M.I.C.A.I.N. here, your friendly, albeit microscopic, Mobil Independently Cognate, Artificially Intelligent Nano-factory.

Things are busy around the Special Dimensions Agency offices these days, what with the expansions and remodeling going on. Sally says most of the work will be done by the weekend. This is good news, as my Petri dish was moved into the back during construction, to avoid all the dust. Course, I still have all my video links and such up, so it's not like I can't see what's going on. Still, there are consequences to being a 12 angstroms long train, and this qualifies as one of the situations where size matters, so to speak.

Paul, my pudgy pal and technical assistant, seems to like hanging around in the back room. He almost knocked my digs over a couple of times already, so I'll be glad to be parked back beside Sally's desk, once all the construction is over. Sally runs the office, and is the client point of contact for our little corner of Special Dimensions Agency. Officially she's my trainer/handler, although Paul and I do all the real work.

I closed up the net news link and opened a channel to the front office camera. Sally was rehanging the plaque we were presented by the Harbor Patrol for my work in capturing the tech bandits that plagued the city last month. The publicity had brought us a shower of work, and my cut had replenished accounts, hollowed out from purchasing a Waldo I'd ordered back then. It got a good dunking and beating during the Maritime affair, so a lot of my earnings had gone into restoring its former glory.

It stood next to me in the back room, its chiseled features seemed to glower at Paul as he puttered around taking inventory.

"You ready for the Golden Condor project, Mic?" Sally had noticed the tell-tale LED on my office cam come on, and had decided to begin her daily nag.

"I think I need another week to assimilate all the old aeronautics data first."

Sally snorted. "Bull. You could assimilate the whole Library of Congress in a week. Have Paul get your kit ready, They'll be here in an hour."

The office camera is mounted high, so mostly all I get to see from it is the top of her brown mop of hair, so long as she is at the desk. So I hacked her Computer's cam, to gaze at her baby blues.

"You know, antique planes aren't exactly my specialty, Sally. Can't Paul just pop over with a soldering iron and handle this one?"

"Shut up, Mic. My notes say they have changed the job. Something of an emergency, I understand. I want you in kit so you can be out here quickly after they arrive to discuss it."

Okay, she wasn't in the mood to negotiate. I can respect that. Golden Condor is a gaggle of seniors with more money than wrinkles that are nutso about old airfoil planes. You know, MIG 17's, Lear jets, old Air Force cast-offs, bi-planes, balloons, that guff. Things flown with minimal computer control, by hand cranks and flapping their arms around, I guess.

Pilots are just a safety feature on air transports. Nobody in their right minds would trust their lives to some dude hitting buttons and working cranks these days. Takes all kinds.

"Oh, crap," grouses Sally. "They're here already. The main desk is buzzing them in--hop to it, Mic!"

I grumbled to myself, switched the I/O over to the workroom monitor and gave Paul the skinny.

"Hey Paul! Mom says my presence is required up front. Stick me in the Waldo and start packing up the field kit."

Paul started as the speaker fired up, and scrabbled a headset out of his pocket. He was supposed to wear it all the time when on the job, since being my meat on the march was his primary purpose. I wasn't always in range of a camera and speaker link. Going around with no street view except for the lint lining Paul's shirt pocket was not an adequate substitute.

"Uh, OK Mic. You ready for the injector?"

This started a knee-jerk location sub-routine up, which I quashed. Where did he think I was? The injector could pick me up from anywhere inside the Petri dish. I switched over to the headset link.

"Load me up, Paul."

The world bobbled up and down as Paul shook his head, then the room swirled about as he looked for the injector.

"To your left, Paul."

"Oh, yeah. Here we go."

Yup, there we went. About ten minutes later I strolled the Waldo through the workroom door and into the office proper. Sally was frowning, twiddling a pencil and looking down at some paperwork. Three of the Condor crowd were already milling around in the small area fronting the desk and trying to avoid getting plaster dust on their nice, newly pressed suits. I kicked myself for not keeping the reception desk's audio on. I was using the full spectrum pick-ups in the Waldo now, of course, but evidently I had missed a little of what was going on here. One of the elderly trio looked up as I entered.

"Is this the, eh, the unit, they was talkin' about in the papers?"

