He was escorted through a lobby with black tiled flooring, 
nonplussed by the Director's presence. Nathan hadn't expected him 
to personally greet him, and he had to quicken his pace to catch up 
with the Director's long strides. 


They walked together. Various offshoots branched left and right from 
the main corridor, leading to conference rooms and offices. All 
empty save for cups of coffee and water bottles, like everyone had 
just picked up and left moments ago. In one conference room a 
screen still displayed the middle of a PowerPoint presentation, stuck 
on a slide about transhumanism. 


"Hey. What's going on here? Where is everyone?" 


The Director looked away. "We have been... liquidating all non- 
essential personnel." 


The words hung between them. Nathan shuddered, recalling the 
staff at the Yukon site. 


"What's considered non-essential?" he asked. 


"Non-combat and high ranking, for the most part," replied the 
Director. "You'd be stunned at how many members of upper 
management are redundant. Or maybe you wouldn't. Personally, | 
find those at the bottom of the corporate ladder to be largely 
indispensable." 


The Director moved through a pair of automatic glass doors and 
came to stand in a wide, circular room. It looked like a dead-end to 
Nathan; there were no other doorways, not that he could see, except 
back the way they'd come. 


"Stand here a moment, if you'd please." The Director indicated a 
square on the floor the size of a folded newspaper. "! would override 
the security commands — | know it's really you, and that you're 
wearing a nine millimeter in a pancake holster — but it's quicker and 
easier to just allow it to cycle through its protocols." 


The glass doors turned opaque. There was a fuzzy hum like an old 
cathode-ray television starting up. Nathan had the sensation of 
simultaneously being watched and probed — of eyes and hands on 
him, peering into his mind, groping and plugging their fingers into 
every nook and crevice. His gag reflex ratcheted to high-alert. 


The Director, for his part, smiled. He was dressed smartly in a slate 
three-piece and polished shoes that reflected the recessed lighting. 
(Probably made out of an exotic animal's hide, the more endangered 
the better. Great white shark or black rhino, perhaps.) He was clean- 
shaven and had a full head of silver hair. He might've been a spry 
eighty, but Nathan wouldn't have been surprised to learn he was 
pushing ninety. 


"You don't like it, do you?" 


"You mean somebody does?" It felt as if Nathan was being molested 
by a ghost. A current of air from an unknown source ruffled his 
clothes and hair. 


The Director shrugged. "You get used to it," he said. "We tried to 
make it as noninvasive as possible." 


"Is it anomalous?" The hum crescendoed. 


"The security protocols? No. It's all current technology. Expensive 
current technology, but current nonetheless. Would you believe you 
just had a PET scan?" 


"Yes," Nathan said, adjusting his collar. "It's not the craziest thing 
I've heard today." 


Like liquidating most of your staff, he thought but kept to himself. 
"No, | suppose not," conceded the Director. 


The humming ceased. A panel on a nearby wall slid aside, revealing 
an aperture beyond. The Director motioned Nathan through, trailing 
behind him. They moved through the aperture — what appeared to 
be a blast door but reminded Nathan of a sphincter, the way it 
opened and closed — and entered a new area of the facility. 


"Where're we going?" Nathan said. 


"We're bushwhacking off the grid." The Director's heels clacked 
against the tiles as he took point. "| forget that you haven't been 
here before. This is the high-security annex. I've changed your 
credentials to match my own, and taken the liberty of downloading 
the facility's map to your phone." 


The wing seemed to be devoted to bio-research. Beyond a row of 
windows Nathan glimpsed a sterile laboratory. Next was a 
refrigerated stem-cell bank and — after that — a server farm. 


They passed through another sphincter-door on the left, the aperture 
dilating to permit entry. Nathan followed the Director and froze just 
inside the room. It was some kind of infirmary, but an infirmary like 
he'd never seen before. It looked like a surgical suite crossbred with 
a mechanic's garage. An array of instruments were scattered across 
tables and countertops: sonic tissue and bone cutters, laser 
scalpels, drills and chisels and a hundred other tools he couldn't 
name. There was a spill on the floor that probably wasn't grease or 


oil. A lithium-ion battery the size of a twin mattress squatted in the 
corner, alligator clamps attached to the terminals. 


Two months had passed since the incident in Massachusetts, and 
Nathan had spent the first of those months in the amniotic clutches 
of a drip-feed. But his complacency was disrupted by growing 
unease. He'd felt like a feral animal, treed by narcotics that wouldn't 
allow him to escape the hospital bed; they isolated and held him 
hostage. When he was awake he was listless — couldn't think 
straight, and the worst part of it was that he didn't care, not really. 
The drugs had somehow robbed Nathan of concern; of all his 
instinctive tendencies toward self-reliance and preservation. It stole 
his drive. The days passed, gently and as inconsequential as leaves 
falling, and the most he could manage to resist it was to pull out the 
IV. This served only to set off an alarm and draw the NP on duty at 
the nurse's station. They would reinsert the infusion while Nathan 
protested half-heartedly. Who did he think he was fooling? Not them, 
that's for sure. They knew he was content as long as they kept 
feeding him whatever the hell it was they were pumping into his 
veins. 


