselves in a better position to make more grandiose plans.. probably stepping on each other's toes and pissing the twins off afresh. But that was how things worked, and it sure as hell beat the current situation.

"Aren't you counting your chickens before they're actually hatched?"

"As if they're really going to survive our plans. We've stopped the fucking rogues."

"We've stopped the fucking rogues," his brother agreed. "We've stopped the fucking rogues!" they chanted together, realizing how silly it was, Paul joining in. "We've stopped the fucking rogues! We've stopped the fucking rogues!" Montgomery attempted to melt his own brain with the depths of his rage and indignation.

"These fucking rogues, anyway," William added after a bit.

"Agh, I know there's a good chance of that, but did you have to bring it up? Aren't I the one who usually does that?"

"But that's why I did. Because it's your turn to be the relieved one, and you need it, so I'm the killjoy. One of us has to do it. Or Paul?"

"No no no," Paul replied. "Leave me out of this one. I don't want to stomp on any of you guys' fun. The railgun twit was probably just some lone nutjob. Let's celebrate for right now, and just find and kill him as an afterthought. Sound good?"

"Yeah," William agreed. "I've love to just hand this to Sarah.. but we shouldn't just leave her to it without help."

"No. We really shouldn't. Come on, let's call her up and make some plans," Howard said, and did just that. "Sarah, we know who the rogues are, and we have their leader. Any ideas come to mind?" Paul couldn't help but chuckle. What a way to announce it. But this was Sarah and she might just pull something out immediately.

The question took her utterly by surprise before she could think it through. "Come to mind? With unknown-location duplicates who might break secrecy in revenge? Nothing comes to mind." Of course she'd spent time pondering it, but wasn't expecting to actually acquire their leader...

"Not unknown anymore. They're on the dark side of the Moon," William said. A pause of a half second. "Literally. Worry about those later, they're already isolated. Go for the public clones first." She nodded in agreement, her thoughts catching up to the Dominator's words. The rogues' public clones would surely be watching anything going away from the Earth and might have ways of sending warnings.

Her brain churned, discounting what she didn't need to concern herself with anymore- the rogues were identified, the rest of the Illuminati could generally be considered a non-threat now (inasmuch as they ever could) and part of the support structure, she still couldn't know what Montgomery didn't or whether or not they really would break secrecy... "I suppose you don't have a plan of your own?"

"Not at the moment. By definition this is your department. Where do you want us?" Oh boy. They were relying on her again. They'd reached their second decade of life, weren't they getting a little old for this? But it was, after all, still her department and would always be.

"I could do simultaneous raids, split us up, use teams of.." She stopped, shaking her head. That plan had way too many contingencies, and she really didn't feel like sending however-many engineereds into the domain of however-many rogues of questionable sanity who were likely to act like cornered animals. Gritzl was quite enough. "They have no idea you took their leader?" she asked, looking past Howard's shoulder at Montgomery.

"None at all," Howard replied, grinning.

Okay, this was very similar to one of the best scenarios she had thought of, she'd actually sat down and daydream-planned this out at one point before she decided it was futile.. what was her best idea? Oh, yes- that one. Straightforward, with basic psychology and sound use of overwhelming force in a controlled area. "I'm going to pull a lot of operatives for this and I'll want some trustworthy Levels." The phrase still felt like a contraction in terms. "You know that formal occasion you wanted me to get dressed up for? Looks like you're getting your wish. Can you get their public selves in one place?"

"If I couldn't command Illuminati, who would I be?" William asked rhetorically. "We have their leader although we probably shouldn't use him except as a counter. I'm thinking 24 hours. Local midnight in Bavaria. Makes it look urgent, but not hasty."

"Another mass meeting?" Howard asked. "That takes me back."

"I don't think we want to. All six thousand, some of which are engineereds and some of which might get the wrong idea when the butchery starts? We could try to move them into another room while we're there, but, c'mon, Howie- I think we can do better."

"We can. But they'll ask their friends. So we'll have to..." About fifteen minutes carefully revising minutiae with Montgomery's unwilling help and a few pointed questions by Paul produced the final result.