A pair of watery eyes peered at me over a pair of antique glasses. The suit fit him well, but since he was as thin as a bent coat-hanger anyway, it could have just been an off-the-rack thing. I hadn't seen a lot of checkered jackets selling on the net, so I doubted it was as new as it seemed to be. I was a little peeved that he knew my Waldo wasn't a real person right off. I had spent real money on the details. Too much media exposure, I guess.

"Call me Mic." I smiled, offering a hand.

The geezer looked down at it, as if I had asked him to inspect it for bugs.

"Boy, they makes 'em purty realistic-like these days, eh?"

I kept the smile in place. "Gets me around," I said.

Sally cleared her throat, getting my attention. "Mr Wallace and his associates have brought us an interesting proposal, Mic. This is Mr. Wallace, Mr. Denton, and Mr. Wright."

She named the trio off in order from left to, heh, Wright. 'Interesting' is code for lucrative, and in this case also for 'shut up, Mic,' so I clammed it and assumed a concerned mien.

Sally beamed back at the codger, and brightly continued, "Yes, Mr.Wallace, this is the renowned MICAIN AI that stopped the Tech Piracy you read about. If we agree to terms, he will be the controller we will assign for your flight project."

Flight project? What Flight project? Last I heard, they wanted some simulator link checked out that was being built for their flight museum. I looked at the three of them cranking around the office. I doubted any of them were in condition to fly anything, though anyone younger wouldn't even remember human piloted flight, let alone have any idea what all the old timey controls the wrecks featured were for. I just nodded and kept listening.

Sally batted her eyes at my Waldo, and smiled to match the two centimeter up-curve I sported.

"The Golden Condor Society is having a gala conference in Bermuda. They will be flying three F-15 Eagles over to the air show from a storage field in Cuba. They're working on a project to automate the piloting of these..." She hesitated, searching for the right term,"important historical planes, without altering the actual controls."

Relics, I thought.

"Best combat jet ever built," piped Wallace.

Best rock ever lofted, I thought.

Sally waved her manicure at the gods of air conditioning. "They came up with some robotic fittings that can sit where the pilots used to, and work the controls, but the effort is just short of being complete."

"Ran out of time," cranked one of the associates.

Denton, I guessed. They looked like a three prune salad, and shuffled around like walnuts in a shell game. It was hard to keep track. I continued to look interested.

"Conference was scheduled too soon. Had to book reservations around some other shindig they got down there. Weren't ready."

My atomic clocks revolved a few trillion times, while I waited with Jovian patience, for the punchline.

One of the three magi finally piped up, "Mostly done, mostly. The gadgets are all linked up, run by a multiplexed radio controller that sits in one of the planes." A semi-toothless smile cracked new ground across the parchment of his face. He chuckled and stirred his hands about as if mixing something in a small bowl. "Kinda like them model planes I had as a boy."

I bit mapped the facial topography and tried to assign it a name. "Mr Wright, yes?"

"Got it in one, son. Like the Wright brothers, easy to remember."

I did a net search and turned up the reference on a site called 'Grandfathers of Avionics'.

"So, what would be my part in this, if I may ask?"

"Gettin 'to that. See, the dedicated AI, the Auto-pilot itself, ain't ready yet. Still in the tanks, growin' up. Need an adult model, like yerself, to download the pilot programs, and link to the mechanical gadgets as actually handle the controls. Eh," Mr. Wright bug-eyed my Waldo, likely searching for an on/off switch, "you do come loose from that manikin, right? See, the three of us will be flying along in the plane's rear seats, one in each, on the trip out. That's the fun of it."

Sally piped up, at this point. "They have the simulator functioning and ready. We can have you plugged in to it and well versed in four hours or so." Sally hit some keys, still smiling, and turned back to the geriatric party planners. "Let's say a half day for training, two days out, two days back, three days there at the...festival, on call. We'll just give you a rental rate, call it 2000 Cr a day, say, 16000Cr."

Denton snapped, "How 'bout a senior's discount?"

Sally frowned, tapping her pencil on her lips. "No deposit, and I'll have a technical assistant and the MICAIN Waldo shipped out to the event site. Might be a little extra punch for your show, having him walk around while he's there."

"Done!" Denton cackled.

I did a quick search of my work contract. The job was well inside it; "repair, maintain, operate," or M&O as techs call it. I was stuck. Renting me as a sideshow for a bonus irked though. I put it down to my justified notoriety and focused on the money. I enlarged the plastic smile another quarter centimeter and flourished with one hand. "Then to the skies, my golden raptors! The Islands await!"

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Wallace squinted at me. "Enthusiastic, isn't he?"

