The assembler was among the most basic of the Operator's tools, and never, ever had errors. It was also slow. Everything that it produced was assembled from scratch almost atom by atom, and then triple-checked for accuracy, as one bad peptide can ruin your whole day. For a project this ambitious it would take an entire hour, and the Operator knew he had other things he could do, but he spent most of that hour staring at it anyway.

"And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever," he intoned, as the user-friendly blue bar on the screen reached the 99% mark.

The moment the vial was extended from the assembler, he immediately, deftly inserted it into a needle casing and slammed the point into the vein at his right elbow, pushing the plunger home and ignoring the pain. He began, slowly, to laugh, and pulled the empty needle out, looking at it with a grin.

His laughter grew to a chuckle, then to a boisterous shout. "I beat you, you stupid old son of a bitch!" the Operator screamed aloud, raising his fists to the sky in triumph, one still clutching the empty needle. "I BEAT YOU!!!" He hadn't expected to defeat Death by such a large margin; he had more than twenty, possibly thirty good years left in him before his victory. Beating the reaper at age 53 was, by that reckoning, roughly equivalent to beating Gary Kasparov in a twenty-move chess game.

Three kids in Northberg's ventilation system heard his jubilation on finally achieving the retrovirus.


"Hello, Duumvirate. Guess who I am." That was a hell of a thing to buzz up and call with. Particularly when the face with deep red eyes wasn't recognizable at all and the voice was vaguely reminiscent of someone they knew. But the background was familiar, as well as the lab-coat suit.. some engineered teenager wearing the Operator's clothes, or-

"Operator, you fuckhead!" Paul shouted. "You could have told us you had finished it!"

"And have you losing sleep like a little normal kid before Christmas?" the Operator asked with his usual inflection but the larynx he had more than thirty years ago. There was a gentle insult in that; in many ways Paul still was a normal kid, comparatively little, and he probably would have been affected by anticipation. "Besides, I had to make sure it completely worked." He could have ripped some normal off the streets or found someone else in the Illuminati worthy of it, but using himself as the final test subject was a very Operator thing to do. He would have eaten the anticipation otherwise. "There will probably be a general one made later, but the model we're working with now requires tailoring for each specific person. I was the first. The Night Operator received his eighteen hours later." And the next person in line.. "Paul, yours will be finished in a couple of hours."

As a precursor to his forthcoming abilities, Paul tore himself off of the couch and rushed up the stairs to get dressed with phenomenal speed. Everyone else smiled watching him go. Kid on Christmas indeed, with the unequivocally best present in the world coming to him.

"As much as we welcome this, Operator, we'd much prefer it if we knew who our enemies are beforehand. Now that it's out of the bag, there's going to be a lot of anarchy when we have to tell people we don't trust them enough to give it to them," William said.

"I'm aware," the Operator replied. "But you know I couldn't sit on it." The twins figured that was because just too many people needed it, but the Operator knew damn well it was his own ego. There was no way he could not let others know about his triumph over Death, politics be damned. The twins might have their problems and he might not be able to give it to everyone he wanted, but at least making it known was his right. "Since you had to mention it I'm assuming you haven't figured out an alternative either." They hadn't. Without knowing who was who, either an enemy would get the retrovirus or someone who was on the Dominator's side, but not quite trusted, would get the shaft. The last thing the twins wanted was a retroviral enemy, so there was going to be a lot of shaft recipients. There was simply no way around it. "With that in mind, who should we start developing it for next?" The question could have been phrased as 'Well, Dominator, who are your real friends? Paul was a gimme, but is there anyone else you absolutely trust?'

Fortunately, there was. "Jeremy Jorgensen and his servant," Howard said. An easy one; the Operator nodded. "The previous Dominator." The Operator was very slightly startled but should have seen it coming. Even for him, it was easy to forget the retired old man still existed. "Our island's servant trainer." That fell under the didn't-even-have-to-mention-it category. "Wilbur Cronkite, the Illuminatus who has had control over microwave satellites since our unimplantation." They let the Operator figure out that if the microwave controller was an enemy, the twins would have been cooked long since. "Hadji Rajadhiraja and his father. Other members of the nuclear group.. to be determined." He needed to see how much nuclear material they really controlled first, and whether or not they had the opportunity to use it.

"Jack Guernsey and Arthur Rosene," William added. The two who had gotten them out of the initial post-unimplantation clusterfuck. "By the time you get done with those, we'll have determined various others." The Operator smirked. Making the retrovirus was a time-consuming proposition, needing lots of physical resources, sentient attention, and computer time to make sure they were doing it right, and that was per-person. Although Illuminati would get priority, there were engineered masters with unengineered servants who needed it, Sarah first among them; she had formally requested that the two Pakistanis who'd helped her in the Osama raid get it ASAP. Both Day and Night Operators would be very busy men these next few weeks; after that, they would have a better system than the laborious process they were using now. Or so the Operator hoped.

