Jules sat in a sun-kissed breakfast nook eating pancakes that were better than any his real mother had ever cooked.

The cook puttered around the kitchenette cleaning the utensils and dishes that had built the meal. She was a woman in her late middle age, more than slightly overweight, but not approaching obesity. A patterned apron protected a bright and shiny blouse. Humming absently, she practically oozed peace and the kind of calm assurance that comes with a lifetime of moderate hurdles successfully overcome.

Jules hoped that whoever was in charge of the conspiracy’s hiring got a raise.

The woman didn’t look like how he remembered his mother. His mother hadn’t aged well before her break, and her mental decline had only accelerated the damage a lifetime of stress does to a face. The actor looked like a gracefully older version of the pictures he had of his mother from the happiest points in her life, when her face was bright and smooth and her eyes actually were able to focus on the camera.

Mentally, he was teetering between outrage and guilty appreciation. The woman had acted like a mother without throwing it in his face. The place was decorated with pictures of him that were intimate without being overbearing. He had even seen a photo or two of his prodigal long-dead brother in a recessed corner.

After the violence and stress of his kidnapping, he was relieved that this moment wasn’t more overtly painful. When he had awoken in the soft embrace of a perfectly normal bed, the first thing he sensed was the smell. He was still smelling it now, and it was the smell of home--half-remembered but still embedded somewhere deep in his psyche.

It soothed him despite his certainty that he should be panicking. The bed he had woken up in felt exactly like his childhood bed. When he opened his eyes he was looking at the ceiling of his childhood rooms. The stool he was sitting on was uncomfortable and wobbly in the same way that it had been when he was a child.

They were using the wiring of his brain to set him at ease, and damn if it isn't working.

He hadn’t seen any obvious surveillance equipment to confirm his hypothesis, but the whole thing was just too surreal to be anything other than a setup. He was reminded of the time that he had suspected a girlfriend of being on one of his competitors' payrolls. Without a scrap of evidence, the whole relationship was tarnished. The feeling was the same, part regret, part fear, and a fuming anger against the injustice of the world and the unremitting persistence of his intelligence.

He watched his “mom” with all the same feelings. He had long stopped believing in the parts of life that he didn’t control being fair, but all the same, pulling the husk of his mother from the ground and regrowing it into someone both foreign and familiar was a low blow. His stomach clenched as he saw her scratch her face; the gesture brought back a surge of emotions-- he had seen his mother do the same thing the same way a thousand times.

He felt the anger starting to build as he watched her.

Suddenly, she turned and walked out towards the garage, idly mumbling about finding something.

As she walked out, Jules heard someone enter the room behind him. He turned and saw Castelain saunter into the room.

After waking, but before walking down the steep stairs of the dopple-house, Jules had decided that he would be calm when the confrontation came. He remembered resolving to be calm. What he experienced upon seeing Castelain was less calm and more raw, scalding hot fury.

He was fairly certain that his face hadn’t spasmed into the rictus that would have mirrored the seething anger in his gut; he had always had better control than that. He had no doubt that Castelain had seen some evidence of his rage, but the Jules hadn’t seen a reaction from him.

I am not going to give th is ass an inch. Redirecting his anger inward, Jules felt an internal deepening. The anger turned within him, churning and burning away the fog and indecision that he had been experiencing since Castelain stood on the roof of the New Venturi building and threatened Lauria’s life.

He felt his patience burning away, as had happened very seldom in his life. The willingness to wait, see, and trust-- that willingness living deep in the heart of all civilized folk--curled into smoke inside the cauldron of his rage.

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He looked at Castelain with what felt like new eyes. The man was tall, sure, and had a patrician demeanor, but Jules saw something different with his revitalized vision: he saw the man’s desperation. Jules imagined this man’s life, the wealth and the power and the control that someone in his position would have been able to exert.