"He will be an excellent addition to your air show," Sally said blandly. She keyed the intercom to the back room, giving me the hard eye. "Paul, prep Mic's kit for transport. You'll need to install him over at the Air Museum for a few hours of flight training. When you get back, put together what you might need for a short week away. I have a little roadwork for you."

"Okay, Miss Holt. I gotta tell my Mom though."

"You can do that after work. You have a day or two."

"Alright, Miss Holt."

Soon, the Waldo was back in storage. Later, Paul and the Wizened Wing-men hooked me up to the trainer at the air museum. In no time at all I had the controls aced, and was dog-fighting the simulated jets like a Barron Von Richter, or whoever.

There were no differences between such trainers and "real" planes anymore, the simulator could even duplicate exact real-time weather conditions and air currents, if required. This was turning into a fun assignment, and I had to admit, handling the old-timey air jets was a rush.

I needed to keep a triple set of visual processors and I/O systems active, to fly all three at once, which slowed my processing down marginally but not noticeably – at least, so far as flight control was concerned.

Paul extracted me from the simulator and put me back into the transport kit. He screwed the earpiece back in that he was never supposed to remove, and thunked it with a finger a few times. It came through like a volcano-bongo drum solo. I frantically decreased the volume until my amp stopped trying to fry. Eventually he pulled his fingers away, and a signature vacant but serious expression rippled over his pan. You know, the one infants get, just before they fill their pants.

Oh god, here we go again...

"TESTING, ONE...TWO.."

Let's see, train wreck, freeway accident. Ah, there it was, 'Woman screaming from Night of Bloody Horror', my fave. I let him have it at full gain. At some point, you would think the concept of a bone conducting microphone, and its twin, the bone conducting speaker, would acquire deep and unique meaning to a tech in Paul's situation. After a stunned moment, the hand flashed up to claw at his ear, but I had already muted the receiver.

"Hey Paul, want to trade some more cool sound effects?"

The hand wavered. "Forgot."

"Did you know, there are certain low frequency patterns that can bring on diarrhea and stomach cramps?"

"Uh, no, Mic."

"They're sub-sonic, actually. So I guess you don't really hear 'em, more a visceral experience, as they say."

"Really sorry, Mic, I'll try to remember."

"Holding you to that, Paul. Serious. So, what's next?"

"Denton says you should get a few hours working the pilot-bots, to get the feel of them. I'm to hook you up direct to one for a while."

Suits me, I already ran the I/O routines in the simulator, but it's their dime.

The things were pretty much just stripped down Waldos. Since they were expected to be seated most of the time, no one had bothered with much of a torso. They were all multi-jointed arms and legs with a camera box sticking up like a lollipop. Outside of a cockpit they looked like a cross between a greyhound and an arachnid. A few trainer sessions later, they just let me wander around the joint. I found where the janitors hung out and was ahead forty credits at craps before they finally caught up with me. The pilot Waldo had a really fine touch with the dice.

The geezers looked amused, but Paul was very agitated.

"I couldn't get you on the earpiece, Mic! Miss Holt is really upset. Says you can just stay here over-night now. I gotta get home and pack. Miss Holt says you will have ta pay my wages for the last four hours."

Oops.I turned my receiver back on. I had been using only the Waldo's local pickup. "Probably just structural interference, Paul. It's okay. Go on home. See you in the morning."

The janitors were about done for the day, but they had night watchmen for the place, so I'd still be way ahead by morning, four hours wages or not.

Eventually it was back into my kit box and a boring commercial flight to the Cuban airfield. I spent most of that time on-line.

The installation to the actual controller, under the rear seat of the lead jet, was quick. I started doing pre-flight system checkouts while the three F-15 Eagles were fueled up then wheeled out onto the tarmac.

There were redundant systems for everything in these planes. Even for the retro-fit pilot system. In a pinch, my control could be defeated and returned to the secondary controls in the rear cockpits, should I burn out, or some such. I wondered why, as two of the three couldn't fly a kite without help from an eight year old.

I was surprised to find the armament systems intact. I had had some fun with these in the simulator, but expected the jets themselves would have had them stripped out. I asked the Golden Geezers about that.

