“Holifeld,” repeated Kess. “Vance Holifeld. Don’t you live in Johnston?”

The old man did not answer Kess or take Elias’s offered hand. Instead he squinted at him, suspicious. “How did you know me, Clever Handle? There are no photographs of me online.”

“You’re a major player in all this and you hadn’t shown up yet. It seemed obvious.”

Holifeld’s eyes moved too much. He blinked a lot and kept glancing in every direction including up, as if something dangerous might be ready to drop on him from the ceiling. “And you’re her. The Beta 2.”

“Excuse me?”

“Can I see them? Your hands?”

Kess looked over at Elias, but he didn’t look back at her. Kess wasn’t really the sort who exchanged looks with people, but she used to do it with her sister and she’d been getting used to it with Elias.

She held out her arms to the old man. He took her right hand in his thin, pale, wrinkled one. A thin dark line, some sort of cable, ran out of his sleeve at his wrist and across the back of his hand. It split into tendrils that coiled around his fingers. Kess desperately wanted to know what that was about, but figured she couldn’t afford to ask questions before knowing how willing Holifeld was to answer. He ran a finger over the star on her palm. “And it works? Of course it does. But show me.” He blinked three times, quickly, like an insect flicking its wings. “Please.”

Glance at Elias. No look in return. “Alright.” Kess held her hands in front of her face, palms facing each other, and let it flow. Blue lightning danced between her metal stars. She let it go for a second or two, thinking about how impressive it must look to someone who hadn’t seen it, before she dropped her arms. “So I guess by Beta 2s you mean Blues, right?”

“That’s what you call yourselves?”

“Yes. And so the Reds would be… Beta 1s? Or Alpha 2s?”

“I assume you’re talking about the Beta 1s. And the Alphas you call Grays. Charming.” He looked at Elias. “You should know it took a tremendous amount of trust to allow one of them—a Gray—into my home.”

“He’s not totally Gray yet,” snapped Kess.

“I know. I scanned you both when you were on my doorstep and determined his progression. My computer estimates that it will be another week at least before Clever Handle can no longer to be trusted. That’s why I’m going to let him leave. Let’s sit down.”

He led them further into his… home? His base? His home base?

The lighting got brighter and less creepy past the entryway, though there was still a depressing amount of concrete everywhere. Holifeld took them down a hall and into a wide room with blocky black leather couches around a glass coffee table. One entire wall was covered in screens (blank, for now), and to one side was a hulking piece of metal equipment, the purpose of which wasn’t clear, thought it had lots of little blinky bits on it. All together, it looked like a supervillain lair.

“When did my life get so weird?” Kess muttered to herself.

“Three and a half months ago,” said Holifeld.

“Oh.”

“That’s when I arranged for two test animals to escape from the Holifeld Company facility in Johnston. Please, sit.”

Kess and Elias settled onto one of the stiff-cushioned black couches, and Holifeld sat across from them.

“Why did you bring us here?” asked Elias. “Are you just going to tell us everything? Why? When we were talking on the forum I had to drag every speck of information out of you.”

“I need someone,” he said. “It’s why I contacted you in the first place. You know about my company? You know the sort of projects we worked on?”

“Magic,” said Kess. “You wanted to do things that might as well be magical.”

“I was born to great fortune. Solid, practical fortune. Steel money. After my father died I used my inheritance to seek out wonders. I soon learned that the world was less wondrous then I had hoped. It was… disappointing.”

“So what was all the spirit writing and spells then?” asked Kess.

Holifeld shrugged. “In time, after other disappointments, I realized that the mind can do things to itself. But I decided that if wonders do not exist, they can be created. I returned to America and sought out projects to sponsor.”

He pursed his thin pale paper lips. “Rubbish. For years my company pursued rubbish and nonsense. But then someone came to me, a scientist. Jonathan Akiyama. He was young, almost as young as you two. And brilliant.”

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Elias raised an eyebrow. “Much more brilliant than us two?”

Holifeld smiled—a thin, wry expression. “Yes. He had an idea, like everyone else, but he had more than that as well. He had a prototype. A glass vial filled with something wondrous. He called it a liquid computer chip.”

Leaning forward, Holifeld tapped on the glass surface of the coffee table. One of the screens on the wall flickered to life, a glowing rectangle in the center of the dark glassy wall. The screen showed a many-faceted, three-dimensional gray shape, with spiny legs radiating from it like a spider. A spider or…

“It looks sort of like a virus,” said Elias.

“It is ‘sort of like’ a virus. The design is based off of viruses. This is Holifeld Company’s principal project. Our—” blink-blink-blink “—magic. Nanomachines. Self-replicating and, when gathered in large enough numbers, capable of complex programming. In recent decades, we have directed the project towards the nanomachine-enabled cybernetic enhancement of human beings.”

