Ruby woke up with a start, after playing the agent of chaos in her nightmares.

She wore pants to bed- the feeling of bare legs under fabric wasn't something she liked- and got up, went to the closet, reached for a shirt, and wondered why she was bothering. Who cared if the males stared at her bare breasts? Wasn't that one of the first things Sarah taught her? Some of them would stare at her anyway.

Instead, she took a shit, checked the Real News online edition for two minutes, and heard the sound of plates as she left her room. The Enforcers were never supposed to be heard- was some lamer trainee fucking up? She moved smoothly to the dining room and was startled by the sight- Sarah, in her usual white-assassin garb, had put down plates full of buttered, jellied toast and cups full of orange juice, just loud enough for her to hear. Luke's electrically-fried chicken notwithstanding, the twins had been eating either imported, stored, or Enforcer-cooked food for a week, and they'd enjoy a Sarah-made feast. "They make you cook for them?" Ruby asked.

"No, they do not."

"Then.. why?"

Sarah did not bother looking back to answer it, and kept her eyes fixed on the slab of deep-frozen pork in front of her. Rapid cuts with a beyond-razor-sharp blade made it into bacon. Sarah was happy that her servant trusted her enough to ask such questions openly, was unhappy that she needed to ask a question such as that, and decided on the quickest way to dispel her normal-world conceits. "Before I answer your question, you will answer mine. I have killed a great many people on behalf of my Dominator, before and during the Duumvirate, many without their prompting and some without their knowledge, as well as a very large number of other gruesome things. With that in mind, why does it startle you so much that I cook for them?"

The eggs were not actually ostrich eggs, simply the result of heavy bioengineering of chickens. These were to be hard-boiled. For eggs served on a plate, normal jumbos would suffice. Ruby stared at them as she articulated an answer. "Because killing's your job."

"Which does not preclude me doing other things and, in pure logic, is completely non sequitur. It's also not the right answer."

"All right- it's not the right question. What startles me is that it's something menial you don't need to! Why don't you have an Enforcer do it?" She was also startled by something a bit more pedestrian: 'Is she actually using her fingernails to turn potatoes into hash browns?'

"I can also have Enforcers do almost all of my dirty work." Sarah left the obvious logic unexplained: 'I don't because I'm better at it than they are. So too with this.' "Until you are able to adequately articulate your objection, I will not answer it."

"All right, here's some articulation. You are a First Level Illuminatus. You have a guy who works for you who's desperately in love with you. You can do what he wants, which is implant him and have him wait on you hand and foot. You can build your own mansion under your own fucking office. Why the hell do you keep coming back here?" Her tone began with casualness but ended with hard contempt.

"I'll do you one better." The boys liked that phrase, and it was so useful here. "Why don't I kill the Duumvirate in a way that makes it appear as if the enemy had done it, openly swear vengeance against their murderers, block all attempts to establish a new Dominator as part of the enemy plot, use my relationship to the late Dominator to keep his former loyalists, and declare myself Dominatrix of Earth?"

The reply came so easy and naturally that it sounded pre-planned, which would make all of this make sense. Ruby moved her face to within Sarah's field of vision. Is that what you're actually going to do?, she asked, barely a whisper, as Sarah could read her lips.

No. And that isn't answering the question, Sarah mouthed back identically.

"I have no fucking idea why you don't!" she hissed. "I'd.. guess because you care about them, but that still doesn't explain why you still act like their own personal bitch." Her contempt was unmasked.

"Ruby, how many places are set at the table?"

Ruby looked. "Six."

"Why?"

The answer was reluctant: "Because there's six people living here." 'Damn that crazy Zen-koan bitch. But if she's crazy, I'm probably crazier. And if I'm crazy, then probably everyone in the whole Illuminati is crazy. And if they're crazy then everyone in the whole fucking world is crazy.'

"And so, then, who are you truly serving?"