"By the way, Operator, now that you're a different person, would you like to give yourself a name? Now that you're one of us it doesn't seem consonant to keep calling you that," Howard noted.

The Operator paused for a brief instant; he hadn't thought of that. "No," he finally answered. "I still prefer my title. But thank you, I appreciate the gesture." He gave a deferential nod and closed the connection.

There was no sense in procrastinating; the twins got down to brass tacks, doing a lot of research on a lot of people they barely knew, pausing only to give their jocular farewells: "Goodbye forever, normal Paul!" "We'll never see you again!" In the normal world, friends help you move and real friends help you move bodies. In the Illuminati, everyone helps you move bodies, and most of your real friends were people you owned. It was an unexpected change of pace; today they were trying to find out who they could trust, instead of who they couldn't.

Which, naturally, lead directly to the same proving-a-negative problems they had before. Damn implant withdrawal. Without it they could easily prove anyone's innocence and not have to leave them implanted. It was an interrogation technique beyond compare. "Why haven't they fixed that yet?" Howard asked.

"Because it keeps servants in line, that's why," William replied sardonically, and Howard felt like an idiot. Knowing that you couldn't be de-controlled without fatal backlash was a damper on otherwise disloyal servants. It was so easy to forget things like that... "Do you want to open that worm can?"

"No." Hey, everybody! We've got a system where we implant Illuminati, ostensibly for short amounts of time just to test their loyalty! No, really, that's all we're doing! That'd fly like a lead brick, and possibly lead to investigation of their real plan.

"It's funny how most of these are servants," William said after a short while. Unimplanted public servants, many of them, tied to no specific Illuminatus but rather a committee or one of the ill-defined conglomerates of which secret masters were so fond. Such a person, whose orders were determined by unanimous consent, could not be a rogue unless everyone in the group was one. The previous Dominator had suggested a new class of 'general servant' for some of these; it didn't fly because masters didn't want to lose their property even if they didn't directly control it. And who was a general servant loyal to, anyway?

"It's funnier how many Illuminati abrogate power like that." But they knew the reason for it: Lack of trust. If one specific Illuminatus got a hold of the microwave satellites (an endeavor that took twenty of them), he could use them on anyone he wanted. A servant, prohibited from seeking power, could not be the same kind of threat.

Except, of course, when the servant in question let a railgun get built in the middle of his base...

"Let's implant every servant we augment if they're not already," William suggested.

"Ooh, they're not going to like that," Howard replied. 'They' in this case being almost everyone else in the Illuminati. The Dominator was, by custom, not allowed to seek direct power, and especially not allowed to start grabbing any holdings for himself. That was theft of a kind the Levels would not abide. "They're still technically owned by somebody."

"But they won't try to stop it. We have precedent. We have logic- we can't be absolutely-absolutely sure because we don't know who they actually obey, and after all, they're just servants; it's not like they have rights." A similar statement would endear them to the Illuminati who kept saying that the Duumvirate was too nice to servants in general. Most of them were older, not quite understanding the new relationships. "And considering that we will make a public declaration that only those absolutely loyal can receive it, who would dare to speak up at the time? By the time anyone does, the deed is done and we now personally own every maintenance man in the Illuminati. No more railguns in walls." Bold, this was fucking bold, Howard thought. Daddy's general-servant idea, returned with an ultimate vengeance. But just say that they'll only get commands to keep the status quo and inform of suspicious activity, since they weren't anybody's personal property and didn't have sensitive info, it'd get grumbled at a little bit, but the benefit.. oh the benefit...

Howard turned to his brother with a smile. William smiled back. Howard put his hand down low and William slapped it from up high; they did the reverse and finished it with a loud smack near their heads.

"And that will be a good show of power before we start dealing with the various engineereds' parents," Howard said.

"Oh hell no," William replied. "Remember Damien? 'My kid is going to replace the Dominator.' Even if the kid in question has no idea. We can't base trust off that."

"Which is why telling them that is going to need the power show." Howard reached under the viewscreen to grab a game controller and a gun-like pointer. Keyboard and mouse be damned. "Speaking of which..."