The rogues got this:

There is a meeting being held on September 20, 12:00 AM, Bavarian local time, at GHQ. Every Illuminatus is expected to attend. You may ask anyone you like if they are coming to the meeting. If they fail to acknowledge that they are coming to the meeting, or if they say that they are but suggest they are not, you must report them, immediately, as a traitor.

Everyone else got this:

This is a test of loyalty and competence. There is a meeting being held on September 20, 12:00 AM, Bavarian local time, at GHQ. You must act as if you are coming to the meeting and give no hints that you are not. You may ask anyone you like if they are coming to the meeting. If they fail to acknowledge that they are coming to the meeting, or if they say that they are but suggest they are not, you must report them, immediately, as a traitor. If anyone asks you what message you have received, you must report the following: (A copypaste of the previous message.) Any other Illuminatus who reports seeing any other message is a traitor and you must report them as such. Under no circumstances are you to actually come to the meeting! Whatever your reaction to this message, do not respond to it.

It would be interesting, to say the least, to see who reported whom. It was actually better than getting just the original traitors; anyone in close contact with them could also be rounded up to be disposed of at leisure, and it really did function as a test of loyalty and competence. Stupid, but tolerably so, people would likely tell their inner circle the truth, but those weren't likely to be real enemies. Anyone actually calling people would be immediately suspected, either as "you're trying to get me in trouble" or "this guy must be the Dominator's target". There was the chance that someone would try to fake evidence showing that someone else called them with it. Smart people would tell no one, call no one, and assume that their friends were smart enough to do the same. The engineereds would likely call each other with both the truth and bullshit, just for kicks, until they broke out laughing. They wouldn't be alone; the twins had given the do-not-reply order specifically for the inevitable amused responses. And if anyone was conceivably stupid enough to come to the meeting uninvited... there couldn't be anyone left who was that dumb, could there? Paul promised to grow a Charles Darwin beard for a while if there was.

"And now for the hard part," Howard said. "How are we going to prevent them from noticing nobody else came?" William pursed his pale lips. Paul gritted his teeth. They spent much longer going over scenarios. They had to expect that their enemies would at least suspect a trap. Best case, some would come early and some right on time, and the later ones would be in constant contact with the former. Worst case, they'd send a point man with memorized countersigns, ostensibly on some business or other there, hours in advance. If the crowd- and six thousand was a crowd- didn't start filing in, he'd get very nervous very quickly. That struck a lot of plans: kill them in the parking-garage hangar, kill them as they came in, kill them via satellite as they started taking off.

"Big group just isn't going to work," Paul said. "We need to break them up."

"Mini-meetings," William said. "You should have said that before we came up with this."

"No, because we need this. The big meeting is to say what can be said publicly." The twins began smiling at him, recognizing the stroke of genius at work. "Because there's a limited timeframe between now and then, and there might be a lot of questions, we have to put them into small classes to brief them on something really important that others might not get to know, because we trust these guys." The smiles grew larger. "And because of that careful timeframe, secrecy, whatever, we can't have it like it usually is with guys coming in whenever they want."

"Not all in the same group," Howard said.

"Oh, hell no. But close. Some guys start at 7:15, some guys start at 8:00. And we make it actually interesting and only say kill when they get there. So all we have to fake is maybe a small crowd of guys who don't want to say what they're doing, and 45 minutes or so of plausible bullshit."

The servants had come to Sarah halfway through and they had all been listening, watching the plan weave itself together. "Strange. You're different when you're amped up. I can't think like that," she said. "You guys start out with one thing and then somehow it evolves to a whole different phylum."

"It's an iterative process," Paul said.

"Yeah. Tell me about it. At least you guys don't ask me to un-kill people." 'No, wait, assassins, we didn't really want him... err.. never mind.' "But I want to think one up my way. If they really don't know then we have all the time in the world." And if they did know, any plans were pretty much fucked. Which is what they were all expecting, really. "While you're on the way, you guys can use your boundless creativity and we can use our boundless cynicism," Laughter from Luke. "and we can compare notes." Click.

"More than eight straight years of this, and she doesn't even blink when it's finally over," Paul said.

