"Montgomery."

The servant sighed when the twins came into the isolation chamber, leaving the door open for their friends to watch. He knew they'd win, once they took him. Brenk's fantasies about killing them with traps could never be anything more, not against these superhumans. He'd been eating the bread and nutrient bars the island's servants were feeding him, drinking water from the sink, wondering why he was bothering. He sat on the bed, looking up at the Duumvirate, waiting to die.

Howard spoke very slowly, very clearly, talking as much to his friends as their captive. "We've been mulling over what you said. The best time for you to reset my implants would have been when I was away from Billy, at that one party. You could probably have found a way to pull me aside from the other engineereds, then- I was ten, and unknowing. But not away from Sarah. He was going to do this in person, the way you wanted, correct? And his first command- as it always is- would be for me not to hurt him." Montgomery nodded. "He would then have had to directly command me to command her not to hurt him, either. By the time the second word left his mouth, she would have already choked him- she wasn't allowed to kill Illuminati then- I would have dropped her standing orders, he'd be a corpse, we would have unimplanted ourselves, and assuming we survived, we would have had this conversation almost a decade ago. If it had been done over a screen, same thing, only with a turned-off screen and a jet ride. Possibly Damien could have pulled it off because I wouldn't have taken him seriously soon enough, but he was what he was and he died for it. Twice. Other than him, your subordinates were right; our speed would have pre-empted it. It's only because of the extreme caution of your group that this has gone on as long as it has." There was one lie in that, one which none of them wanted to admit. At the time, his servants wanted him dead for what was done to them. Howard would have tried to unimplant only himself. And, without support, he would have probably died screaming.

"Go on. Gloat some more, damn you," Montgomery said, shaking his head. "Or just kill me now. Go on! Do it! What are you waiting for, you have your precious future for as long as it lasts!"

"Actually, as soon as you tell us one last thing, we're going to let you go," William said. Montgomery stared at him in disbelief. "Explain in detail the nature of implant withdrawal."

"Beings with a central nervous.. no.. it's.." He wracked his brains. There was so much technical data, but he didn't have his notes on him and that would be regurgitation, not explanation. "The animal brain is designed to work as a unit. Memory, instinct, consciousness- all are supposed to be a unified whole. They're not always unified, especially not in people, and so we get things like addiction and unexplained desires. But when we override the conscious- shunt it off, replace it with orders- it becomes much worse. Grand mal worse. That's what causes it, the disconnect between conscious and subconscious, between wants and needs, between ego and unresolved issues, and believe me, for servants there's a lot of those. Effectively, the mind battles itself to the death with the brain as its battlefield." The twins weren't sure whether or not any of this was real or it was all complete bullshit. At least Montgomery believed it, and it was at least somewhat related to experimental evidence.

"So why don't people die the moment they're implanted?" Howard asked.

"They did!" Montgomery replied. "For the longest time they did! It took me forever to figure out how to suppress the effect, to put a constant command for the brain not to wipe itself out. I used to tell Stark that people were already dead the moment the damn things hit their forebrains. But this was a week after he used them on me so he thought I was just being angry." The twins smiled as they figured how it happened. Montgomery said 'They work now', Stark said 'I have a good way to test them'. Didn't the Evil Overlord's Guide mention something about not putting your engineers behind their own traps?

William had a suspicion. "This 'constant command', it doesn't always work fully, does it? Not on everyone. Not all the time."

"We had some difficulties at one point, but our test subjects seemed to be surviving. Other than a few nightmares, we didn't have anyone experiencing further effects." His eyes widened as he spoke, as William was scowling at him the moment he said 'nightmares'.

That answered one old question, then. The fucking things didn't work right, and probably never could, and that was why William had suffered two straight years of nightly screaming terror. "Oh, I'm going to enjoy letting you go," he said, enraged. "Hey, Sarah! Mind getting something to let him go with?"

"Let me go. To Hell. Right. One last joke, huh?"

"Oh no, no, we'd never use that kind of euphemism. If we wanted to send you to Hell ourselves we wouldn't need anything to do it with," William reminded him.