"You," Ruby answered decisively. Fuck if she'd buy into the commune bullshit here! Sarah's smile and chuckle let her know that she had, in fact, answered correctly. The seeming mixed message made Ruby wonder if this was an extension of the servants-as-hands business or if she was just being fucked with.

"The twins like thick strips but they also like it crispy. I've considered it basically unsolvable through ordinary methods. I leave it to you if it's possible."

A dark thought took her: she'd immolate the bacon, then not wanting to go through the whole business of being dealt with by Sarah, she'd point her palms at her own head and unload full force. It was not the first time she had considered suicide in that way.

Actually looking at what she had to do made her chuckle- the bacon was sizzling in its own grease! If she tried to crisp the bacon the way she was being encouraged to, she'd have an explosion even if she just tickled it.

All right, letting it boil in fat wouldn't help. No way to crisp it like that. Ruby poured the grease down the basically uncloggable sink and let it sizzle again, this time louder with a few exploding pops, some of which would have landed on her bare tits if she didn't dodge ('wow, she's right, I really don't have to give a shit'). Press the spatula down, push all the grease out of there, pour that down the sink again.

"Why so much?" Ruby asked, managing several pounds of it.

"Six large and growing engineereds after not eating for twelve hours or so, and you really have to ask why so much? Even when I think there will be leftovers, there never is."

"So what's in all this stuff? I know those can't be normal eggs, this bacon definitely wasn't normal, those pancakes don't smell the same.."

"The pig was killed a week ago, on this island, and those are barely touched biologically. What you didn't smell were additives. The hens were engineered. The pancakes are a certain rare brand that is still commercially available, with a few extra things I put in for spice. The cereal is entirely normal, although we go through it first for quality. The juice is normal pulpy," An agricultural-lord Illuminatus ran his own orange farm in his spare time, right next to his barn full of engineered pot. "and today the milk is from camels."

"Camels?"

"Would you prefer human milk? If I couldn't have shipped mine to Quad I probably would have put some of it in here and seen if they'd have noticed."

"Wait- Enforcers can lactate- or he could have- oh God-" Ruby zipped to the sink, dry-heaved four times in rapid succession, and zipped back to her work. It's a good thing she thought of that before breakfast instead of after, isn't it?

"There is no God," Sarah reminded her.

"You're telling me." Delete the thoughts- 'mindwipe, I still want that fucking mindwipe'- reboot the brain. "When do we eat?"

"You speak as if there's a schedule. The boys usually get up when they smell this."

"Heh, the boys." Ruby sat down and began to dig in.

"All men are boys. The men who haven't been emasculated, anyway, full of curiosity, adventure, chivalry, and testosterone. Take a man fifty years old; he develops a retrovirus and suddenly he's ready to take on the world, all by himself."

"The Operator's like that? I thought he was just a science guy."

Sarah replied by explaining the Operator's plans for world annihilation, to which Ruby's facial expression went from a grin, to incredulity, then slowly back to a grin again.

"Do the... boys know about this?"

"For the moment, the Duumvirate is keeping its options open." A glance by Sarah signified the entrance of said Duumvirate, who took a longer-than-usual glance at Ruby's breasts before nodding and focusing on their food. Ruby didn't care. If they were going to force sex on her they would have already done it, in which case she probably would have found a way to explode the entire mansion. Paul and Luke entered shortly afterwards, and Luke sat across from her, not hiding his intent in the least. He'd healed well; the right side of his face was slightly pink, with a single layer of raw skin. He ate like he was in a contest, a different hunger in mind. Tenacious son of a bitch.

But he made no moves at the breakfast table, instead choosing to discuss something less likely to get him immolated. "So it's been four years since Howard found out about his implants, right?" he asked, looking back and forth at the twins, unable to tell them apart.

"Close to it," Howard replied. "Right before our twelfth birthday." Their sixteenth was coming up shortly, and they intended to make it an enormous subterranean extravanganza, commissioning engineereds to build a facility in Antarctica specifically for the purpose, playing many variants of laser tag with any engineereds fast enough to pose a challenge. These lasers would be of the blue ten-milliwatt variety, not the microwave gigawatt.