Denton,who had affected a cane and panama hat after landing in Cuba, wiggled his stick at the three antiques. "They don't care so much about that here on the Island. Used ta' be a closed dictatorship, back in the day, ya know. The systems had ta' be re-machined ta' put 'em backta' spec, once't we got 'em here, but they's the real McCoys all right. Wouldn't take anything less to the convention. Bombs are fakes, all for show, a'course. The air-ta'-air missiles are light plastic, payloads are bags a' colored powder proxed to go off twenty feet away from anything solid, just in case. The 50 calibers shoot a light load, enough ta clear the barrels — blank plug ammo. Puts on a good show, is all. Chaff packs, flares is real. Didn't see no harm in that."

The planes were probably bought salvage by the pound. These guys had poured big credits into the restoration effort. The systems check-out was perfect, a good thing, since the cruise would be taking us over the Sargasso Sea, a pretty desolate area. I checked the simulated combat file they intended to run at the air show. Flashy but innocuous. There wouldn't be any passengers along for the air show demos anyway. The Rickety Retros had decided I should earn my keep at the blowout by running the exhibition remotely.

I had some time, so I ran through a few things on-line. The flight path took us over the area once called the Bermuda Triangle, an area long held in superstitious awe, a nautical mystery spot. I looked up the articles of constitution for the Golden Condors, Inc. It seemed the three held the planes in common, with simple survivor rights, and equal share maintenance costs. Pedestrian.

Mr.Wright, also cane equipped, outfitted in a loud islander shirt and white shorts, meandered around the three planes, whacking the small runway tires and peering up birdlike at the three open cockpits. Boarding ladders were already hung on the F-15 Eagles, and Wright hauled himself up one of them and bent in to check out the auxiliary seating. I kept switching views around to follow his poking about.The rear cockpit was tough to see though. The mechanical pilot's visual sensors were forward looking with only about 80 degrees of horizon rotation, depending on instrumentation for everything else. Noticing the camera head trying to unscrew itself in the front cockpit, Wright piped up.

"I'll be riding with you, eh, with yer processor anyways. Just checking the seating. I'm the only one of us three what ever got checked out in one of these, you know."

This started my automatic processes again. This time, an aeronautical certification check. Annoyed, I aborted it. Gee, an ex-pilot, no less. That meant he could kibitz with authority, and provide me with far more irritating back-seat babble than any of the others.

Blessed be the very small, for they can be storied to death with impunity, Amen. I checked to see where the defeat was for the rear seat mike.Wasn't one. "Hey that's great, Mr. Wright, glad for the company!"

The other two finally wandered up, and with a certain geriatric excitement, the three climbed into the rear seats of the jets and strapped in. Soon as they were buttoned in, I began to taxi the jets onto the runway, and we were off. The flight started out fun, and my elderly passengers spent most of the time chattering back and forth through their headsets. The flight path was not in the commercial corridors, no air controller would allow these antiques anywhere near the normal traffic, so the skies were pristine.

Trouble came in the middle of the flight. The controls on the jet I was installed in stopped responding to my tele-operation link. Lights changed across the console, and my jet started to gain altitude sharply. I kept the other two on route, while accessing diagnostics and toggling the redundant systems of the rogue flier. I sent a verbal warning to my passenger.

"Mr.Wright, we are having some control problems here. You might want to check out your auxiliary controls."

The only response was some breathy chuckling. Arming and targeting systems flashed to life across the cockpit panel. I tried to use the mechanical controllers to correct this, but found them dead to my signals. A burst from two wing guns moaned through the plane, and I watched in horror as the jet dived upon my two other F-15's. I quickly rolled them out of the path of fire.

Sounds of mild discomfort floated into my pickups from the two attacked jets. Denton was screaming in a high tenor something about animals going to the bathroom during procreation. Simultaneously, Wallace was making absurd rapid- fire assumptions about machine behavior, reproduction and theology. Taken together, it made for an interesting, if surreal, picture. I was tempted to open a few net ports to run down some of the more interesting references, but was busy at the time.

The wing gun bursts didn't look like blanks to me. Remembering some of the stories about the Bermuda triangle, I checked the compass. Nope, no spinning or odd behavior. Then it occurred to me that my on-board geezer was doing this. He must have cut in the fail-safe manual control link, severing my operation link to this jet. Luckily, there was no such manual cut-off for the other jets. Things like that had to be done from inside each plane--thus, "Manual cut-off".