When they were pwning some very surprised young Illuminati and servants in UT2003 CTF (and getting pwned in return; these kids were getting hard to beat), Paul was feeling the most anxiety he had in a long time. He also felt exhaustion, as he had hauled tremendous ass getting here, both with the jet and his feet. He had passed some kids in the hall, who weren't sure whether to follow him 'I am a bomb technician, try to keep up' style or run away from whatever his goal was. Curiosity won and some of them almost ran into the examination room with him before the Operator shooed them out. (One little retrovirus, and they listened to him quite a bit faster now...)

Now Paul was staring at the needle that would change his life forever, which the Operator had wryly labeled 'Health Insurance'. He blinked at the size of it- a small tip but twenty-five cubic centimeters of fluid, enough for every cell in his body and then some- as the Operator took a deep breath. "Paul. I want you to understand something before I give this to you." Yeah, that helps a lot.

"Cut the shit, Operator," Paul said. "You don't think I've dreamed of this almost my whole life? I've wanted to be as powerful as Dominator William" Paul was half a syllable from saying 'Billy' there. "ever since I met him. You have any idea what it's like to be in a shadow since young childhood? Even when we were servants I was always beneath him. You've already made the fucking thing, and there's nothing you can possibly tell me that will make me reconsider."

"Not even that you still will be?" Paul looked at him. "The regeneration side of it is perfect. Has to be, for it to be worth anything at all. You'll be every inch as diseaseproof and immortal as your friends. About as proportionally strong for your size, although nowhere near as big. The other abilities.. the speed, the smarts, the perfect coordination.. I can't. It will take at very least six months for me to be able to perfect that in a retrovirus. Maybe even longer, maybe I never will. I could tell you why but it'd sound like nonsense to you." The extremely basic explanation, which Paul would puzzle out days later, was that the nerve cells would change too much in relation to one another and it'd be brain-lethal halfway through. The body would survive- engineereds usually do- but the axonal connections would be broken, the personality and the memories wiped. "It is still a massive improvement in those areas as well, maybe about 85% of the way from you to them now." 'Less,' Paul figured. 'He doesn't know just how much the twins changed after unimplantation. But that wasn't genetics, that was something else...' "It just won't be.. perfect." He said that like he was admitting that he fucked three goats last night and was trying not to go after a fourth. "And it will probably be many decades before there can ever be anything to improve an engineered." Retroviruses are still viruses and get slaughtered by the superior immune systems in very short order. "So you can either take it now and still be a bit less, or you can wait a while and be at least closer to an equal."

Paul did not even hesitate. "Give it to me." As the Operator injected the needle directly into Paul's vein ('the best pain I'll ever feel'), he explained his reasoning, his teenage voice going higher and louder. "What if something happens to me in those six months or more? What if something happens to them, that I could have prevented if I took it? Do you think I could let my own.. my own vanity stand in the way of that? You took it; why would you even think that I would walk out of here a normal? What kind of Illuminatus would I be?"

"A less thoughtful one. And nowhere near as good of a friend for them," the Operator replied, withdrawing the needle. Paul's arm felt funny from the sheer amount of fluid pumped into it. The Operator set it down gently and then did something Paul absolutely did not expect- he rushed towards him and picked him up in a gentle bear hug. "Two or three days. And then.. welcome to the fold." He gently set the young Illuminatus on his feet.

"Thanks. Thanks.. a lot. I wish I could give you something back for that," Paul awkwardly said, just to say something grateful.

"Sarah lives to kill and destroy. The Duumvirate lives to rule. I live to create and improve."

"I live to preserve," Paul said after a moment's consideration.

"Then that is what I hope you do. Don't let the bastards win. Even if the worst happens, even if.. even if your friends are killed, Paul, never let these usurping scumbags win." Oratory was never the Operator's strong suit.

Paul didn't want to think about his friends dying any more than he had to. "I know, Operator. If it happens that way.. I'll go down fighting." He had had thoughts along those lines less than an hour ago. Those engineered kids.. the entire world.. under the control of the enemy? Not on his watch. Not ever. Imperfect or not. "One more thing. You keep focusing on them. But I'm one of your creations now, too." Paul turned and strode from the room, and left the facility with not nearly the hurry he had coming in, flying home at a leisurely pace as the virus snuck into his cells to alter his DNA.

He found himself consuming three energy bars on the plane, and the moment he got home he immediately treated himself to a buffet of freshly-butchered meat, vegetables, and starchy egg noodles, the twins sitting down with him to have dinner early. He generally understood why he'd be so hungry, but wasn't expecting to get hit with it so fast; he didn't even feel like anything but his usual self. But he was tired and readily fell asleep at five in the afternoon, waking up to a dark room and intense discomfort on every level. This was not the effect Paul had in mind. Lying in bed, tossing and turning, unable to feel relaxed or comfortable in the least, guts painfully stretched to the limit but somehow not quite satiated, pulling the sheets off of him and over him again because somehow in the perfectly climate-controlled room it was too hot or too cold, feeling a nameless, low anxiety because something just wasn't quite right, something with his body..