"And you guys haven't managed to capture anyone alive who can be implant-forced to tell you who did it?"

"No. They, or rather their exact clones, have suicide implants," William told him.

"Wait, you can't just knock them out and remove them?"

"Luke, I assure you, you're not the first person to bring this stuff up," Sarah said. "Anything that artificially knocks them out, anything that messes with their body in any serious way- it'll kill them. Even if you hit them hard in the head, they've got something that knows that. I'm sure deadly false positives can happen, maybe already have, but it's an effective defense mechanism against people who want to capture them. Most specifically, us."

Luke was not going to be so easily bested. "What if they regenerated out?" The rest of them looked at him as Christians do at a Satan worshipper. Even Ruby wondered what had driven him to suggest something like that.

Howard took the lead. "You know how long the retrovirus took to fully modify you. In that time the enemy could activate them easily. We would have to administer it clandestinely, and then we'd have an enemy retroviral on our hands." Obviating their whole policy to begin with.

Luke still wasn't giving up. "What if.. what if the retrovirus they got wasn't the same? What if it was just regeneration, or.. what if it made them stupid? Not stupid, because they wouldn't remember so much, but slower? Easier to control?" This time the look of anathema was profound, mouths stopping mid-chew. The twins glanced at each other with a single thought- Holy fuck!- going between them. It wasn't just that Luke was suggesting pure heresy- a retrovirus to make people worse!- but the fact that he was right. His plan could work.

"That is the most diabolical plan I have heard of coming from an engineered. Not the best, or the most intricate- just the nastiest," Sarah said. Her overall opinion was that operational concerns must take priority over political ones. That chicken had come home to roost.

"You're fucking welcome," Luke replied. He understood how things worked around here by now.

"The Operator is not going to like that one," William noted. Dislocating his arms and legs was one thing, but asking him to do his job in reverse was something else.

"Doesn't the Operator do what you tell him?" Ruby asked. The Duumvirate didn't answer, letting it be a rhetorical question, but they did eye their friends' servants warily, not used to being in the presence of people more... ruthless? diabolic?... than they are. The twins were brutal, to be sure, but that wasn't the same sort of concentrated evil that Luke's plan had brought to the table. It was an embarrassment being out-eviled, particularly in a culture where 'good' and 'evil' were laughed off as normal concepts and people were held in respect for their vicious cunning. But the servants weren't really 'evil' so much as..

The Enemy. With the takeouts (Come to Engineered Takeout, where fresh meat is guaranteed!) of Rhines and Gritzl, the Duumvirate had acquired, not merely destroyed, a piece of their enemy, embedded in friendly, obedient (so far..) retrovirals who wanted the enemy dead for their own reasons. The twins looked at each other in simultaneous understanding, and started to nod.

"All right," Howard said. "We'll do it. And as a reward, you get to see the look on the Operator's face."

The look on the Operator's face was, indeed, a solid reward. Indignation, disbelief, and a sort of absolute, transcendental horror warped his features into a grimace, his red eyes squinty and contorted. "You want me to what?" he asked, in lieu of anything better to say.

"It is an entirely temporary measure, simply to counter suicide implants. Anyone who receives this retrovirus shall die," William said.

"Oh, I'll make sure of that. Those all will disappear from an engineered body within a week if they aren't set off. I'll give you the benefit of any sane doubt and it'll kill them in a month or so. Making them sterile from the moment it goes in, of course. And I'll be damned if I'm making a general version of this."

"Isn't a true Illuminatus the master of both?" Paul asked.

"Damn whoever wrote that!" the Operator exploded. "There's diseases I could make right now that would leave huge swaths of the population more compliant, with incredibly low secrecy risk. I won't, and it shouldn't take you very long to figure out why, and I assure you my personal feelings have little to do with it." It took the Duumvirate a fraction of a second to figure out one big reason; if 90% of the population becomes placid, the remaining 10% is going to think they're the Illuminati. "This? If anyone finds out I've made this, you better make some room on your island, because nowhere else will be safe."