Eventually the nurses grew weary of reattaching the perfusion, and 
so they simply tied his hands to the hospital bed, and that was the 
end of that. 


Nathan couldn't recall much else from his time in the hospital except 
for the disturbing image of his torso filleted on a surgical table, 
observed from an angle as if he was having an out-of-body 
experience. He would've dismissed it as a dream spun by his addled 
brain if the image wasn't so damn persistent. 


After that came the rehab. He'd called it quits just one week into 
physical therapy with the random and impromptu decision to fly to 
Tahiti. The Director had surprised him by leaving him alone. He'd 
paid the rent on Nathan's bungalow, had sent him a stipend along 
with prescriptions and a treatment plan, but other than that remained 
unobtrusive and hands-off. 


Until now. 


"Are you all right, Nathan?" 


Supported by pylons, the bungalow had roosted ten feet above the 
beach, and the blue Pacific waves lapped and hissed and foamed at 
the base of the poles during high-tide. 


"Nathan? You're drifting.” 


Nathan snapped back. He didn't want to; it would be easy to close 
his eyes and disappear into the memory. Get lost in there, like the 
hospital bed and its intravenous nectar. He could dine on lotuses all 
day, set Blonde on Blonde to repeat, and dream about anything 
except this new reality that he'd been thrust into: 


A woman was strung up on the far wall of the infirmary. 


She was crucified by bindings at her throat, wrist and waist, holding 
her upright and in place. All of her joints looked to be dislocated. Her 
legs were missing from the knees down, the left arm cuffed within an 
Ilizarov apparatus. Tubes ran from frosted tanks into her spine. 


The flesh had been excoriated from her body, exposing a metal 
skeleton beneath and a white mop-head of intestinal wiring that 
spilled out of her abdomen. The metal gleamed like chrome. 


"Bitch has a goddamn bomb tuned to her neural oscillations," the 
Director said as he advanced on the woman. Nathan didn't think 
he'd ever heard him swear before, and for the second time that day 
he was nonplussed. The Director crouched in front of the woman's 
splayed body, hands braced on his knees and leaning forward. His 
nose almost brushed her pubis. "You were lucky. If she'd spent 
another ten minutes in your car we could've used you for chum 
fishing. We had to freeze her with liquid nitrogen on the medevac to 
prevent it from detonating. | still haven't figured out how to defuse it. 
That's why it's so cold in here." 


"What is she?" Nathan inched forward, curiosity getting the better of 
him. 


The Director glanced at him over his shoulder, flashing a smile 
sharp enough to cut glass. "You don't recognize her?" 


Of course he did. He didn't ask who she was, he asked what she 


was. The last time he'd seen her had been over two months ago. 
She was covered in blood, and he'd been in a rush to save his own 
skin, but there was no mistaking that face. The phone in his head 
had a recording of that night, captured by the camera attached to 
Nathan's optic nerve. He'd reviewed it so many times that he knew 
the exact time, down to the second, when the Foundation agent 
appeared. He pulled it up now and paused the frame, comparing the 
image to that of the one in front of him. 


"Should |?" he said. 
"She's the Foundation agent you captured." 


He'd had a lot of time during his rehabilitation to scrutinize the 
events of that night in Millbrook, and most of it didn't make sense. 
The Director would've maintained constant surveillance on the area 
after the positive Sothian hit on the satellite, so why had he acted 
like he was unaware of the Foundation's presence up until Nathan 
arrived at the scene? And — for that matter — why delay that arrival 
by more than half a day? Under closer examination, the Director's 
explanation seemed more and more like a magician's misdirection, 
especially after he didn't hesitate to send in a helicopter to retrieve 
the Foundation agent. 


There were other holes that persisted; whenever Nathan presumed 
to have a firm grip on things they buoyed and expanded, leaving him 
gasping and struggling to stay afloat. His assignment was to capture 
the alleged Sothian cultists, yet he'd been given an arsenal to take 
on a military unit, not subdue a covenant of witches. No non-lethals, 
no handcuffs, no charms or wards or talismans. Nathan wanted to 
interrogate Herbert McKeown, but he hadn't seen him since they'd 
boarded the maglev train together. He didn't even know if the old 
man was still alive. 


"She's a cyborg." 
"Android, actually," the Director corrected. "You're a cyborg." 


