“We good?” Evan asks Louise as he comes into the war room. His face is more sheepish than I’ve ever seen it before.

“Yeah, we’re good,” she says. “Thanks for apologizing, but you were right. I shouldn’t have done what I did. It was stupid.”

“You two need a moment?” I ask, feeling like this might be a better conversation for them to have with me somewhere else.

“No, we’re done with touchy-feelies,” Louise declares.

“Good. While we’re doing reconciliations, you want to talk to Andrea again and get her on board with helping out on the Jeff hunt?”

“I actually did already.” She sighs. “She told me she’s already lost a father and a brother, and doesn’t want anything to do with anything that might cost her another, even if it looks like he’s gone full dark side. I wouldn’t count on her for any kind of support. Is Lin coming today?”

“No, she’s spending the day with Yang Song in Vegas, trying to get things back to normal with her after sneaking off to Denver. She finally got access to some of her inheritance money that her dad had secreted away in offshore accounts. So she said it was time to do some shopping.”

“Didn’t you just buy her whatever she wanted anyway?” Evan asks.

“Only what she told me that she wanted, which I think was a lot less than what she actually wanted. Anyway, she’s not coming. How about Valerie?”

“She’s helping Lucie this morning,” Evan says. “She finally decided she wanted to know the gender of the baby. Valerie said to just fill her in on anything important, and if we want we can go see the ultrasound pictures after we’re done here.”

Lucie. My index triggers. My dead brother’s pregnant girlfriend. She and Keeya, Chad’s other girlfriend who is also Lucie’s girlfriend. They’ve been living here on campus for the last couple of months. I haven’t talked to either of them in a few weeks. I should check in with them. Maybe I’ll tag along after this meeting.

“Alright, it’s just us then,” I say. “Let’s get started.”

Louise puts up a bot screen, showing the details of her autopsy. Evan looks for a long silent moment, then nods.

“Rough way to go, even for a bastard like Smith.”

Louise and I both nod.

“So, did you check out where they launched the attack from?”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “It was in one of those tall apartment buildings a few blocks away from my grandparents’ house. We swung by and I checked it with my bots, but there wasn’t much there. There were some bot husks left behind, self-lobotomized like they should be, which makes me think the wild bot behavior was programmed into the death tornado. They left medical gear, syringes and painkillers and stuff like that, but no computers or any of the equipment from our lab.”

“Do we know if it was just the two of them? Or a whole illuminati crew?”

“From talking to some neighbors, it was just two people living there with descriptions that matched Smith and Jeff. Kept to themselves, only went in and out every few days for groceries, never had visitors. They rented it not long after I resettled Grammy and Gramps. So, I think that they were planning this ambush for a long time.”

Louise looks thoughtful.

“How did they know you were coming? Or even that your grandparents had moved there?” she asks.

“I definitely underestimated Smith,” I answer, shaking my head. “There’s a bunch of possible answers for both. Maybe Smith had connections to find out when our plane had a flight plan filed. Or he might still have friends inside our house somewhere, on the legal team or elsewhere. As for how he found my grandparents, it could have been anything. For all I know, he could have had bugs planted in their old house from the moment he disappeared and listened in when I called them. Or he could have had a PI keep an eye on their house and follow them. My grandparents aren’t exactly experts in spycraft. It wouldn’t have been too hard to figure any of it out, given some money effort.”

“Right, that makes sense,” she says, nodding.

“So anyway, let’s update our theories,” I say, grabbing a marker and going to the section of the whiteboard where our collective understanding of our threats were posted. “We were wrong about Jeff running the death tornado.”

I strike a line of bright red through that theory and scrawl out new ones as I talk.

“We’re sure now that it was Smith running the attack, using an implant Jeff tweaked for him. The automatic installer only sort of works, and it looks like it kills you after a couple of days. At least it killed Smith. We think that Jeff was smart enough not to test it on himself first. Illuminati involvement is still a total unknown. This could have been just the two of them, or it could have been them backed by secret international forces. For that matter, this puts into question whether the original theft of our gear wasn’t just Smith and Jeff working together with hired muscle. Though I think the timing of it right after our trip is too suspicious to believe that.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

I pop the cap back on the marker and use my invisible hands to park it back in the mug of markers on the table.

“So,” Evan says, “now we know even less than we did before?”

“Basically.”

He shakes his head. “Lets focus on the immediate problems: Jeff is still on the loose, he has an almost-working bot installer, and he wants to kill us. He doesn’t have Smith backing him up anymore, but all of Smith’s money is still unaccounted for, so we can assume Jeff has at least several million dollars available to him. Plus probably illuminati support. Did I miss anything?”

“That’s about right,” Louise confirms.

