Unlike my siblings, I grew up out in the regular world. After Mom died, I went to live with the father that I’d never known, the famous genius Tom Butler. I came to suspect that Father had killed Mom so he could use me as a guinea pig for his experimental brain implant and the nanotech it controls. It turned out that Father was only sort of responsible, but that didn’t stop me from killing him. I used to feel bad about that, but I think in the end it was the right thing to do. I had to sacrifice my brother Jeff to make it happen. He didn’t die, but I wrecked his mind, used him up, and pinned the whole thing on him. He’s been at the Wallace Hospital since then, an institution for the criminally insane. I tried to kill myself one time over the whole thing, but I’ve made my peace with it now. I’ve been trying to do as much good in the world as I can to make up for it all. We’ve got a good plan to solve pretty much every major problem in the world over the next couple of decades, and thanks to Father we’ve got the tools to do the job. We just need to put in the work to get it done.

The implant Father gave me explains why I have an overlay permanently embedded in my field of vision. It’s also why I can feel a cloud of self-replicating nanobots like they are a part of my body. The implant gave me and some of my siblings the power to take down Father, but it also wrecked me for a lot of normal life things, like being able to remember my life. Having a computer in my head helps me cope though. I get prompts all the time reminding me of who people are and things I need to do. If I use them right, I can mostly fake still being a human being.

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I met Lin when she was dying of a brain tumor. My sister Louise saved her life with Father’s amazing medical innovations using our family’s nanotech. I’m still not sure why, but Lin took a liking to me. She went back to her home in China afterwards, but we started writing to each other and really hit it off. When we went to Southeast Asia later that year to clean up the Mekong River basin, we met up with her. That didn’t go super well, since her father sold us out to some shadowy international consortium that wanted to weaponize our tech for all sorts of bad things. Things got worse from there. My brother Chad got killed. I did a whole lot of killing. I don’t feel bad about any of that at all. Anyway, Lin’s father ended up taking some hostages to try to save his own skin. Lin had to choose sides, and ended up killing him. It wasn’t a great day for any of us.

We left in a hurry, taking Lin, Yang Song (Lin’s translator and bodyguard), and a German scientist named Max Braun with us back home to the Butler Institute in Nevada. I was looking forward to some quiet time helping Lin to get over killing that whole thing about her father, but no such luck. My brother Jeff had somehow gotten loose from the Wallace Hospital. He broke into the campus, stole a bunch of tech from Father’s lab, and stabbed Mrs. Hastings on his way out. With what he knows, the gear he stole, and the fact that he has every reason to hate us, we’ve got a little bit of a problem on our hands.