My inference engine put pretty heavy odds down that the other two planes were just packing pop guns and fire crackers, like this one should have. I banked the other two planes, sending them left and right, dog-tailing them upwards to match the rogue's altitude. Wright still managed to acquire targeting on one of the two, and an air-to-air missile released and launched. I countered, releasing chaff and flares from the other jet, rolling it away from Mr. Wright's current path, hoping the G force this built wasn't killing my passengers.

"This is not smart, Mr. Wright. Why don't you let me drive?"

"The hell it's not, sonny!"

The airwaves were by now full of frightened squeaks and more antique and interesting expressions, which boded well, in terms of passenger health. I tried a burst of high frequency sound through my geezer's ear-cups. It was like throwing cow-pies at a tank. I hit him with those ultra low frequency pulses I had threatened Paul with. It slowed him down some, and the cabin's "volatile gas present" sensor lit up, but he must have caught on, because he pulled the phones plug from his helmet.

Now there is one thing that is absolutely true about the Bermuda triangle. Whole flights of planes and dozens of ships have disappeared in it, never to be recovered. The stats on the number of incidents is actually not any higher than other places but it is a big, desolate roach-motel of a swatch. I tried to keep both Denton and Wallace out of the line of fire and headed generally towards Bermuda, and the safety of land.

Wright was trying to establish another target lock on one of my planes, which I kept moving in evasive and likely, sickening ways to avoid. I hoped I wasn't drowning my geezers in vomit, but the invective had deteriorated into gurgles and bracks. Not so good. Luckily, Wright was no younger, and couldn't push his jet as hard as needed to account for the evasions. I did an Immelman-like move with the two other geezer jets, spawning more funny burble-grock sounds, and released all of their toy missiles in front of Wright.

A dense area of Talc, smoke, and soft plastic shards blossomed twenty feet before the plane. Wright's jet coughed and died as the intakes plugged up with debris, halite, and fine colored powder. I couldn't unplug from the I/O gel pad without relinquishing control over the other two jets, but I could detach junior, my mobile manipulator unit, to go walk about, and I had.

While I fought to keep my passengers whole, it had been scouting for some circuit or link I could still access, and I found it, a fuse-link for the fail-safe switch. I shorted the circuit to permanent "On" and immediately cut the O2 to Wright's breather mask down a couple tads. Groggy, Wright continued to bat at the non-functional controls, while I reset all the jets on a direct shot to Bermuda at the highest speed their fuel supplies would allow, and radioed in. Meantime, Wright's jet plummeted down in a lazy barrel roll towards the drink, with me along for the ride. I primed and fired four times, frantically working flaps and tabs trying to level out the spinning jet, and with only moments to spare, managed to clear and re-fire Wright's F-15 before it could smash into the Sargasso Sea, dooming us both. My flight back was very leisurely, the jet having developed very high temps due to the clogging.

Ambulances and fire equipment clotted the runway, and I scanned my passengers with worry as they were dragged out of the planes and carted off to the local hospital, moaning and woozy. Hawaiian shirts, now more colorful and smelly than when put on, made me thankful olfactory sensors were not part of the three jets' retrofits, but all seemed to have survived. A couple hours later Paul made an appearance on the tarmac, and removed me to my mobile kit, and then to my Waldo, that Special Dimensions had freighted in. My reports were electronically filed and accepted, so there were no bright lights or good cop, bad cop grilling. At least for me. I strolled the Air show, posing for pictures while Paul mostly ogled the wrecks and took in the scenery.

"You gonna put on the simulated dogfight like it says in the brochure?"Paul asked.

I smiled broadly for yet another Kodak moment, then turned to look at my round assistant. "In what? The controller jet is impounded with fouled engines. Just go and enjoy the show."

"Okay, Mic."

"And don't get lost!"

"I won't, Mic."

"Remember to call your Mom, she worries."

"Will do, Mic."

I guess the cost of high ticket antique maintenance had become just too much for Wright, and the club incorporation was just too simple, offering no sellout clauses. He could just give up ownership at a huge loss, but that wasn't a satisfactory answer.

Wallace and Denton had already refused to purchase his shares. The corporation was insured though. Wright's only quick out was to become "sole survivor" according to the policy provisions and then cash in. If he could have gotten the jets dunked in the Sargasso, he would have smashed the link controller, killing me, and made up whatever tale of system malfunction he wished, after dumping all the live rounds, and detachable armament. Alternatively he could have just ejected, and rafted around waiting for rescue, yet another sole survivor of a triangle mystery.

I didn't bother to look into the exact details. I was getting paid, and having fun mugging for the cameras.