That was it. Not just his body, but his whole being, felt wrong. He felt much too weak, much too slow, much too stupid. His cells were starting to write checks his bloodstream was having a hard time cashing. But he knew what was going on, and with that knowledge brought quietude and acceptance. 'If an engineered found himself in a normal's body, it would feel something like this.'

He drifted off into an easy, peaceful, dreamless sleep.

The next morning he woke up feeling like he was on cloud nine. He catapulted himself out of bed with an enormous smile on his face. Life was great. Life was awesome. He was going to go and play some video games, then he was going to go on the computer and figure out all of the Duumvirate's enemies and kill them all, and then go get a skateboard or something and do some awesome tricks. He knew how silly he was being, but his manic euphoria wasn't abated until he felt the pangs of really needing to go to the bathroom, and intense hunger. He settled the first immediately, rushing to the toilet and immediately vacating his bowels and bladder, expelling a wretched, foul-smelling mess that poured out of him like liquefied rot incarnate. He knew what it must be- almost everything in his gastrointestinal system. An overload of bacteria, some impurities, some oddly-digested turds caused by his body's change. His piss was thick and orange, his improving kidneys removing more garbage than before.

Feeling much lighter, he rushed downstairs, not waiting to get dressed (God knew he saw the rest of them naked often enough), and smiled when he saw what was waiting for him: a massive meal of bacon, eggs, cereal, and thickly buttered toast, with cups of milk and orange juice, the 'complete breakfast' of TV fame that almost no one could actually eat. The amount of calories in this meal, he figured, were enough to give normal dieticians a heart attack just by looking at it.

"You're up early," Sarah remarked, as Paul attacked the food with his fork and teeth. He almost choked, forced himself to swallow, and went after the next bite as if nothing had happened. Sarah sat down and started to eat.

"Did you cook this yourself?" he asked her after several more bites. It tasted like she had.

"Yeah. I think I should start doing that again." She didn't explain why, and Paul didn't ask. "You look.. insightful.. today."

"Like you wouldn't believe! I feel like I can do anything. Or.. no, I feel like I should be able to do anything, I just can't right now because I'm still mostly normal inside. Do engineereds feel this way all the time, and just don't show it?"

"Not at all. Improvement in your condition brings that kind of elation, but maintaining a current state does nothing. It's like that for everyone."

"Bullshit it is," Paul replied. "When I became an Illuminatus, that was the second biggest improvement of my life, but I didn't feel happy, I was just worried sick."

"Did you feel happier when you figured out what you were doing?"

"...Kinda."

"Hm." This actually told Sarah a great deal about Paul's subconscious, and what it considered to be truly positive. "As for your original concern, we don't have this happy thing like we feel godlike all the time. We don't feel strong and smart; we intuitively feel everyone else is weak and stupid." He didn't respond to that, and she gave him a look conveying the simple message: Including you. He didn't respond to that, either, and continued shoveling down food. "That doesn't bother you?"

"What? I always knew that. I figured you guys considered me just a normal. It's always been like that, even when it was just Billy and me, of course I didn't know it was quite like this."

Sarah thought a bit. "Paul, have you ever had any friends in a wheelchair, or on crutches, something like that?" He shook his head, knowing where this was going. "Remember the all-engineereds party they had back on their thirteenth?" Paul looked up. Since they didn't want to stoke Paul's envy, they never told him the details, and he never asked. "That was actually all engineereds with a certain amount of physical ability. One part of it was rock climbing, slamming spikes into the rocks with our hands, and some of them halfway fell just reaching back to jam it in. It was the classical definition of incredibly dangerous, but since there was no one trying to kill them, none of them got hurt. I was the one in the back pulling the spikes left behind." Nominally that was servants' work, but it fell too squarely in the 'If you want it done right' category for Sarah to delegate it. "Paul, them being with you is like.. it's like having a friend in a wheelchair, and going to play frisbee."

"Hey, we have!"

"That's right. And the kind of frisbee you'd play with a kid in a wheelchair is about the same way they've played with you. Hell, if they didn't like you so much, I'd leave you behind half the time, because if we ever have to run very fast, you can't keep up and they'd probably end up carrying you."

"What, is this some kind of an apology? I always considered you a psycho-bitch from Hell, and I'm really, really glad you can't get old because I'd hate to see you as an old lady," Sarah laughed uproariously at that. "but if you didn't start this I would never have told you. Why should I have? C'mon, Sarah, I am one of you now, and isn't that all that matters?" Paul's acceptance and forgiveness were astonishingly rare in the Illuminati, and Sarah blinked in surprise.