Sarah came back almost immediately, holding an implant extraction device, and Montgomery's breath caught in his throat when he realized what it was. Howard smiled at him and spoke as if talking to a small child. "Hold very still. After all, you wouldn't be free if you were still implanted, would you? So it's time to let you go." Smiling as well, William placed the implant remover to Montgomery's forehead and activated it. The moment the implants were detached from his forebrain, Montgomery fell down off the bed into a sitting position, staring wide at a point two feet to William's right.

"Stay back!" he screamed, scrambling backwards away from something that only he could see, hitting the wall and not feeling it. He was in his own world now. "Get away from me! You're not- AAaaaaaAAaAagh!!" This was all being recorded, and his warbling high-pitched wail would be played back for amusement later. He continued to scramble backwards into the wall, no longer using his legs. "No! No! Aaaaaahh! AAaAAAaah AAaa-" His arms stopped working as well. Then his voice. Shortly thereafter, his lungs and heart. The twins left the corpse to be disposed of by servants, most likely through canine digestive tracts.

"Now that the last of them are gone, we have something else to deal with," William told his chuckling friends. His tone was so utterly formal that masters and servants alike stopped abruptly to look at him.

"Sarah. Paul," Howard said in the same formal tone. "We, you, and your servants are going to sit on that couch and make a number of hard decisions. If you have any needs you should take care of before then, take care of them now."

"Ruby, get some food ready. Quick to cook, quick to eat. I'm taking a shower," Sarah ordered, walking upstairs. The armor did not perfectly absorb sweat.

"Yes, Mistress." Quick-cooked bacon, eggs, instant oatmeal, and microwaved hot chocolate would take her about five minutes, with some of the cooking heat coming from her hands.

"Luke, go check my holdings and make sure nothing's going to interrupt this," Paul commanded. He had an inkling of what the hard decisions were going to consist of. Despite his agreement to near-total omnicide, he still considered himself human enough to tremble at the thought of what the twins were planning. He needed several baths at once but could only take the one.

"At once, Master," Luke said, smirking just a bit. Going over Paul's limited holdings properly involved a few thorough, rapid-fire Q&A sessions with a few servants.

The Duumvirate showered, used the bathroom, and put on comfortable robes before sitting down on the couch to get things ready, letting Northberg know that they were going to start giving authorization for a whole lot of retroviruses soon. They opened up window after window of information, knowledge, and facts, all about different unengineered Illuminati, as masters and servants switched places for hygiene, Sarah in her white suit and Paul wearing socks and comfortable pants with his Duumvirate-logo T-shirt, all perfectly white, the servants in pitch black. They all ate together, hungrily but in total silence. Then, as one, they got up to sit down on the couch, the Duumvirate in the center, Paul and then Luke to their right, Sarah and then Ruby to the twins' left. Six keyboard-mouse arrangements were extended in front of them on trays, and six mouse pointers, all subtly different, availed themselves on the big screen. The only reason they ever used this all-for-one setup was when a great much business had to be done at once.

"Sarah, Paul, Luke, Ruby," Howard said, still in formal mode. "We are all going to the future. The engineered humanity is going to the future with us. Today, and possibly tomorrow, and possibly for the next week, we will decide who else to bring with us, one by one."

"If any of you have any opinions, observations, or anything else to help us make that decision, or if you find yourself unable to continue, you are obligated to speak up," William added. Sarah and Paul would be invaluable, of course, but it was the servants the twins really wanted, as ferrets for the kind of evil the Duumvirate did not want to see in their coming utopia.

"Am I to assume that anyone not going to the future will have his future cut short?" Paul asked in the same formal tone.

"Yes," William said, and Paul exhaled in a long sigh. This was going to be ugly. Paul had intuitively known since almost a decade ago, when he was twelve years old with a brand new white suit, that some sort of harrowing practically had to happen. He'd wanted to get rid of some bad apples before the End as well. He just didn't know it would go down quite like this.

The twins started with the ones they thought would have the most certain answers. "Donald Simpson," William said. No one had problems with him and so by mutual assent he got to live, and William copypasted his name into a file available only to them and the Northberg leadership.

"Wilfred Garcia," Howard said, glancing at Paul.

