“What’s the matter with you?” cried Rod.

“Leave out of it,” snapped Aleku, his forehead dripping with sweat and his finger trembling over the trigger.

“Stop!” pleaded one of the women, shaking like a leaf at this terrible sight.

Rod felt utterly torn: rage and confusion were stirring in his soul. He stood quivering and gripped his hair in a frenzy. “Stop, please, stop arguing,” he cried. “Oh, no!” he cried again, “can you really, can you really, can you honestly be doing what I think that you are doing? Am I not dreaming? Are you really going to murder a woman, shoot her in the head, put a bullet through her skull... what the hell is going on? Why would you do that? You’re going to go to jail; put the gun down, please, you’re not in your right mind.”

“Would this have happened if I had just left like I was told to? This can’t be happening,” he continued, swaying side to side in a panic, unsure whether to stay or to go, struck by sheer amazement at the circumstances in which he found himself to be in. “I knew that Aleku had grown up privileged, that he had grown up with a silver spoon in his mouth, that all his beliefs and opinions in the world were just middle class values, so why am I surprised at this? I just...I just never knew he would go this far, this far in realising these values. He’s gone absolutely psychotic but he is so blinded by these values that he can’t see the forest for the trees...Why am I thinking like this? He has all the success in the world and yet it’s not enough for him. He could retire and yet here he is working on something that doesn’t provide any value to the world, but instead takes more from it, exploiting it. I should have followed my gut instinct after highschool and completely cut him off; back then, however, I never had the foresight to predict he would become this utterly vile, vile, base, loathsome and depraved person. No, no, he was never like this in highschool. He was a sweet boy, perverted, however, by something I had nothing to do with.”

“No, this isn’t Aleku. He’s simply out of it at the moment. To be fair, to be fair, he has drank a lot it seems, and people act crazy when they have drank a lot of alcohol, that explains it...But what the fuck? He’s holding a gun to somebody’s head. I have to stop him, I have to stop him! Why, why then am I paralyzed, why then am I not doing anything...? I am a coward.” Rod clenched his fists.

But then the young man saw out of the corner of his eye sudden and slight movement, and he turned sharply to the corner of the room where the movement had occurred in the form of a black flicker and saw Jam on the floor lying on his face. Then he saw his friend roll over, gasping for air, his face stained with blood, and stand up, all before bending over and spewing yellow crumbling cube shape pieces onto the floor in a grotesque incessant retching. The crown prosecutor swayed from side to side, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, with the corners of his lips turned upwards and his spiky teeth showing between cracked and yellow crusted lips.

“He’s absolutely out of it,” said the brunette.

“Sophia,” said Aleku calmly, “clean it up.”

Bowlby and the rest of the party looked at Aleku with wide, wavering eyes, and then at the poor woman.

“You must be joking!” she cried.

“I’m not,” said Aleku flatly.

Rod wanted desperately to say something, to put himself in between the poor woman and his delirious friend, but he instead started, for whatever reason, to back away slowly towards the same door he had come through fifteen minutes earlier, looking around but avoiding eye contact with anyone. He was sweating, pale and his eyes were huge and glowing like a deep-sea creature, and he was utterly exhausted in his legs and terribly afraid in his chest, as though his heart would burst out like some alien, and his breathing was terrible. He felt ashamed for his action but attempted immediately to cast it away like a series of cobwebs, swiping deliriously at the space in front of him; all at once, however, he got the idea to distract the terrible man.

“Hey, Aleku,” he shouted, “Lena promised to pay me millions of pounds to never talk to you again.”

The crazed billionaire turned and looked at him with a bewildered expression, his eyes fixed with suspicion and disbelief.

“Yeah, and she showed me the system too.”

“She showed you what?” growled Aleku. “That bitch,” he said, “well the gigs up. Should I play the James Bond villain then? Should I give you the monologue explaining my plan?”

“I already know it because you told me it earlier. Look, I don’t care anymore just don’t shoot her,” replied Rod. However internally, he was wondering to himself why he was trying to prevent her death. He did not even know her. He did not feel like anything was even real. It was like some surrealist dream.

“Pfff,” wheezed Aleku, coughing repeatedly. “I’ll tell you why I have a gun pointed at this woman, and why I am about to blow her fucking brains out if she doesn’t do what I tell her to. She’s a spy from the-”

“You don’t need to tell them where I am,” interrupted Sophia, “they’ll find out when the time comes for them to know.”

“I swear down you the most annoying bitch I’ve ever known bro,” said Bowlby. “Just shoot the bitch,” he shouted.

“Explain who you actually are, Sophia.”