“So what’s he going to do next?” I ask.

“He’s going to want a working implant and cloud,” Evan states confidently. “For all the fears he had about the AI, he loved that thing more than any of the rest of us. Even right up to the end when Noah wrecked him, he needed that implant for everything. And he knows that without it, he’s not going to be able to do much against us. He would have seen pretty quickly how bad the install on Smith went. I’d bet anything that he’s figuring out the failures in the installer code right now. He’s going to need to test it though, so my guess is that he’s going to be looking for test subjects. Unwilling test subjects. Disposable test subjects.”

A heavy silence fills the room as Louise and I look at each other and realize there’s no other prediction that makes sense. The brother I broke is going to be out there killing people. I really should feel guilty about this.

“Yeah,” Louise finally says.

“So can he just point the installer at someone and say go?” I ask.

“No, they’d need to be sedated and immobilized. He’ll need respirators and all that like we have here. He’d also need something along the lines of an MRI or a CT scan machine. Maybe a PET or DTI would work. But he’d have to do some kind of brain scan beforehand. If he’s working solo, he’s going to need time to set all the servers up again. In that case, we’ve probably got a while before he can even try. Even if he has someone else taking care of that, we can assume he will take some time working on the code. At least a few weeks.”

“How’s he going to get enough medbots to even do it again?” Evan asks. “There weren’t enough in the stolen gear for more than one implant, and you can’t replicate them without a working interface.”

“He obviously had the implant interface working well enough to grow more bots,” Louise replies. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to produce the standard worker bots he used in the Cyclone of Death.”

“Oh, duh. Didn’t think of that.”

“Besides, if you don’t care about the rules, you know as well as I do that there are ways to overcome the safeguards. But I don’t know how many medical bots he might have in carrier boxes now. We don’t know nearly enough. I hate operating on this much guesswork.”

“I know,” I console her, “this sucks. But it’s all we’ve got. I’ve got Alan working on tracking down what vehicle Jeff used when he ran. If we can figure that out, that’ll hopefully get us a toehold on finding out where he went next. Father had some very longstanding relationships with the Feds and law enforcement systems all over that we’re working on leveraging. We should be able to play surveillance state as well as anyone can.”

“By relationships, you mean like bribery?” Louise asks.

“No, that’s only if you do it at a small scale,” Evan explains. He’s been more involved in this side of the search than I have been. “It’s more like setting up scholarship funds and making sure the right people’s kids win them. And then making sure that local police departments all over have funding for better gear than what taxpayers will give them. And funding police union events. All totally legal as long as you know the right loopholes. There’s been a whole section of Father’s legal team dedicated to it for years.”

“It’s expensive, though,” I add. “It’s a good thing the Geologists are ahead of schedule or we’d be going broke.”

“How are they doing, anyway?” Louise asks. “I’ve been so busy with my research I haven’t checked in with them at all lately.”

“Great. We’re going out next week to set up the first automine. At least we were going to.” I pause for a second to look at the financials. Yeah, we still need to. Even with threats looming over our heads we need to pay the bills. “We’ll just need to be a lot more careful with security for it than we were going to be. Maybe we need to move up giving the Geologists the full upgrade and activating their cloud weapon systems. Then they’d be able to take care of themselves without one of us needing to babysit them.”

Louise sighs and slumps in her chair. “Not going to be easy, that. If I can’t have Evan full time, I’ll need to give Max complete access to everything and have him help me.”

“If that’s what it takes. At this point Max knows enough that giving him permission to see all the Butler tech won’t make that much of a difference.”

Louise and Evan nod in agreement.

“Anyway,” I continue, “if everything goes to plan with their stuff, we’ll be rolling in more precious and semi-precious metals than we know what to do with. Then they’re going to start fully automated bulk production of the cheaper stuff after that. Copper, lead, zinc, and beryllium mostly. It’ll be a steady revenue stream for as long as we can foresee. We shouldn’t ever need to worry about funding again if things go well.”

“That’s good,” Louise says. “Speaking of big projects, I think Max and I are near a breakthrough point on ours.”

“Your big secret one that you won’t tell me about?”

“Less of a secret and more of a surprise. Anyway, I want to focus on that for the next few days and get it to a good stopping point, then we can switch gears and work on upgrading the Geologists. I can help with Jeff if it’s critical, but otherwise I want to avoid distractions.”

I feel the distinctive rhythmic vibrations of the ultrasound in the medical wing of the residence.

“You two notice that?” I ask.

“Notice what?” Evan replies.

“The ultrasound. Lucie’s finding out about the baby now.”

Louise puts on a smile, the first one I’ve seen on her face all day.

“Enough of this for today,” she declares. “Come on, let’s go see the pre-baby pictures.”