"Yeah. Yeah, it is an apology. I just thought maybe you'd made yourself intentionally blind to it, so I thought I'd just tell you, and let your happiness absorb it."

"Sarah, did you really think I'd be mad at any of you for being engineereds?" She blinked. "Don't you think I know what it means to be inferior? I've known Billy since we were little, I've knew some of what he can do and how much better he was than me, now it really stands out, but since I was a kid then, I didn't see anything really weird about it. I think I even helped him hide it, because he wasn't allowed to tell anyone and even if nobody else knew, I knew, because we're best friends. That's why I was taken in the first place, remember?" He paused a moment. "I just wish I would have been taken with him, because Damien was some major fucking bullshit." Damien had eaten Paul's bullet five years ago, but for the first time Paul wished he was alive again, because as an engineered he could do so much worse than simply shooting the fucker.

"And watching you blow a hole through his head was the most satisfying day of the tenth year of my life," William said decisively from behind him, Howard smiling at the memory. Paul turned- how had they gotten so close?- but then remembered that they possessed the same stealth skills Sarah did, if with less polish and practice. He'd have to study it.. and all the other things engineereds took for granted, but normals had a hard time with or could never know. Could he really retrain his body's reflexes?

Howard was considering apologizing for Damien, but decided against it as awkward and unproductive. So he wordlessly hugged Paul for a moment instead, and Paul laid his fingers on his arm, smiling. How could I blame you for being you?

Then the twins sat to eat similar portions to what Paul had, and Paul marked 'Appetite' as one of the first things that had changed about him. Wait- no- it was even worse than that. He was hungry, but he couldn't physically eat another bite. His stomach contents would have to migrate further for him to be able to shovel more down- which his body was desperately telling him he had to do.

"I'm full, but I'm still hungry!" Paul exclaimed after sitting at the table another fifteen seconds. "Do you guys get like that?"

"Not unless we've been starved.," Howard started, remembering those silly Inheritor's Tests they had been forced to undergo. They had never found out just who had come up with that shit, and both independently considered that whoever had was a possible enemy of some stripe or another. Or maybe just someone with a mean streak, which was another phrase for 'everybody'.

"That's.. kind of what I am." He was normal. He needed to be an engineered. Whence would the energy and matter come? Ah, if only he could simply eat uranium and bypass all this organic shit.

"Blood substitute's in the walls," Sarah suggested. After the railgun incident, she had ordered some of that to be placed in similar fashion to the weapons. She didn't care if it was overcautious.

"Um.. no thanks. I'll be all right. Fuck..."

"Drink more, it absorbs faster," she shrugged and said, going back to her plate. Paul poured himself another tall glass of milk (sheep, this time) and chugged it down by force, refusing to choke. He then closed his eyes, pretended his stomach didn't hurt so much, and sat there, listless.

"You remind me of a snake," William said off-hand, and this time Paul did choke, milk coming straight out of his throat and into his nose and lungs as he started laughing.

"What? Why?!" he finally said, after he had coughed the last few drops out, his stomach actually feeling a bit better with the convulsions; he could swear he felt some food drop into his small intestine.

"Don't you remember that snake eating that rat on the Discovery Channel? The rat was three times as wide as the snake."

"Oh, that, yeah! But the snake only eats every 48 hours." Paul had watched his friends pig out constantly. He just didn't quite cognite until now that it would be him doing the same. He walked out of the room and to the couch, popping out a controller. "It's my first day, let's see how I do!" he called back to them.

He thought about playing normal-world stuff, but was too familiar with the stuff he liked; instead he tried one of those engineereds-only games that some bored, twisted Illuminati programmers had made, and got his ass swiftly handed to him, the game mocking him outright (in a horrible nyah-nyah voice, too) that he had to be a normal because he failed so miserably, his friends giving some good-natured laughter as well.

"Wow, I've never seen that," William said through the chuckles. "Try again tomorrow? Or go outside?"

"I am not doing physical anything until I know I'm not going to fuck up and kill myself," Paul said decisively. What if his reflexes tried to make a move his muscles couldn't actually do, or his muscles became too strong for his bones for a while?

"Not even Frisbee?" Howard asked.

"All right, Frisbee. But I am definitely not working until I know I'm not going to fuck that up."

"What if your rivals had the same thought?" Howard suggested. It didn't seem likely that they'd piss off someone who just got a greater capacity to hurt them, but some Illuminati did things like that.