Paul's breath caught in his throat. If he said anything like 'kill', it would be accepted at once, and his old enemy would be in his grave before too long. And yet, since the coup attempt all those years ago, Wilfred hadn't so much as said boo to him, staying far out of his way in every sense. He considered asking the twins about what their criteria were, but he knew the answer quite well. "He's fairly decent at playing the current game," Paul said instead. "When you change the rules, he'll be able to play by those just the same, so he's qualified to come to the future with you." Paul wasn't sure whether he agreed with their 'future' phrasing, but chose to use it as a mark of respect. A few seconds of research revealed that Wilfred had mostly consensual sex with women and ran his businesses mostly evenhandedly, with eyes only to his own real gain and not some twisted ideal. Or so he let be known about himself, but actually investigating almost six thousand Illuminati at once was an impossibility. The twins were tacitly surprised at Paul's mercy, but Wilfred got to live.

"Vernon Stuart," William said. Sarah smiled- they remembered him! She had also used him as an object lesson for Ruby, and smiled wider as she watched her servant open logfiles in rapid succession, highlighting a section of a conversation.

"No future," Ruby said. "This is why." The highlighted section, as part of a discussion about human genetic advancements, read:

he even mentioned using African genetics -- can you believe it? As if anyone would want that!

"That is stupid," Howard pronounced, his formal persona cracking just a bit. Genetic engineering made racism less than meaningless. When not constructing DNA from whole cloth, the Operator and his cohorts had used genetics from Caucasians, Africans, Mongolians, gorillas, swine, bison, electric eels, salamanders, and flatworms in their drive to build a better humanity.

"He's serious?" William asked. "He's not just joking or telling his correspondent what he wants to hear?"

"He means what he says," Ruby replied. The name went into a killfile of the sort pertaining to Operations. This list would determine who was destined to receive a different virus. These targets would be given theirs after the real retrovirus had been distributed; by the time the first victim knew what was really happening to him, the last victim would already be injected. The twins were no longer concerned about secrecy breaches as vengeance.

They decided to do the guy he was talking to next, and he, too, landed in the killfile. Some were decided very quickly (a couple as 'Why isn't this one retroviral already?'), others took several minutes, and one particularly wealthy owner of diverse holdings took a full fifteen minutes for the kill-no-kill decision to be made. It turned out to be no-kill; the twins determined that he was trying to be a true Illuminatus, the master of both sides of everything. A lofty goal, perhaps unattainable in practice, but dreaming big was something they wanted in their future. The kill ratio was about one in six; as expected, most of the heximation was being carried out by the servants pointing out chains of behavior that signified serious problems with their subject. Paul asked for only a handful to die and most of those were swiftly emphasized by his servant. Sarah only chose to kill a few times, most of it being from very old grudges and things that never made it into a database, and so a few old pedophiles and demanding blowhards were scheduled to bite the dust. The twins only chose to leave one person in the past themselves, someone of questionable sexuality with a bad tendency to demand that the Dominator allow him (?) some sort of seniority bias over young engineereds, acting on some bizarre idea of what constituted fairness. Most of the people they personally wanted gone were gotten rid of earlier that day.

The adage was true: The measure of a person was found in how he treated those beneath him. A flattering, bootlicking coward would show up to certain venues with a servant with not-quite-hidden bruises, and tugging on a few investigative threads revealed hints of him successfully threatening others into not contacting the Dominator for certain disputes. That was an absolute no-no, and a reason to kill him immediately, but they just put him on the no-future list instead. The one after that was a man who had implanted his own wife the moment he was inducted into the Illuminati, and ordered a lot of S&M gear shortly afterwards to add to his existing collection. In public the two appeared comfortable together. The consensus was that she was totally into it and he had no interest in seriously hurting her or anyone else, so he'd see his next birthday. He apparently had a female counterpart, and that kind, gentle, grey-haired manipulator of landed nobility didn't even bother with implants for her young husband, married shortly after she joined. She had certain ideas of how to clothe him. There were publicly-available pictures, funny and slightly disturbing, made better and worse by the fact that he apparently liked it. It was screwed up, but nobody's 'Okay, put an end to this shit' trigger went off, and if they killed everyone who was simply screwed up the twins would own a very barren planet indeed. She was highly competent in her daily business, and occasionally went out of her way not to piss off engineereds. It might have been fear of ending up like Rhines or simple prudence, but it was clear that there were things she thoroughly understood and so she would survive. The imagery would be different with her having eternal youth.