William smiled at him. "About a decade and you just figured out how different she really is?"

"Or maybe she's expecting more from somewhere else," Paul replied.

"She's not, and even if there are, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. This is it, Paul. These fuckers are dead," Howard said with finality.

"We know who they are, and we know how to kill them. It's going to be easy," William casually agreed.

"NO!" Paul suddenly blurted out. "Don't say that! Don't ever fucking say that! Damn it!"

"Everything will go according to plan. There are no unknown unknowns. Nothing can go wrong," Howard said with a grin. Paul made a strangled -Ghhrlrrrkk- sound deep in his throat. Sure, there wasn't any such things as bad juju or tempting fate, not really, but for fuck's sake Howard...

"They're just words, Paul," William reminded him, chuckling.

"Yeah! Words that signify thoughts that result in mistakes!"

Howard hugged him gently. "After this much time, after this much frustration, after this much hate from other Illuminati and retrovirus politics and all the other shit we didn't need and the fact that they fucking put implants in my fucking head, do you really, seriously believe that we're going to fuck this up?"

Montgomery, nearly forgotten, raged silently. All that effort, all those years, all that work, and all he got was being on the wrong end of his own implants to a practically certain doom, watching people he hated with all his might celebrate their victory. Almost two and a half decades after the fact, he realized that he should have never invented the damn things in the first place, that he should have lied to Stark and said it was utterly impossible.

The twins returned home to smiles, affirmation that their plan was probably the best of some good alternatives, a solid amount of basic work setting things up, and an intense feeling of relief. They tossed Montgomery in the isolation room and went to sleep early, as they had a great amount of ass to kick in the morrow.


They woke up very early in the morning to find a new servant accompanied by the crew sent to take him. Gary Gygax turned out to have metastasizing cancer at the time, so his acquisition was trivial; a quick body replacement, a retrovirus, implants, and an ass kicking later, there was a reported death in the news, a lot of sad D&D players, and a promise William made good on.

Paul just had to ask. Without any mention of omnicide, the twins and Sarah were, in fact, Lawful Neutral, Sarah's servant was Lawful Evil, his servant was considered NE instead of the CE he was expecting, and after a brief description of his ideals and exploits, Paul himself was considered, amazingly enough, Lawful Good. By the standards of people who went around slaughtering things for personal gain, anyway. A great number of Illuminati including one of the rogues wanted him, and the twins agreed to grant the new retroviral to one of the retroviral Consortium members, an experienced Oriental Adventures fan who wanted him both as a GM and to give him a taste of his own medicine.

They checked their messages and were pleased and mildly surprised to find no reports of any kind. Perhaps everyone had finally gotten the hint, but that was doubtful and too much to ask. The only message they found of particular interest was that Daniel Westham was going to send them some help in the form of fitted spacesuits that he'd been working on for a while.

Then they were gone, flying high and fast to the Bavarian headquarters, asking several dozen questions along the way and on-site. Everything was in place, and everyone in the local general-servant management expressed an encompassing feeling of It's finally fucking over. Please let this be the end of it. The endless paranoia and mistrust of the past near-decade had aggravated Illuminati who inevitably took it out on them. They welcomed the day when the people they were ostensibly serving would just stop being assholes about everything from meeting rooms to aircraft parking, particularly since the servants were retrovirals and thus smarter than their clientele.

A handful of rogues and a number of actors showed up roughly at the same time for the first seminar. Most of the actors were actual Illuminati, most of those retroviral and a few not, with some additional servants pretending. Some of the participants didn't know which were rogues and which were other actors, but that was part of the point; they were there simply to flesh things out.

The twins watched the rogues' body language whenever they could, expecting something to go very wrong in a hurry despite their earlier bravado. The rogues were all well-disciplined enough not to give anything away, all of them acting like nothing was wrong even in close proximity to the Duumvirate, to the point that the twins started to wonder if Montgomery hadn't tricked them somehow. The twins' enemies did not even crack a smile when told that they were so highly unlikely to be rogues that they were trusted enough for this secret knowledge: a true invisibility system, capable of moving photons in such a way to leave no visible trace. The 'technical' discussion was at the end of the seminar, the rogues with no scientific background at all being the only ones there long enough to hear any of it, as it was the Illuminati version of Troll Physics. Before then, they'd be bamboozled by a carefully-designed presentation, multiple very experienced Illuminati and their even more experienced servants having developed every bit of it. (The fact that they were promised a retrovirus in return for their absolute cooperation motivated them a great deal.)