The foreign woman, her slender body captivating Rod against his will, and to which the latter’s self-admonishments for such misogynistic behaviour fueled his own self-hatred, grunted and smirked, and said, “You think that you can stop me?” She started very slowly towards him, placing one small foot in front of the other daintily, looking at him seductively with her big soft eyes, which swam with a consistency of disturbed jelly, and which put in the hearts of the three men who saw her an internal contradiction within their hearts: on the one hand they felt subjugated by such a possessing force, and on the other they were resentful of it, for it came from an unpossessable object; and a third, in particular, was experienced by Rod, for he was also ashamed of his thoughts.

This, in fact, made Rod ponder at that moment; a thought struck him all of a sudden, a line of inquiry he was compelled by the desire for ultimate truth to pursue. “Are these guilty feelings from thinking such mean thoughts about the opposite sex,” he thought to himself with an air of self-satisfaction, “just a replacement for what one feels for committing sin? Has the academic institutions taken the place of the church in the state’s control of the population through ideological means?” Rod patted himself on the back for this in his mind and smirked to himself; but then he was brought back to the reality of the situation by the woman’s monologue.

“You are the West’s darling,” she said, “but the powers in the East have grown tired of being left out. You have what we want.”

“And what is that?” Bowlby said, pale with fear.

“You’ve destroyed entire ecosystems in your pursuit for glory, for riches-”

“And Russia hasn’t? And China hasn’t?” Aleku protested.

Sophia tutted and shook her head slowly. “You are a very bad man,” she said teasingly.

“Why won’t she speak simply!” Bowlby exclaimed.

“Shut up you simpleton,” said Sophia, “you could seriously hurt someone with your stupidity.

“No, you shut up! Shoot her, bossman.”

“You can stop this before it’s too late,” said Sophia quickly.

“You can’t stop the Warriors!” shouted Bowlby.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Aleku grunted, “You heard ‘em. You can’t stop us. It’s too late.”

“There’s a reason you haven’t shot me yet.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get around to it.”

“You’re gonna leave me waiting forever?” said Sophia softly, her collarbone on the barrel of the desert eagle.

“I’ll kill you,” Aleku said breathlessly. “Tell me what you people want,” he exasperated.

She held eye contact with him. “We want the system, or at least its code so that we can create our own.”

“Fat fucking chance,” said Aleku.

“Woops, I don’t think you’ll have a choice after seeing what my bosses are willing to offer you.”

“Your bosses?” said Aleku with puzzlement.

“My bosses...I’ll just tell you that they wish to stay anonymous, but that their general locale is in the far, far east. They aren’t from my country, either, so don’t try to guess who they are. Let’s just say that they are very powerful people. So powerful in fact, that they own slaves.”

The crowd collectively gasped.

“You have not heard it all yet,” continued Sophia, “for I do not trust all that I have to say to the ears of such idiots as you have installed in your company. Let's go somewhere more private.” And she turned towards the door, where Rod stood blankly like a dangling curtain, and stared at him until he moved to the side with a whimper.

“What made you come all the way here knowing that this could cost you your entire life?” asked Aleku as they walked out of the podcast room, too distracted by the woman’s commanding presence to take notice of Rod following them from behind.

“My country was torn apart by the meddling of yours, and it has destroyed my whole village, levelled it flat with napalm. My neighbour’s children were napalmed, and the news on social media was laughing about it, saying that it was our fault.”

“How’s this got to do with me,” said Aleku unashamedly.

“You own the governments, yes?”

“Not exactly...”

“So, then, just hours ago you were lying to your friends when you said that you had every world-leading nation in your pocket?”

“Wait, how did you know?”

“My employers have means that transcend even yours,” she replied.

“Except for the system.”

“Except for the system,” she repeated.

“Why do you want the system?”

“They think it too...let’s say, dangerous, for one side of the globe to monopolise such a revolutionary technology. It is truly AGI, right?”

“AGI?” piped up Rod from behind; he was too far invested in this conversation to let anything pass his understanding.

“Artifical General Intelligence. It is the representation of human cognitive abilities but on a general scale. Who are you?” asked Sophia, giving the young man a strange and concerned look.

“I’m Rod Beasely,” he said.

“Again, I ask you, who are you and why are you following us?”

“Ah, yes, you should go away,” said Aleku quickly, his eyes glued to Sophia. He was breathing quickly and sweating profusely. Ever since he had met her, in fact, he had been completely enthralled by her domineering presence, yet not at all honest with himself about it. He was trying to fight it tooth and nail, and yet, despite winning many of the battles that had occurred between them ever since they had met, he was seriously losing the war. It was something peculiar about her that reminded him of his childhood, an aspect of her personality, the way that she looked, it was, it took, it completely stole his breath...

“I need to speak to you,” Rod said quickly, a million thoughts swarming in his brain. He reflected upon his last interaction with the girls and wondered why they changed the way they addressed their father. The young student had always thought about seemingly insignificant things like that, always asking questions which always inadvertently landed him in hot water. Nobody seemed to appreciate him, and that is why he desperately wanted to keep Aleku and Jam in his life...but a multi-million pound sum was hard to just pass by just like that.