Paul winced. "Fuck, looks like I am. ..Later. Much later." 'When I get a hold of myself.' He didn't have that many real rivals anymore, anyway. Wilfred had a more or less permanent grudge but would never act on it. He enjoyed general non-aggression with pretty much every other Illuminatus with Central and South American holdings, and had mild, active agreements with a few.

Paul didn't feel any different- he didn't see himself catching up more, or thinking ahead to one of the twins' insane wind-predicting boomerang throws, and he didn't even try for the laserlike toss that sizzled a foot past him and banged the steel wall- but they smiled at him at the end of it nonetheless.

He watched the twins deal with various retrovirus seekers, trying to see if he had any new insights yet. Not really. The twins were still the same to him, dealing with problems in their usual way. The day's petitioners, he noticed, were more pissed than usual. From what he gathered, the twins had found loose servants who didn't exactly belong to anyone, and were going to implant them before giving them the retrovirus. This proved unpopular, particularly since most of the involved Illuminati weren't getting the retrovirus themselves. Paul congratulated himself on noticing something: the twins' faint look of puzzled surprise when they found out that the main problem wasn't them stealing servants through implanting them (many of the Illuminati in question were starting to consider them more of a burden than a bargaining chip in the post-Duumvirate political climate), but a more generalized fear of power concentration. 'Unitary executive theory' was a line of bullshit fed to normals, and despite the twins' frequent reassurances, they had difficulty convincing everyone in the Levels that they had no intent of eventually misusing those servants in an all-out power grab.

Paul wouldn't have minded losing a problem as thorny as a shared servant; he still felt like he was struggling to tread water in Venezuela. He had no idea if his few enemies knew he was retroviral or not; none of them had anything to do with the few various things he had to research that day, which turned out to be actual coincidences instead of a real conspiracy. Well, at least they looked like coincidences.. fuck that. Even before the retrovirus he knew not to try to prove that kind of a negative. After dinner (veal, very fresh, the calf having been butchered on the island an hour before), he went straight to bed, the light in the windows just beginning to fade.

He dreamt. It was at once terrifying and exalting, depressing and jubilant. His life flashed before his eyes- he thought that was only supposed to happen to the dying- and suddenly he found himself in a massive adventurer's dungeon, wearing gleaming weightless platinum armor, his shield made of the same, a mirror-bright longsword in his hand. He slew screeching demons with blinding speed, dodged balls of fire from iron dragons' heads while wall-jumping, escaped a flooding trap by climbing up the rock wall, and before he knew it he was at the final guy, an enormous, hunched-over thing with blades on its arms, back, and tail, foot-claws poking holes in the ground, angled eyes glowing yellow.

And the monster spoke to him in a deep, gentle voice from between its long, pointed teeth, giving him some sort of promised blessing and asking for something wholly incomprehensible in return.

Paul awoke suddenly to the dawn, and felt like he had never done it before.

"Alive. I'm alive," he whispered into the darkness. He was alive, more than he had ever been. He was surprised he had memories; how could he have been awake and moving before, and yet.. not? His experience yesterday morning paled in comparison. This was life.

And- at the same time, yet not cancelling out- he felt like his entire body had been burning from the inside out. His muscles felt torched, his nervous system screamed as if it was looking for something it no longer had. His bones were the worst; they felt horribly mangled, twisted somehow.. no, short. His bones were too short by a tiny amount, enough to loosen his joints. Paul sat up- very quickly- and his vertebrae screeched in protest, a whisper of a headache starting to confound his transcendent elation. I do not want to get up. At all. Nope, nope, nope...

Yet he did, hunger his driving force. First to the bathroom, where his piss smelled of something rotten and fermented, his shit that of a dying man; he started to drink large gulps of water from the sink before he stopped himself. Water wouldn't quench this fire. He ambled down the stairs, torn between the strange knowledge that he could backflip down them, and the pain making him walk like an old man.

Eventually he gave in and flipped forward off the fourth stair from the bottom, landing on his feet with his legs bent as if he had been practicing parkour all his life. His knees popped loudly and he stood up- fast- his back screamed again. "Nnnnnngggg!" Okay! No more of that! Not today!

Food. Lots of it. What's for breakfast? There was plenty of cereal- no, wait- the calf had weighed more than four hundred pounds, Sarah didn't waste that much meat, the island's servants would eat some and the dogs got the legs, but it can't be all gone...

Good. A large haunch was impaled on one of the deep freezer's many meat hooks. Paul darted in (he hadn't gotten dressed that morning, and it was seventy below in there), ripped off the entire seventy pound haunch with one hand, and darted back out, slamming the door to the freezing air.