Then there was another woman, who oversaw an enormous amount of prison work camps in multiple industrial countries, contemplating on an obscure but public diary that she was sad that newly engineered servants wouldn't stay castrated, but happy that she could do it more than once, just as soon as this rogue business ended and she got her retrovirus. The servants didn't even need to open their mouths, saying it all with simple looks. "Yeaaaahh," Paul said.

"Yeaah," Sarah agreed, click-dragging the name to near the top of the doomed list.

Paul remembered someone else with a problem and mentioned Rick Cream's name. He attempted to sign the death warrant without an explanation, but the twins were having none of it.

"You made a promise, but we have to know the reason," William said, the formality intentionally ice-cold and distant. "You're not the one breaking the promise, because we're not giving you a choice." Paul understood why they were being so hard, even if he didn't like it. His dear friends were still the Duumvirate, and they reserved the right to turn absolute authority on and off as they pleased.

Paul told them a condensed, short-sentences version of everything involving Rick, Kylie, and Charles. If the mood was better there would have been a great deal of hard laughter. Luke finally understood what he had in common with the old servant: ruthlessness. Rick's assholery earned him a slow elevator to Hell.

Over time they faced a dizzying panoply of men, women, and a handful of unengineered children and teenagers. The kids and teens all got to live, minus one incredibly ugly-minded girl who reminded Paul of Damien. Only a couple of the older ones were recruits, and the parents who had chosen not to engineer the born Illuminati (and hadn't already been killed by their pissed-off children) all ended up futureless, Luke and Ruby competing to see who could ask for slaughter first.

What Paul found surprising was that the group didn't argue once. He found no fault in any of their decisions, and they found no fault in his. He was expecting to speak up to contradict a death. But every time, there was detailed evidence that the subject was simply no good as a person, and the servants practically had a doctorate in broken-minded authoritarian psychology, and so Illuminatus after Illuminatus was consigned to doom.

After three hours they had decided the fates of two hundred Illuminati, taking an average of less than a minute on whether or not to individually execute a controller of the world. Of the roughly 6,200 Illuminati, only about three hundred were engineered, the majority of them young. That would mean another eighty-six hours of straight work assuming they kept up the pace. Paul found himself wishing that they could go faster and mentally cursed himself for it.

"Okay, can we take a break? Maybe go downstairs and play some games or something?" Luke asked, his head roiling.

"Yes," Howard said immediately and started pushing trays back towards the screen.

"Good, I can't.. think anymore. We've been.. doing stuff all day, you think this might have affected our judgment?"

"Somewhat, but in a good way," William said, dropping the formality. "We can't do a full investigation on them all, but we already have more than enough information. Anyone smart enough to hide everything from our eyes and the public records is smart enough not to be a problem later. We can't know what's going on in their heads, but we can't know and we have to do this anyway, and we're not going to start implanting now. Maybe we're all tired, but for this we have to go with our gut, our subconscious when we look at the evidence. It's not like finding rogues."

The elevator took them down to the basement, and they stepped out to walk to the arcade. Howard said, "In theory, even if we don't have time for a full investigation, we should still have enumerated in detail what we're trying to keep and what we're trying to lose, and then base our decisions on some defined metric. But that's coarse-grained digital when what we want is analog. It's like trying to use a machine to check the air when you've got a good dog."

"A dog that's probably going to be put to sleep soon." Everyone stopped in their tracks when Luke said that, turning to look at him. Suddenly the air was more cloying, their sense of fatigue much worse, as if a nightmare were about to poke its head into the waking world. "I really wish you hadn't said that it's good for us to go with our gut. And I really, really wish you hadn't said that our detection or whatever is as good as a dog's nose. Because my gut is telling me that when you have detectors like the two of us who are sort of from something you don't want in your future and who understand it all too well, what you do is you use them to finish off the last of the fuckheads and then you get rid of them for a clean sweep." They were in the middle of disposing of mean, ugly-minded Illuminati, bad to have around, who had served their purpose and were no longer of value. The disposal of similar servants was trivial by comparison.