This is why you sent me to Massachusetts, Nathan thought. He'd 
never outwardly expressed his doubts regarding Millbrook. An alert 
popped on his HUD whenever the Director dialed into his head, but 


he was suspicious that the Director had a backdoor allowing him to 
circumvent the notification, and was potentially spying on Nathan 
around the clock. 


"So what's the big deal?" he said, leaning against the wall. "This 
technology has been available for years." 


The Director shook his head. "Not like her. There's nothing like her. 
The technology is still only theoretical. She has a positronic brain 
utilizing artificial DNA computing. From what I've been able to find 
out she can exceed five yottabytes of storage capacity." 


The agent's scalp was peeled back, the top of the skull removed, as 
in an autopsy. 


"Looks like a normal brain to me," remarked Nathan. It was true — 
at least, for the small part visible. 


"But it's not," continued the Director. "Do you have any idea how big 
a single yottabyte is? No? It's a thousand zettabytes, or a thousand 
trillion gigabytes. It's impossible to compress that much data into a 
human cranium. It'd probably take me a drive the size of school bus 
to fit half of it. This android's memory density just isn't possible — 
not yet, anyway — and it somehow sustains equal flops without 
melting. | wouldn't believe the Foundation had that kind of 
computing power if | hadn't seen it for myself — no one does, not 
even the Pentagon or the FSR." 


"You don't know how they did it? Christ. You've had two months. 
Haven't you been reverse-engineering her?" 


"There's a bomb wired to her brain activity," the Director reiterated. 
"It's severely impeded our diagnostics." 


"Can't you just — | don't know — hack into her?" 


"She runs on a closed network to prevent that sort of thing. But even 
if | manually plugged into her | wouldn't risk it. She's a supernova of 
power, her operating platform is unique, and there's no way to know 
what kind of defenses it has. | don't want to go up against her 
immune system and accidentally start a fusion reaction." 


"Immune system? Wait. Are you telling me she's still alive?" 
"If that's what you want to call it, yes." 


Nathan felt something that he wasn't used to. What was it? Panic? 
Fear? He wasn't familiar enough with the emotion to accurately 
identify it. Anxiety? 


"You... you vivisected her?" 


"She doesn't experience pain the same way you do, Nathan. It's just 
an analogy of pain. | didn't torture her. Besides, the explosive device 
necessitated her continued survival. She didn't really give me much 
of a choice, now did she?" 


Constant exposure to violence had caused Nathan to develop a 
mental callous against death. As far as he was concerned there was 
nothing mystical about it, no final judgement or waiting paradise, and 
certainly no 'New Game +' encore. The world had existed for four 
and half billion years prior to his creation. He had a hunch that it 
would continue on fine without him. Death was just another waste 
byproduct, dying not much different than taking a shit or blowing 
your nose. And what was left over, after all was said and done, got 
flushed down the toilet same with everything else. 


But that didn't make him a sadist, and he was hard-pressed to 
imagine a fate worse than the Foundation agent's. 


He crossed his arms and veiled his disgust with apathy. "You called 
me in for this?" 


"No, but you should know that thirty six seconds ago the Foundation 
destroyed our missile silos, taking out our air deterrents." 


"What?" Nathan pushed off the wall and stood rigid, his body tensed 
as he sussed out the news. "You didn't remove her tracker." 


"We removed three. After that the scans came back negative. Even 
if she was still broadcasting, this facility is too far underground and 
too well-insulated for a signal to reach the surface." 


"Why don't you go up and explain that to them, then?" 


Roman Emperor, King of France, and Conqueror of the Daevites". 


Researcher: Researcher Saramago 


Sample 887-1990: The 2005 novel "Twilight", translated into 
Tswana. The character names "Edward" and "Jacob" are reversed 
throughout the text. 


Sample 887-2011: A critical essay discussing mythological 
representations of the fictional island of Australia, dated 5th May 
1998. 


Sample 887-1709: A proclamation of the marriage of Shaka Zulu 
and Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent, giving his full titles and 
styles as "His Majesty Shaka, by the Grace of God, of the Zulu 
Nation King, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland 
King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India." 


Researcher: Dr. Ox C. Moran 


Sample 887-5674: 444 pages of an English dictionary. All words for 
describing smells are excluded. The entry for 'nose’ is a string of 
expletives. The definitions of 'square' and ‘triangle’ are swapped. 


Sample 887-4590: A Japanese strategy guide for the video game 
‘Pokemon:Blue.' The guide spends most of its time discussing the 
superiority of bug-typoe Pokemon and advantages of wearing shorts. 
The guide ends less than halfway through the game. 


Sample 887-9090: A sequence of exclamation points and question 
marks. When converted into binary and run, plays Pong. 


Sample 887-0511: A detailed story about a young O5-11 peeing in 
his pants in front of his friends. 
Researcher: Dr. Bolo