His bones were screaming again and he shifted to carrying it in both hands, plopped it up on the counter, and began to cut. He tried taking a bite, but it was too cold, too tough. Boil it, then; he substituted strength for finesse, chopping the frozen meat harder than he had ever hit anything in his life, tossing the loose cubes of meat into one of the large pots. But not by itself. He chopped up some potatoes, using the same blade and almost as much force, and plopped them in, the water boiling over.

"Stew for breakfast?" Sarah asked next to him, and he felt no surprise at her stealth this time.

"You've never made stew, have you?" he asked.

"I usually let you guys do the digestion," she replied. "What goes in it?"

"Anything and everything," he replied, feeling a pang of loss- his mother had said that- and then laughed despite himself. He was now as different from his mother as she was from a chimpanzee. Spices, herbs, salt and pepper- no carrots, those tasted like ass when cooked- went into the pot, before he sealed the lid and superheated the contents to a cheery 150 degrees C. He waited ten agonizing minutes until he stopped caring if everything was soft enough, and turned off the stove, strained it all through a colander, and poured it into a large bowl, taking the entire thing to the dining table, picking meat out of the bowl with his fingers and tossing it through the air to cool it. "Want some?"

"First recorded negative effect of retrovirus: Loss of table manners," she said dryly, and shrugged, picking out a few chunks with her fingernails, then leaving to get a bowl for herself. As well as some milk. And utensils. She chuckled to herself. Engineered males were cavemen. She scooped some of the chunks out of the bowl and he almost protested; he wanted to eat all of it.

"Your back hurts?" she asked. He nodded. "Your joints are swollen, but your back's like a mountain range. Did you do something or is that what happens?"

"That's what happens. My vertebrae are too small. More milk?" he asked, having drained the cup in one gulp.

"Get it yourself or get a servant," she said, and he got it himself.

"I do need my own servant by now, don't I," he said. "But you're much higher than I am and you don't have one either." They both had plenty, of course, but none of those were personal servants.

"I don't know if I ever will," she replied. "Don't get one just to get one, or that you think you need one. Make sure it's someone special to you," she continued.

"I wouldn't do that to the people special to me," Paul answered. Besides, his brother would make a piss-poor servant, even implanted. "Wait, are you saying I might implant a girl?"

"The concept of it! That such a thing might be done!" Sarah said with more than enough sarcasm. "Engineered boys enter puberty earlier. I don't know what happened with your balls after the Operator grew them back, but if you suddenly get the hankering for a harem, get it somewhere else." And GTFO.

"Sarah- just- no! No, there's no fucking way! I'd never do that. If I ever need it that badly I'll just use Enforcers." What he didn't mention was that fucking Enforcers felt very wrong after the first few times and so he had been making semi-regular dates with Palmela Handerson and her five sisters. They ate in silence for a bit.

'Who knows? Maybe he's even telling the truth,' Sarah thought. It was funny how an essentially random normal managed to keep his personality under both the influence of servitude and power. Maybe what he really needed was someone to corrupt him.

The twins came down the stairs the way Paul wanted, with a couple of quick leaps and a casual flip over the railing. "Something smells good," Howard said.

"Is that.. stew?" William asked. "Your mom used to fix that stuff. So what's up?"

"We were just talking about sex. He might even be genetically compatible," Sarah said. The transparent attempt to induce jealousy induced humor instead.

"Yeah, good luck on that one," William told Paul. They grabbed bowls and spooned stew from Paul's dwindling bowl, reinforcing Sarah's judgment of cavemen. "You look like you just got off the rack," he continued as he made winching motions with his hands.

"I know! And it hurts like fuck."

"I think you might want to tell the Operator some of this," William suggested. Howard took a bite of the stew- too bland. More spices had found their way to the table and the twins used them copiously.

"Doesn't he already know? He first used it on himself," Paul replied around a large mouthful. Ahh, fuck, was one of his front teeth coming loose? Yeah, maybe he hadn't cooked through all the meat, but.. oh, right, he might lose and regrow all of them. No wonder he needed calcium.

Howard chuckled. "The Operator's modified himself dozens of times, done things with his bones, muscles, and yes, his brain. Good for a guinea pig but not good for a baseline. His side effects probably had side effects."

Paul's first thought: 'Mmm, guinea pig. Maybe I'll have cuy for dinner.' His second he spoke aloud: "Why is this sounding less like medical science and more like mad science?"

There was some chortling. The twins looked at each other.

"Number one, it's just him," William began. "It's not like he's working with a team that he doesn't control on this. There's no peer-reviewed journals or medical texts or FDA or whatever the hell normals would use to regulate this thing."