Kess looked down at her metal-tipped fingers. “There are little robots inside of me.”

“Yes. Once inside the body, they perpetuate themselves, building more nanomachines out of fat and food. Then they begin to make changes. They alter the brain, drive subjects to eat materials needed for further modifications.”

“What was the point?” asked Kess.

“To begin with, for financial reasons—soldiers. Mercenaries.” Blink-blink-blink. “Etcetera.”

“So what’s with the weird tribal thing? The Red vs. Blue.”

Holifeld made a few tapping, dragging motions with his fingers on the tabletop. Two other screens lit up. One showed sunny green video—a jungle, with dark-furred chimpanzees gathered in the trees. As Kess watched, the video point of view blurred, swinging from the vantage point of one branch to another. The other screen showed a 3-d model of a brain, though it looked subtly different than pictures Kess had seen before. Not a human brain, she realized—chimpanzee. Parts of the brain lit up green and red and violet.

“Years ago we realized that a potential application of our machines was brain mapping, brain augmentation. We seeded—you might say infected—a group of wild chimpanzees. Highly expensive operation. We recorded their behavior—tdsxhat video is from a camera implanted in a chimp’s brow—and matched it to brain recordings. The process is not straightforward, but we began to understand some of the machinery of the brain, including those parts governing loyalty, group membership.

“The possibilities were immediately apparent. Imagine ensuring a person’s absolute loyalty. Imagine knowing they would never betray you.

“Jonathan—he wasn’t like many scientists, he had a tremendous eye for the profitable applications of his discoveries—envisioned bands of soldiers, physically enhanced and united by brain augmentation. They would fight for each other as fiercely as you would for your family. The army spends considerable time and resources trying to inculcate a similar dynamic. So we developed our machines to utilize the brain’s existing architecture. There are codes that tell you who your tribe is. Who to trust, who to protect. In here.” Holifeld tapped his forehead with one long, bony finger. As he did so, his hand began to shake. He grimaced at it and pushed up his sleeve with his other hand. The dark cables that twisted around his fingers ran up his arm to a sort of wide bracelet just below his elbow. He tapped it a few times and his hand stopped trembling.

Kess had a horrible vision. With this technology you could forcibly rip people away from their families, like she’d been ripped from her sister. You could convert spies, make them loyal to you and not their home nation. You could play around with love and hate, reach into people’s brains and rearrange their circuits against their will. Instead of bringing up any of that she said, “I could betray the Blues if I really really wanted to. It would feel terrible, but I could do it.”

Holifeld shrugged. “The project was complicated and highly ambitious. We don’t understand the brain well enough to fine-tune the changes we want. The brilliance of the nanomachines is that they are self-directed and self-correcting. We could alter the brains of a test subject, record the results, and the new generation of nanomachines would program themselves accordingly.”

“How many monkeys did you go through?” asked Kess.

“Not enough to finish the project goals,” said Holifeld. “Particularly after we tried to integrate different aspects of the project. Each Beta type was designed to transmit a unique signal so that they might recognize each other. That technology was thoroughly understood. But when this signaling process interacted with the changes to the brain’s loyalty centers, it caused the Beta 1’s and Beta 2’s to react to each other’s signals with distrust and antagonism.”

Elias nodded. “So red tribe hates blue tribe.”

The flood of answers coming so quickly after they had spent so much effort looking for them made Kess dizzy. “Okay. So why are only teenagers affected? And why can I see radiation and the others can’t? And how do the Grays fit in?”

“The adolescent brain is mostly-matured, but still growing, radically altered by hormones in the recent past. This makes it more easily converted than those of either children or adults, especially when the machines are spreading like a disease, through contact, rather than being deliberately administered. As for your enhanced vision...” Holifeld made some more adjustments to the coffee table/control panel. Now one of the screens showed a computer rendering of an eyeball, a round white orb trailing bloody red fibers. Holifeld tapped his finger and the picture changed. Metallic cables wound around the thick red sinews stretching back from the eyeball. The white surface of the eye, and its round blue iris, were coated in what looked like clear beads.

“This feature was meant to be included in all Beta 2’s. However, the visual processing involved is quite complex. It requires coopting some of the brain’s natural visual systems. Only some brains are well-suited to the process. It’s a quirk. Random. The machines realized your brain was an appropriate candidate—I say the machines, though by the time they began to modify your eyes the machines had already altered and coopted much of your own brain for processing power.”

Kess had too much to think about already, so she put that aside for later.

“And do you have any questions, Clever Handle?” asked Holifeld, turning to Elias.

“Lots of them. But only one urgent one.”

“And that is?”

“You said you needed us for something.”

“Of course.” Holifeld leaned forward, his cable-covered hand on his narrow old-man knee.

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

“I need you to break into Holifeld Company.”