The blood drained from Paul's face. "You.. really think that, after.. after all of everything, that I'd.."

"Don't tell him it doesn't make sense," Ruby interjected. This had originally been her concept, said in confidence some years ago, that there would be a day that they were unneeded, and they would not be released to anywhere but the grave.

"Yeah, it makes sense.. for various values of sense!" Paul looked between the two servants. The twins said nothing, and Paul didn't like that. Sarah said nothing and under the circumstances he liked that even less. "Okay, wait, everybody just wait, this.. let me think," he yammered needlessly. "If.. I actually did that, then by the same criteria that we were using up there to determine who lives and who dies, I'd have to kill myself right after killing you. Christ with the cross jammed right up his ass, that is something we don't want in the future!"

"Will not happen," Sarah told her servant, as if asked about some operational detail. Ruby turned to the twins, about to ask for confirmation, but their slight smiles reminded her that it wasn't their business. Masters are responsible for servants, and she and Luke weren't their servants.

They played together. The game of choice was a motion-controlled co-op warzone, the sensors being accurate enough for real-time dodging and punching. Six made it slightly crowded on the screen if not the spacious playing field, but it was doubly wonderful for the fact that nothing would be unstoppable or unfair. Not worrying about dying in real life was a nice addition, too, but they knew this game and even with extra enemies on a very hard difficulty, six players was a ballstomp as they intuitively, immediately covered each other's asses.

Once they were done they found how badly they needed to sleep. They had a long day of extermination tomorrow, and the five after that if they worked at the same speed for 14-hour days. They didn't like the prospect, but delegating wasn't an option.

Paul opened the trap door between him and his servant when he reached his room. "Luke, get up here. You're sleeping with me tonight."

"What?!"

"You heard me. No, this isn't about buttsex. You and I are going to sleep in the same bed, and if you truly think that I'm going to get rid of you when this is over, I command you to fry my brain in my sleep."

Luke sighed, elevating himself with one hand. Paul's command was either very clever or very unthoughtful, but he'd missed the same thing earlier. "You're not going to get rid of me after this. Even if the Operator's viruses kill ninety-nine point nine percent, the other seven million are going to be a pain in the ass, and like we said before, for that you need slayers." Luke lay in Paul's equally-comfortable bed for the first time. 'Of course it's the same,' Luke thought, pulling up the sheets and putting his hands between his head and the pillow. 'Everything's maxed out for everyone here. Even the servants. That's their future.'

Was Paul really going to sic his pet sociopath on the remnants of those who had looked up to his servants' servants, ordering him to systematically butcher men, women, and children alike in humanity's last pogrom, the only concessions to mercy speed and painlessness? Of course he was. "So it would be after that, then. But even though I've never lied to you once, you still think I'm lying now."

"Come on, we both know how this goes, it's important that you don't lie to me so I can do my job right. You only need to tell me one lie in my life."

"That's.. no, I get it now. It's because of what we've been doing, that you actually decided that you need to die. That's what happened, isn't it? Your detector went off on yourself, and you're projecting- onto me!" Luke started to reply but Paul overrode him, outraged. "You see this?" he asked, sticking a thumb into the neck of his Duumvirate T-shirt and waggling it at Luke. "You see that emblem on it, you see what color it is? I decide what happens to your life. We decide how all this ends, and you know damn well who I mean. So no, you are not allowed to sacrifice yourself for whatever you think is our goal. 'Get rid of us for a clean sweep.'", he imitated with sarcasm. "I own you!" Paul laid down his head on Luke's chest, sharing the sheet, their faces inches apart. "And I say, I am letting you go do whatever you want when there's no more normals to worry about, and if you don't think you can live on this planet after that then you can move to Mars!"

"The world a mess," Luke replied, reluctantly placing his arm around his master, tacitly admitting that Paul was very right on all counts. "Does that count as getting rid of me?"

"No." Paul went to sleep shortly thereafter without his brain getting fried.