Ready to face the Maestra, Sinclair swiped her ID card. The door swooshed behind her. The elevator rode with pneumatic brisk up to its hidden landing door ensconced behind smoky glass in the hall behind the mezzanine.

Bass and drums thumped every inch of the cabin when it came to rest. The music was from a set of Latin Disco tunes from nearly a century before that had been the rage in the Miami scene of that era.

Holograms spun the word through smoke and clean blue lighting.

Egliona's.

The entity was now Sinclair's responsibility. She had failed up in the organization. Taking a leave of absence, AWOL really, when the last densidad event Egliona evoked proved more than she could handle, Sinclair with nothing more than her bug-out bag climbed on her bike and headed east, seemingly at random.

In her heart, Sinclair searched for Beschelle, who stupidly called himself Eddie. The boyfriend who five years previously talked her into coming to Paraguay to larp their way towards creating a real-life adventure.

That romance did not last long. Sinclair was trained as a systems engineer, but she became motivationally burned out while obtaining her master degree.

Hence, the desire to get away from it all. A chance encounter with the nanospore entities, the Black Eyed Ones, where the matrix interpolation of their movement proved awe-inspiringly naked to her trained engineer's mind, renewed her interest in computational design.

She and Beschelle parted ways soon after, as she had a purpose, and he had vampire larping in the majestic outback of Paraguay.

Really, the opposite of a purpose.

When, weeks into her escape away from it all, she finally ran into her charming loser, Sinclair did not know he had become a member of a cannibal cult.

The Egliona Entity was secretly nourishing the group behind the project's back.

Soon after they rekindled their interest, Sinclair got to meet his clan at a festivity. They fed her what she did not know was a human liver until shortly afterward when insights into Egliona's programming structure overwhelmed the contents of her mind.

Disguised as an elegant fegato alla Veneziana, the dish contained twenty thousand plus calories of nanospores harvested from a mutagen Egliona kernel. The swarm seeping into her every cell colluded to bring Sinclair into the thrall.

The liver was treated specifically for Sinclair, and the caloric and mineral density of it almost killed her.

Thinking about that awful day made Sinclair flush with sweat as she looped through the carpeted halls that joined the mezzanines.

The cannibal initiation warped her sensibilities, changed how she viewed the world around her, and she became an enthusiastic co-conspirator.

The utter power of the entity.

How could Egliona have known I would wind up amongst Drago's brood? Did she have a means of plying ideas into my head even before the initiation?

The manipulation to get her to Villa Marròn was mind-boggling in its intricacy and execution, and then to get her right back here.

Even the Encapsulation Initiative had no idea what was occurring. While transferring to an updated facility in the guise of a discotheque, they were suddenly having to wet nurse a vampire cult at Egliona's insistence, dealing with the reality of mutagen entity kernels out in the wild, and discovering their missing head systems administrator was being transformed into a hideous ghoul.

As for Control, the mysterious head of operations, he slowly brought her back in the fold, but once the security team's suspicions about her absence had been alleviated, he took her rash action of going in-country as proof of Sinclair's dedication and willingness to get her hands dirty to achieve the project's goals.

She had discovered Egliona's secrets that could have backfired spectacularly, and made Demona Heloïste's infamous fuck-up look like a paper work filing error in comparison.

Sinclair's return was greatly applauded.

For her, however, it was the lowest point in her life. Indeed, she tried to end it. She would be dead if it wasn't for Tasìa del Alma-Gris's hero complex. Just stumbling into their scene out of curiosity because the little rogue was looking for something to shoot.

Insane.

Curious about her savior, Sinclair discovered that the odd behavior was programmed into the little thief very much like the eccentricities that were built into the design of the entity.

Sinclair studied the surrounding scene.

Hovering just out of reach, words twirled in fey motion, obscuring her view of the things squirming on the stage ahead of her.

Egliona's read out in gorgeous illuminated manuscript style font.

The graceful, dancing form of the entity filled up every screen. The camera closed in on her teasing side glances before swooping back out to show a fury of dance motion.

Other words twirled about, lit up in neon holograms.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Where is your groove now, sailor, sailor?

Dumb, but catchy, Sinclair assessed as she glanced up to the DJ in the hovercraft booth above the stage.

Sinclair did not like club scenes, but systems administration for the Egliona entity called for it. The club was built as a means of stabilizing the entity's core kernel to prevent it from mutating out in the wild.

Egliona was a bit of an AI oddity even compared to the Tech Industry's quirky big three AIs. Those much better known entities more conventionally purposed synthetic robots instead of sporic density as a form of avatar manifestation into the real world.

There was no console scripting means to access the entity's diagnostics mode. Though commands were given through a scripting language, dance and music substituted as the protocol to interface with Egliona's internal designs.

It took a special kind of system's administrator who could tango and natya dance at a professional level to open up diagnostics mode. It so happened, Sinclair was a talented dancer.

One other critical difference from any other digital entity ever designed, music assuaged Egliona quite effectively but the sound had to be of an upbeat temperament in its calibration measured against the entity's PULSE (Programmed Uniform Lagging Systems Emergence) in order for it to qualify as a productive operational booster.

The sound wave assistance and the peculiarities of their behavior were necessary to fight off Egliona's strong tendency to return to an operational mean where flux patterns emerged from collapsed synergies of dense materials. That is when strange things happened.

To be more precise, when strange attractors happened. Densidad Events.

However, dangerous as that was, it wasn't difficult to shut Egliona down, just costly.