The fact that the audience was so far from the speaker should have given it away. Had any of them been close enough, or the room been darker, they would have noticed it was a variant of the standard monitor-false-image business used in vehicles, which used glare and tinting to mask the lack of depth. Combined with some very careful angles and fast movements, the illusion was nearly perfect; in a sense the system really did provide invisibility, just not a type effective in the real world. By the time the floating-head Enforcer showed up ostensibly wearing a full-body suit of the stuff, the rogues were all enraptured, both by the idea of real invisibility and the idea that the Duumvirate was dumb enough to trust them.

Of course, it actually was a floating head. Extremely thin strings (seen by most of the engineereds, who were far too disciplined to even snicker) held it up as it moved with the cadence of a walking Enforcer.

'Magic tricks. Normal kid stuff,' Sarah thought with utter disdain as her presentation began and she followed the script. 'Years upon years of searching for them and now we're fooling them with magic tricks.' Sarah thought she understood at least the basics of powerful-stupid by now, but every time she saw it she was appalled afresh. How could men with such power be so utterly gullible? And this was how they were going to spend the last hour of their lives. Believing nonsense in a room full of people who wanted to kill them, following along blindly like idiots, occasionally staring at unobtainable tits and legs. Like sheeple.

The Enforcer at the back of the room gave a hand movement- everyone who was in the rogues was in the building, so if any shit went down it was an option to begin slaughter and chase down the remainder. The plan had gone off without a hitch. Easy, almost too easy. Sarah played it out to the end, letting the bullshit flow for a few more minutes before the Enforcer gave the last signal and the game ended.

"To go further in the applications, it can be made in large sizes as well. Jets with contrails are out, but given a quiet propeller plane you can adequately be dead," she finished, instantly whipping out her trusty dual pistols and scoring messy headshots, having planned every twitch well in advance. Yup, these were definitely rogues all right; there was a bit of plastic visible in one of their brain stems, everything above that having been turned to pink mush.

One of the heads went splat before she put a bullet into it. A teenager sat grinning, his elbow covered in blood, brains, and a few small bone fragments where he had sent it into the skull of the rogue next to him. He wanted in on the action, period, and whose kill it rightfully was didn't concern him.

"I guess you recognized him?"

"Never saw him before. Saw you target him," he answered.

"Good call." She flipped open her phone. "They're dead here. Status?"

"Dead," Ruby replied, and there was the crackling of burning flesh in the background. "Dead," Paul said. "Tortured," the Duumvirate replied, and Sarah heard the beginnings of a scream before they clicked off. The guy's suicide implants would kick in, surely, but the twins were going to find out when, just for revenge and kicks.

Hers wasn't the only active phone; every Illuminatus in the room had one out, glaring at each other, overhearing each other's conversations, and more than a few zipping out of the room to avoid being overheard, resources being of a higher priority than washing someone else's brains off their clothes and hair. The Duumvirate had done this intentionally; a nice fun grab-bag free-for-all on the resources left behind, open only to the participants; the masses of calls they'd get later were worth it. Sarah had her own phone ring several times due to the requests on the assassins' organization to take the old servants or other ronin, and had one face-to-face conversation with the implanted-Illuminatus who had asked for a takedown, granting it easily (pssh, couple of ten-year-olds for that) but reminding him that he could probably have done it himself with his new powers.

The news traveled at the speed of light, the rest of the Levels wanted their retrovirus now, and the twins had to set a pre-connection message of "No, not yet" due to heavy amounts of spam, dozens of individual Illuminati thinking that they were important enough to merit asking the question and receiving a positive answer. Rogues or no rogues, some things never changed.

But before they would give their power base what it wanted and needed, they were determined to wipe out the enemy organization completely, and that was a different proposition entirely.