Everything that Jules had built was a threat to Castelain: the Valuestream and the Governance; the billion user open-source hardware network sharing economy with data in 170 nations; the crowd-sourced means of production for every industry than man had conceived; the self-governing vessel that churned out more money in a month than most nations would in a year; and the mythos that he knew had grown around his own words and person.

Castelain was afraid. Jules had a strong suspicion he knew why-- he knows first-hand how powerful it was to have built a machine to turn will into action.

And if Jules’s suspicions were correct, his captor’s family had had access to that for longer than just a few short years. This is a man accustomed to wielding the power of kings.

As he watched his captor with fire in his heart, Jules's suspicions were only confirmed. Jules’s work was an existential threat to the old ways. He knew that Venturi had sought and gained the investment of the old guard, but Venturi was just the first among many sailing the waters that he, Julius Thomas Socrates Paine, had set into motion. He couldn’t point to anything that Castelain was doing that gave him the confidence he was experiencing, but Jules felt it nonetheless. With a snort because fuck respecting this asshole, he walked to the sink to refill his water glass.

“Well,” Castelain began, “I guess there is no need to sugar coat it. You are here for as long as I decide is necessary, to work on whatever I deem is necessary. Your cooperation is directly proportional to the comfort that we will provide you during your service. You will start working on recreating the propulsion array that launched the Creator, and we will provide you whatever resources you can justify to accomplish this task.”

Throughout the speech, Julius did not react. Not a twitch of anger or a smirk of contempt. The control that he had sought through equanimity found its expression in the anger that consumed him. He thought he felt agitation growing in Castelain’s delivery, but the man’s control held anything discernible at bay.

“Is that all?” He asked.

“It is.” Castelain replied. “We have already pulled all that we can from your less than conscious self. It is time that you join the team and do your part to make sure that the passage of control into the hands of the generation that you empowered is peaceful.”

“Oh, is that what you are doing?” Jules disinterest was not feigned. Something else was filling his person. It wasn’t thought and it wasn’t emotion. He felt vital, and his deepest attention was on his internal transition. I don’t understand why I am reacting this way. Why am I not afraid? His mind bade him be afraid, but nothing in his brainstem complied.

Castelain responded with a mild look of curiosity before answering. “Yes. We are a just organization with noble goals. Our records date back to the Pharaohs. They chronicle the collapse of civilization when power changes hands too fast. You can see it as recently as the White Revolution in Russia, or the losses China suffered at Nanking. When power changes hands it is always bloody unless the new power is afraid of the old. The Paine Attacks--” even this reminder didn’t crack Julius’ aplomb “--are uniting the world, reminding them that power is terrible and always corrupt.”

Finally Julius smiled. “If your power is that old, imagine how corrupt it must be.”

That got a reaction from Castelain, “Ah yes, you are perhaps in a better place to cast stones than most others, but you forget, we used your weapons to attack the world. The weapons that you designed while urging others not to design weapons took a thousands of lives. The weapons that cut past every shell of security on which the Western world depends. All we did was find them, build them, and use them. You created them. Without you they would not have existed, and you know that they are far from the worst in those secret files of yours.”

And the thing was, suddenly Julius did remember his secret weapon files, hidden more than a few layers deep in the Valuestream’s network. Nothing until now had brought them to his mind. He remembered the designs that he had hidden for the day that an enemy emerged terrible enough for them. He remembered his pledge to design and not to build. The vow be ready to build but not to build. Even on his most pacifist day, he was not blind to the existence of psychotic evil, and his prized paranoia had begged him to design things for a fiery day.

This day, it turned out.

He didn’t react until he remembered some of the other secret things that he had built: things that he had stashed deeper within the Valuestream’s code base, where he thought it possible that no one had penetrated; things that he was certain would be of assistance to him now. He felt the anger crystallize within him. Then he smiled.

“I will think about what you’ve said. I’m going to go find a rock to sit on.”

He left, leaving a finally flummoxed Castelain quizzical in his wake.