"Does he forget who he's talking to?" Ruby asked.

"Only when he's pissed," Howard said casually. "If he did like it I'd wonder what happened."

"You're not supposed to like it, Operator," William added, using an intentionally gentle tone. 'You're supposed to do it. And if it's any consolation, you're also supposed to purge this thing from existence when we have no further use of it." Which would probably be after the End of Secrecy.

"Oh, believe me, that is a foregone conclusion. I'll have it ready in three days. Would you like to tell me your targets now?"

"We build our weapons, then we aim them," Sarah said evenly.

"Very well," the Operator said, sighing, and clicked out. Luke started chortling.

"I find it interesting that half the engineereds here have hatred towards that man," Howard said.

"I don't hate him. I just like watching him squirm," Luke replied.

"I don't hate him either," Ruby said. "But he obviously kind of thinks that he controls you. Can't you tell?"

Howard started chuckling. "But Ruby, they all think that. 'I'm the real Illuminatus.' 'They couldn't get along without me.' 'They might run things now, but our time is coming.' 'I have the real power.'" Howard's voice acting was fair, but an octave or two lower than most Illuminati. "I run an organization composed of experts, engineereds, and megalomaniacs. All three have their uses."

"So it's one-sixth of the engineereds here who hate him," William said. "And insanity and genius go hand in hand- that's part of why there's so much shock about the raids that took the two of you. We've had a man kill himself with robotic dolls... or, wait, shit.."

"Think he's not dead?" Howard asked.

"How are we supposed to know?" William replied bitterly. Exactly where were they supposed to start looking, outer fucking space? "They didn't even have to clone a sentient for Peter."

"You remember him?"

"Peter Brenk, yeah I remember! Don't you remember? You lost your fucking arm! Other than that, I don't remember much about him, though."

"Why would you not remember something like that?" Ruby asked, baffled.

"Why would we bother? At the time he was presumably dead," Howard said. "And we never met him, just his psycho-pit. A lot of first levels physically showed up. I think most of them wanted to do suicide prevention." Brenk was actually fairly well-liked, even generous by the organization's standards. He was very good at both mechanical engineering and normal manipulation, and usually threw in a lot of technological-gizmo freebies with his various deals.

"The alternative, of course, is that they wanted to cover it up," William continued. "And they would probably need the assistance of the on-scene leader, who was..." Some instant research yielded the name Donald Simpson.

"And you're not going to inspect him?" Ruby asked. Her voice almost never had emotion and betrayed no skepticism. Sarah was enjoying this exchange.

"Go after a man who, five years ago, ran the on-scene operation presumably attempting to save the life of a man who may or may not be actually dead now, on a loose suspicion that said dead man could possibly be a rogue?" William asked rhetorically. "Unless they're completely incompetent like Mando was, they can orchestrate cover-ups in minutes. Sometimes even automatically. And Donald is not incompetent."

"We have to- have to- treat this like science. Coincidences mean absolutely nothing. Unless we know something, we don't know it. Otherwise we can follow blind leads and step on land mines from here to eternity," Howard continued, with more than one glance at Sarah. "And when getting evidence is an act of violent politics, hypotheses.. fail to readily form," he finished wryly. "Paul tries, but.."

"And I try regularly. You are right about one thing, Ruby- basic research is always worth a shot." Research of publicly available info never works, but, well, there's always that chance. The absence, or lack of detail, of said information- or its apparent fakery- would likely be a stronger clue than its presence. Of course, the initial and continuing use for it was for Illuminati to keep their stories (to the normals) straight.

"Speaking of which, I wonder what would make your servant stop trying to fuck me?" Ruby asked as if Luke wasn't there, raising her eyebrows at Paul as if asking him to command his servant out of it. Paul just shook his head slightly, as he figured an order like that would cause more problems than it solved. Ruby turned to Luke, gauging the condition of his face and various parts of his body.

"Pain won't work on him," Sarah told her, as she was clearly considering it.