"Number two, there are no regulations. The Operator makes what he wants. If his instruments and experiments, or ideals, or anything else he values, tell him it's a good idea to do something, he'll do it," Howard continued.

"Number three, that asshole cultivates his mad scientist image," William said. "He drops it around us, but he does it. It works most of the time, too."

"Number four, he is a little bit crazy. His brain is not configured in the same way as.. anyone else's, actually," Howard finished.

Paul started chuckling. "Now what I'm seeing is the Operator making the final version of a certain genetically constructed cell and going "It's alive, it's aaaaaaaaliiive!" Paul's Frankenstein impersonation would have impressed Bela Lugosi.

"Paul, I can absolutely guarantee you that he was not doing that," Howard replied.

"How can you be sure?"

"Because the cell divided almost immediately, and he was too busy going 'Oh shit, what the fuck do I do, there's two of them, there can only be one Dominator so I better make one the servant.'", William replied, and took a large bite.

Paul had been trying to reconcile the various qualities of the Operator for years. He summed it up: "He's a great guy, though. He's loyal, he's confident, he's brilliant, and he's more than competent. He's just.. a fucking mad scientist." Painfully full again, he got up to talk to the Operator. Main screen, nothing else would do for this.

"He's a great guy, though," Sarah said from behind him, matching his cadence exactly, and Paul turned in surprise. "He's loyal, he's mostly confident by now, he's smarter than most, and he's generally competent. He's just.. a fucking Illuminatus." The way she said the last word could have been compliment or epithet.

Paul sat down on the couch and did not bother with pleasantries in his call. "Why didn't you warn me?" As was to be expected, the Operator knew exactly what he meant.

"Placebo effect," the Operator replied. Paul nodded; that sort of thing was supposed to only work on nescient normals but that was egotistical bullshit. "This is especially true when entering uncharted territory and doubly true when dealing with things that might be psychosomatic. I was hoping that you would come to me after the process was finished. But I didn't want to say that beforehand, because anxiety would be a factor. But now that you've come to me, go on, tell me everything; I'll let you know if you should panic." Wow, your bedside manner sucks. Paul told him pretty much everything anyway, including attitudes and emotions, and showed the Operator his swollen joints.

"Hrm. That's a growth-rate issue; you're a teenager, hormones, et cetera. You'll have a growth spurt and it'll level off soon. Been drinking milk?" Paul nodded. "Don't be afraid to eat mammal bones now." Paul pursed his lips; his teeth felt like they were taking too much abuse, and a couple of them.. "Teeth feel like they're about to fall out?" The Operator was obviously a jump ahead of him. "You'll lose your right upper incisor, your right upper canine, and a left lower bicuspid at the least. Don't be worried; their replacements will be in shortly."

"Will my brain outgrow..."

"Don't worry about it. You might get a mild headache for a couple of days, that's it." The Operator's tone indicated that he'd already thought of this one, too. Paul started to think of something else to say, but shrugged. A half-second of silence and he clicked off.

"He's afraid of what I might have told him," Paul mused aloud. "He doesn't want information suggesting that it's not perfect. If it's not an epic fuckup, don't mess with it." He started to chuckle, right along with his friends who had heard him. "Being engineered doesn't mean you don't try to protect your own ego. But wait!" He turned from the screen to look into the other engineereds' smiling faces. "I already knew that."

"But you know what we're protecting more than our ego?" William asked, looking at Paul, who didn't know the answer. "Our asses! To the extent of total paranoia, thanks Sarah." She just shook her head. Operational concerns had to take place over political concerns. No matter how much they thought they trusted someone.

"Jeremy's coming over," Howard explained. "We're going to test him."

"Test him?" Paul asked.

"Yeah, we're going- actually, make this a test for you too. We need to make absolutely sure that there is no way the rogues managed to get Jeremy to join them," William said. Paul was willing to play their game. Okay, the way he emphasized Jeremy's name meant it was something specific to him. His position, which these days involved intricate Eurozone economic bullshit? His age, his lifestyle? Maybe the fact that Jeremy actually knew something about electrical engineering, or.. damn, if he could just call Joey up and ask what was special about-

Oh. Duh. That master-servant pair was practically inseparable. "You're going to reset Joey's implants for a while?" Paul offered. That would likely be taken poorly.

"We could do that, couldn't we?" Howard considered. "No, too invasive. We're just going to make Jeremy order him to tell us the truth and then cut them off for a few minutes. Shame we can't use this on everybody, but how many rogues are going to have servants they trust that much?" The answer was 'probably not many'. The rogues would likely see the vulnerability in the first place. And if this test procedure got out, it wouldn't be reliable anymore.