“Yes, yes, we can talk later.”

“No, it’s about your daughters...”

Aleku sighed, putting a hand to his sweaty forehead and sliding it down his face in apparent boredom. “Who told you that you could talk to any of them? Damn it.”

“Well, actually, they’re, uh...”

“I haven’t got time right now,” said Aleku. “I haven’t got the energy to chase you away, ah fuck.”

“Is it appropriate?” she asked. “From what I’ve gathered, your friends are...scum.”

“We are the scum of the earth,” said Rod, forcing a cheery smile to hide his inner turmoil.

“Hm,” grunted Sophia. “I once thought,” she continued, “that the so-called ‘First World’ countries would be filled with giant intellectuals, and that everybody would be middle class. What a naive outlook.”

“Do not judge a book by its cover,” said Rod. “Many fall prey to the fallacy of overgeneralisation,” he added smugly.

“That is why you used my private jet,” said Aleku thoughtfully as he rubbed his chin, “to get into this country without suspicion.”

“You’re only thinking about that now? Was it not obvious?”

“What the hell is going on?” asked Rod exasperatedly. “Why do you have a fucking gun? Who are those people? What happened to Jam? Who is this lady?”

“Why don’t you shut the fuck up and let me think about things,” replied Aleku, visibly annoyed at his friend for asking so many questions.

“I must remind you, Mr-”

“Just call me Aleku,” he grunted, “a lot has just happened and I need to get into work mode.”

“...there is no mention of your surname on any of your social media accounts. Why is that?”

“I only trust my real friends with access to my surname.”

“Hm,” she said, raising her modest eyebrows. “Well, if business goes well then I expect I’ll know soon enough.”

Aleku could not help but smile, and said, “Maybe this corridor is too bright for your sensitive, uncivilised eyes...”

“Business can be discussed anywhere, Mr...Aleku.”

“Then why did you ask to speak in private?” interjected Rod.

Aleku turned his neck sharply and looked over his shoulder at his childhood friend, giving him an equally sharp glare. Rod interpreted this the best way he could, by refusing to acknowledge it. He knew his friend, and he knew that his friend was a man of principle, and that deep down in that hairy chest of his that there was a beating heart which could and would listen to reason. He knew, or at least he thought that he knew, all that there was to know about his childhood friend, and he knew a way in which he could keep the millions of pounds his daughter offered him and his most valuable friendship that he had with the billionaire.

“I mean,” he shrugged, “if business can be discussed anywhere, then why did we leave everyone just then. To be honest, though, I am quite glad that we left everyone because I hate the loud noise and the presence of so many people in such an encapsulated space – it felt claustrophobic. Listen, Aleku -”

“You know I am leasing out my system to the UK government,” began Aleku, his attention focused solely on the spy, “why would I listen to anything that you have to say? In fact, I ought to hand you over to the authorities-”

“You mean the crown prosecutor who’s laid unconscious in that room,” she said, pointing to the way they had just come. “What do you think the crown court will think of this?” she asked with a condescending tone. “It seems like they wouldn’t want the bad press associated with you,” her voice trailed off with this last sentence; however, her stare lingered.

“There are so many political opinions that I hold, I would be cancelled in a day if the press got hold of them,” remarked Aleku. “That’s why I own most of them.”

“Yes, but not all. A little birdie tells me that there are journalists out there intent with taking you and your baby down.”

“Yes, and you know of them?” said the businessman slowly and carefully, as though suppressing very dangerous words.

“Oh, yes, there’s a whole list of them. But first, I want to know from you why you care about some meanies speaking ill about you on the internet,” she said amusingly.

“You know a businessman’s reputation is more important than his product.”

“Is it? I didn’t know. I’ve always had the idea of starting my own small business...Hpmh. There’s a cap on your profitability if you’re suddenly seen by your customer base as a very, very bad individual.”

“One may revolutionalise entire industries ten times over, but the world only focuses on the single mistake he made.”

“So, you admit that you’ve made mistakes?”

“Ah, wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Maybe I’ll get to if those pesky little journalists happen to publish their material.”

“Are you threatening me?” asked Aleku, his face suddenly flat and devoid of emotion.

“You are not a true Eastern European if you arrive at that conclusion, Mr...Aleku,” said the woman. “All the bad of the English mentality with all the bad of the Eastern European mentality in one.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think of me as an inferior, don’t you?”

“Why, yes, but I think of everyone as my inferior,” added Aleku triumphantly.

Sophia smirked at the cleverness of this comment, restraining herself from the slightest of chuckles. “You know, you remind me a lot of my father.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

Rod was starting to become bored of this conversation and slowed his pace. He was about to turn around and head back to the podcast room to make sure Jam was turned over so that he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit, when he felt the rough calloused hand of his friend on his shoulder, followed by a series of sentences which sent a shiver down his spine.