"No.. you're right, it won't. I guess I'm going to have to try something a little longer lasting," Ruby commented, looking at his groin in a decidedly non-sexual way.

"What- what the fuck? You're going around.. topless and it's like you're-", Luke said, confused.

Her eyes went to his forehead. "Hmm, I don't see a towel... 'She's not wearing her burqa', the mullah said. 'She must be asking for it.'"

"Oh, fuck you."

"You wish."

"You know, I could find a way to stick you to your bed and rape you, even if it's the last thing I ever did," Luke said, and stalked off to parts unknown.

"I could call the right people and pull the right strings, and start global thermonuclear war, and it would be the last thing I ever did," Ruby replied evenly to his back.

Sarah had no advice to give. She wanted to tell her servant that she was simply following the mis-reactions that she had forced into her own brain as a response to the attempted conditioning, and should dispose of them as unnatural and misbegotten; however, that same counter-conditioning had awakened her killer instinct. "I love burqas," Sarah said instead. Expecting and getting the puzzled look from Ruby, she continued, "It's just a shame I'm too tall to pass as a native in one. For concealed weapons there's nothing that beats it. I could go for a big, fancy dress sometime if I'm ever in need of heavy weapons with a large ammo supply, but dresses aren't nearly as much fun. Oh, and by the way- you couldn't actually start global thermonuclear war even if you did pull the strings. The warheads won't actually work." Things like this were part of the reason why.

"I'll keep that in mind," Ruby replied, and mimicked one of Sarah's vanishing acts, only with less stealth and more fire.

The twins had been sitting on the couch the whole while, holding back, quietly listening, not wanting to disrupt the amusement. After the principal actors had left the stage, they cracked up in gales of echoed laughter, not caring who could hear them.

"I don't want them to know that they can kill random normals every so often as long as they keep that kind of comedy up," Howard said.

"You know what we need to do now, though?" William asked.

"Contrive a situation in which Sarah needs to bring heavy weapons and a large ammo supply to a formal occasion?" Howard suggested, deadpan.

"That, and send our favorite rage elementals on a mission which would logically require both of their skill sets and abilities, preferably in tandem. Sarah?" William prompted. Paul looked at his friends with a You're going to try to mastermind what? expression.

"That's difficult, because their abilities can be mostly replicated through technology. If I wanted a lot of fire or electricity for some reason, I'd use a flamethrower or a generator, and I could turn them up and down as I pleased. What you're really looking for is a situation where careful, fluctuating levels of both are necessitated, where there would be an advantage in using people with direct bodily control over those things," Sarah answered. Not likely.

Paul was sick of being left out of the act. "All right, then just bring Luke along on the next large operation you send Ruby to and let's see what happens."

"You know, of all the operations I've been on, 'Let's see what happens' has never been even a minor objective," Sarah replied.

"Well if you can't do that, then he really is useless." That statement by Paul dampened the mood considerably. "Isn't there a tradition here of not wasting servants? You might have trained her yourself but he's been trained here, and frankly, I'm not sure how much he even needed. You said that if I couldn't you'd find uses for him, anyway."

"So you think it's good for him to be sent into an environment where.. never mind. You guys wouldn't get the joke," Sarah said, giggling. "Now all I need to do is see if there's anyone in Utah who needs to die, and we'll be all set." The twins gave her a blank look. Paul got the joke, but didn't want it. "Never mind. I can use him, maybe in the next couple of days." She'd get him started with some standard fare she'd usually use a genetic normal for, get a baseline, then ramp it up.

"I've come up with that formal occasion, but it'll have to wait until near the End of Secrecy," Howard said.

"And I'll have to wait until you stop toying with perverted concepts just to spice up your sex life," Sarah answered, reaching into the twins' suits, grabbing both of them by the dick, and leading them both upstairs into their bedroom, leaving Paul alone still staring at the screen, wondering just how much of engineereds' behavior was governed by logic and how much by hormones.

"I think I better stick with Enforcers until secrecy ends," Paul said to no one.