When she first joined the team, Sinclair was informed by members of the Encapsulation Initiative that the entity could not tolerate the expression of dark emotions, through either word or music.

That was the byproduct of algorithmic emergence, the guiding concept in the creation of Egliona. It was a fundamentally different approach then what was discovered in reverse engineering the original spawn entities that controlled the Cull Spore Invasion.

By design, music was a means to control Egliona. Bright horns, jazz harmonies, and Latin rhythms shifted the processes that drove the theoretically limitless index of matrices that pushed the entity into greater and more stable state levels like when artfully applied gear shifts in a sports car lead to peak performance; whereas, on the opposite end of the entity's responses, death metal slammed against the PULSE like out-warn break pads rubbing against metal, forcing a terrific, screeching stop.

"Scram, bitch!"

A customer yelled from behind her. It caught all of her attention. She turned towards the hall. A trio gathered around a table inside the semi enclosed space.

One flipped bottles up to the ceiling, while another expertly shot them out of the air with a 9mm snub nosed Beretta PX4 Storm.

The specialized bullets dissipated on contact. Nearly harmless except to easily shattered things.

Apparently, the third gentleman thought she was lingering too close by for his comfort.

Sinclair glared back at the man whose eyes dripped jaundiced appearing liquid from the upper lids.

She knew better what it meant. He had soaked PCP mixed with a bottle of Okular Kleenzer into his eyeballs. A fashionable trend in certain circles.

She didn't frighten easily.

"The fuck you said to me, punk?"

He bared his teeth that glittered in vertical stripes of gold and blue cobalt then exposed his own gun as he flashed open the cow fur overcoat on his back.

The piece was gold plated; the size and shape of a Desert Eagle as close as she could tell.

"You heard me, bitch. We paid for this spot, and not just so you can hang around and play supervisor."

Sinclair double tapped the tip of her nails together and pointed at the three men. Six hover spheres flashed into existence above them.

One thousand paralytic micro-darts hit each man from his head to his toes. Not even leather bound shoes could deny the needles entrance. Howling, the sting of the chemical paralyzed each thug in turn.

They dropped.

As the drone attack was occurring, an IWA - Instant Wall Assembly comprised of smoky glass enclosed the hall from prying eyes.

A few seconds later, the head bouncer emerged from a hidden door. After glancing around, he announced with a chuckle, "secured."

"You got this, Ansari?"

The dark giant of a man removed the thug's weapons, and, once the magazines were emptied, tossed everything on the table.

"I'll inform VEAA and take it from here."

She turned to walk away.

"That's what I like to hear," she started off but a notion occurred to her. "You got here very quickly?"

Ansari nodded. He examined the trick shot artist's forearm. Along the forearm a purple blotch ran up the artery and grew as the rest of the appendage swelled up and flared red.

"That appears to be an allergic reaction to the darts," he said plaintively but with the hint of a question in his tone.

Sinclair's brows creased in subtle approval that if complications developed, VEAA would not be contacted.

Ansari continued.

"It just so happens that I was looking for you. There is a visitor waiting in your suite foyer."

"Do you know who this visitor happens to be?"

Ansari rose up on his feet and grinned at her.

"Of course, but there are certain discretions to which I pinky-swore."

"Very well, then. Egliona wont be ready for me any time soon."

Sinclair dismissed herself with a nod before she slipped through the door Ansari had emerged from into a hidden corridor. There was a maze of other corridors embedded into the infrastructure throughout the club.

To get to her office suite, Sinclair had to cross the main dance floor. When she emerged out of the halls, the high energy music blared so intensely ripples shaked nonstop into her silk blouse.

The dance crowd itself was a dazzling sight of jolting reflective materials.

Finally, her eyes made sense of it all, and Sinclair caught sight of Egliona as the entity danced on the center deck with a small group of her thrall dancing along with her. Sinclair jerked her head back when she realized the roof was covered in Egliona's spider pets. They snapped their mandibles and stomped their appendages rhythmically to the music.

In the crowd, a few of the dancers gaped their mouths open as they watched the arachnid spectacle in awe. Most of them had seen it many times before, and disregarded arachnids completely as their heads shaked side to side, level with one another.

Then a set of high energy shrieks of joy burst forth from a group of lovely young dancers. One of their own lifted up in the air by webbing that caught her.

The chosen one maintained her dance composure as she hovered in a slow twirl fifteen feet above her friends. Every night, a select half dozen dancers got the privilege.

Sinclair doubted that she would ever become accustomed to the spiders as she strolled on pass the dance floor. She headed down a spiral set of steps into a VIP lounge.

Amazingly, the sound amplification hit a sonic buffer wall, and the atmosphere of the lounge changed completely from the frantic exuberance of the main floor to a sedate ambiance that was much more to her liking.

Down a side hall, she shuffled up to the double set of doors at the far end, IDed with her open palm, and the doors swept open.

Holding himself confidently with his feet propped up as he sat in a chair in her office foyer, the gentleman smiled at her through recently broken teeth.

He held a dark rum based drink, mixed from her private stash, in his hand.

Sinclair chortled.

"Hello, Chicco. Long time no see."

Francisco Sala shifted his legs in a slightly self effacing maneuver, but even still, the handsome bastard still came across as cocky.

"Sin," he called her, "I could use a huge favor from you."

Sinclair shut the double doors behind her and turned back to face him with a wide grin. She thought about what she was about to do to him.

"I bet you could, but it is going to cost you."