A commotion bursts out from down the hall. Lin's voice is shouting in English and Chinese. I don't know what the Chinese part is, but the English is clear.

"Noah! I just heard. I didn't know! I swear I didn't know! Noah!"

She reaches the doors with Max right behind her. She gasps as she sees my brother’s body on the floor. Then she sees me across the room.

"Noah! Max just told me what happened!” Her voice turns pleading. “I didn't know, you have to believe me!"

I hope it’s not just stupid puppy love, but I do believe her. She wouldn’t have helped set us up for this if she’d had any idea what it really was. Dorothy rises and points her pistol at her.

"Step away from the door," she demands coldly.

Lin charges into the room anyway, ignoring the threat.

"You’re not going to shoot me. You need my father too much. This thing, Max?" She asks, giving the jammer on the ground near Dorothy a nudge with her foot.

“Ja! Yes! That is the jammer!”

Whatever training Yang Song has been doing with her has been doing wonders for her legs. She delivers the box a powerful kick worthy of any soccer player, sending it flying into the wall where the impact cracks open the case. She rushes toward it and jumps, landing on the box with both feet and flattening it.

“You’re much too late for that to do any good,” Dorothy declares, her face an angry smirk. She turns to the guards behind her. “Go get Liu and tell him to restrain his brat,” she snaps. He doesn’t move, so she snarls something at him in Chinese. That gets him moving fast. As he hurries off, she turns from Lin to Max and points the pistol at his leg. “I may not shoot you, Ms. Liu, but I would have no qualms with putting a bullet in your friend’s kneecap. Get out, and get out now.”

I pray to Mom that Lin’s kick and stomp were enough to break the jammer. I sync with the nearest batch of bots that we just constructed. The extra skin I feel from them has never been so comforting. I start them replicating as fast as they can, feasting on the corpses of the fallen bots all around. I see Evan, Louise, and Andrea doing the same.

Lin slowly backs out of the room, joining Max at the doorway.

“This is wrong,” she declares defiantly.

“I don’t care,” Dorothy answers. She raises her voice and yells something at the other guard in Chinese. He runs off too.

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“They’re getting another jammer, Noah,” Lin shouts into the room.

“Louise, I didn’t know what they were going to do,” Max calls out. “I was hired to consult with you, to help to ensure you could install the implant successfully outside of your own family. They did not tell me any of this would be coerced.”

I don’t have enough bots to spare to check his vitals, but he seems as sincere as Lin. Besides, why would either of them be here helping us if they had been in on it? I’ll spare them both from the upcoming retribution.

“You’ve got three seconds to be out of my sight,” Dorothy demands, putting her other hand on the gun’s grip. Her sights are lined up with Max’s knee.

I see Andrea look up and see she’s got her eyes fixed on the room’s security camera. Her fingers begin dancing and I see a thin film of bots cover the lens. If she’s doing what I think she’s doing, and she pulls it off, her brain is about to do the most elaborate feat of math, programming, and art I’ve ever heard of.

To All: You mind if I take Dorothy?

“One.”

From Evan: All yours.

“Two.”

From Louise: Do it.

She doesn’t get to three. I send out a thin, sweeping blade of bots, neatly severing Dorothy’s head from her body. With her back to us as she looked toward the doorway, she never saw it coming. Her body collapses, and her head rolls backwards towards me. I hear angry yelling from down the hallway in Chinese.

“Stall them if you can,” I call out to Lin and Max. They both look horrified, but they nod and dash down the hallway.

Louise, and Evan have grim smiles forming on their faces. Andrea’s eyes dart frantically between the two cameras in the corners of the room as her fingers dance to work their magic. Marc is still pacing and muttering, I don’t think he registered any of what just happened.. The whole Geologist cohort stares at the new corpse, stunned.

An uproar of many voices speaking several languages comes from down the hall. I push my tiny new army to grow as quickly as possible. The room grows colder as the bots draw in all the power they can from the ambient heat.

To Louise, Evan, Andrea: We need to get that other jammer before someone turns it on. Release everything you have to me.

They give me understanding nods as I sync with all the bots in the room. I reach out, running a thin mesh network down the hall, past the small crowd shouting at each other, towards where I’d felt the blind spot earlier. That must be where Dorothy was. Sure enough, the guard is on his way back from there, carrying the jammer, thankfully still powered down. I reach inside it and shred some wiring. That should be enough, but I start building bots inside it just in case, turning as much of its innards into extensions of myself as I can before the guard reaches the General along with the guards, staff, and attendees clustered around him in the hallway.

I pull the bots back. Andrea points to herself and glances at me meaningfully. I release almost all of the bots, saving a small group for myself, just enough to keep growing. I don’t know what she has planned, but I trust her. Andrea syncs up with the freed bots, leaving just enough for Evan and Louise to kickstart their clouds’ growth again. Her fingers dance wildly, and the air near the doorframe shimmers as blobs of color start to emerge from nothing. The voices from the hallway are growing closer, but I don’t want to spare any bots from replication to see what’s going on. I barely have enough now to stop a single bullet if things get bad.